This is the first in a series about subtle paradigm shifts that need to occur in education.

Joel picks up a lizard and places it on the sliding glass door.  "Its fingers or toes . . . I think they're toes.  His toes are stuck to the door."  At another time, I might engage him in the question about why he's using "he" as a default.  However, right now isn't the ideal time for a conversation on language and gender.

Joel looks closer and offers a hypothesis, "I think his tail is part of how he stays balanced."

He adds another lizard to the door, studies it and then adds three more.  Finally, he decides to hold the lizards in his hands to get a feel for how they stick to things.  "There's no slime or anything.  It's not wet," he informs me.

*     *     *

When I was in college, I learned that objectives had to be "observable behaviors."  It was all part of the Skinner's patented pigeon-in-a-box method of learning.  Professors warned us that we had to have quantified data in the form of specific behaviors in order to assess learning.

"Don't tell a child to differentiate between the causes of the Civil War.  You need to say that students will differentiate four out of five causes of the Civil War given a fill-in-the-blank test.  See the difference.  You can't measure the first."

I can't measure the inquiry and creativity of studying lizards, either.  Learning is a cognitive process.  Objectives that obsess with "observable behaviors" fail to recognize that it is not a mental journey that exists within the individual student.  Sometimes learning cannot be easily observed.  Often, it cannot be measured.

And yet . . .

I've often fallen into the trap of viewing learning as something that simply happens in the mind alone.  I've treated education as an abstract process contained within the cerebrum (and occasionally the amygdala if we're getting emotional).  For all my talk of "the whole child" I often fail to remember that learning is an action.  Typing a blog post is an action.  Picking up lizards is an action.  Reading a book is an action.

There is no make-believe "up-in-the-clouds" zone of cognition followed by a set of actions.  Even the act of silently reflecting is simply that - an action.  When I treat learning as simply an act of cognition, I fail to grasp the fact that it is a full-scale, multi-sensory action.  When I treat learning as simply a behavior, I assume that it is all external, all good-bad and based upon a set of reinforcements.

If I can remember that learning is an action, I'm more apt to treat students as whole people with the need to engage with their world uses all five senses.  However, I'll also remember that the mind is engaged in a mental journey that is often a mystery to me and perhaps even a mystery to the student.  I'll recognize that learning doesn't exist in a make-believe abstract vapor, but that it also doesn't exist as a set of reinforcements in a Skinner Box.