Does helplessness impair learning?
Here is another statement from a list in Brain-Based Learning: Possible Implications for Online Instruction Stephanie A. Clemons http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Sep_05/article03.htm
8. Threat, high anxiety, and a sense of helplessness impairs learning.
Our last episode ended with an obligatory wait for the entrepreneurs to come to the rescue and fix the problem of threat, high anxiety, and a sense of helplessness as they go about impairing learning. As promised, this post will deal with the Godot question: “What shall we do while waiting?”
Why deal with a question that may be better left to “them?” When I don’t know what to do, I get a sense of helplessness that would no doubt impair my learning if I let it continue. So I start figuring out what to do.
Since we already have a head start on that sense of helplessness, let’s start there. I suspect that the main reason why learners sometimes have a sense of helplessness is that they are helpless. Someone else, older and wiser, can look at the situation and say, objectively, that they are not helpless. Someone else, with skills of problem solving, would easily analyze the situation and come up with several things to do.
Before you can walk in someone’s shoes, you must first be barefoot.
Someone else would not feel helpless. But here, now, this person, feeling helpless, does not know what to do. Come to think of it, I am not even sure that it is the feeling of helplessness that impairs learning. I hate to be so obvious, but maybe not knowing what to do would impair learning no matter how the person felt about it.
People do not design instruction to cause students not to know what to do. They set up curriculum paths and prerequisites to see that students have the proper content preparation for a specific class or course. This kindly, paternalistic plan seems to work most of the time. But one of the omissions from this curriculum is a course in Knowing What to Do.
This idea reminds me of Thinking 101, the class you didn’t get in school. I suppose if they left thinking out of the curriculum, it was reasonable also to leave out Introduction to Studying. Don Dansereau, at TCU, teaches a course in Techniques of College Learning. But maybe there are techniques of high school learning. Or techniques of online learning. Maybe some of them are the same as for college learning. The Studying venue in the Thinkerer has a collection of common techniques for studying. That might be a start for Knowing What to Do. Find out what other people do. That’s probably better that a sense of helplessness.
8. Threat, high anxiety, and a sense of helplessness impairs learning.
Our last episode ended with an obligatory wait for the entrepreneurs to come to the rescue and fix the problem of threat, high anxiety, and a sense of helplessness as they go about impairing learning. As promised, this post will deal with the Godot question: “What shall we do while waiting?”
Why deal with a question that may be better left to “them?” When I don’t know what to do, I get a sense of helplessness that would no doubt impair my learning if I let it continue. So I start figuring out what to do.
Since we already have a head start on that sense of helplessness, let’s start there. I suspect that the main reason why learners sometimes have a sense of helplessness is that they are helpless. Someone else, older and wiser, can look at the situation and say, objectively, that they are not helpless. Someone else, with skills of problem solving, would easily analyze the situation and come up with several things to do.
Before you can walk in someone’s shoes, you must first be barefoot.
Someone else would not feel helpless. But here, now, this person, feeling helpless, does not know what to do. Come to think of it, I am not even sure that it is the feeling of helplessness that impairs learning. I hate to be so obvious, but maybe not knowing what to do would impair learning no matter how the person felt about it.
People do not design instruction to cause students not to know what to do. They set up curriculum paths and prerequisites to see that students have the proper content preparation for a specific class or course. This kindly, paternalistic plan seems to work most of the time. But one of the omissions from this curriculum is a course in Knowing What to Do.
This idea reminds me of Thinking 101, the class you didn’t get in school. I suppose if they left thinking out of the curriculum, it was reasonable also to leave out Introduction to Studying. Don Dansereau, at TCU, teaches a course in Techniques of College Learning. But maybe there are techniques of high school learning. Or techniques of online learning. Maybe some of them are the same as for college learning. The Studying venue in the Thinkerer has a collection of common techniques for studying. That might be a start for Knowing What to Do. Find out what other people do. That’s probably better that a sense of helplessness.
posted by Selby Evans at 8:07 AM
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