Learning How to Learn

A Focus on Learning How to Learn

At a School Meeting in October, Emily Gum, Assistant Head of School for Teaching and Learning, talked with students about the Academic Merit system, and the ways that it exemplifies Frederick Gunn’s educational philosophy.

“Academic Merit is our secondary grading system. It’s really core to how we think of our academic identity,” Gum said. “It’s part of our school motto, A Good Person is Always Learning. Academic Merit gives you feedback on learning how to learn.”

Academic Merit is feedback that comes from every teacher at the end of the term and is intended to help students measure their progress in five key areas: preparedness, completion and conscientiousness, engagement, collaboration and group work, and self-awareness and persistence. These are the skills that help students to understand how they learn, and to develop a lifelong love of learning.

“We basically teach three big ideas,” Gum explained. “We teach a knowledge-rich curriculum. We teach that what you learn should help you have an impact in the world. And the thing that holds it all together is learning how to learn.”

Students need deep knowledge. They need math and the sciences, and they need history, a world language, and to be able to write and communicate, but what a Frederick Gunn School education also teaches is that the purpose of possessing all of that knowledge is to be an active citizen in the world with an entrepreneurial spirit. That is why students engage in a four-year citizenship curriculum under the Center for Citizenship and Just Democracy, why they are encouraged to take a deep dive into one big question or idea during Winterim, and why they are encouraged to problem-solve in the Ideas Lab and entrepreneurship classes, Gum said.

The idea that holds all of this knowledge, imagination, creativity, innovation, and impact together is being a great learner. “It’s how to be great at learning and putting that knowledge into practice. As a learner, you have strengths and weaknesses and

At left, Emily Gum speaks to students during a seminar in the Reading Room; above, students work together on a science lab project; below, demonstrating teamwork in French class.

particularities that are unique to how you learn. Most of the time, no one talks about this until you have leadership training in the world as an adult,” Gum said. But, she added, “To understand ourselves as learners is to understand the world. We take that seriously here. Every time you get a report card, and every time you receive feedback from your teacher in the form of Academic Merit, you are learning about the things that make you a great learner in the world.”

The school’s focus on students learning how to learn emanates from Frederick Gunn. “A person who is humble, open to new knowledge, open to new thought, that really has defined the school since its founding. Academic Merit helps us capture the moral quality of learning beyond the limitations of our grading system,” Gum said.

In The Master of The Gunnery, U.S. Senator Orville Platt wrote of Mr. Gunn: “His idea of education, acted upon in his own college experiences as well as when he came to be a teacher, was in the perfecting of noble manhood — the creating of a noble life. He studied rather for the effect of study upon the mind and heart than for position in his class. He had no desire to be thought a scholar. He acquired learning that he might know himself as a man. He was singularly oblivious to what the world calls fame. He would never contend for place. Others might have the honors of his class; he was content with the consciousness of power and benefit derived from study.”

As Gum explained: “What he was mainly interested in was students understanding themselves and figuring out how to make knowledge active in the world. The way to do that was to be a great student of the world.”

We see this in the way Mr. Gunn approached the natural world with his students, leading them on walks through the woods, where he offered lessons on botany and ornithology, or sending them under the canopy of trees beside his school to practice their elocution or part in the play. Mr. Gunn adopted an experiential approach “even in the way he taught Latin. His students didn’t learn the grammatical content of Latin,” Gum said. Instead, he preferred to have his students read Latin verse aloud.

“As a school, we’ve always taken a comprehensive approach to learning,” Gum said. “There’s a movement in education now to talk about mastery in education, and what it means to deeply grasp information and knowledge through a person’s participation in the learning process for the purpose of using it in the world. Related to this is discussion about experiential education and project-based education. We as a school have been thinking about that for a very long time. The whole approach started with Mr. Gunn and was based on his belief that knowledge helped you to be morally good in the world because it helps you to have a positive impact in the world. It’s not just knowledge but learning, and the humility that comes with that is what allows you to do good. That is the thread that is carried through The Frederick Gunn School.”

To understand ourselves as learners is to understand the world. We take that seriously here.“

– Emily Gum, Assistant Head of School for Teaching and Learning