Elementary News

Transfer as the POINT of Education

As educators we value the ability of our students to apply their learning, especially to novel situations. The late Grant Wiggins, an advocate for Authentic Education, described Transfer as the aim of education. “The point of school is not to get good at school, but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life.”

In our class lessons teachers are aware that transfer doesn’t occur just because content is covered. A perfect score on a worksheet about personification doesn’t demonstrate understanding of the value/impact, particularly for empathy, of this literary device. We need to provide opportunities, including events, for application to occur if we want our students to demonstrate authentic transfer. 

The following is an example of personification used when fifth graders read The One and Only Ivan by Katharine Applegate. The main character Ivan is a gorilla that is given human qualities. Ivan states in the book:

“I think for a while. It's hard to put into words. Gorillas are not complainers. We're dreamers, poets, philosophers, nap takers.” 

Students can only prove their understanding of a topic like personification, if they are given opportunities to use their learning in different and often unfamiliar tasks. Personification is best understood, and indeed assessed, if learners have to complete tasks that challenge them to make  sense of past learning in unfamiliar tasks. Third graders are currently writing first person stories where they become a specific animal living in a defined habitat. Through personification the third graders are challenged to demonstrate their understanding of specific biomes. As a best practice school, our goal is not to simply ask students to learn stuff and then be tested on that learning. Rather as Wiggins explains, “Assumptions about transfer accompany the belief that it is better to broadly ‘educate’ people than simply ‘train’ them to perform particular tasks.”

As parents when your child comes home to share a piece of individual learning with you try to challenge him/her by creating new and unfamiliar scenarios/tasks to see if the learning has been transferred. 

1 (Taken from ‘Transfer as the point of education” a blog posted by Grant Wiggins 11/01/12)