A Different Way to Learn

This past semester has brandished its own set of unique challenges for students across the country. The return to on campus learning has forced students to restructure the way they’ve been learning over the past year and swiftly adjust to the demands of their courses. But has the return to in person learning highlighted foundational issues in college curriculum overall?

As many students have noticed in their return to college campuses, the ability to steadily learn and retain information from last year has grown increasingly difficult. This is an effect of distance learning, but even more so it’s a representation of how students struggle in a saturated goal-oriented style of learning. To counteract this, colleges should look to inject a more growth-oriented style of learning into their curriculum to redefine the goals students have.

Goal oriented learning refers to being focused on reaching or completing tasks to achieve a planned outcome. Students have been in this primary learning environment for most of their educational journey, but as a year of distance learning has shown them, being heavily task driven doesn’t always correlate to learning. One college student Bishop Rhone speaks to the obstacles he’s found in the goal-oriented landscape.

“School always felt like it was about hitting marks,” Rhone recollects, “so if I didn’t understand something or meet a standard I felt I must not be capable of understanding this subject.”

Rhone discusses the pressures students face to keep up with a target grade. He found that in the areas of class he thought would focus on growth, the emphasis was more on having the right answers as opposed to understanding the process of getting to them.

Contrastingly, a growth-oriented model of learning leans on building up talents and abilities over time through persistence and feedback. This is a method students generally experience much less in college as their primary activities push them to prioritize target standards. Schools can benefit from including more growth-oriented components into their courses because it enables students to perfect and understand their given craft and it helps them retain the information they learn long term.

When asked about how colleges can make their classes more growth-oriented, Rhone suggests a more modernized approach to learning. He talks about his fashion photography class that models this idea, as it encourages the process of learning, checks on his well-being, and sparks feedback and discussion between him and his professor.

“The class is modeled around the question: Do I want to get better at taking photos for myself?” Rhone states. He feels this distinction is important because the focus is on the individual student and their personal desire to grow.

When classes are formatted to expand upon the natural incentive students have to grow and learn, they will forge students that are more interactive with curriculum content and more driven to steadily improve. As for students like Rhone they will find their efforts in courses will materialize in more fulfilling ways than the restrictive label of a letter grade.

Of course, goal driven ideals aren’t inherently bad. In fact, in a world that is result driven it’s important to be able to use goals to create your own learning atmosphere. Likewise, goal-oriented teaching styles can be very conducive to those in the sciences and mathematics. However, when goal’s simply become landmarks or labels as they can sometimes be expressed in curriculum, they lose value and can become detrimental. While total reformation of the school system is not in order, awareness of an element that holds students back from long term learning is.

As Rhone wholeheartedly puts it “I look at it like this. Let’s say I’m working in marketing, and I need 5,000 people to buy this product from me. A goal-oriented person will likely hit that or slightly above. A growth-oriented person will shoot below, get there, and eventually surpass that goal. Society seems to be tailoring us to do the bare-minimum but I think the result we all want is to achieve and learn way more.”