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Immersion First

By Peter Lloyd

Here’s good news: We all learn and will continue to learn the creative way—by fumbling our way through the application before reading the instruction manual. Not just with software and electronic devices but with life. Unfortunately reactionary educators will continue to try to make us learn the old, top-down, theory-first way.

Even as we discover how conterproductive it is, they will persist, I’m afraid. Because the old-school way makes efficient use of teacher time and classroom occupancy.

How We Learned
In most Western education factories, you and I were taught principles first. To learn a language, we began with grammar and even spelling before moving on to composition. In geometry class we memorized theorems before tackling problems, in math class—order of operations, in science class—Newton’s laws.

How silly! Think about it. That’s not the way you learn when you go after something for which you have passion. How did you learn to speak and understand your first language? Did you take lessons? Maybe you could call them lessons, but I prefer to call what we did as babies immersion. We learned to walk the same way. Proof that we can learn to swim when tossed overboard. Immersion first. Theory later.

Some have recognized the traditional approach as bass-ackwards. What would happen, they seem to have asked, if we started with the problems and let students discover the patterns and eventually the theory?

How We Learn
Recognizing that the brain is a pattern-recognition machine, the researchers described in Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas have challenged students to jump in, head first, and to make mathematical decisions, for example, before grounding themselves in the applicable theory. And it works! This perceptual-learning approach, gives the brain credit for being able to recognize patterns and come to correct decisions intuitively.

The brain can do so much more than we think it can. It spends every waking moment observing and recognizing patterns. No wonder you have the ability to learn just about anything. When you muster the motivation, all you need to do is to jump in and do it, before mulling over the theory. Just do it fast enough to prevent your thinking from getting in the way.

In my experience, it has always taken a good deal of experience with a subject to climb my way up to a vantage point where I can finally see the big picture. But that trek was the fun part, the learning. Why deprive students of it? Especially since it is so much more instructive than the old-school way.

School of Rock
Perhaps no example of immersion-first learning speaks more eloquently or loudly than the School of Rock. Their “lead singer,” Chris Catalano, says in the video below, “If you teach a kid theory, he’ll lose interest in music. Whereas if you teach him how to play music, he becomes more interested in the theory behind it.”

Now view some of the student performances. Think of how this creative, immersion-first approach can help you and those you need to teach.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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