Leading and Learning

Many, but not all lifelong learning institutes in the country approach teaching and learning the same way. Even for those familiar with the basic method, however, it’s useful briefly to restate fundamentals because they are so much at the core of how and why we learn.

The traditional learning roles in American colleges and universities have students and teachers. These are usually hierarchical and formal distinctions; you’re one or the other. Doctoral students are often in a bridging role, they may be both but in different roles, not at the same time.

By contrast, the learning roles at HILR are collaborative, not hierarchical. Leading and learning are intimately bound because of the structure and ethos we refer to as peer learning, where members lead all classes. All HILR “teachers” come from the “student” membership ranks. They’re called “leaders” rather than “instructors,” “teachers,” or “professors,” and the students are called “members,” reflecting the community ethos we strive to maintain. The leader picks the topic, submits a description and curriculum outline to the Curriculum Committee for approval, and guides the discussions. Leaders who mainly lecture are in the minority.

The core of our HILR experience is built each semester around 60 to 70 “study groups,” rather than “courses.” The HILR ethic to lead a group is strong and 40 percent of our members have led one at some point. This is due, in no small part to admissions screening that looks for people who want to lead study groups as well as take them. Members marvel at how common it is that we are in groups led by others who, in turn, were members of groups we led. Roughly half the members, as well as half the leaders, are men and half are women, and the relevant committees work hard to manage this balance. It enriches our learning experience, even though not everyone at HILR is aware of this managed policy.

There are at least five kinds of learning that go on at HILR: learning different subject matter in and through study groups; learning that involves new ways of thinking; a broader kind of learning, about life; learning through leading a study group; and something that is our intention to promote further through this volume, learning through writing. Let’s look briefly at each.

Subject-Matter Learning

Consistent with the university, we don’t offer how-to study groups such as photography or drawing, though we do have some computer classes. We seek a balance of offerings—in science, music, literature, history, and so on—as well as focus on new areas, or old areas that have changed radically since college graduation—such as astrobiology, genetics, globalization, postmodernism, and the green movement.

Because there are no exams, term papers or grades, we’re all there because of our love of learning for its own sake. This sets the tone for everyone’s participation and learning experience. A very typical comment is:

At HILR I am always learning something new and stimulating. The climate of a study group nurtures that stimulation—no tests, and no achievement awards—just learning for its own sake with people who are intelligent and open. (Rhoada Wald)

John Hovorka, another member, said:

I spent my life in physics, but I would lead study groups in other disciplines. I would choose a topic and spend the summer assembling the articles, books, and videos I proposed to use. This involved considerable rereading and reviewing. Preparing study groups for HILR, I equate education and surprise, putting together disparate ideas for their consideration.

Subject learning at HILR evolves from many sources, particularly from readings, class discussions, and reports. In some study groups, members prepare special reports for a class, individually or in teams, usually ten or twenty minutes in length. Whether they present orally, write then read, or post on the course website, those who prepare reports invariably learn more.

“Ways of Thinking” Learning

Those of us who were blessed got a really good undergraduate education that, in addition to subject-matter learning, taught us how to think. Beyond and apart from the facts and study groups, we learned how to develop a quality of mind. When this happened, no matter how much we forgot specifics, it gave us perspective and values that we nurtured from then until now. Our cognitive frameworks changed, and while we forgot a lot of content, we didn’t lose the context as easily. Later, when we came across new ideas, say in art or economics, we had a basic framework that helped us assimilate unfamiliar material.

We learned things like how to shape questions, how to evaluate knowledge, and how to make informed judgments. Qualities like these are usually not the primary subject matter of study groups—except perhaps in the rarefied air of a philosophy course or in the presence of an extraordinary teacher. In our youth, we were lucky indeed if some professors taught us how to focus on such qualities in and of themselves and better still, how to apply them to our beings and to our lives. Maurice Stein talks about this in “A Gift” in this volume.

A penchant for new paradigms is something we bring to lifelong learning places. We don’t acquire this orientation once we are in them; rather, we bring it with us already formed. But we certainly sharpen it here, especially if we take study groups in subjects where we have no background. In an astronomy study group, for example, we don’t just learn about planets, stars, and galaxies; we also acquire new ways of thinking about where we came from, what makes us who we are, and where we might be going. In a government study group, we don’t just learn about a clean air act, a government bailout, and a history of the second amendment; we also learn about the advantages and disadvantages of a balance of power and the layering of local, state, and federal rule.

New ways of thinking are especially true in fields that rapidly develop new knowledge. Over many decades, for example, we often wondered how cells knew what to become, and that long-standing question got answered when stem cells were discovered. This led to an entirely new way of thinking about development and disease treatment. New developments in evolutionary biology and genetics also give us very different ways of thinking than we learned in a college biology course around the time of Crick and Watson’s double helix discovery. Invited guests from the larger Harvard faculty and various research initiatives are particularly helpful here.

With this integrative way of thinking, we might even see the parallels in the parts of these wholes, and wonder what is common between planet/ star/galaxy, local/state/federal and, say, cell/body/species?

These first two ways of learning, then, are about content and context. The latter does more than just group the former into chunks and courses; it offers a way of seeing and thinking itself. Years ago we learned how to learn, and we just won’t stop.

Life Learning

Many members speak about another kind of learning that goes beyond the subject matter. As Peg Senturia puts it, HILR enables us “to search for answers along new paths in the welcome company of other pilgrims with diverse stories.” This larger learning, a kind of wisdom exchange, seems to last longer and be more important to many than any specific study group subject. It’s contextual learning, which affects our way of seeing and thinking.

This third kind of learning helps us cope with lifecycle issues such as retirement, health, aging, and death. It is transforming and has a staying power that we hold very dear. It changes our lives profoundly and permanently. You won’t find it listed in any of the curricula and in hardly any of the readings. When it is talked about, it’s as often in the Common Room as in a classroom. But it sure is there, and welcomed.

The first two types of learning come largely from learning in and from the study groups; this third kind comes more from the total experience. It’s possible to run courses without community, and some learning-in-retirement programs at universities, particularly those without a central physical space, do just that. Retirees, for example, are often welcome to occupy empty seats in a university course, when they exist. It’s also possible to have a community of elders without any serious element of academic learning, and that’s more typical of retirement communities. Over 30 years, HILR has somehow evolved into an environment that marries both community and learning.

The consequence is that members learn through the study groups and also through general immersion and participation. Though it’s an empirical question we can’t answer here, if asked to choose which one members value higher, I think many of us would bet on that wishy-washy, amorphous yet transcendent notion of learning beyond the academic. (I discuss this at greater length in my essay, “Begin Again.”) There is, as one member put it, a “cacophony of advice” about aging exchanged among our members. Beyond the context and content of subject matter learning, there are also lively discussions about life in general as we age. Here, the talk is as likely to be about aging well and about health in old age, as it is to be about illness and mortality. Many of us are awed by the courage of members to go forward in the face of significant handicaps and hardships, to covet learning in the teeth of life’s decline.

Learning by Leading

A fourth type of learning comes from leading. There are many leadership roles, particularly on Council (an elected position), and on both standing and non-standing special function committees. However, the major type of leading is by leading study groups, which is teaching itself. Most leaders remark:

Preparation for a study group requires a real commitment in terms of time and energy. I find it satisfying intellectually; I probably learn more from teaching than any other role.

Study group leaders have different backgrounds for the groups they lead. Some were professionals in the field and in the study group’s subject matter; others always had an avocational interest in the subject and want to carry it further; and a few do it expressly because they want to learn more about a subject of which they know only a bit more than those taking the study group. Either way, study group leaders do more to learn the subject matter involved than those just taking the study groups. And to state the obvious, the more effort you put in, the more you learn.

“It was so ingrained in me that leading a study group was not the same as teaching,” said a very experienced study group leader. Her philosophy is that “we are to guide or lead the group and also learn ourselves.” It’s fairly commonplace for teachers to be aware that they’re learning as they’re teaching, but it’s another thing altogether that this is an explicit and avowed part of the deal. It’s part of the pitch that encourages members to lead a group, a conscious inducement rather than an unnoticed byproduct.

It’s worth mentioning again that HILR’s admissions process looks for leadership potential. Most members probably have more of this trait than the average person. This could as easily have come from community and volunteer work as from job and career.

Learning by Writing

A fifth kind of learning comes almost serendipitously—through writing. Writing is an under-practiced undertaking at HILR because there are no exams or written term papers. Members do write, of course, but almost all the writing is done outside the context of study groups and classrooms. This is not to say that writing outside of study groups is not discussed, vetted, critiqued, and evaluated. It almost invariably is.

Few people, other than diarists, write exclusively for themselves as the only reader. Sometimes the sole purpose of writing is to get feedback—for suggestions about how to improve a draft or to decide whether a piece is or isn’t acceptable for a publication. Another set of reasons for writing is more to learn about emotions and social reactions than to hone one’s writing skills per se.

Our literary journal, The HILR Review, is published once every two years, and is going online. There are five editorial boards (art, essay, fiction, memoir, and poetry) that choose very different works from a large number of submissions. Fifty-one writers and poets, ten artists with the brush or camera, and three more artists in pencil or pen and ink contributed to the 2009 edition. That’s a ratio of better than one in ten members.

There are also groups who are learning by writing. In addition to formal study groups on poetry, memoir, and fiction, there are a selforganized writers’ workshop, a poetry group, a memoir-writing group, and a playwrights’ group.

Also, this volume itself began with a five-member group writing their narratives; now about five percent of the members participate in “new pathways” writing. We want to encourage greater awareness and participation of this fifth way of learning in all lifelong learning institutes.

Retaining What We Learn

Short-term memory often presents a common challenge for the elderly. When it comes to learning, this may well be a good thing. We generally think of learning as the acquisition of knowledge, and seldom as the acquisition and retention of it. Every semester, members are eager for more learning but how much of it do we remember? As one elder put it, “My mind works like lightning—one brilliant flash and it’s gone.”

Even in our youthful years in college, we may have had difficulties remembering all the courses we took, let alone the content of each. Knowledge seems to reside in the brain’s short-term memory; only a portion of it makes the transition into long-term memory, while most of it evaporates much like our recollection of the contents of last Tuesday’s dinner, the movie we saw last week, and the books we’ve read in our book groups only a few months ago. Some of it comes back when given a clue, like the name of the restaurant, the hero, or the author. This often leads to larger pools of content that still reside in our mental landscape. Retention of information is trickier than its acquisition.

It seems safe to say, therefore, that the act of learning itself may be the love object here, even more than the specific facts or features learned. Everyone at lifelong learning institutes seems to love learning as an end in itself, almost like a Platonic ideal, giving it more transcendent value than the particulars of any study group’s content. By the time a semester ends, at the same time that we are probably forgetting much of what we learned, there is a feverish excitement about seeing the list of study group offerings for the following semester. We can’t wait.

The more groups that are offered the more ecstatic we are about the feast prepared for us. We’re really like restaurant patrons; we want a splendid menu even though we’re only going to eat a single meal—well maybe a three-course meal.

This love of the act was probably acquired early on in our lives, and it is what stays and transcends specifics. It’s a deeply embedded trait and at the heart of the learning that goes on in each member and in the lifelong learning culture wherever one is found.

Milt Paisner, a long-time study group leader, expressed the subject of memory and retention this way:

Everyone’s familiar with the learning curve. Well, there’s also a forgetting curve that matches it. If the learning curve is a gradual, slow rise, then so too is the forgetting curve. If the learning curve is quick and steep, so too is the forgetting curve. What matters is the learning itself. Our career isn’t injured; our goals aren’t unrealized.

Beneath the specific and the superficial, is perhaps the deepest reason our members have—again, they simply love learning itself. The specific study group material is secondary. Every semester we shift and switch topics; the constant is the love. Since most of us take more than one study group at a time, we can’t even say that we’re monogamous learning-lovers. We’re forever on the prowl for our next conquest, but truly we are the seduced rather than the seducers. To adjust the metaphor, we’re learning junkies.

We learn for the simple enjoyment of the act, and because we want help to explain to ourselves the world we live in, in all its rich variety. This motive explains why people choose to have their fun through academic study rather than with golf or bridge. Social contact may be the common ground, but the substrate is of a definitely brainy fiber. And finally, bringing us back to the ultimately unavoidable topic of aging, we learn in order to keep alert. We exercise our brains on the “use it or lose it” premise.

Interest in a subject matter, love of learning itself, curiosity, enjoyment, and staying alert; there is merit to all these reasons why elders choose to learn, and the community’s members frequently mention all of them. None do it to prepare for a late-age career; there’s nothing instrumental here, no practitioner training, professional certification or new career development. This is key to maintaining a reasonably high study quality without a strictly academic regimen. Whether motivated more by lofty intellect or by human connection, everybody wants the same sustenance: to learn.

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