Debates and Scholarship

The field of learning strategy work is not overly fraught with controversy. The purpose of this work is straightforward. Yes, there are nuanced arguments about method (direct instruction versus facilitation); end-goals (achievement versus development); positionality (authority versus collaboration), but these typically resolve themselves in the middle ground. As educators, we draw eclectically as bricoleurs, sometimes offering a direct instructional approach when called for, at other times pulling back and facilitating discovery in the students we’re working with. As support staff, we know that students want different things and we find balance between offering strategies instrumental to achieving credentials but also attend to other important things related to the lifelong capacities for learning. And as professionals, we find ourselves somewhere in between students and professors, inside and outside the classroom, curricular and co-curricular,  perpetually monitoring our positionality in this regard. So, there is shifting terrain in this work, the stuff of professional reflection and conversation. More concretely, though, there are some areas of schism that are (or should be) subject to scholarly debate in the field.

What is the value of learning skills/strategy instruction?

This is the bedrock question at the root of our work. What are Learning Strategists purporting to do for student learning? And is there empirical evidence to support that we are doing it? Our answer to this first question establishes, in essence, the dependent variable(s) upon which our learning strategy “interventions”, the independent variables, act. So, what are those dependent variables, those things we deem desirable for students and that are subject to our influence? This question would yield a range of responses from the practitioners in the field, and likely some misguided responses from those outside of it. Do we:

• Nurture academic readiness? (and what is that?)
• Cultivate a capacity for lifelong learning (and what is that?)
• Build academic/learning/study skills (and what are those?)
• Facilitate the development of metacognitive skills?
• Support the development of self-regulated learning?
• Increase retention, persistence rates, and grade point averages?
• Facilitate the development of positive dispositions towards learning?
• Build in students their academic resilience/resourcefulness/self-efficacy?

And so on. And are these desirable? And why?

And, if we are to see learning strategy “interventions” as playing a causal role in the development of any of the above, what is the evidence for that? Again, this is a foundational question and one to which we, as a community of professionals, pay insufficient attention. The value and efficacy of our work cannot simply be taken for granted, especially when there are those who make the case that there is, indeed, little or no value to this work. How do we counter that conclusion?

Skill vs Strategy

If you are to call yourself a Learning Strategist, there should be some solid, shared understanding of what is meant by the word strategy. What exactly do we mean by this? Is a strategy different from a skill? In what way? Are the two things related? In what way? Is a strategist someone who facilitates skills? What is a learning strategy anyway? How is it different from a learning skill? Or a study skill? What other titles might be possible and what would the implications be? Learning Skill Facilitator? Study Tactician? Study Skill Advisor? Learning Coach? And then, to complicate it even further, we throw the word academic into the mix. It’s a word-cloud of possible associations.

Some people think of strategy as a step-by-step, ordered process employed to complete a task. In this way, strategy subsumes skill. In other words, strategies are an approach to skilled performance. To take a simplistic example, consider the order of operations in math calculations – brackets, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.  The skill is being able to operationalize this order; the strategy, we might say, is the mnemonic BEMDAS.

But is that the whole story? Does that adequately explain what we mean by strategy? Is BEMDAS a strategy? Or a tactic in the service of a strategy? How does the idea of goal fit in? These are foundational debates, but we do not adequately grapple with this.

One of the best explanations I’ve ever come across about this comes from well-known education thinker, Grant Wiggins, who characterizes it this way:

• Goal: the end-mission of an enterprise
• Strategy: overall approach to using all resources to achieve the goal
• Tactics: specific “moves” designed to execute the strategy in service of the goal
• Skills: personal abilities needed to execute the tactics and strategy and to achieve the goal

What I think Learning Strategists often end up doing is simply teaching tactics, the “moves” that are proven effective in certain situations (BEMDAS, cited above, could be thought of as a move, or a tactic). These “moves” or tactics are what typically end up on “lists of effective strategies”, but the point is that the tactics one uses are determined by the strategy they invoke. The situation is the key. For example: Think of a student who has the goal of passing an exam. There are several tactics that can be employed – create a study group, do some deep reading and take notes, make flash cards, review the textbook and so on. Tactics. But the tactics that get chosen must be fit for the purpose of the situation, which is the strategic question – how should the student best marshal all their current resources to achieve their goal in this setting, in Wiggins’ framing. The situation and the goal can be widely varied, as we all know. There could be time constraints. The student could have a job, or an illness, or a disability. The exam may be worth a huge percentage of the final grade, or very little. It could be in a course the student doesn’t care much about. The student’s goal may be simply to get a passing grade, or it may be to ace the exam, etc. etc. The situational variables will determine what the strategic approach will be, and which tactics will best serve that approach.  And the specific academic or disciplinary content in question also determines which tactics are most applicable.  Good athletic coaches know this very well. They don’t just teach “moves” or “skills” they put players into practice situations where they learn to make their own decisions about which moves to use in given situations, and according to the strategy that the coach has made clear, or that the game situation dictates.

It’s true that we could get caught up needlessly in the semantics of this, but it is helpful to think it through and be clear in our approaches. And, of course, it bears emphasising that our work is not simply instrumental in these ways. Much of what we do involves nurturing in students a deeper, healthier relationship to study and learning itself – which a question, not of strategy, but attitude. I turn to more discussion of this later.

Bolt-on vs Built-in

In 2006, Ursula Wingate published an influential article in the journal Teaching in Higher Education titled “Doing away with ‘study skills”. She declared, in that piece, that the traditional model of providing study skills support through centralized learning support centres is “ineffective”. She points out some of the limitations of this “bolt-on” approach – things like limited attendance, its rootedness in remediation, and that, in her opinion, the learning, in that approach, is fatally divorced from subject-matter. Further, she offers an interesting take on “skills” and what we mean by that term in the larger context of post-secondary education. Wingate writes from the perspective of the UK where they make a distinction between “key skills” – those competencies deemed essential for success in career and lifelong learning – and “study skills” which are seen as distinct from key skills. In this framework, she argues, study skills are to be seen as only useful for success in higher education but not essential for success in career and lifelong learning.  She makes the case that study skills are indeed essential for success after higher education and should be included in the category of “key skills” and therefore taught and evaluated inside the curricula – built-in rather than bolted-on. While I agree with Wingate on the essential, lifelong nature of “study skills”, and the value of built-in learning supports embedded inside curricula, I question her further assertion about the ineffectiveness of generic study skills provision. She simply presumes as inevitable, that the generic, centralized approaches are superficial, trivialize learning, and foster shallow approaches to learning. She goes on to claim that: the “bolt-on” “…approach is not capable of developing more than study techniques.” This is a nonsensical leap. The value and substance of any learning experience depends on the thoughtfulness and skill with which it is designed and delivered, and there is no reason to believe that deep and substantive nuance cannot be the hallmark of centralized study-skills instruction. If learning skills are not being delivered from those departments effectively, the answer is not abandonment, but improvement.

Domain-Specific vs Domain-Generic

The notion of domain-specific versus domain-generic learning is related to the bolt-on/built-in debate but exists at a much more fundamental level. This is the stuff of learning development theory, the deep structures of learning. As such, we scratch the surface here where it is relevant to do so for our work. At the risk of over-simplifying, consider domain-generic learning skills as the kinds of skills and competencies that would cut across multiple domains, regardless of the specific content. In other words, learning a skill (say, critical thinking, or note-taking) in one context can be extended broadly to other contexts because of the inter-related mechanisms of the brain. The term “generic” skills is the term often applied to these kinds of competencies – critical thinking, problem-solving, communication etc. – as a way to express this idea. These skills are generic in nature and apply across multiple domains. Domain-specific learning, on the other hand, is the kind of development that happens within a specific discipline or domain (mathematics, painting, language). What is learned in one domain has little or no benefit or cross-over in other domains. Domain-general learning theory posits a cohesive, singular  neurological structure  while domain-specific theorists suggest a set of independent neurological structures (again, this is a vast over-simplification). So where do study-skills fit in? Are they generic or specific? Does learning effective time-management skills apply across multiple domains? Or is it better to conceive of time-management-for-mathematics-students, time-management-for-art-students etc. As we teach ways and strategies and means of learning, should we be general, or domain-specific? As with most things, a common-sense approach seems warranted. Of course, certain skills and strategies for learning will have wide applicability (domain-generic), but we may need to help bridge the gap for students to apply those skills in particular contexts (domain-specific). When working with a medical student, for example, we may be of limited use if we offer only broad and generic “study skills”. We will need to know something about their disciplinary context, the kinds of learning that is taking place in that context and then apply our strategic learning approach to that context – common sense, but raises questions worth thinking about as you do your work with and design programs for students. How do we promote services? How do we organize programming in cohorts?  How do we differentiate “core skills” programming from other more domain-specific programming?

Study vs Learning

Do we help students develop skills in learning or skills in study? Or both? And what’s the difference? Some may argue that this is an artificial, false dichotomy, a distinction without a difference, but the words, study and learning represent the foundational vocabulary of our work so it behooves us to at least explore what is implied and entailed, either explicitly, or implicitly, when we use them.

The word “learning” has become the favoured one in recent decades. The defense of this move towards “learning” (as opposed, say, to “studying”) and “learners” (as opposed to “students”) declares that this is a more compassionate language, one that is more “person-centred”, better recognizes the idiosyncrasies of each person’s experience of education, and mitigates the power relationships in the classroom. To use the language of “learning” and “learner” is to signal a progressive stance in educational thinking, part of a liberating development, freeing students from the more oppressive, commodified aspects of the educational machine. But, as with many developments in education, it happened quickly, without much debate and became a kind of unassailable virtue to use this language. Gert Biesta, in his ongoing invitation to question and consider this “learnification of education” writes about what he sees as …. the new language of learning—a language which refers to students as learners, to teachers as facilitators of learning, to schools as places for learning, to vocational education as the learning and skills sector, to grown ups as adult learners, and so on (Biesta, 2010, p. 541).  Biesta and others point out that this “learniifcation of education” is a kind of trojan horse – importing and codifying the very neoliberal entanglements that it purports to reject.  The concept of “learner” , they say, suggests a “lack” of something – the learner is…not-yet, and requires the intervention of the educator to get them to a state of learned-ness. Teachers, in this view, are the ones who explain, and explanation is required for the learner to learn. There is a subordinate relationship between the one who knows and the one who doesn’t. And “learner” implies that something is to be accomplished, an outcome reached – ie. learning. And not merely learning but learning of something – some bit of content, some part of a curriculum. This, of course, is not a thing to be viewed with scorn – learning of something is a good and productive thing. But it does perhaps close off from view the idea of “teacher”, not as the superior intelligence, the one who possesses what the student does not, but …as a will, as someone who demands the effort from the student and verifies that an effort has been made. This at once changes the identity of the one who is the subject of education. It is no longer a learner, it is no longer someone whose intelligence is subordinated to another and therefore needs explanation in order to be ‘lifted up’ to the level of the explicator. The one who is the subject of education is summoned to study and thus, in the most literal sense, has become a student. (Biesta, 2010, p.545. Emphasis in the original).  The term “student”, unlike “learner”, does not contain the necessity for explanation from the teacher as a requirement for learning. Nor does it contain the necessity to acquire a specified bit of knowledge. It implies that the person learning is able to do so on their own, through the act of study, without a teacher’s explanation, relying upon their own intelligence and voice.  Study is the act. Learning is the outcome.

Student/Learner; Study/Learn – we needn’t choose one or the other. But we should aim for greater precision in our use of terminology and better understand, through discussion and debate and argument, what deeper implications and webs of meaning may be entailed in it.

I believe that this is just scratching the surface of what potential scholarship can emerge from the work of Learning Strategists. The unique work we do with students is a crucible of knowledge-making, insight-formation, theory-building and our Centres have not yet reached their potential as sites of scholarship and research. There are questions that we are well positioned to explore:

• What is a Learning Strategist and how do they function at the university?
• What are learning and study literacies?
• How do students develop academic acumen?
• What does it mean “to study”?
• What are the long-term impacts of learning strategy work?
• What approach to learning strategy instruction is most effective?
• What is the difference between study- skill and study-strategy?
• Who seeks out learning strategy support and who does not? And why?

It’s worth asking yourself, as a practitioner in this realm, is the work and its value straightforward for you? Or are there controversies in the field that are in need of resolution, or scrutiny? Are there deep, foundational premises upon which the practice is built that should be subject to critique? Where do you stand on some of these tensions? As a practitioner, it’s of course important to engage in these sorts of discussions and, happily, there are nascent, emerging, and well-developed mechanisms in our wider professional practice that allow for that. A quick word on that follows.