What Is Our Purpose?

Abstract

This chapter asks and then answers ‘What is our purpose?’ for student learning, for teaching and for the book itself. It elaborates the need for, and the possibility of, a coherent solution to the problems associated with an education in which all the parts are not well connected.

1.1 Purpose

There are a lot of hidden similarities in education. Differences are often emphasised, and similarities hidden, by the articulation of context-specific terminology and techniques. These include differences associated with ways of learning and teaching, such as pedagogy versus andragogy; epistemological perspectives including objectivism versus constructivism; pedagogical approaches, for example, Direct Instruction versus discovery learning; disciplinary ways of speaking and doing such as counting and accounting versus zoo visits and zoology; and ways of researching, as evident in qualitative versus quantitative methods.

Between all of these perspectives and approaches are genuine differences that are good and helpful, for they mirror ways of learning, teaching and researching in a variety of contexts. Such differences in perspective and approach mirror the differences between the communities to which they belong. However, these perspectives and approaches also share quite a few similarities.

This book is about the similarities. The similarities are important because they can be the connective elements across formal education, for teachers, principals, academics, communities, education systems, parents and especially for learners. Frequently, education comes across to students one learning activity, one assignment, one subject at a time. But all those integrally involved aim for education to become a forest of learning for students, rather than a sequence of individual trees. That forest is a complex ecosystem of interactions, involving all year levels, all subjects and all educational concepts growing in health and harmony. Where all the individual parts join together into a complex whole is the location that students develop 21st century skills, becoming critical thinkers and problem solvers who are research-minded and information-savvy.

In order to connect the similarities so that students learn more effectively to solve complex problems, think critically, research and make evidence-based decisions, this book introduces and explains the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching (MELT). The MELT provide an understanding of the connections between diverse educational contexts, approaches, ideas and activities, and so enable a variety of different perspectives, practices and energies to work together. The MELT illuminate a way for educators and learners to participate in the development of sophisticated thinking skills, where the individual trees are more clearly connected in a forest of learning.

The purpose of this book, then, is to connect disparate energies and ideas of education through the MELT in order to facilitate students’ development of sophisticated thinking. Educational theory and practice has tended towards conflict, creating uncertainties, distrust and wasted effort. With projections that Earth will reach a population of 8 billion people in 2023 [1], we need a new, more complementary style of education for the billion human brains that will be born from 2023 to 2030 [1], for they will become the leaders of the planet from 2040. Many of the problems they grapple with as leaders will be human-generated.

From Dewey in 1904/1974 [2]  to Bundy in 2004 [3], 100 years of education research produced a set of understanding of learning as diverse as human learning and sophisticated thinking over the past 100,000 years. From MELT’s perspective, this diversity is necessary, insightful and if not complete, then well-rounded, for informing education. As we move into an era where e-learning blended with face-to-face is the norm in schools, and in many technical education and university programmes, what do we need to know about human learning 100 Millennia ago, and how does it connect to the twenty-first Century?

The first 4 billion anatomically modern Homo sapiens born, from around 200 millennia ago [4, 5] to 100 millennia Before Present (BP) [6, 7] have a fossil record that demonstrates just a little innovation [8, 9]. Our large-brained ancestors primarily survived in the environments in which they were raised, or adapted to the new environments into which they moved.

The flurry of innovation shown in the archaeological record from around 100 millennia ago [8] onwards marks a transition to modern human behaviours. This set of behaviour is manifested in the development of diverse technologies, including hunting tools, fire control and chemical modifications, and abstract representations such as artworks. From this time, Homo sapiens are clearly apes with sophisticated thinking enabled by adaptive learning. Humans were not merely wandering into new environments from this time, but taking more calculated risks to get to new places, as evidenced by transport technologies such as simple canoes.

This flurry of innovation was self-perpetuating. One reason for this was that development compounded: one tool led to the development of another tool, and when both were used together, this enabled further development [9]. Another reason was that humans could now observe others’ intentional adaptation of things, so that the idea of innovation became apparent. At some point in human history, someone first coined a word for the idea of intentional change, and humans armed with such a word may have caused the concept of innovation to reproduce like a meme [10], further accelerating innovative practice.

The innovation flurry was also driven by the fact that many of our innovative solutions became problems themselves. Enhanced hunting technologies at times led to the extinction of the prey on which humans depended. Domestication of herd animals provided a breeding ground for many killer diseases that resulted in large-scale human and animal suffering. Wide adoption of crops led to the extreme use of herbicides and insecticides, and the clearing of natural habitats. And technologies that closed the distance between people through online social engagement across the globe enabled cyber-abuse to enter people’s bedrooms and addictive behaviours to control the tempo of modern relationships. Solutions produced fresh problems, each of which required increasingly sophisticated solutions of their own. Thus, we became the problem-solving ape [11], in part because we had to learn to solve the problems we made for ourselves and for the whole planet. As a species, we have a knack of solving problems with solutions that create new, more complex problems.

The MELT provide a way to gather together and connect educational ideas and energies in a way that may help us to break out of the vicious circle of our solutions that cause more problems. This is possible because, as noted, the MELT connect to 100,000 years of human learning and 100 years of educational research; with this diverse set of otherwise conflicting set of understanding, the MELT can enable an education that is broadly savvy of the influences on education. The MELT intentionally draw together and represent disparate views of education theory and practice, so as to capture the broad sweep of learning and teaching, including Direct Instruction to discovery learning; objectivist perspectives on learning through to social constructivist thought; primary/elementary school to Ph.D. studies; and accounting to zoology and interdisciplinary notions; The MELT then can be used as a conceptual set to connect those with different roles such as caregivers, lab managers, learning advisors, learning designers, lecturers, librarians, principals, professors, parents, programme coordinators, sessional staff, supervisors of higher degree by research, teachers, vice chancellors and, crucially, students from primary/elementary school to Ph.D.

MELT is frequently put into action to help students understand their own sophisticated thinking and see more clearly the purpose for their own education that necessarily revolves around the further development of that thinking. It is not easy for teachers to have or develop a sense of purpose for students that goes beyond the immediacy of daily lessons to the big picture. For both students and teachers, MELT may be used as a thinking routine [12] that becomes habitual (but not mundane) and which, through repeated exposure, prompts growth in sophisticated thinking, not only about what to do and how to do it, but also metacognitive  awareness.

When considering the last 100 years of educational research, our understandings of learning and teaching can seem more disparate than ever, and theory has not connected well with practice. For example, it is common for teachers to omit the explicit use of theoretical frameworks for their lesson planning and when leading other teachers [13]. However, we are also at a point of knowing an amazing amount about the complexities of teaching and learning. The MELT were formulated not to be theoretically pure, but through a consideration of major aspects of educational research and simultaneous reflection on classroom practice [14], as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4. The models provide a conceptual framework for action, not a theory or set of theories. A ‘conceptual framework’ pertains here to a structure that guides thinking, that sets the parameters for considering learning and teaching.

The MELT provide a practical philosophy, then, connecting theories with theories and practices with practices, and especially connecting theory with practice. The MELT makes the skills associated with sophisticated thinking explicit, with the intention of encouraging coherent, explicit and cyclic development of such thinking across students’ education.

This book spans early childhood education (ECE) to postgraduate study and contains examples across those contexts. But why would an early childhood teacher care about Master’s level study, or undergraduate or high school? Why would a Ph.D. supervisor care about primary school learning? I suggest a reason is that the MELT can help with the connections across education, ultimately improving learning and teaching in ECE, primary and secondary school, technical education, undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D. and employment contexts. Another reason is that all students use and teachers value the skills and attitudes associated with the MELT, because the models encapsulate what we do when we engage in sophisticated thinking [14].

A brief history of MELT

Beginning in 2004, my colleague Kerry O’Regan and I synthesised disparate literature and reflections on classroom practice, culminating in the first fully-developed version of the MELT, called the Research Skill Development (RSD) framework [15]. The RSD was employed in two national studies [15,16,17,18,17], which were designed to determine its efficacy in higher education contexts. However, the word ‘research’ did not always connect to people’s practice. For example, Sue Bandaranaike coordinated student placements in industry called Work Integrated Learning or Cooperative Education and knew that ‘research’ did not fit her context. In 2009, Sue re-articulated the sophisticated thinking expressed in the RSD in terminology that was true to employment contexts, producing the Work Skill Development (WSD) framework [18]. Then, in quick succession, colleagues in Oral Health developed the Clinical Reflection Framework in 2012 [19], student-tutors developed a pentagon-shaped version for engineering, called the Optimising Problem-Solving pentagon [20] and an early childhood music teacher developed a song version called ‘Research Mountain’ [21], both in 2014. Colleagues from the University of the South Pacific developed a process-based version [22], using the metaphor of weaving a Pacific Island mat, the italitali mat that students were sitting on in Place Value. In 2018 Monash University developed the Digital Skills Development (DSD) framework [23] and in 2019 the Blended and Engaged Learning Zones (BELZ) [24] was devised for the design and evaluation of modes that are explicitly blended with e-learning. (Note that ‘learning’ is used preferentially to ‘e-learning’ in this book because modern learning is so often bound up with, or mediated fully by, the electronic that it is often not helpful to differentiate [25]).

By 2016, the number of RSD-based models had grown to such an extent that one name was chosen to be emblematic of the characteristics and purpose of all of them: the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching [15]. It took from 2004 to 2016 to determine the core characteristics of these models, and to find a name that could connect them conceptually. The MELT evolved over time to become a set of related, but context-specific, representations of how sophisticated thinking could be taught and learned, in keeping with Homo sapiens’ history [9] and contemporary learning environments [14, 15].

Contemporary issues

By unpacking the MELT, this book will address four perennial, yet contemporary, issues:

• How educators may effectively help students think in sophisticated ways, including understanding their own thinking processes. Sophisticated thinking takes many forms, and includes researching, problem-solving, evidence-based practice, clinical reasoning, ethical reasoning, critical thinking, discovering, inquiring and understanding concepts, as well as metacognition.

• How to connect different aspects of education so that they mutually reinforce and complement each other:

  • Across students’ education, from early childhood through to school completion, technical and further education, undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. level, onto employment and continuing professional development.

  • Across subjects and disciplines from counting and accounting to zoo visits and zoology, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning.

  • Between sometimes competing paradigms, theories and teaching practices.

• How to deepen educators’ understanding of the dimensions and practicalities of student autonomy in learning. This understanding will illuminate connections between disparate discourses around student-centred learning, Direct Instruction, Cognitive Load Theory, Threshold Concepts, discovery learning and networked learning, as well as student cultural, language and learning diversity.

• How educators can effectively engage with educational theory in ways that offer practical value for teaching and learning environments.

The book introduces the MELT as a way to conceptualise how such enabling, connecting, deepening and engaging may take place.

This chapter details the purpose and features of the book and of its namesake subject, the Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching. Section 1.2 outlines the MELT’s six facets of sophisticated thinking, elaborated along a continuum of learning autonomy. Section 1.3, called Parachute, comprises a story about two students, Shelly and Katie, each engaged in an individual short project in the first year of high school. As well as covering some of the types of learning that are common across formal education and in many different disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts, this story is true to the sophisticated learning that humans have engaged in for 100,000 years. In Sect. 1.4, 100 billion brains, humans are contrasted with beavers, who were the premier engineers of the past 20 million years, but who were stuck in their mode of learning. Unlike beavers, humans have developed multiple ways of learning, suggesting that a multiplicity of teaching strategies are not just possible but desirable. Section 1.5, One billion brains more, outlines the absolute need to develop sophisticated thinking in order to address educational and planet-wide problems, requiring a conceptualisation like MELT to connect different teaching approaches and ideas. Section 1.6 provides the structure of this book, where each chapter’s title is one of the seven questions that are central to each MELT facet and to learning autonomy. The chapter concludes with Sect. 1.7, Student learning that resonates. For the MELT, recognising and fostering a diverse range of teaching and learning strategies is absolutely central to effective education. Therefore, this book explicitly articulates the connections between disparate educational ideas, placing them all on the same learning autonomy continuum of the MELT, in the hope that these ideas will be taken together as a set and become more mutually supportive.

1.2 MELT Components

The MELT comprise the six facets of sophisticated thinking elaborated along a continuum of learning autonomy.

1.2.1 MELT Facets

The facets of the MELT concern the ‘what’ of learning and teaching. Content varies subject-by-subject, lesson-by-lesson and in the MELT focus, the ‘what’ concerns the skills and attitudes of sophisticated thinking as applied to, and mediated by, the content.

Figure 1.1 shows a version of the MELT that was inspired by engineering students who tutored in a large first year course. The student/tutors adapted MELT and devised a version that they called the Optimising Problem-Solving (OPS) pentagon. That version stripped out a lot of detail, resulting in a representation that is student friendly and focuses on the facets, rather than explicating learning autonomy directly to the students. Context-specific adaptations of MELT, portrayed in the pentagon configuration, are used, with students from Year 4 of primary school to master’s level, and in introductions of MELT to educators in schools and universities.

Fig. 1.1

The MELT Pentagon’s six facets, each with a pair of verbs, a key question and an adjective in blue which represents the affective domain

Complex learning from ECE to Ph.D. always requires something akin to the six MELT facets. In many ways, these facets are clear and uncontroversial in nature if not in name, and commonly made explicit in education. Each MELT facet comprises a name made of verb couplets, an associated affective adjective, and a corresponding question, as shown in Table 1.1 (as well as a description, provided in Chap. 2).

Table 1.1 The six facets of MELT

The facets of MELT are quintessential processes whose descriptions act as triggers and connectors. As quintessential processes, the MELT facets can’t independently capture the meaning for every context. They are fully dependent on the educators who adopt them, each of whom knows or is coming to know, what needs to happen in any learning situation that they are facilitating, and how to articulate the processes they are facilitating.

Each facet of the MELT is designed to ‘trigger’ words and phrases that better describe the facet’s concepts in a particular context. These words and phrases then may conceptually connect to other contexts which use different words and phrases for the same concepts being triggered by the facet. Without this conceptual connection, the processes associated with the same facet may otherwise seem unrelated to students and educators. For example, the facet embark and clarify may trigger terms that suit the start of a process such as ‘pose research question’, ‘define problem’ or ‘determine need’, depending on the terminology of the context and the purpose at hand. These terms do have useful differences, but they also have conceptual overlap that is frequently overlooked. As triggers, the facets are not generic skills, because ‘generic’ implies skills that students maybe able to generalise from one context to another. The facets may be better thought of as ‘connectable skills’ rather than transferable skills.

As an educational trigger, each facet has four vital inter-related components. Three are introduced above (verb couplets, affective adjective, key question), and the fourth component, introduced in Chap. 2, is a sentence description of each facet. Some educators may focus on the cognitive aspect (e.g., embark), some on the affective (e.g., curious), some on the question (what is our purpose?), some on all three. But together, these aspects provide the sense of what we are after across education, and that sense can be explicitly connected from one context to another. Subject and discipline-mediated ways of understanding and representing the facets vary widely [16,17,18,19,20,19], as demonstrated in Chap. 3’s look at MELT use in a variety of contexts.

1.2.2 Continuum of Learning Autonomy

The continuum of learning autonomy in MELT concerns the ‘how’ of learning and teaching, that is, the ways that the facets maybe developed, making the continuum an explicit articulation of the teaching process for scaffolding the development of sophisticated thinking. It is also possible to enable students to understand their engagement in the learning process, and representation of the continuum of learning autonomy expressly for students is shown in Fig. 1.2. In the figure, the red pentagon represents lower levels of learning autonomy, where students emulate; a yellow pentagon at mid-levels of learning autonomy, where students improvise, and a blue pentagon representing high levels of learning autonomy, where students initiate. Students may emulate, then improvise, then initiate sophisticated learning and then proceed to emulate once more, for example, if the learning context shifts so that students are unfamiliar with new content, if conceptual demand goes up or as the expected rigour increases. In other words, learning autonomy in MELT is not unidirectional towards high autonomy, but rather shuttles back and forth, according to the young child’s or the Ph.D. student’s learning needs [27].

Fig. 1.2

A student-oriented continuum of learning autonomy, here represented by three verbs and corresponding colours: emulate, red; improvise, yellow; and initiate, blue (see www.rsd.edu.au/framework)

Learning autonomy in MELT maybe engineered by teachers, and matrix versions of MELT often articulate a five-level, teaching-oriented continuum of learning autonomy, shown in Fig. 1.3. Five levels of differentiation are sometimes helpful for teachers, whereas three levels are typically enough for students.

Fig. 1.3

A teaching-oriented continuum of learning autonomy, here represented by five verbs and corresponding colours: prescribed, red; bounded, orange; scaffolded, yellow; open-ended, green; and unbounded, blue (details removed: see www.rsd.edu.au/framework)

Frequently, considerations regarding the extent of learning autonomy are left buried below the level of teachers’ and students’ consciousness. However, implicit understandings of learning autonomy permeate classrooms and supervision contexts in which teachers seek to develop sophisticated thinking [27]. The question below, associated with the continuum of learning autonomy, is arguably the most pressing concern in education, whether for face-to-face, online, augmented, virtual or blended realities. It is ultimately the most contentious question and because of this has the potential to connect disparate ideas in education:

How much guidance?

The six facets of MELT elaborated along the continuum of learning autonomy frame, but cannot answer, the above question. The question can only be answered by individual teachers and their students, by school communities, by systems and, maybe soon, by Teaching Machines (see Chap. 5) who understand the context of learning. The MELT explication of the continuum of learning autonomy provokes answers, however, around a healthy shuttling where students emulate, improvise and initiate and then proceed once more to emulate. The amount of guidance depends on the relationship of the student to what is learned, to the teacher and to the broader context, and the complexity of such relationship is best discussed and debated.

1.2.3 MELT as a Thinking Routine

Sharing the inter-relationships of facets and learning autonomy, the MELT takes on many forms and may be revisited in different guises along a student’s learning journey. Some forms include tables with text, pentagon or jig-saw shapes, songs with actions, and a weaving metaphor; diverse MELT models are presented in Chap. 3. Formats and phrasings depend on the purpose chosen for each of the MELT, the intended audience, and educators’ professional judgement, and so the MELT are necessarily fluid. With a growing number of emerging MELT, the models show the potential of working together as a set that conceptually connects the disparate ideas and energies of education. Multiple manifestations and uses of the same overarching framework by many educators, researchers and parents may, over time, richly develop the sophisticated thinking that enables students to create solutions to problems—solutions that do not become the cause of further problems.

Providing students with multiple exposures to MELT in many guises enables the six facets to become a thinking routine [12], a way of thinking that can conceptually accompany them throughout their education and remain afterwards. Researchers found that a hallmark of effective teachers was that they frequently employed explicit thinking strategies for students to use [11]. Teachers repeatedly introduced, modelled and used these strategies to facilitate student learning. The researchers called these thinking routines because they became almost second nature for students, and they were a vital component of ‘making thinking visible’ to teachers, parents and to the students themselves. The six facets of the MELT can become for students a thinking routine if teachers facilitate their use repeatedly. One final-year university student, looking back over multiple semesters of MELT use said ‘because they have been consistently applying this structure to all of our assignments, we have come to think that way for science’ [28]. MELT became a thinking routine for that student.

Education connotes a process of educing, a ‘leading out’ of what is inside students, their capacities for sophisticated thinking, whereas the facilitation of learning content knowledge could be called inducation. A combination of inducation and education provides the opportunity for sophisticated thinking to be nurtured in a content-rich environment. Students who employ skills in inquiry learning without much background knowledge and understanding often struggle [29], while an emphasis on content is frequently demotivational [30]. Diversity of pedagogies, teaching personalities and contexts, with inducational and educational elements, will provide rich learning. For example, it seems counterproductive to teach students to think critically while only presenting them with one understanding of critical thinking. Critical thinking in English literature looks quite different from critical thinking in astrophysics; students will develop richer, more robust and useful forms of critical thinking if presented with the diverse approaches and methods afforded by different subjects and disciplines and they can see the similarities and connections, not just the differences.

This book seeks connections, not through terminology or definitions, but by provoking thought on how sophisticated thinking maybe facilitated by MELT adaptation and use in many content-rich contexts. The book introduces, mirrors and represents MELT by using the seven questions above for its structure.

The story below, along with Place Value (Preface) and Silver Fluoride (Chap. 2) will be used in Chap. 2 to show how the complexities of sophisticated thinking are, across formal education, legitimately and usefully captured in MELT.

1.3 Parachute

This chapter emphasises purpose, and purpose is the underpinning theme in the classroom story below, called Parachute. A big range of teaching and learning strategies is evident in Parachute: there is a teacher present, a person who holds a vast amount of culturally-specific knowledge and who is keen to incorporate that into the students’ own knowledge bases. The teacher has an intention for the learning that may or may not be realised student-by-student. There is a learner, Shelly, who is willing to take a risk and innovate, and another learner, Katie, who plays it safe and emulates the teacher. There are unnamed students who strongly influence the learning dynamic, even though the focus of the class is nominally an individual project.

This diversity of actors and actions is true to the reality of human learning across millennia, where the capacity to learn was a huge determinant of the survival and evolutionary direction of the species. At times in our prehistory, imitation and rote learning, forms of emulation, were far more effective for survival than discovery learning requiring innovation. However, there have also been many times where existing knowledge and practice were insufficient and, like Shelly below, individuals or groups needed to take risks and innovate. Without such adaptations, human groups would have perished or been overrun. Or they just may have missed an amazing opportunity unless they adapted and took risks, as demonstrated by the Polynesians who sailed into the unknown Pacific about 3,000 years ago [31].

Sophisticated thinking has always involved drawing on existing knowledge, evaluating that knowledge and then seeing if different knowledge and skills are needed. Like this book more broadly, Parachute does not romanticise discovery learning as a panacea, but neither does it promote a strong didactic approach as the solution. MELT is suggestive of something more fluid, something that takes shape and then flows again between didactic and discovery approaches. The story is narrated by me as a participant observer conducting research in Mrs. Breen’s Year 8 science class [32], and shows the potential and problems with content knowledge acquisition and with discovery learning.

Parachute

‘Continue on with your steps for your parachute,’ calls Mrs. Breen, addressing the class during the double period before lunch. ‘Then draw up an observation table. We have material in plastic bags, cotton, string of two different lengths, thick and thin.’

Shelly takes a compass and attempts to draw a circle on some plastic, using a pen. Once Shelly has cut out a misshapen circle, her desk partner Katie uses it as a template for her own experiment, cutting out a circle of plastic and a circle of cotton.

Shelly works on some calculations for a while, then comes up to me and says, ‘I don’t have enough plastic.’

She explains that her intention is to make a square parachute of the same area as the round one. I am shocked when I see how much plastic Shelly has left. There seems to be enough to make ten square parachutes of the same area as the round one she is holding.

‘I need a square one hundred and eight by one hundred and eight centimetres,’ she informs me.

My mind reels at the size of this square. It would have a surface area greater than her work desk, and yet is supposed to be the same area as the circle she has cut, a circle only a little larger than her open hand.

‘Show me how you worked out the area,’ I ask, wanting to find out how she could make such a miscalculation.

To find the area of the circle she has made, Shelly puts pi r squared into action, and her calculator reads ‘433.5’. So far, so good. Then, to find the length of a side of the square to make it an equivalent area, she hits the division button, followed by the four buttons.

‘One hundred and eight,’ she exclaims. ‘See? It doesn’t fit.’

Sure enough, her sheet of plastic would be dwarfed by a square with sides of 108 cm and, therefore, she thinks she doesn’t have enough material.

I brace myself, remembering that Shelly is a very bright student and begin, ‘The area of the circle is right, but the square is much too large. You just found the length of the side if 433.5 was the perimeter.’

‘I don’t know how to do it,’ she says, looking up at the clock.

‘What is the area of a square with sides of two centimetres?’ I ask in Socratic fashion.

‘Four centimetres squared,’ Shelly answers.

‘What are the sides of a square sized nine centimetres?’

‘Three?’

‘What did you do to get it?’

‘Divide by itself?’ asks Shelly in answer.

‘Sort of,’ I respond, thinking she is getting close.

‘Find what and what… like square roo… like you..?’

I write ‘√9’.

‘I don’t know how to do that,’ Shelly laments.

I show her the symbol on her calculator. It is term three of Year 8 and Shelly is in the top mathematics class. She says that does not know how to find the length of the sides of a square when given an area. She says that she does not know how to find the square root of a number, even using a calculator.

Much worse to me, though, is that she never thought for a second that there could be something wrong with the size of the square she had calculated. And she was an ‘A’ grade student in maths.

Shelly finds the square root to be 20.5, runs to her desk and immediately starts to rule up the plastic. There is now plenty of material to make a square parachute with sides of 20.5 centimetres.

Mrs. Breen goes to the doorway to speak to a number of students dropping parachutes outside: ‘Alright everyone, back in.’

As Shelly hears this, she says, ‘Shivers,’ quietly to herself, grabs both parachutes and heads for the door.

She almost makes it outside, when Mrs. Breen waves everyone back to their seats. ‘I want everyone to listen.’

Back at her seat, Shelly works hastily to make sure her parachutes are ready to test.

‘I know most of you have done the experiment…’ (Shelly works at a more frenzied pace) ‘…but I also want you to do a bar graph.’

Mrs. Breen draws an example on the board.

Katie begins to do some test drops with her two parachutes. She is comparing the drop time of a cloth parachute and a plastic parachute, which was the example provided by Mrs. Breen. Both parachutes float to earth in a satisfying parachute-like manner.

Shelly grabs the stop-watch and starts to drop her square parachute. However, the string pulls off the plastic.

‘Mine doesn’t work. It’s crap,’ she sulks to Katie.

Shelly quickly repairs the square parachute and drops it again (Fig. 1.4).

Fig. 1.4

Shelly determines the drop time for a square, plastic parachute

In the results table, under the column heading ‘round’, Shelly writes ‘0.68’, then crosses it out. Next to this, she writes ‘1.12’ after another drop. Then, she crosses this out. She drops again and writes ‘0.93’, yet changes the nine to a six, so her only number in that column reads ‘0.63’. This dropping, erasing and writing process continues for several minutes.

Mrs. Breen passes and asks, ‘So what happened? Is it OK?’

‘Yep’, says Shelly, ‘the round one takes longer to hit the ground.’

‘Did you use several measurements?’

‘Yes.’

Mrs. Breen smiles, extremely pleased with Shelly’s success.

Mrs. Breen returns to the front and explains to the whole class, ‘In the conclusion, list what went wrong, and how you could improve.’

Shelly gets to work on the conclusion of her report. She writes, ‘If the key factors are the same the parachutes should come down at the same rate as it was not proven here I have come to the conclusion that the shape does matter to the time.’

Katie works on improving her cloth parachute. She drops it and coos, ‘Cool,’ as she watches its smooth flight.

As it floats gently to earth once more, she says abstractly, ‘I hate maths with a passion.’

Shelly echoes her sentiment: ‘I hate maths too.’

1.3.1 MELT Features in Parachute

In Parachute, Shelly and Katie were engaged in learning that involved designing experiments and determining independent variables, dependent variables and controlled variables. MELT is one way of representing the sophisticated thinking in this story. The simple analysis of Parachute below foreshadows the six facets of MELT that are introduced more thoroughly in Chap. 2.

Shelly is determined to compare square and round parachutes, whereas Katie looked at cotton versus plastic, the teacher’s example. This is where each decided what to embark on for their experiment, as well as beginning the complex process of ongoing clarification of purpose.

Early on, Shelly worked to craft two plastic parachutes of different shape but the same size, and realised that she needed to use geometry to achieve this. She created the round parachute, measured it and generated its surface area from pi r squared. Then she used the formula for perimeters of a square to calculate its sides—generating a number that dwarfed the circle. Shelly found needed resources (plastic, a calculator and maths formulas from memory) and generated data using an empirical methodology.

Shelly realised there was a problem, and her evaluation correctly suggested that there was insufficient material to make a square big enough to match her calculation. I was surprised that she did not notice the huge discrepancy in size between her actual circle and her proposed square. It seems she implicitly trusted the mathematical calculation, even when the discrepancy was huge, evidencing little reflection at that point. Shelly sought help from me for more materials. However, instead of sourcing more, I prompted her to consider that her calculation of the size of the square was wrong. At this point, Shelly and I tried to determine whether she knew an appropriate formula to determine the amount of material she would need for a square parachute. When she struggled remembering a correct equation for the area of a square, I provided her numerous cues until I virtually told her area equals the length of one side squared.

Once she applied a formula that gave a more sensible answer, she produced a square parachute of comparable size to the round one, and began to time parachute drops. She wrote, erased and rewrote results into her results table. This organisation of results was accompanied by the evaluation of data as somehow wrong and in need of re-recording. All the while, Shelly had the huge pressure of managing her dwindling time to set up the entire experiment, which was novel, in that no one else was contrasting shape, while others were following the teacher’s example procedure.

Shelly analysed her data and found that the round one took longer to fall. Her synthesis was the overall finding that ‘shape does matter to drop time, given the same surface area’.

Throughout, Shelly listened to and talked with her desk partner, me and the teacher, while she also wrote and recorded, demonstrating multiple modes of communication. She applied remembered and prompted knowledge (formulas for the area of a circle and of a square) to the experiment, as well as her evolving knowledge of experimental design, relating this to her existing knowledge and to others in the classroom.

The story is set in a school science laboratory, but Shelly engaged in sophisticated thinking that is as relevant to hunter-gatherers as it is to learners in virtual worlds. Lab learning, hunting and online gaming differ in many ways and the fundamental neuronal wiring of the brains of children brought up engaging heavily online maybe quite different to that of hunter-gatherers. However, the story contains elements of the sophisticated thinking that we crave as teachers and such thinking spans 100,000 years. Like most learners throughout human prehistory and history, Shelly experienced frustrations, setbacks and unresolved tensions, as well as some successes.

The in-class learning of Shelly, involving exploring and risk taking, and of Katie, involving emulating and safety, demonstrated a lot of the potential and pitfalls connected to learning autonomy. Shelly attempted to work on her own questions about square and round parachutes, showing much more autonomy in learning than Katie and others in the class by initiating in many MELT facets, and improvising in the rest. Katie was primarily emulating the teacher’s example. Thus, there were differentiated experiences along the continuum of learning autonomy in the same room, at the same time, given the same parameters by the teacher. The task in Parachute had the scope of open-ended inquiry, but because the teacher provided modelling that students were permitted to imitate, most students took the safer, easier way of emulating.

Shelly’s higher autonomy had associated risks, exemplified by her extreme miscalculation. Shelly had possibly applied the formula for the area of a square dozens of times in her schooling, and this time she was way off any sensible number. While there is potential for huge learning here, the situation is also an example of a huge learning curve. Where that curve is too steep, some students may experience enough demotivation and discouragement to put them off trying. However, Shelly was not deterred by her miscalculation, in part because she did not perceive the discrepancy in the actual size of the round parachute and the calculated size of the square one. Instead of recalculating, she sought more material to match her calculation. From a Problem Based Learning (PBL) perspective, if Shelly recognised the discrepancy between calculation and size, this could have led to deep learning [32]. However, within the constraints of the classroom, she had little time to complete and submit her work. Practicalities of teaching, such as lesson length, frequently dictate what actually happens in formal education regardless of theory informing the lesson. Ultimately, Shelly demonstrated in the eighty minutes before lunch the sophisticated thinking that comprises MELT’s six facets on the higher end of the continuum of learning autonomy. Often these facets are not deployed consciously and, much like an unopened parachute, learners may have a hard landing when conceptual difficulties emerge.

In Parachute, Shelly’s own research question created a need for mathematical calculation and specific mathematical equations. This maybe contrasted with Place Value, where children required no specific knowledge to play around the tree, and in their classroom, the focus was on content knowledge inculcation or construction. Shelly, a student of thirteen, had experienced seven years of schooling in maths, and it’s reasonable to assume that she would have learned about calculating the area of a square several years earlier. Place Value represented learning experiences in two different contexts and each elicited a very different learning autonomy. However, Parachute showed some of the tensions that maybe evident within a single context, and highlighted the intimate connection between content knowledge and inquiry learning. This tension between an appropriate knowledge base and learning through discovery has been evident throughout human prehistory. The questions of engaged learning and teaching are as pertinent to ancient Homo sapiens as they are to contemporary humans whether they are inhabiting real or virtual environments. The wiring of our brains may be or become quite different, but the questions of learning are the same.

Through our prehistory, humans proved to be highly adaptable because our brains were not programmed to ‘get stuck’ on one mode of learning. But ironically for a discipline centred on learning, the practice and research of formal education have tended to become ‘stuck’. That is, researchers have often prioritised researching the forms of learning that seem optimal to them, and looking at the learning gains by contrasting performance, e.g., that of Direct Instruction versus discovery learning. The findings of studies, of course, have always depended on what was valued as a learning gain in the measurements. But a mentality which emphasises measurement has possibly diminished educators’ awareness of the potential range of ways to learn, with a whole spectrum of possibilities being minimised for the sake of theory and parsimony. Search for a grand theory that underpins all learning undermines the potential of humankind to engage in diverse and enriching learning and teaching. To maximise the efforts of educators and students, it is necessary to pull together the disparate threads in education, in a way that reflects how humans were geared to learn 100,000 years ago and how they are currently geared to learn. In educational practice and theory, MELT connotes a fluidity, rather than being stuck in one place, in keeping with our learning as a species.

1.4 100 Billion Brains: Learning from Human Prehistory to Contemporary Classrooms and Learning Environments

Humans are the only known animals to use systematic, descriptive labels for living things, including ourselves. And while we labelled our cousins with systematic and descriptive species names such as Homo erectus and Homo habitus, we chose for ourselves the more interpretive title of Homo sapiens, or ‘wise man’. If sentient animals had a vote, would they describe modern humans as wise? We are certainly a learning animal, but many animals are that too. What about our learning is distinctively sapiens? We have big brains, proportionally, but Neanderthals had a bigger brain volume [33] and still died out.

As noted early in this chapter, Homo sapiens have been very efficient at solving problems whose solutions created new problems which emerged days, years or centuries later. This is highly disturbing, albeit probably inevitable. The disturbing side of the process whereby solutions beget problems is obvious, with rates of species extinction unprecedented since the meteor that led to the demise of the dinosaurs, degradation of water, air, soils and society, and massive migrations, alienations and competition between cultures, religions, political ideologies and nations.

The inevitable side of the process by which human-made solutions generate new problems may come as a surprise. To demonstrate this inevitability, I present a comparison between humans and beavers—the pre-eminent engineers of the animal world, for more than 20 million years [34] up until 12,000 years ago. The reason for this comparison is that those early engineer-beavers were more instinctive than purposively engaged in their learning, whereas humans frequently need engaged teaching to enable engaged learning.

1.4.1 Beaver and Human Know-How

The massive engineering projects requiring complex social behaviour, up until relatively recently in the earth’s history, were conducted by beavers. It is only in the recent past, starting about 12,000 years ago [35], that human engineering projects were conducted on a scale more massive than beavers’ dams, even though the human physique’s capacity for engineering has exceeded the beavers’ physical capacity for 200,000 years.

So, how is it that beavers were more able to conduct massive engineering projects than humans for over 180,000 years? In short, because it took a whole lot of learning about materials, physics, chemistry, maths, nature, and ourselves, including through artistic expression, creative imagining and philosophising, for humans to take top spot on massive-scale engineering. Critically, what is important to, and reflective of, MELT, is that this human learning was diverse in mode.

A curious feature of beaver dam-building know-how is that the majority of it is in their genes [36, 37]. Beavers can learn over time to build better dams, but their fundamental damming behaviour is hard-wired. So, even if you could challenge a beaver to build some other massive structure (such as a bridge) it would not have the cognitive capacity to do so. Beavers are smooth-brained (lissencephalic) whereas humans and other apes have wormy brains featuring gyri and sulci, which allow for more neurons and synapses to be packed into the same space. Pre-programed know-how only gets you so far, and beavers can’t generalise their learning from dams to other engineering projects.

As with beavers, Homo sapiens have genetically programmed know-how: we can suck, chew and crawl, and maybe some humans can walk and run without examples. But we can’t talk, write, read or do anything like build a dam without learning to do so, whether by watching and listening, with a teacher or through trial and error. Beavers’ engineering knowledge is pre-packaged, whereas ours developed over the course of tens of thousands of years, and needs to be culturally transmitted rather than genetically transmitted.

Perhaps because we have so little genetic know-how, human babies are called ‘sponges’, as they appear ready to soak up and imitate almost anything they see and hear. As a tragic example, orphans in Romania who were deprived of care by adults [38] mimicked the movements of cranes that they could see through the window. Engaged learning is the norm for a baby in three modes: being taught, observing, and experimenting through trial and error. All these three modes are vital for normal development, and the second and last are ubiquitous for babies.

Being taught, however, requires someone to facilitate the learning. This could involve correcting a child’s pronunciation, instructing on the number of protons in magnesium or suggesting a strategy for brush strokes on a painting. While common, teaching and being taught are not ubiquitous. This is the most difficult to operationalise of the three modes mentioned above, because it depends on the intentionality of someone who is not the learner. Such intentionality requires some effort, some thought. In societies with universal schooling, the process of teaching and being taught entails effort by the whole of society. So this book is about engaged teachers. And because learning can and does take place independently of a teacher, this book is also about engaged learners. Most of all, it is about the relationship of engaged learners and engaged teachers together, where sometimes the teachers learn and sometimes the learners teach.

MELT frame a range of teaching pedagogies that fit human learning. At one extreme end of a teaching spectrum, beavers don’t need pedagogy; for them, there is little intentional teaching and little capacity to engage in it. At the other end, humans need a multiplicity of pedagogies that represent our broad-ranged sophisticated thinking, and the MELT represents this range. The use of the plural word ‘models’ in MELT is intended to capture the numerous ways of conceptualising engaged learning and teaching. The broad parameters that all existing and future MELT share attempt to capture the breadth of education research, theorising and practice for the past 100 years, and the breadth of the human experience of learning and teaching for the past 100,000 years.

‘Engagement’, the ‘E’ in MELT, is a term sometimes used glibly in education, but in MELT it is used deliberately to suggest the same idea that it connotes in the context of a manual car: it won’t move unless you engage the clutch. There must be cognitive meshing. Learning, then, is a ‘moving forward’ into a place we have not yet been conceptually, enabled by engagement. Teaching is driving towards a goal, a forward impetus where frequently the teacher steers. But in contemporary classrooms, online environments, and throughout human prehistory, learners may be the ones steering and controlling the accelerator and brake. Teaching, in MELT, is attending to and establishing the preconditions and conditions for learning, including cognitive, affective and social aspects. Without a teacher, planned learning is difficult. However, when the learning is driven by a teacher, it is never guaranteed to be positive or effective, especially if students are demotivated about the learning at hand. It is a huge challenge to teach a class of students effectively day after day, to tutor, to supervise, and to nurture learning.

1.4.2 Inevitable Earth: Problems with Dams

Another good reason to know about beaver learning is to deepen our understanding of human learning and its consequences. As beavers evolved increasing capacity, physically and cognitively, to build dams, they not only built bigger and better dams, but they changed entire ecosystems through the flooding of valleys to make lakes. They changed the course of evolution for untold species of plants, animals, fungi and bacteria. However, this process took millions of years, and entire ecosystems adapted slowly to beaver-induced changes [39]. Many animals wreak major changes quickly on the landscape, such as swarming insects or defoliating elephants, but few have had an impact on the scale of beaver technology [40].

Compared to the elaborate engineering projects of beavers, we Homo sapiens were very simple builders for most of our evolution. However, as noted earlier, simple toolmaking eventually gave rise to a compounding [8] of tool use, where one tool enabled other tools: a chipped rock made sharp for killing an animal, for example, could also be used to smooth the haft of a spear. Animals use what’s at their disposal, and humans were no different. The pace of technology compounded, and while initially glacial, it became exponential: single-edge stone tools maintained the same design from 200,000 to 120,000 BCE [8], but once further adaptations emerged, tool use and development took off—literally—like a rocket!

This ratcheting up of problem-solving capacity and technology is possible because human brains are learning-versatile compared to beaver brains. A major element of human learning before the establishment of cities was that our brains had the capacity, much more so than beavers, to engage in didactic-reproductive learning, generation after generation. At the same time, we also had the capacity, used when the circumstances warranted it, to engage in the development of new knowledge through research-like processes of discovery. When competition came, when the environment changed, when an important prey animal died out or humans moved into different ecosystems, the learning of established ideas through reproductive modes was inadequate by itself. Adaptation was required which, in turn, demanded a different order of learning. Human brains are adaptive and plastic, and adults could shift their thinking somewhat, rewiring neural networks. However, for the young with developing brains who moved with their extended family into new challenges, an upbringing of upheaval geared their brains for discovery mode; they neurologically wired to inquire [41, 42]. A challenge for educators in the twenty-first century, then, is to work out what modes of learning are pertinent in emerging local and global circumstances and what balance can be struck across different modes of teaching and learning, from more didactic to more discovery-oriented. The MELT facets and continuum of learning autonomy provide the what and how of Homo sapiens’ transmission-oriented and innovative learning over the course of the last 1000,000 years, as we have always, and need still, to emulate, improvise and innovate.

1.5 One Billion Brains More: The Problems We Face Need Research-Mindedness

Because humans are adept at solving problems, and because our solutions cause more problems, we and the planet are on a destructive trajectory. Education systems that replicate our current successes will also magnify our current problems. Instead, we need educators with broadened perspectives that cope with, and even enjoy, a range of teaching and learning modes. MELT articulate the human capacity to learn didactically and to learn through discovery in ways that reinforce each other. While some educators, parents, researchers and students take a polarised position towards one particular teaching and learning approach, MELT suggest that we need learning environments that explicitly value every point on the learning autonomy continuum This is, arguably, our best hope to move from an inevitable problem-solving/problem-causing loop to a less predetermined future for the Earth.

We need to be able to cover every point on the continuum of teaching and learning approaches, because we need brains that are wired to swing adaptively from learning established knowledge to constructing fresh knowledge. We need brains that are wired to memorise and recall and wired to inquire and delve [41]. Education systems need to draw on young children’s natural curiosity, promote the acquisition of the massive canon of modern knowledge, and be more purposive in how they move between these two.

How can parents, caregivers and early childhood educators help young children’s brains to wire in such a way that they love to learn existing knowledge, as well as to discover knowledge on their own? How can these loves be nurtured throughout primary and secondary schooling? What will facilitate the further development of such engaged learning with undergraduates and Master’s students, including those who are enrolled in teaching degrees? What difference will this make to Ph.D. students and other researchers when addressing the problems of the Earth? And what will this mean for teachers who engage in their own active and systematic learning, such as action research and ongoing professional development, to improve their students’ learning? Further, how can we best nurture a love of moving fluidly across the continuum of learning autonomy, rather than prioritising one of the ends?

The above fluidity is one where our genetically-determined neuronal architecture and its adaptive responsiveness to environmental cues [42] forms our brains with not merely the capacity to learn new things, but the capacity to rewire. MELT can inform a rewiring for the next billion brains that is both knowledge-savvy and inquiry-oriented (Fig. 1.5).

Fig. 1.5

Wired to inquire?

Humans have the greatest number of neurons at about seven months’ gestation, typically two months before birth [42]. Then apoptosis—healthy, natural cell death—is genetically programmed to remove the less used neurons, so that newborn babies and adults alike have substantially less neurons than we had when we were in the womb [42] where the adult brain has around 80 billion neurons. Typically, those neurons that synapse—or connect—with other neurons survive. These neurons continue the complex process of developing neural networks, with any one neuron connected up to 1,000 other neurons [42] in a mind-boggling array that is the powerhouse of sophisticated thinking.

Most amazing and relevant for MELT is that the number of our synapses—the connections between neurons—goes through the roof early in life, so that by age three we have trillions. But after the age of three, our healthy genetic programming begins to reduce those networks in a process called ‘neural pruning’ [42]. Our healthy brains go through this natural pruning process where if we don’t use it, we lose it: a synapse connection in which two neurons rarely communicate tends to be pruned. The saying is that neurons that fire together wire together [42], meaning that if two synapsed neurons communicate regularly, they will stay connected and maintain their part of the network. After the age of three, we begin to lose billions of synapses each year, and this process continues through different parts of the brain until the twenties [42]. This sounds bad because learning equates to synapse formation and maintenance. However, neurons and synapses require a lot of energy, and an overly complex network is less efficient and effective.

But here’s the thing: what we are sensing, doing, thinking and saying from birth and beforehand (e.g., tasting mother’s amniotic fluid as an embryo) influences our synapse formation, and what is pruned [42]. So children who spend the majority of their time using information and communications technology (e.g., gaming) are using their brains in such a way that some neural networks are enhanced and others are limited. As a result, their neuro-architecture—their actual brain’s wiring—will reflect their environment [42], just as has always been the case for human brains.

The brain’s wiring is a complex mix of genetic determinants and environmental influences. As an extreme example, a baby reared in the dark will not be able to see even when taken into the light at age one [42]. The development of optical pathways in the brain is not only genetically determined but requires environmental stimulus; use it or minimise it.

Learning in the human brain is not compartmentalised into ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’. Long-term memory is closely associated with the part of the brain called the hippocampus, which itself is also associated with emotions [43]. Correspondingly, a longstanding finding from psychology is that we learn that to which we attend [44], and so motivational elements are vital for learning [43], frequently in multimodal ways that reinforce learning [44]. MELT explicitly articulate the cognitive dimensions of engaged learning in concert with the affective dimensions. The beaver in each cartoon at the beginning of each chapter calls out affective-oriented words that connect to the more cognitive facet titles, and this simultaneous connection of cognitive and affective domains is central to MELT, because the connection is true and vital for human learning.

A full range of educational experiences, including face-to-face, hands-on, online and virtual learning, is needed for the education of the next billion brains on the planet. This range of experiences needs to be full not just in terms of subject matter, but in terms of how this subject matter is learned. In MELT terms, this especially concerns the continuum of learning autonomy. A full range of educational experiences would embrace teacher-directed immersion of students in content knowledge and in key concepts, as well as student ownership of learning and inclusion in curriculum decisions, where students would be given scope for high levels of autonomy in their learning through investigation, problem-solving and discovery. For the MELT, autonomy ebbs and flows from levels of low learning autonomy, with prescribed teaching, through to high levels of learning autonomy with teacher boundaries removed, and back again to low learning autonomy. Such shuttling, where students emulate, improvise, initiate and flow back to emulate over time, is suggestive of spiralling learning autonomy throughout formal education from early childhood through primary and secondary school, to employment, technical study and university, whether a student completes compulsory education, undergraduate study or proceeds to Master’s level and Ph.D.

1.6 Structure of This Book

This book’s seven-chapter structure mirrors the seven core components of the MELT, the six facets and learning autonomy. Each chapter has as its title one of the seven central questions of MELT on a title page comprising a cartoon by Dr. Aaron Humphries [45]. Each cartoon has three characters: a young child, Albert Einstein, and a beaver, each saying something emblematic of the sophisticated thinking pertaining to a particular facet. The child sings a line that represents a facet from the song Research Mountain [21] except in Chap. 7 she says a line from a research article. Einstein says something for each facet that connects to sophisticated thinking from the Nobel prize-winning end of the learning spectrum. And the beaver calls out the affective aspect of each facet. In each cartoon’s banner is the facet process, such as embark and clarify, and all facet processes are double-edged, comprising two strong, interdependent verbs for learning.

This introductory chapter asked, ‘What is our purpose?’ for student learning, for teaching and for the book itself. This chapter elaborated on the need for, and the possibility of, a coherent solution to the problems associated with an education in which all the parts are not well connected.

Chapter 2 is titled ‘What should we use?’ and this question is asked in consideration of our educational purposes. Chapter 2 provides a deep sense of the MELT, explaining in detail the six facets of sophisticated thinking and a consideration of how much guidance students need in terms of learning autonomy. Chapter 2 does this by delving into each facet in turn, interpreted in research stories from primary school (Place Value in the Preface), high school (Parachute in this chapter, below) and the account of a university graduate (Silver Fluoride in Chap. 2). Chapter 2 details the educational literature that informed the creation of MELT, and notes that much of that literature is descriptive in nature and lacks a theoretical underpinning.

Chapter 3 of this book, ‘How do we arrange?’, provides numerous examples of teachers using MELT to arrange and prompt more sophisticated thinking across the educational trajectory. These examples help to introduce others’ pedagogical interpretations of what form MELT had needed to take on and how it needed to be implemented in order for it to work in each of their contexts.

Chapter 4 ‘What do we trust?’ pulls competing theories together in productive tension and places them as the underpinning of MELT. By providing the theoretical underpinning of MELT, the chapter specifically positions competing theories together on the learning autonomy continuum, with the aim of arousing awareness and choice of where to operate on or across this continuum.

Chapter 5 is titled ‘What does it mean?’ and provokes a consideration of seminal and recent learning theories and what they mean for contemporary educational practices and teacher action research in light of MELT. Unpacking and placing learning theories on MELT’s continuum of learning autonomy is very practical for teacher understanding of theories and for their application of these to classrooms and online learning. Chapter 5 shows the connections between four contemporary learning theories, some of which are perceived to be in direct opposition, and the ways that teacher action research can bring theory to life. The chapter contains a chilling warning of continuing to treat educational theories as competitive rather than complementary, as Machine Teaching comes to the fore.

Chapter 6 asks ‘How do we relate?’ in regard to humanity’s relationship with itself and the planet, and why things seemed to have panned out in a way that leads us inevitably to environmental devastation and social upheaval. The chapter proposes ways in which MELT may be part of a solution that doesn’t cause more problems.

Chapter 7, ‘How much guidance?’ addresses the scaffolding of student learning, using MELT’s consideration of learning autonomy. The chapter considers those involved in education and the amount of guidance that may be needed to make MELT work in various settings. Autonomy in MELT is a relationship word, and is intimately connected to ‘ownership’ of teaching and learning. The need for ownership and empowerment is a major factor when considering how much structure and what sort of guidance is needed by students and teachers alike. The coherence of student learning journeys maybe possible through teachers, parents, schools and universities pulling together in the same direction, as directed by policy, but policy is not so good at motivating that pursuit in the long-term. In order to promote ownership and empowerment, it’s good for teachers to be autonomous. But students exposed to a series of overly autonomous teachers may find that their education feels broken and incoherent. How much guidance do we need for teachers and for students?

In summary, this chapter explains the need for the MELT, Chap. 2 details them, and Chap. 3 provides examples from ECE to Ph.D. level. Chapter 4 provides the theoretical underpinning, Chap. 5 considers contemporary learning theories in light of MELT, and Chap. 6 draws together the relationships that MELT may forge. Chapter 7 concludes with considerations for operationalising MELT.

1.7 Conclusion: Student Learning that Resonates

The billion human brains that will be born between 2023 and 2030 need something different from the learning and education that has occurred so far across 100,000 years of human history. That billion will inherit the leadership of the earth somewhere from 2040, with all of the accumulated problems caused by humanity until that time. Those billion need diverse learning environments that resonate with their complex learning capacities, that connect to multiple educator perspectives and theories, and that enable them to address local and global issues in ways that do not cause more problems than they solve. The complexities of human learning demand an expansive and encompassing conceptualisation of learning that mirrors different disciplines, learner ages, teaching theories, learning throughout prehistory and educational research. The billion need to be those whose knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, creativity and discernment are so powerful that they can anticipate problems caused by proposed solutions, and forge solutions that don’t cause more problems. The facets and their elaboration across the continuum of learning autonomy of the MELT are proffered in the next chapter as a conceptualisation that can help address this educational need.