Readings

Theories of Learning

One of the major problems which has inhibited the success of education is that we have never had a thorough understanding of learning and since we have never properly understood the process of forgetting, we have never been particularly helpful in preventing it.

The situation is changing rapidly as a result of the coming together of the science of the mind (psychology) with the science of the brain (neurology).  A huge amount of research into the function of the brain has taken place during the last few years and (some) educationalists are beginning toe xamine the relationship between neurological discoveries and models developed in the field of pysychology.

In his thorough review of the lessons which we are being taught from brain research ("The Brain's Behind It", 2002) Alistair Smith tells us:

"Schools are good at doing bits of information.  They are not so good at the joins.  The Western curriculum tends to be packaged up in discreet bits attended to for given periods of time within a recongnised chronological window.  The brain is better at doing connections than doing bits and will without the conscious engagement of its owner, seek to find connections".

"Learning itself is all about seeking and securing connections.  Finding and looking after the joins is what schools should be doing.  At the synapse, the more cells thatt fire together, the more secure the connections thereafter".

Some years ago I wrote that the intelligent person is not the person who knows a lot but rather the one who understands the relationships between the things which are known.  This idea, from which Centres of Interest sprang, was based on pyschological, rather than neurological theory.  In 1966 George Kelly had written: "To Construe is to hear the whisper of recurring themes in the events which reverberate around us".  We naturally make connections between the things which have happened to us.  If new experiences do not connect then we cannot make sense of them.  Effective teaching is a process of building on what has gone before, of connecting the new ideas to those which are already part of the schema of each of the learners.  If we do not exploit the natural connections which exist between experiences we fail to induce learning.  Actually we often do fail, which is one of the reasons why so much of what we heard, but did not learn, at school is never retained.

Plato likened mans contact with reality to his preception of the walls of a cave seen by the flickering shadows of a fire. Now some features would seem distinct, but not others  The depths of the shadow would vary and shapes loom in a constant ebbing and flowing of the light.

George Kelly regarded experiencing to be a process of construction.  He wrote: "We never really know the world; rather, we have experiences and build up a picture of what the world must be like in order to account for those experiences."  The value of knowledge lies in the extent to which itcan be applied in future contexts thus enabling us to predict outcomes of situations which confront us.

If all of man's knowledge was arranged ont he floor of a room, like some gigantic spieder's web with its myriad of connecting strands, subjects and Centres of intereste would merely be entry points into this matrix.  Thrrough each of these entry points you could gain access to the whole matrix.  Some parts of the web would be close by and the connections would be obvious.  Some would be so far away, with so many intervening pathways and changes of direction that the relationships with that entry point would be obscure.

The current school subjects are simply the most recent organisation of knowledge into a pattern which varies widely among different cultures and has changed considerably through the years.  They have developed by a process of accretion and substitution and though there is limited logic in their arrangement or their boundaries they are what we have and therefore what we must teach to.

It falls to us to plan reinforcement of learning to ensure that the ideas which we introduce to the children find echoes elsewhere in their lives.  If the connections are made explicit and the learning relates to other recent experiences then learning is mroe likely to occur.  We have a responsiblity to ensure that the richness of the experiences we provide for them leads to growth rather than evaporation.

Earl Kelley wrote: "Whatever we tell the learner, he will make something that is all his own out of it, and it will be different from what we held so dear and attempted to transmit.  He will build it into his own scheme of things and relate it uniquely to what he already uniquely holds as experience.  Thus he builds a world all his own, and what is really important to him is what he makes of what we tell him, not what we intended."

The pedagogical skill, then, is to enable each learner to have access to the things which we teach.  We will do that most effectively when we make connections with what has gone on elsewhere in their lives.

Roger Harris

Headteacher, Woodbrook Vale HIgh School, Leicester