02.09.06

Push vs. Pull Learning

Posted in Future, Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 10:43 am by Norm Garrett

I spent much of the morning today learning to use a new Java IDE (Eclipse) that I will need to be teaching in a year or so. As I progressed through the tutorials (which are excellent), it dawned on me that I was very much engaged in what I would term pull learning. In pull learning, I decide what I want to know about and pursue it. It is what I spent much of graduate school doing (once I got past the required doctoral courses). It is what original research is all about. In fact, it is clearly the model that most of us follow in our personal lives and is the foundation for what has often been termed life-long learning.

So why do we insist on using the push model 90% of the time in higher education? We attempt to stuff our students’ heads full of what we think is important and then check on them to make sure the stuffing hasn’t fallen out. If that’s not the model we use to learn, then why do we use that model to teach our students? If our students are to learn to think at higher levels, as I discussed in my previous post, then why aren’t we more engaged in pull learning? I think our fear of pull learning stems from several things:

1. We are afraid they will “get off track” and not pursue what we think is important
2. We think they will be wasting time and effort on superfluous material or content
3. We don’t trust them to think for themselves
4. We don’t think they know enough to know what to pursue
5. We don’t think they will do any work at all if they are just “turned loose to pursue their own course”
6. We don’t think they have the skills to engage in independent learning
7. How will we test them on what they are supposed to learn?
8. How will we fit unstructured learning into a structured syllabus and curriculum?
9. How can we be assured they will know enough to progress to the next course in the sequence?

Well, you get the idea. This is the tail wagging the dog. The structure of the curriculum and the traditional methods of instruction are dictating how we move forward. Can’t we think in other terms, ignore current structures and come up with some new ways of doing things? Maybe we need to use a bottom-up approach where we decide how best to communicate content, then build an entirely new curricular structure around that. Maybe the Carnegie system is outdated. After all, if the structure is so rigid that we have lost all true flexibility, what does the future hold?

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