Imagine this scenario for a moment. You walk into class one day after discovering the lesson plan you worked on all week has vanished. Your instincts, experiences, and trust in your own intuitive instructional nature—it's all laid bare. Why not have some fun with it?
This is a time for your sense of teaching innovation to be coupled with the joy of discovery to empower learners through engaging in messy learning. This is your chance to let your learners lead the way and show you what they can do, using creative freedom within a solid framework strengthened by guidance and mutual trust. In other words, it's time for a bit of unstructured learning.
But what do we mean by "unstructured"? Surely learners need some sort of organization, some sort of composition to the journey of learning to make it effective. Yes, they absolutely do, but it is also possible to offer them autonomy and self-determination within the structure we provide as teachers. So when we refer to unstructured learning, we're actually referring to encouraging freedom within a structure.
What "Unstructured" Means in Learning
The term "unstructured learning" has in the past been associated with other types of learning such as flipped learning or blended learning, but it's much more than these. Just as the term suggests, unstructured learning is learning with no specific structure. It removes the notion of a linear pathway for learning to allow young learners room to develop agency and learn in ways that are relevant to them (Educa, 2016).
In this kind of learning, there is a basic structure to a lesson but there's not necessarily any definitive, rigid template for learners to adhere to other than that. Instead, it's about promoting exploration, revelation, and agency in learning (Hendricks, 2019).
Learners need structure, but it is also possible to offer them autonomy and self-determination within the structure we provide.
With unstructured learning, the learners commence with achieving a clear understanding of the learning intentions and the criteria for their success. From there they forge their own paths, and the journey is continuous. This means learners aren't expected to produce a solution to a problem or to answer a challenge in a finite number of ways. It's full of rich experiences of learning from mistakes and asking meaningful questions that lead to more delicious discoveries.
Structured Vs. Unstructured
In our quest to understand unstructured learning better, it helps to have some examples of what it might look like in practice. We can start by comparing the two:
- Structured learning happens when the content is organized like the chapters in a book. The teacher closely tracks the learners' performance and engagement and follows up if they are not completing the specific work in whatever the projected time frame might be.
- Unstructured learning is when learners have more control over what, when, and how they learn. They collaborate freely inside a much more relaxed timeframe, and the teacher is there to offer facilitation and guidance where needed and necessary.
Unstructured learning is built around activities that may include but aren't limited to things like:
- Makerspace projects (building and designing to solve a problem)
- Creativity projects (making art, music, and theatre)
- Open debates about topics of interest, or Socratic Seminars
- Peer-to-peer discussions and interviews
- Online research and taking video tutorials
Messing Around
What makes unstructured learning so beneficial for learners to experience? Simply put, it's an authentic real-world way of learning. It closely replicates how learners will self-educate throughout their daily lives once their formative school years come to a close.
If you think about it, the real world itself doesn't have neat compartments or set disciplines for success. In the real world, learning has no beginning and end and is largely driven by both individual inquiry and curiosity (Heick, 2020). It demands adaptability, patience, and a willingness to learn and to use what is learned at the moment. As John Dewey wrote, "The school must represent present life — life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighbourhood, or on the playground” (Dewey, 1897).
In the book, One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, high school senior Nikhil Goyal offers this perspective:
"We need to arrange the curriculum around big ideas, questions, and conundrums ... letting kids learn by doing ... let kids travel to places, work with mentors, and inquire about the world around them." (Goyal, 2012).
For our learners to be successful, that's the shift in ownership that needs to happen, and it's what unstructured learning encourages. We must shift responsibility for learning from the teacher, where it has been, to the learner where it should be (Crockett, et al., 2011).
As we said, unstructured learning is non-linear learning, which is like a tangled string meeting itself several times at different angles. When you look at something from different angles, your perception is strengthened and each angle reinforces your understanding.
When our learners have opportunities to learn like this in school—creatively free and in the moment—it challenges and inspires them to grow and succeed in ways that speak to them personally. That's the beauty of unstructured learning.
Unstructured Means Freedom Within Structure
We mentioned earlier that unstructured learning experiences don't mean that a plan and guidance have no place in education and should be avoided. Actually, the opposite is true; it is within the sureness of the structured framework of a lesson or unit that learners can explore and investigate safely with agency over themselves.
As we wrote in the book, Agents to Agency, this doesn't mean learners have free reign to do whatever they wish. Again, autonomy is granted within the structure of a learning journey, provided by the teacher, and is geared toward helping learners "build autonomous skills in concert with their teacher's support and guidance to achieve mutually determined outcomes" (Crockett, 2022, p. 25). There is a balance, a negotiated common ground, between what learners are required to learn and what they are curious about.
What makes unstructured learning so beneficial for learners to experience? Simply put, it's an authentic real-world way of learning.
It still requires support from the teacher, particularly in the early stages of learning. This happens in the form of presenting scenarios, learning intentions, discussion topics, guiding questions, essential understandings, and the like. In the end, however, all these methods are designed to support and guide learners as they wade happily through the unknown, guided by their interests and instincts.
Though the teacher provides specific guidelines and goals, learners engage their higher-order thinking processes when learning is a little unstructured. We can support them and help them when called upon, but the learning paths are theirs to walk.
A Final Word About Unstructured Learning
Although this kind of learning is a great way for learners to achieve desired outcomes, it bears repeating that it does not in any way lessen the vitality of a classroom teacher's presence. Quite the opposite; it strengthens it.
You are still the best thing about a learner's school experiences because unstructured learning—and any learning—allows you to act as a facilitator and guide as they build their learning experiences, step by step and triumph by triumph.
References
Crockett, L. (2022). Agents to agency: A measurable process for cultivating self-directed learner agency. Bloomington, IL: Solution Tree.
Crockett, L. Jukes, I. Churches, A. (2011). Literacy is not enough: 21st-century fluencies for the digital age. 21st Century Fluency Project ; Corwin.
Dewey, J. (1897). My Pedagogic Creed. School Journal, Vol. 54 (January 1897), pp. 77-80. Retrieved from http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm Mar. 9, 2023.
Educa. (2016). The Benefits of Unstructured Learning. Retrieved from https://www.geteduca.com/blog/benefits-unstructured-learning/ Mar. 9, 2023.
Goyal, N. (2012). One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School. NY: Alternative Education Resource Organization.
Heick, T. (2020). How Learning In Your Classroom Is Different Than Learning In The Real World. Retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/learning/real-world-learning/ Mar. 15, 2023.
Hendricks, P. (2020). Messy Learning in Student-Driven Classrooms. Roeper Review, 42:1, 68-70, DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2020.1689595