The Learning Cycle: Insights for Faithful Teaching from Neuroscience and the Social Sciences
Overview
How teachers teach is not necessarily how learners learn. Educators generally focus on content delivery. But much of the learning process involves affective and behavioral factors that shape learners’ outcomes.
Veteran educators Muriel and Duane Elmer provide a holistic model for how learning takes place. Their learning cycle moves beyond mere recall of information to helping learners value and apply their learning in ways that are integrated into behavior and practice. With insights from neuroscience, educational psychology, and learning theory, they address how the brain can become more receptive, how emotional environments affect learning, and how learning tasks and experiential exercises can help foster the development of skills and habit formation. They do so in the context of a thoroughly Christian framework that emphasizes not just knowledge, but character, integrity, and wisdom.
Learning can be accomplished in and beyond the classroom to move from content mastery to life experience. Here are sound avenues for helping your students become the lifelong learners God intends.
- Helps learners value and apply their learning in ways that are integrated into behavior and practice
- Provides insights from neuroscience, educational psychology, and learning theory
- Addresses how the brain can become more receptive
- Introduction
- Level 1: Recall: I Remember the Information
- Level 2: Recall with Appreciation: I Value the Information
- Level 3: Recall with Speculation: I Ponder How to Use Information
- Barriers to Change
- Level 4: Recall with Practice: I Begin Changing My Behavior
- Level 5: Recall with Habit: I Do Consistently
Top Highlights
“Kolb defines learning as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (Page 9)
“Learning occurs by changing the synapses so that the influence of one neuron on another also changes.’” (Page 11)
“summary, he said he did not feel that class material was connected to life issues he would be facing” (Page 2)
“Could it be that the ‘great escape’ may refer not only to students failing to ponder the meaning of classroom material; could it also describe those of us who have ‘escaped’ the responsibility of nurturing contemplation, meaningmaking, and the will to change as a necessary step in teaching? By ignoring this crucial learning activity, by being too preoccupied with packing in more content, we ‘tell’ people that it is not important, it is not necessary, and it can be skipped. In other words, we have unknowingly created an unholy habit by which our learners skip the connection between truth and life.” (Page 83)
“The point is simple. Education is composed of knowing and doing, rhetoric and behavior, theory and practice, intellect and engagement, cognition and courage, orthodoxy (straight speaking) and orthopraxis (straight living), content and experience, knowing truth and doing truth. However it is stated, the end product is the same: the linking of life in the classroom to life in society. They must be seen as close friends, mutually informing and transforming the other.” (Pages 8–9)
In an unpretentious, transparent, conversational manner, Muriel and Duane Elmer both warn and instruct. Traditional, truncated ‘talking is teaching’ approaches to education are not merely inadequate, they can be spiritually malignant or even lethal. The Learning Cycle blends biblical insight, educational theory, and research into an accessible and powerful conceptual framework that has revolutionized my teaching and can do the same for yours.
—Ralph E. Enlow Jr., president of the Association for Biblical Higher Education
In our training course to help camp leaders create their own Bible study curriculum in Latin America, we discovered very few resources to help people apply Scripture. The Elmers’ learning cycle revitalized our 2020 version of both teacher and student editions. Their book provides abundant insights for helping people obey truth, whether found in God’s Word or any subject matter. Driven by a passion to close the gap between hearing and doing, the Elmers include practical strategies like asking students to do a barrier analysis by asking, ‘What obstacles might you encounter if you obey this truth? How can you prepare to overcome them?’ Their style of writing engages the reader, intertwining deeply personal experiences with insights from brain research and the social sciences. This book also crosses cultures perfectly.
—Lisa Anderson-Umana, director of leadership development with Christian Camping International, Latin America
Muriel I. Elmer (PhD, Michigan State) is a retired adjunct professor for Trinity International University where she taught in both the educational studies and the intercultural studies PhD programs. She has taught nursing and intercultural communication at various institutions and has been an international consultant and educator for many cross-cultural organizations. She was the director of child survival programs and a training specialist at World Relief as well as a missionary in South Africa.
Duane H. Elmer (PhD, Michigan State) has taught in over seventy-five countries and has provided cross-cultural training to Fortune 500 companies, relief and development agencies, mission organizations, churches, and educational institutions. He previously served as director of the PhD program in educational studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He has also conducted peace and reconciliation efforts in several countries. His books include Cross-Cultural Conflict, Cross-Cultural Connections, and Cross-Cultural Servanthood. The Elmers live in Winfield, Illinois.