SWENSDAY STUFF

The Five Laws of Learning: Teaching Students How to Fish
Swen Nater

I remember when I bought my first home. It was a two-bedroom track home in Orange County, CA, with a small backyard. The first time I tripped a breaker switch, it took me ten minutes to find the box. I didn’t know anything about that house or the appliances. I didn’t know if I had 110 volt outlets in the garage or if it was wired for 220. I was clueless as to how much insulation was in the walls or how far apart the studs were.

But suppose I hired a contractor to build my house from scratch, and had him teach me every step, from foundation to finish. Suppose I had him explain and demonstrate how things were done and why. Suppose he had me participate by having me do a little electrical, plumbing, siding, and roofing. I would know every operational detail and spec of all the materials. If anything broke, I would be able to fix it or know what’s wrong with it if I didn’t. I wouldn’t need the contractor to tell me.

Buying a house is like someone giving you a fish; being involved in building it, is like someone showing you how to fish. There is knowledge about the components, how they work, why they work, and how they work together. This is good teaching. Coach Wooden believed in this method of instruction because he knew, in games, new problems would be presented and he wanted to equip us to solve those problems on our own.

To accomplish this, he used The Five Laws of Learning: Demonstration, Explanation, Imitation, Correction, and Repetition. Like building a house, there are three stages to The Five Laws of Learning: The Foundation, The Construction, and The Finishing. To help you understand how Coach used the laws to create understanding, we’re going to imagine you are very young and your parents are beginning to teach you how to read. The book they are using is The Cat in the Hat.

1. The Foundation: Demonstration and Explanation
You are very young and your parents are already reading the book to you. They demonstrate what reading is all about. At first, you don’t have a clue that they are reading but, as you get a little older, you begin to catch on. What gives it away is, they are running their fingers under those funny looking things with letters and saying the same words every time they read.

When you get interested in what they are doing and want to do it yourself—like children do—they show you the connection between the letters and the sounds they represent. They demonstrate and explain to you, when you blend those sounds together, magic! It makes a real word. 

You now have the foundation. You are learning how to crack the code. You don’t know the entire code (44 sounds and the graphemes that represent them) but you know enough to read most of The Cat in the Hat.

2. The Construction: Imitation and Correction
You take a stab at it but you don’t get far. However, your parents help you. They correct your errors and praise you when you are in the zone. There are words you’ve never seen but you try to read them. Sometimes you can and sometimes it’s hard. In the very first line of the book, you encounter the word, “shine.” You can read “shin” but not “shine.” Your parents explain, when you see that “e,” it signals that the vowel before has a different sound. They tell you what the word is. Not much later, you run across the word, “made.” It looks like “mad” but you see the “e.” You change the sound and off you go.

Imitation and Correction is the construction phase of learning because students learn by doing. When you’re building a house, you may be breaking a beam or a pipe or two, but you’re learning to mend, glue, and sometimes just to scrap it and get another one. The frame is going up, the plumbing is going in, and the electrical is being wired. And because—like you learning to read—you are right there using your hands, you are learning how things work—one mistake at a time. 

3. Finishing: Repetition
Back to The Cat in the Hat. You can read the entire book but not perfectly. Sometimes you forget a word or a symbol, like “th” or even that little “e” at the end of a word. But you’re getting better and better. There’s nothing new to learn, really, not for that book, so it’s just a matter of practice. And each time you read the book, it sounds more and more polished. You make a few less mistakes, your inflection is more believable, and your reading sounds more like speech. It’s like finishing a house with beautiful cedar siding, paint, gutters, shutters, and doorknobs.

Coach Wooden often said, “Repetition is the key to learning.” How true is that! It’s true because “learning” hasn’t happened until it’s automatic. You haven’t learned The Cat in the Hat until you can almost read it from memory. With repetition, you finish the process.

How Coach Wooden Used The Five Laws of Learning
1. A Foundation of demonstration and explanation present a very clear picture of what the finished product is supposed to look like. Coach always explained and demonstrated a drill, an offensive play, or a defensive play. Once we saw it, we knew what it was supposed to look like.
2. The Construction gets the student” learning by doing” as he imitates, makes mistakes, and uses prior knowledge to solve new problems. Once Coach showed us the “Whole” and taught the basics of how to execute it, he put us into scrimmage situations. You have no idea how many mistakes we made. We struggled but he kept correcting. In the process, we began to think out of the box and come up with new ways to do things. Often, he liked them. I’m sure he had already thought of them but he wanted us to discover them for ourselves. This way, like building a house, we would know how things worked and why.
3. The Finishing is where the student repeats and repeats the action, smoothing out the bumps, until he can do it with his eyes closed and he understands everything about it. Finishing is something Coach did that separated him from other coaches perhaps more than anything else. He drilled and drilled until things became automatic. In games, we were a well-oiled and cohesive team. But, unlike a machine, we were able to improvise and adjust.

The Five Laws of Learning, when used properly, accelerate learning because of the step-by-step method. But they also facilitate deep knowledge and understanding. In short, teachers who use them will not be giving their students a fish; they will be showing them how to fish. 

If you want them to learn,
Here are five little clues,
The Five Laws of Learning
Is what you should use.

Just show them the model,
Explaining just how,
And put them to work
With the sweat of their brow.

They’ll make some mistakes
But they’ll work through the chore,
And they’ll get so dang good,
They won’t need you no more.
Dr. Swen