Executive summary: Long-term academic mentoring counteracts poorly delivered courses by personalizing & contextualizing learning.
There’s a cliché that “the best learning is for life”, a truism that rolls easily off the tongue but isn’t at all clear if you stop to consider its meaning. Most people today, and certainly most students, unfortunately think of learning as a contingency for achieving a near-term goal, perhaps to pass a test or to gain acceptance at an institution or to receive a degree at a university. This attitude is understandable in a world in which challenges and needs and methods and solutions are changing incredibly fast, and in which adaptability is therefore considered a key metric for success. However, it completely misses the point that true learning is an exquisite, personal and timeless experience, which is amenable to nurturing but never to force.
a sure solution for learning
in a world of rapid change
You don’t have to look for long to notice the current regrettable prevalence of testing in schools. For many students these days, the whole experience of learning a subject such as physics or mathematics could be described as lurching from one quiz or test to the next, with little time to consider the subject matter in any broader context. Ask a student about this experience, and they’ll almost certainly relate. They may also describe real trauma that they have suffered as a consequence of rapid, test-intensive teaching; and they will probably agree that, weeks or months after a course has finished (usually in the Götterdämmerung of the final examination), they have retained a depressingly small percentage of what the course was supposed to teach. This is hardly surprising in light of the fact that teachers, themselves pressed to deliver to ridiculous agendas, often have to skirt so much foundational or ancillary material that the residue of their curriculum is rendered incoherent. Days missed for staff consultations, teacher training, school system testing, administrative necessities and downright absenteeism don’t make these problems any better.
if you want to learn something well, you should try to learn it more slowly
Some families understandably turn to tutoring to try to navigate these situations, particularly when the speed of their children’s courses outflanks what the parents can remember from their own days at school. For some students, subject tutoring can be enough to accelerate their progress and to compensate for some of the gaps in a course, but, all too often, this merely serves to qualify the student for entry into the next, more advanced, course. Eventually, and especially with structured subjects such as math and science, the Peter Principle of “rising to one’s level of incompetence” takes hold, and the student’s rate of learning can become seriously degraded. This is the sad consequence of racing through earlier curricula in the mistaken belief that faster is better.
Educational literature and social opinion are in solid agreement that, if you want to learn something well, you should try to learn it more slowly. All competent teachers know the time-management techniques that really work. There are spacing effects, whereby you allow time for concepts to take root in students’ minds; spiral learning, where you build understanding incrementally over time by orbiting between topics; and “just in time” introductions, through which you carefully synchronize the curriculum to support the student’s next topic needs. Naturally, these are the first techniques that go out of the window when students and teachers are under extreme time pressure to complete the units of a course by a particular date.
One of the most positive pedagogical developments in recent years has been the recognition that students each have unique characteristics in the ways that they learn. I define long-term academic mentoring to be a fusion between ordinary tutoring, highly personalized teaching delivery, multi-subject support, and the deliberate suppression of the short-term attitude. My own version of long-term mentoring often involves a 2-4 year engagement with a student, typically spanning their learning from middle school through to university, and offering a sense of continuity across several academic subjects. In those years, you can sadly guarantee that the student will experience the rapid delivery and content incoherence that I described above, but you can hope to do something to guard against their worse impacts on the student’s learning potential.
true learning is an exquisite, personal and timeless experience, which is amenable to nurturing but never to force
Long-term academic mentoring establishes a shared dialog with a familiar vocabulary and a learning pattern based on the student’s personal learning preferences. It can counteract confusion in a current course by reminding the student of things learned long before. It can overcome some of the panic and trauma of poorly-delivered courses by representing the course content in a more familiar and tailored way, with proper consideration not only of the context of the subject matter, but also of the student’s current, past and future learning interests. It can pre-empt low grades, by ensuring that the student stays with or even ahead of the course material. More particularly, long-term mentoring supports the student with a figure who may be lacking in their school: a dependable adult person with deep educational expertise, specifically interested in helping that student over a period of many months or years. The mentor can be relied upon to see the student through the short-term shocks, and to help the student stay on a long-term learning path that is likely to foster deeper understanding and much better retention. Thus, long-term mentoring is uniquely positioned to inculcate learning habits and learning skills in the student, to show the student how to work through the inevitable short-term crises at school, to guide the student to learn in ways that work best for them, and to equip the student to learn how to learn more in the future.
The bottom line: Long-term academic mentoring is a sure solution for learning in a world of rapid change, because, properly delivered, it invests students with self-awareness, confidence and adaptability that the fast-moving future will demand, while protecting them from the dangers of excessive speed and testing in the short term.