Teaching and Learning Through an Evolutionary Lens

How can we teach a new generation of students? One approach suggested by various educators is to improve our understanding of students' prior knowledge and view course materials and exercises from their perspective. This could mean to cover topics in ways that resonate with each student. As a student, one should aim to observe and learn through understanding the intent, rather than simply memorizing steps. My goal in this short essay is to examine teaching and learning from an evolutionary perspective and explore how it could help educators and learners connect better with each other's needs.

Historically, our ancestral primates learned to use tools and adopt new skills by observing others using those tools and implementing those skills. They did not independently invent them. Without knowledge transmissibility, we would never have succeeded as a species; it would be very inefficient and would have taken a long time to acquire those skills. In fact, acquiring novel skills through observation is something very specific to our ancestral primates and some species of birds. This happens in primates because of Theory of Mind. This feature enabled our ancestors to actively teach, as teaching requires an understanding of what another mind does not know and what demonstrations can help shape another mind's knowledge in the right way. Furthermore, a good learner must project their mind into another's to understand their intent and knowledge. Understanding the intent is very important here, as it helps the learner develop motivation through understanding the final goal of the imitation, which is acquiring the skill, not just imitating the moves the teacher performs. This means "learning" and not just "memorizing" with no understanding of the final goal.

I think this offers an interesting way of thinking about the teaching-learning dynamic between a student and educator, and it could effectively distinguish a good educator from just a knowledgeable one. A good educator has a much better capability to understand what happens in the pupil's mind throughout a course or a given lecture and can address the student's needs accordingly. From the student's perspective, the goal should always be to understand the intent of the learning by projecting their mind into the educator's and focusing on the goal. This requires effort and careful attention.

While Theory of Mind provides a framework to understand what one needs in a given situation by projecting the mind into another, our ancestors took learning one step further by developing the ability to anticipate future needs. This cognitive leap allowed them not only to understand others' current mental states but also to imagine future states of mind and make decisions based on those anticipated needs. Think about how you might do your groceries for a week and have to predict what you would want and make plans accordingly. Evolutionarily speaking, one possible reason that our primate brains developed such a feature was to help our primate ancestors become more adaptable to a fruit-based diet and its limited-window availability, so they could plan accordingly for their nutrition. This specific feature can be seen as imagining a future state of mind. We take an action now to satisfy a want in the future, even though we don't want it now. While this specifically concerns how we anticipate our own future needs, it can, for the purpose of teacher-learner context, be thought of as a tool to anticipate someone else's future needs.

This capacity for anticipating future needs has direct applications to teaching and learning. An effective teacher can anticipate their students' future needs and prepare the course materials, notes, learning aids, or other needed tools to address those needs. This can come as the teacher becomes more experienced or through meticulous observation of students under their advisement. Similarly, a good learner should be able to anticipate their future needs based on what they are currently learning and seek the relevant materials and related questions from the educator.

In an ideal learning environment, there is a two-way street where an educator can project their mind into a student's mind to understand their knowledge and guide them as needed, while the learner, through projecting their mind into the educator's, learns to infer the intent and not get caught up in sometimes unrelated information. No teacher will be perfect, so there will always be some noise that needs to be filtered to focus only on the signal. The signal here being the intent. Furthermore, the same two-way street must exist between the learner and teacher when it comes to anticipating future needs. While an educator can use that evolutionary skill to predict a learner's future needs, a learner can use it to take necessary actions to gain as much as possible from the learning environment by putting in the effort to anticipate what they might need in the future, either based on how they will be examined in the course or through understanding of their future career (in the case of a college student) and what could help them achieve it.