ASU Research E-Magazine: Cycles of Learning

Think of effective learning as a science experiment, with you as the scientist. You become vaguely aware of something. Start tinkering with it. Discuss what you saw occur. Refine your guesses. Then test your new theory.

Anton Lawson practices the process. It is the basis for the Learning Cycles teaching method he has refined and championed.

Learning Cycles is a highly interactive way of teaching. The method breaks learning into three key phases: Exploration, Term Introduction, and Application. Each phase is patterned after methods used in actual research. Lawson uses the methodology every day in his work as a professor of zoology at Arizona State University.

“The best way to learn is to dive in and start ‘playing,’ if you will. Years of practice have showed us that,” Lawson says.

“Diving in” creates a disequilibrium between what students expect and what they actually observe. Such disequilibrium fosters creative thinking and innovation skills. That, Lawson says, is what prompts real learning to occur.

During the Exploration phase, teachers introduce topics of interest to students. They then ask general questions such as “Why?” or “What if?”

Students then proceed to conduct hands-on research, using real materials. The idea is to have students look for patterns and begin to wonder how, why, and how often each thing occurs.

Lawson calls this the “Don’t tell . . . experiment” phase. He warns that the exploration process can be ruined if the teacher asks questions that are too specific at the start. He also warns that teachers using this technique must know more—not less—about both teaching and their subjects. Classes and guesses can move many ways quickly.

Once general patterns are observed, teachers should bring their students back together for phase two. That’s Term Introduction.

Term Introduction is the point at which general patterns are discussed and observations named. Terms such as normal distribution, bell curve, and hypothesis should be introduced.

Discussions eventually lead to questions like: “Where else do we find this pattern?” Or, “How many people in each height group would you expect to find campuswide?”

It is at this point that students enter the Application Phase. Students test their assumptions by extending them to other things and situations.

For example, Does what I first observed hold true over many trials? Does the normal distribution process I observed in human sizes apply to the size of leaves as well?

“To be a really good problem solver in class—and life—you need to be able to take lots of facts and make sense of them,” Lawson says. “You must learn to think, not just memorize.”

Lawson says that results from hard scientific research consistently have confirmed that interactive teaching is much more effective than lecturing for preparing kids for life.

“Ultimately, people will be divided into one of two categories: people who think and people who don’t,” Lawson says. “The people who think will be more skeptical, better able to problem solve, and more competitive than those who blindly follow rules.” —Lindsey Michaels