I have to teach myself - Complaint or Praise?

Perception is everything, isn't it? (In this picture, you can see both a beautiful young girl and an old hag, depending on your point of view).

To prepare for a presentation we gave in Raleigh last week, I had occasion to interview some of our students just finishing our "Student Success" class. The goal of the class, obviously, is to help our new students prepare for college work. We have revamped this class (which was the topic of our presentation) so that, hopefully, students work not only at learning the content, but at learning to learn and at preparing to do so in an online environment. The course is completed from our online LMS, although students can opt for a facilitated environment to help them with the technology. The content is designed to provide choices of pathways towards mastering the various skills identified as necessary for college success and includes the requirement for some reflection and student self-direction.

One of the students I interviewed indicated she didn't like online classes because, in her words:

I have to teach myself!

I find that such an amazing statement, particularly within the context of NOT liking an environment designed to help students become independent life-long learners.

Teach yourself? Of course you have to teach yourself! How else can you learn? You can be told, warned, coerced, lectured, spoon-fed, praised, criticized, .....

BUT

Until you self-illuminate the "light bulb", you have not learned.

What the student was saying, I think, was not "I have to teach myself", but more probably:

I don't know how to self-direct my learning. I only know how to memorize what someone else tells me is important about a subject. I am unfamiliar with non-passively creating knowledge and do not like the uncomfortable feeling it imposes. I much prefer the safety of having someone else tell me what I need to know.

We educators propagate this resistance. As David Cohen pointed out in his June '08 essay in the Oxford Review of Education, teachers are experts and, as such, generally present concepts from their expert perspective. They are far past remembering the fumbling and frustration of the learning years, and so tend to bundle their expertise in complete packages that a learner cannot possibly emmulate. Worse, Cohen does not offer an easy way out of this paradox (emphasis and spacing added):

The lack of many efforts to thoughtfully unpack knowledge is no simple oversight, easily remedied with a bit of supplementary instruction. For such teaching cuts against the ways that we learn and hold knowledge, and the value that we attach to masterful performance.

Much deliberate re-learning would be required before most good performers in any field would be able to understand novice work and appreciate the paths to competent performance.

Much study of learning would be required in order to recover the elements of early and inexpert performance, and to learn what instructional approaches might help novices to improve.

Much analysis of knowledge and of teaching would be required to understand how knowledge might be unpacked and extended so as to offer learners greater access to it.

Many opportunities to cultivate intellectual courage and adventurousness would be required if teachers were to learn to extend knowledge in ways that increased uncertainty and multiplied the difficulty of instruction. (p. 374)
(Cohen, David K.(2008)'Knowledge and teaching',Oxford Review of Education,34:3, 357-378)

It sounds like we all better get busy! We've got a lot of work to do and much to teach ourselves.