Adaptive learning: teaching skills that translate to the real world

Teachers give their utmost daily to teach dozens to even hundreds of students. As educators, we work our hardest to customize our teaching methods in an effort to reach all students regardless of their racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, academic, or developmental backgrounds. However, there are few teaching approaches that focus on educational methods that cover all students of all backgrounds. To reach this universal teaching method we need to first identify what all of our students have in common.

The thing all of us have in common is that we are alive. Can the study of life (biology) teach us about how living things learn? Biologically, learning is a form of environmental adaptation where small physical changes accumulate (particularly for tiny structures in our brains) in response to iterative environmental interactions. The power of biologically informed learning can be seen in the way that researchers can teach bees to roll a ball onto a circle to receive a tasty treat. If researchers can teach bees to do something completely new (rolling a ball onto a circle) then maybe biology can give us some good pointers on teaching our human students too.

There are two major secrets from biology that we can apply to our classroom: iteration and association.

Biologically, information used for learning is processed through associations that reflect environmental processes. Environmental processes are composed of multiple associated objects/processes sensed through multiple sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc.) over time. These environmental processes must then be experienced iteratively to allow our brains to cross-reference between repeating events to identify important common elements between iterations. We can leverage our natural process of learning by creating purposeful educational environments that utilize multiple associated modes of transmission (sight, hearing, touch, and smell).

Translating biology into classroom practices: What does this mean in practical terms?

1. Learning is achieved through multiple iterative environmental elements in association with each other. We can bring environmental learning into the classroom by introducing more 3 or 4-dimensional (time) with processes and objects.

• We can try modeling our classrooms with physical manifestations (not just posters) of the things we want to teach and grouping them together in "a natural clustering" based on their physical, or mathematical associations. This may involve commonly used practices like classroom pets or terrariums, or more special instances of bringing in 3D models or functional objects to pass around the classroom. These can be used to associate tangible objects or representations to content in lectures/presentations.

2. Environments are constructed through multiple associated modes of transmission. A good learning environment is made up of associated elements that we receive through multiple modes including sight, sounds, smell, touch, etc. This leverages natural sensory cross-referencing used to improve sensation and environmental awareness.

• We can try teaching the same concepts by using multiple modes of transmission or at least by using descriptive words that evoke separate senses. We can describe what it looks like, feels like, smells like, or sounds like. This provides context that can be used to conjure a picture of an environment. It should feel 'real' and by evoking multiple sensory modalities we activate the natural associative cross-referencing that all living things use to confirm the validity of sensory inputs.

3. Living things learn through iterative associations, we have the capacity to identify what is important as the elements that are repeated. Conversely, if they aren't repeated then we naturally deem them to be unimportant 'fluke' events. While reviews are indeed helpful, from a learning perspective, we should utilize themes. Reviews are just the exact same information experienced 2 times or 3 times over with minor differences based on an educator's delivery. In the real world, many things don't happen the same way twice, not to mention repetitive reviews can be very boring for some students. However, by focusing on themes we can iteratively present similar ideas and concepts from different perspectives. This allows us to make exercises for our students to identify commonalities between lessons to identify what is important without focusing too much on minor details.

• We can practically apply this in our classrooms by interconnecting what we teach by coming "back" to previously discussed subjects and re-analyzing them from new perspectives or in new settings and encouraging the identification of common elements between past and current lessons. By employing these types of approaches we can interest our students that get bored easily with repetitive information while helping other students that haven't quite grasped core concepts by providing different perspectives that may resonate more with their personal interests or predispositions.

One last tip. Learning takes time, so we can all take a deep breath. By definition, iteration means that things need to be experienced multiple times and there is no shortcut without a time machine. The good news is that iterative and associative learning focuses on analytically finding commonalities. These are skills that have clear real-world applications and cannot be replaced by a web browser search. Ultimately, these teaching approaches are life-tested learning methods that are primed for real-world adaptability that will give our students flexible foundations for success in whatever fields they choose.