Action Is the Learning Process

Mapping out that future! (Photo: C. Powell/Overseas School of Colombo.)

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A “process view” of the PYP Exhibition at the Overseas School of Colombo, Sri Lanka

A chocolate-smudged face; cookies in hand; and a wad of greasy money, hanging precariously from a Grade 2 student’s pockets. These are all reminders that we strive to turn student learning into action, but frequently stumble into delectable tokenism. Here the argument is between a grand, teacher-choreographed gesture, and small, seemingly insignificant steps that students take to better own and control their learning.

Action is a way of learning, and it necessarily means that students take control of the learning process. Our goal at the Overseas School of Colombo, Sri Lanka, was to create student ownership of the learning process and monitor it through continual snapshots of student action. These play-by-play snapshots demonstrate both the mounting ownership as well as the level of synthesis occurring.

With this goal in mind, we set about streamlining the exhibition process itself—imagine eating Spaghetti Bolognese with a two-year-old, trying to keep the pasta on the plate and the sauce off the shirt! Nevertheless, we took an inquiry cycle and merged it with a research framework. The fit was not exact, but some tweaking allowed us to follow a route of guided inquiry.

Using this structure, we returned to the idea of action as being the manifestation of synthesis or conceptual depth. Here questions allowed the students to construct deeper understanding along the way. For instance, How will your learning drive your inquiry further? What learning goals have emerged based on what you have learned? And, How has your learning action changed over the last couple of weeks?

Simply put, students with a superficial understanding of their area of interest needed greater action emphasis on their own learning. Students who were beginning to understand their areas of interest at a deeper level, on the other hand, were able to formulate creative ways to get involved and be part of a solution.

Logistically, we implemented an action component into each of our master inquiry cycle stages. This was a continual reminder for students to consider how their learning would influence and drive their future learning. The connection we sought was between an inquiry lens determined by a specific key concept, new content learning, and the independent initiative to own and drive one’s own learning. Here synthesis does not automatically lead into application. A much more creative and sometimes “stretched” approach is required.

Requiring action, while not teaching it, equates to trying to fatten a cow with a measuring tape: you cannot expect students to do something that you have not taught! Therefore, we concurrently taught Hart’s ladder of participation modeling for the students what each rung of the ladder means.

This tactic operates on the premise that action starts with the individual and as we get more confident and successful in our endeavor we are more able to extend our action to our community. The emphasis here is that action is part of every step of the inquiry cycle, not just the last stage.

The Exhibition process at the Overseas School of Colombo has been hugely successful. We have 22 students who took their interest in real-life problems determined (through key concepts) what angle they were going to look at, and drove their own conceptual depth according to their growing knowledge.

Not every step was smooth. However, our students formulated goals and accumulated ownership of their learning. For teachers and students alike, action does inform our way of learning, and indeed our learning behavior.

Finally, the significance of action as embedded in the learning process is that for a concept-driven curriculum, action is both the tool and the pinnacle of understanding. It is both the verb and the noun used in individual inquiries.

Ownership of the learning process is reflected in the conceptual depth of understanding, the degree of synthesis as materialized in one’s learning behavior. Action is the process of learning.

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