Transferring our Learning -- A Monumental Task?

         Well perhaps not such a monumental task, but most definitely a comprehensive one. While reading the pertinent chapter in How People Learn as well as Wiggins & McTighe, I realized that educating students in the correct manner and way that will allow them to transfer their knowledge to their "home, community and workplace" could take a lifetime to achieve. Not to mention, things would go much more smoothly if all of the teachers of that one student, the student's parents, and essentially anyone that student interacts with that teaches him something (including his peers) were on board! And that is just one student. Either education as a whole has to be completely rethought, re-worked, everything we've done until now thrown away and start over (which is what I suspect the book's authors are advocating) or we have to be content with what we have and make it work. I'm starting to think revolutionizing education and starting over is the way to go. These readings make me remember my childhood education and attempt to assess it in light of my new learning; according to most of the readings, I was taught ever so incorrectly, what a shock. Yet, I managed to make it this far. But I'm digressing--back to the subject matter!
            I learned something interesting about myself this week: I'm definitely, for the most part, a performance-oriented learner. However, when it comes to English literature, I am a learning-oriented learner--my appetite for learning in this discipline cannot be sated! I always thought I was simply "not good" at math.
         Another interesting thing to me was the idea of awakening metacognition in students as a useful tool to improve rates of knowledge transfer. I love the idea of telling students "We're going to learn about shapes and how we use them outside the classroom....Do you think we've learned everything there is to know about shapes? Where can we go to learn more? What do you think we should know about shapes?" and truly engaging them in the learning process. For the first time ever in my education, this semester I had a professor ask each student what they wanted to learn from this class and which career path they were interested in. She made the syllabus after that first class, tailoring it to our responses--brilliant and yet such a simple concept, teaching us what we wanted to know! Granted, primary and secondary educators do not have quite that luxury thanks to the need for students to pass standardized tests (don't even get me started!) but even employing that concept within the daily lesson could possibly make a big difference.
          I wanted to touch on the idea of "learning [especially advanced learning] can't be rushed" and what that means for us librarians in our one-shot-workshops but I feel as though this blog post is long enough so...class discussion topic?