Significant learning

Let’s be honest. It’s satisfying and important to see our students accomplish the learning outcomes we state in our syllabi. But that’s not what puts a big smile on our face or lives in our memory for years to come. Rather it’s the paper that demonstrates incredible insight, the class conversation that goes off the rails—in a good way, the project that breaks new ground, the performance that knock our socks off. It’s the unpredictable moments when everything comes together in a special way. Again, let’s be honest. We are satisfied and rewarded by competence; we are thrilled and energized by significance.

Fink also talks about significant learning in terms of process. He describes significant learning as happening more often when students are highly engaged and when the learning environment has high energy. Others refer to the similar phenomena of peak experience (Privette & Bundrick, 1997), sweet spot (Jerome, 1980), flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993), being in sync (Strogatz, 2003), and liminal state (Rowland & Wilson, 1994), all of which involve high engagement and energy, great focus, and even a sense of time becoming fluid.

Another concept similar to Fink’s significant learning is “powerful learning experience.” In a series of studies over 20 years with over 400 participants, Rowland and IC graduate students explored the nature of these experiences (e.g., Rowland & Kitchner-Meyer, 2018). They defined a powerful learning experience (PLE) as one that stands out in memory because of its high quality, its impact on one’s thoughts and actions over time and its transferability to a wide range of contexts and circumstances. They found that several factors were often present, including active learning (doing it in authentic context), a relationship with a mentor/expert teacher, and reflection in and on action. However, they ultimately concluded that PLEs are highly individual. Rather than being the predictable outcome of a known set of factors, PLEs are complex and emerge for an individual from a unique combination of factors in the moment. Fostering PLEs is thus difficult. Rather than prescribing a specific strategy to achieve a predetermined learning outcome, one needs to create conditions in which a PLE is more likely, for example, to “over-conceptualize” and “underspecify” the design (Weick, 2004), set especially high expectations, carefully monitor what is happening in the moment, and quickly adapt.

Here are a couple reflective activities you can do that may increase the significance of learning in your courses.

1. Set aside how you typically teach your subject and ask yourself this question: What are my highest-level goals for my students? Not the SLOs in the syllabus, but my true aspirations for what my students might be able to achieve. Then ask: How can the course be designed to create conditions in which those goals might be achieved?

2. Answer these questions: What is the best course you ever took as a student? What was it that made it so great? How is that mirrored in your own approach to teaching? How well does that work for all your students, including some who, no doubt, learn differently than you? How can you adapt things so that all students can achieve significant learning?