Moving Thinking to Lifelong Learning
Transfer moves a skill from one area to another, such as the classroom or the assessment area being moved into a different context, thus becoming a life skill. The first clues to this may well appear to you, the teacher, as some irrelevant student verbiage. Was the student letting off pressure with a silly comment? Was the student bored and needed a distraction, or is it something real and worthwhile?
The panel at the right is the final, expert level of a sequential and incremental rubric illustrating a process to organise a student’s work processes. Toward the end of the process, at the final expert level, I noted that she had added to her rubric. C. Clothes in the wardrobe.
After puzzling over it, I realised that she had transferred the processes involved in tidying up the management of her schoolwork to tidying up the management of her bedroom. When I asked, she confirmed this. This was a crucial breakthrough for her as it was the first inkling that she was starting to develop transfer.
How serious the transfer is, is not as important as learning to do it, and that means practice fields need to be provided and persisted within the classroom. To get you, the teacher, started, here are some suggested areas for focus for these practice fields:
• Apply to real world problems outside the classroom.
• Create analogies from within the school.
• Use in a sport or recreational context.
• Ask the students to apply the principles to another activity using a Venn diagram.
Transfer is important enough to include in all curriculum areas.
Teacher imagination will be able to think of further relevant and motivational ideas for their students. However, at least to start, keep them simple and relatively obvious. The aim at this stage is not the degree of difficulty but grasping the thinking skills involved. Alice, in Lewis Carroll’s, Alice in Wonderland, could not see the point of struggling. By “There is no use trying,” said Alice, “One can’t believe impossible things.”
The Red Queen would have none of that. “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” In the same way, we need practice. Keep a watch out for student initiated transfers in the wild – not specifically during the lesson. Where it happens, it will also be a clear signal to you, the teacher, that deep learning is present and being applied. Thus, it gives information that qualitative assessment, such as alphabetical and numerical grades do not.
Provided there is trust between teacher and student, look for an opportunity to have a private chat about how self-talk has developed through to the transfer stage, and eventually schedule that student to take a five-minute slot to explain to the class or if thought better their working group, on how this transfer was discovered. Constructivism will spread like a pandemic to other minds.
However, it is not all positive. Let Madeline Hunter have the last say: “When we do not want the old learning to transfer because it will interfere with new learning we can learn how to minimise or eliminate the transfer.” That will not often be easy and will rely on the individual teacher being prepared to use their personal, practical knowledge from critically looking at their own practices and passing these on to the students.
