Good learners, like everyone else, are living, squirming, questioning, perceiving, fearing, loving, nervous… but they are good learners precisely because they believe and do certain things that less effective learnersdo not believe and do. And therein lies the key.
What do good learners believe?
What do good learners believe?
- First, good learners have confidence in their ability to learn.
- Good learners tend to enjoy solving problems.
- Good learners seem to know what is relevant to their survival and what is not.
- Good learners prefer to rely on their own judgment.
- Good learners are usually not fearful of being wrong.
- Good learners are emphatically not fast answerers.
- Good learners are flexible.
- Good learners have a high degree of respect for facts and are skillful in making distinctions between statements of fact and other kinds of statements.
- Perhaps most importantly, good learners do not need to have an absolute, final, irrevocable resolution to every problem.The sentence “I don’t know,” does not depress them.
From Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman (1969)