LILA ~ Learning Innovations Laboratory at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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  1. Marga Biller

    Unlearning to Learn: A 10,000 Foot View

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    Unlearning to Learn:  A 10,000 Foot View David Perkins offered his third installment of a “10,000 ft.” view synthesizing where we are in our story about Unlearning for the year. He began by reminding us that our three “quests” have been to define, understand and foster Unlearning, and that today’s synthesis would focus on our progress in these quests through the systems lens. Defining Unlearning Perkins situated his synthesis by noting that from the start of the year we’ve held a big idea: unlearning is necessary when we face interference from prior learning. We’ve come to see, he says, that...
  2. Marga Biller

    Unlearning Urban Traffic Engineering and Street Design with Ben Hamilton-Baillie

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    In our own organizations, we often try to improve performance by clearly defining work processes and procedures expecting that these will produce the expected outcomes. Yet in many cases they don’t. By exploring the Shared Space approach, we hope to gain some insights into such questions as: How might we identify what needs to be unlearned before trying a systemic change? What systemic mindsets and habits have to be unlearned before change can be initiated? Does unlearning have to occur simultaneously throughout the whole system or can it be a gradual and in pockets? How do you design systemic cues into the environment in order to prompt different actions and sustain the new behaviors ?
  3. Habits in Everyday Life

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    Wendy Wood from USC joined LILA to share the research she does on habits -- what they are, how they can be aligned/misaligned with intentions, and how habits often override intentions (for better of worse). She set the table by suggested that habits are part our multiple selves, specifically part of our automatic self.That is the self that is guided by cation cues (like seeing a pot of coffee). This self is less conscious, not easily verbalize what we are doing, and changes slowly with experience. The automatic or "habitual self" is different from the "intentional self", which is guided by attitudes, goals, values. This self is more conscious, can verbalize, and can change quickly with decisions.
  4. Marga Biller

    Challenges of Unlearning

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    David Perkins shared some of his thinking about some of the challenges of unlearning. There are many ways to dig into the topic so he invited us to consider what is the big picture about this year’s theme in three ways: Defining Unlearning: Broadly speaking we can think of it as interfering with prior learning. Lots of learning builds on prior knowledge and beliefs. But there are other situations in which prior habits, mindsets, or systems are obstacles. A second point is that unlearning may not be the best term because you don’t really erase something, you typically bracket or...

Harvard Graduate School of Education