Let's revisit learning and think about three questions: what do we already know about learning? What do we not really know? And what would really like to know? Here's a little conundrum for you. If you look at this slide which has got four windows. Sometimes called the Jahari Windows. Think about this, I know what I know. I'm pretty confident, I know what I know. I'm also pretty confident I know what I don't know. Here's one, even more puzzling, I don't know what I don't know or, and I don't know what I know. This takes a little bit of thinking about it. To think about the things that you're sure of but it just ain't so as Tom Sawyer once said. So we'll just go back and have a look at that again and if you were just looking into each of these four quadrants and think about what is it that you, put your hand on your heart and say, "I know that and I am very confident about what I know as a teacher and I'm also confident about what I don't know." That's an important thing for teachers to recognize and be confident that we're still learning and there's a lot of things you don't know. Have a look at this next slide as well which poses the question, what is distinctive about human learning? So, this is a bit of tests of what we know or what we think we know. So, if you were to fill in each one of these little bubbles, what would you put in them? What would you say you know about human learning that is quite distinctive? When you've had a think about that and you may want to take a bit more time, you might want to actually do it with someone else. To have a discussion around it, to see what other people's ideas are. How they would fill in the balloons. Here's one version of an answer. If we start at 11 O'clock learn in reciprocity. Human beings are social animals and we learn together. All our learning is in fact social in one way or another. We construct abstractions, we can think abstractly. Can dogs, cats, birds think abstractively or is it a particular human trait? We store information outside our body, not just in our heads whether it's in computers, or cameras, or textbooks, or wherever else, we store information outside our body. We think about our thinking, and we think about our feelings and as moral beings, we make ethical decisions. We portray our thoughts and feelings through art, through music, through a whole range of different ways and we construct meaning from our experience that all our thinking and all our feeling and all our doing comes out of that way of thinking and reflecting about experience. Well, if you go further from that and look at some of the key findings from research, there are seven things I would want to highlight here from what we've learned about learning. First of these from the psychologist, Jean Piaget, who talks about cognitive conflict. The idea of how difficult it is to hold two contradictory ideas together but it's through that process that we begin to learn and to resolve that conflict that is there. The second is Leverage John Dewey, the American educator talking about, we need to have some form of leverage to test, raise, to lever up our thinking so that it reaches a higher level and the Danish psychologist Qvortrup says, well, we can't really do that unless we're on the right bandwidth using the metaphor of tuning in a radio or tuning in the television to get the right bandwidth. Then the third thing we know about learning comes from the psychologist Damasio, who talks about learning being mediated by emotional centers. That all our learning comes through emotional centers, whether it feels as if which is emotionally charged or not, even if it's the most abstruse mathematical problem, it still has to engage our emotions. Fourthly, as David Perkins again, Harvard psychologist talks about attention. Giving attention to the learning moment. That moment when challenge and skill meet. When we're challenged but we can rise to the challenge and finding that key moment in learning and teaching since David Perkins is one of the distinguishing characteristics of good classrooms and good teachers. Then Jerome Bruner, one of the great psychologists of education. Now I think in his 96th year, talks about learning by teaching others. We learn when we teach other people because we then rehearse ideas. So in this slide, the little girl who's teaching her Teddy is now the smartest in the class, and I am the smartest in the class. The sixth learning is a social activity, says Vygotsky, that we learn through with and from other people. That all even though we may be in isolation studying in our rooms, studying our homework or reading, we are always carrying around other people into our head. Finally, Howard Gardner talks about the importance of context, and context is critical. But one of the things that's actually very difficult for young people is to take their learning from one context to the other. From the Maths classroom in a secondary school across to the English classroom or the science classroom because these things are often so context-bound and even more difficult is to take your learning from this classroom or school into what Gardener calls an open field, that unstructured place, where we don't have teachers or textbooks to help us but we have to fall back on our own resources, our own thinking, our own skills. Finally, all of these things require feedback. That loop coming back to us telling us where we've done well, where we could still do better. Not so much telling us where we've been wrong, but formatively helping us to think again about how we could think better. If at first you fail, try again, fail better. If as a teacher, how can you put all these things into practice in the classroom? They're so high level if you like and so demanding, but they're all crucial and characteristic of what teachers do. What teachers do is to read the room, read the classroom. In doing so, thinking how will I know? How can I possibly know when children are learning or not learning? When they're distracted, when they're bored or when they're engaged. How do I recognize the signs? How do I read the body language? And when I do that, what can I do to change things. Look at this slide again from David Perkins who talks about how we can distinguish a culture of learning in the classroom and he says four things, four things that you can do as a teacher. Make learning an object of attention. Make learning an object of conversation. Make learning an object of reflection. Make learning an object of learning. That's worth thinking about. How do you talk about the nature of learning? Not just moving through the curriculum, but stopping to have time to talk about learning, to talk about thinking, to make learning itself an object of the conversation. So, one of the suggested readings for you is David Perkins which you'll find on the website, titled Visible Thinking. Read the article and when you're reading it, look at some of the problems, some of the questions accompanying it for you to reflect on and think about how some of these big ideas actually apply in your own classrooms and you may already been doing them, you may already been doing it quite intuitively and quite spontaneously, but thinking about it more systematically will help to reinforce and extend what you already do and make it more effective.
