Authentic learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages students to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world. Once an educator provides a motivational challenge, they nurture and provide the necessary criteria, planning, timelines, resources and support to accommodate student success. The teacher becomes a guide on the side or an event manager, a facilitator not a dictator. Processes become the predominant force and the content collected is organized appropriately into portfolios.
Authentic learning engages all the senses allowing students to create a meaningful, useful, shared outcome. They are real life tasks, or simulated tasks that provide the learner with opportunities to connect directly with the real world.
Instead of vicariously discussing topics and regurgitating information in a traditional industrial age modality, authentic learning provides a learner with support to achieve a tangible, useful product worth sharing with their community and their world.
Our greatest short coming in education these past few years has been to ignore the brain research that is richly available to us that affirms that implementing multi-sensory activities, pursuing meaningful tasks, exploring a variety of skills with real world applications is optimal learning and that it needs to be practiced regularly.
A student sitting at a desk, taking notes and regurgitating curriculum content uses approximately 3% of their brain's capacity. In general, students learn to sit quietly, respond in turn, follow instructions and complete tasks for the evaluation of a control teacher. This classic industrial age approach has been used since the mid 1870's to produce a work force to facilitate mass production lines that were to become prevalent in the next hundred years. That era ended in the 1980's if not before. If all we do is sit at a square table, with a square piece of paper, in a square room with departmentalized lessons and timetables, then what are our education systems really producing? Brain-based research shows that using all senses maximizes the learning experience. Interacting, manipulating, exploring, collaborating, discussing openly and sharing for meaningful reasons while having ample time to nurture a greater depth of reasoning and creativity is optimal learning. It's learning that sticks. It's learning with roots!
Process and Content: Let's re-prioritize the learning journey
In an authentic learning model the emphasis is mainly on the quality of process and innovation. It's about allowing students to pursue individual learning opportunities that are unique to their interests, through real life processes. The emphasis isn't just about regurgitating content for a unit test, it's about developing a set of culminating skills sets, within a realistic timeline, using self-motivated inquiry methods to create a useful product to be shared with a specific audience. It's about engaging in activities that students care about and can be immersed in a meaningful, shared experience.
More importantly, the learning journey that ensues is life changing as students are connected to the multi-sensory processes rather than the short term memory skills that a content driven curriculum demands. The content is important but when using an authentic learning approach content is recognized as it is properly intended to be - a portfolio of records, research, plans, lists, notes, reading, contacts, drafts and support information that will become the artifacts of the authentic journey.
With the advent of the world wide web, content is readily available to everyone. We can reference, cross reference, research any topic at rapid speeds and do it at any time when it's relevant for us. We can access it through mobiles, tablets or computers as we access information as it is needed and when it is needed. Is it still relevant for a teacher to predominately dispense content to students, then evaluate the regurgitation of that content given as the main assessment of a person's learning ability? Authentic learning allows for students to demonstrate their skills through a series of unfolding learning processes with a definitive product that they can actually demonstrate. At no time in history has information (content) been so readily available to the masses, but it's the synergy and processes of engagement that defines our human experience. That's where the real value in education lies today.
I believe that curricula must reflect a successful balance between learning processes and topical content? Remember, processes take time to learn but once they're consolidated they're intact for a long time. Processes require skill sets that are developmentally prioritized and require skilled instructors to transfer these skills. If you want students to engage in deeper thinking opportunities, then time becomes one of the most valued commodities. Are education systems willing to forgo the number of content expectations in their curricula in favour of embracing processes that require more time committment?
Good teachers are quick to point out that their curricula covers so many topics and expectations that there isn't enough time to cover everything appropriately. The more topics, the more content and the more time it takes to cover everything in the curriculum, and mathematically it just doesn't work. The rules dictate how the game is played, so to cover every expectation educational systems rely on the "here's the information" and "here's the test" mode of education. It's an efficient way to deliver content quickly so that all expectations are lawfully covered. It's an over used exercise in short term memory skills and cognitive cueing tricks, but its not a fulfilling, meaningful way to learn. Unless students are immersed in relevant, multi-sensory activities with specific, audience directed outcomes and culminating skills sets, then what students are learning is not sticking.
The quality of research, subject knowledge, skill development, expert consultation, dedication and resourcefulness that goes into the making of a product is directly related to the quality outcome of that product.
Is It Authentic Learning or Not?
Remember, in true authentic learning an outcome designed to interact successfully with a community is the goal. When this happens a whole new layer of emotional, academic and skill set developments take place. There's a big difference between preparing a skit for some classmates verses a dramatic production for the public. There's a much larger personal investment required when a student becomes an ancient Egyptian tradesperson working at a market stall to an interacting audience than holding up a Bristol board display and explaining ancient Egyptian information on it. Best of all, the student retains information from this type of multi-sensory, authentic learning experience longer because it's real, it's connected.
Authentic learning is not project-based learning nor is it constructivism. These models of education were designed within the classroom context. Although at times they stepped successfully into the world of authentic, and are extremely useful tools in moving closer to an authentic learning approach they are not authentic learning models. Authentic learning is intended to successfully interact with a community; by going out to interact with a community or the community coming into the student community to interact. That's why it's authentic! It's a quality outcome or product of significance that is intended for community consumption or betterment.
Kudos to those teachers who provide project-based, simulation, game-based learning opportunities. These are significant, engaging initiatives that provide the best kind of classroom learning and education systems need more of you. They are fantastic opportunities in providing working instruction and to model inquiry method, team work and sound skill development. What I'm encouraging is to take the next step. Consider a project to be developed for real world applications beyond the school walls. Not every time, but perhaps once in a school year attempt an authentic event. For those who have stepped into the realm of authentic you'll understand how this impacts everything. It will impact the initial discussions, the consultation, the refined skill sets, networking and the professional development a student and teacher requires.
