Renting vs Owning

Most students don’t own their learning—they only rent it

Most of what we “learn” in school doesn’t stay with us.

Implications in the classroom

You may be old enough to recall the lyrics from the song “Kodachrome” by Paul Simon. It starts out “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all . . .”

Does that bring back memories? I remember not only the song, but also, frankly “all the crap I learned in high school.” Most of which I have forgotten – except for what I’ve needed to know and have used over the years.

In previous Substack posts I’ve addressed the question of ownership – of determining who the learning actually belongs to. Instruction “belongs” to the teacher probably 99% of the time. The teacher determines the lesson for the day, how it will be presented, the pacing, what activities will be used to reinforce the lesson and then how student understanding will be assessed.

Responding to that instruction belongs to the learner. They effectively “rent” short term memory space in their brain long enough to accomplish the goal of a grade.

Instruction runs smoothly on its own—but that doesn’t mean learning does. Teachers do their best to make their lessons both meaningful and relevant for the class.

But . . . the research is clear – personal relevance is THE most important catalyst for long-term memory.

There’s a reason for that.

You may not be familiar with the term Self-Reference Effect (SRE) but I guarantee you’re familiar with it. Durbin et al (2017) described the tendency to remember information more effectively when it is understood in relation to ourselves. That’s because the self is like a hub where everything else connects– a complex network of existing knowledge and memories (Hamami et al, 2011). I always used to tell my students “Go from what you know to what you don’t know”. That was a good attempt, but incomplete because I was still intent (obligated) to teach and instruct them in what I had determined they should know at that time. That did not make it personally relevant to them.

Teachers try to be creative in the way they attend to the SRE idea. As I mentioned, they try to make a lesson relevant to absolutely the greatest degree possible. I remember teaching the plus perfect subjunctive in French. Twenty years later, even my best students probably recall very little. However, I made sure to “teach” it in an exciting, relevant way that allowed them to . . . use it correctly on a quiz or test or when writing a paper. But my lessons were just that – they were my lessons and frankly the reason teaching that verb tense was meaningful to me was because it was part of my curriculum and I wanted them to be successful with what I was teaching them.

There are a couple of other ways that teachers try for relevance – one is by relating content that the teacher has chosen to something they think will be meaningful to the class. When I was a principal I remember observing a really respected math teacher. The day I was there the lesson was on calculating the volume of an irregular 3-dimensional object. To make it come alive out of the pages of the book she had them design swimming pools and figure out how much water would be needed to fill them. Some were simple – lap pools – basically rectangular boxes, but some were more complex with a slope down to a certain depth and then the rest of the bottom was level at a certain depth. The students had a lot of fun with it and were quite engaged. They learned to do what the teacher instructed them to calculate. I asked how many of them had drawn their pool based on the pool in their backyard. None. Not because they wanted to try a different one, but because none of them had a swimming pool in their yard! Sure, the example was more relevant than a problem in the text, and the teacher had made it more exciting because she was excited, but I wonder how many of them took what they learned in class and applied it in a totally different context. There was absolutely not self-reference involved.

I was visiting with a friend recently and asked him what the most advanced math class was that he’d taken. It was Calculus. He’s not in his early 50s and I asked him what calculus he remembered. His blunt reply was “Absolutely nothing! I never use it” “However”, he continued, “I use algebra all the time.” Why? Not because the Algebra teacher was better than the Calculus teacher (same person, in fact), but because he uses algebra – he needs it for his purposes.

I admire teachers who try to make their lessons relevant through examples, etc, but ultimately, if it doesn’t have meaning for the individual student, it’s not going to last.

In fact, the latest research says that when things matter to the individual – when they are responsible for emotional arousal the amygdala is activated which in turn activates the hippocampus and as a result certain memories take high priority (Ritchey et al, 2008; LaLumiere et al 2017). Now I haven’t seen the studies, but I would imagine that fear can cause short-term emotional arousal as well. Why do I bring it up? Because this is often teachers’ ace in the hole – it’s how they make sure that ideas make it into memory. IF you don’t learn these formulae for this test, you’ll get a failing grade. If you don’t have a high enough class average, you’re going to fail the course! I t’s a kind of relevance—but not the kind that lasts. Most of us can probably cite personal examples of when that sort of negative stimulus was strong enough to work in the short term, but then either faded, or perhaps you even blocked it out after that because of the negative associations.

We confuse success in the moment with learning that lasts.

A lot of educators are aware of the research and they do their best to fit it in with their practice, but it’s just not very effective. No matter how hard you may pat yourself on the back because almost everyone in your class passed the test or the course, it’s still probably a hollow, short-term victory. Yes, you used alternative grading and every technique you knew of and made them successful in your [calculus] class, but unless it was personally meaningful it was like a post-it-note and not velcro.

The principle is paradoxical. It’s not a hard principle to understand most of what people learn and remember for the long term is personally relevant. Ownership isn’t something the teacher can create for the learner.

This is where the distinction matters.

Unless it’s personally relevant, students are only going to “rent” the knowledge – they won’t end up owning it until it is truly theirs.

What does it look like when the learner owns the relevance? For one thing, they end up owning the learning, not just doing a short-term rental. I’ll talk about some creative ways for that to happen.

AI† This post was written by me, not by AI. However, I did use AI for 3 very slight modifications. The image was generated using Gemini.ai.