Adaptive learning through thematic instruction

The current paradigm for improving teaching is to customize teaching styles to different student levels, interests, and class dynamics. The goal is to "leave no child behind", and we do this by constantly adjusting our methods to help those students (or groups of students) struggling to keep up with coursework. This is exhausting on the part of the teacher and fosters negative perspectives that focus on the potential failure of "leaving a child behind". This doesn't have to be the case, through a shift in perspective and approach, we can move towards generalizable teaching methods that focus on cultivating positive learning experiences for all students.

Finding a way to inspire learning in all students. Customization is exhausting and endless, we need a change in perspective. This is taxing on teachers and cannot (by definition) be applied equally to all students. To cultivate academic growth in all of our students we need to first understand what all students have in common. Our students may have different racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or developmental backgrounds but they are all living on this blue planet that we share. If we are all living things, then what do all living things have in common? We're all alive and we all have the ability to learn.

Shared amongst all living things on planet earth is the ability to adapt to their environment. This simply means that living things interact with their environment in a way that promotes their survival. For time scales that involve multiple generations a random adaptive process called evolution is able to produce adaptive change.

Evolution requires heritable changes to DNA through extremely rare and random mutation events. Then these mutations can spread through a population(s) over several generations depending on several factors namely natural selection. This is a slow and random process where changes are usually bad and improvements are exceedingly rare. For individual humans, this time scale is practically meaningless and adaptative changes are rare and random. However, living things also have the ability to actively adapt to conditions in their environment at the time scales that stretch from a fraction of a second to their entire lifetime.

Biologically, learning is just an accelerated form of adaptation that doesn't directly require gene inheritance to provide adaptive information. While genes provide a stable form of transmitting adaptive information, their stability means they are slow to change. The big problem is that often the environment changes faster than our genes can. This is a problem if you're trying to adapt to an environment during your own lifetime. Genes only really change at the level of their distribution through a population (aside from chance mutations), if an individual is born with unsuitable genes for a particular environment then they are out of luck. This is why learning is an excellent extension to gene-based evolutionary processes. Learning is an adaptive process of organismal change in response to their environment at a time scale that far outpaces gene-based evolution. Learning is simply a small physical change (particularly for tiny structures in your brain) in response to environmental interactions. In this context, if an environmental interaction results in adaptive physical change then it is learning. To learn, the organism's body must respond to environmental conditions then physically change in response such that with the next set of environmental interactions the organism's body is slightly better at dealing with the inputs from the environment. This is called an interaction loop, where physical input (light, water, food, etc) results in a physical change in the organism that improves the next interaction. The important point is that in an interaction loop there is iterative environmental input and consequent iterative responses.

Iteration is more than repetition. All living things including humans learn things through interaction with their environment. Biologically, information used for learning is processed through associations that reflect environmental states, which are composed of multiple associated objects/processes sensed through multiple sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc.). Computationally this allows us to cross-reference between repeating themes to identify important conserved elements between iterations. We can leverage our biological abilities to learn, by creating purposeful/educational environments that utilize multiple associated modes of transmission (sight, hearing, touch, and smell) to mimic the natural way living things learn. In this way through iteration and creating purposeful learning environments to deliver information through multimodal associations, we can craft nurturing learning environments for all of our students. For those educators who think these concepts sound familiar, this is multimodal and thematic learning.