Learning is a misunderstood thing.

Learning is a misunderstood thing. I am regularly reminded of how much we overlook it, because of what we want to believe about it.

My two elder daughters, Anya and Nadia are 8 and 15 respectively and on Sunday mornings I pick them up from their mum’s so that we can spend the day together. As I drive, I try to make conversation - in the annoying way that parents do – and receive the kind of answers that suggest I should give up:

Me: “So – how was school last week?”

Chorus: “Fine.”

Me: “Did you do anything interesting?”

Chorus: “No”

Me: “Anything bad happen?”

Chorus: “No”

Usually I stop at this point, for fear of breaching some kind of EU legislation. But on this occasion the sheer insanity of what was being said overwhelmed me and I threw caution to the wind:

Me: “So – you’re saying you spent a whole week at school and nothing – nothing interesting happened. All week. You don’t remember anything at all that was interesting?”

Nadia: “No – it’s just boring”

Me: “Why is it boring?”

Nadia: “You just sit in a classroom and teachers write things on the board. It’s really boring.”

Me: “Don’t you have any good teachers?”

Nadia: “Our maths teacher is ok”

Me: “Why is that?”

Nadia: “She actually cares about what she’s teaching. And us. She spends time with us individually.”

Me: “Anya – how about you? Do you have any good teachers?”

Anya: “No.”

Me: “Have you ever had any good teachers?”

Anya: “Mmmm – yes. Mrs X was good.”

Me: “Why was she good?”

Anya: “She was really kind.”

Me: “How would you make your lessons better?”

Anya: “Have sweets and cake”

Nadia: “Do more stuff – like, practicals”.

Me: “So when you look back on your lessons – are there things you particularly remember?”

Anya: “When it was our teacher’s birthday.”

Nadia: “The school trip to Switzerland. Also, when we had to go out and cut up daisies with plastic scissors.”

Now this may seem like quite a mundane conversation – I’m sure similar conversations are to be had across the country – but it is its familiarity that is so shocking: our children are perfectly capable of analysing and describing what is wrong with learning, and we have learned to routinely ignore it. Personally I am staggered that my children can spend an entire week in a place of learning and not find anything interesting. Surely, it should all be interesting – or am I missing something?

Now I take the point that learning and fun are not the same thing (despite the fact that, in a curious inversion of school practice, most organisations use ‘happy sheets’ to measure the success of their learning programmes). Just because a child is bored by their classes, it doesn’t mean they haven’t learned anything (and I suspect that ‘adding sweets and cake’ is not the last word in education policy). What is clear, though, is that children best remember episodes – and that as far as they are concerned sitting in a classroom writing stuff down is just one big homogenous episode. It is not so much that people ‘learn by doing’ as that people learn stuff with ‘colour’ (Affective Context), which is why going to Switzerland with friends is more memorable than sitting in class 6B with friends. And yet – we do the opposite of making learning episodic; we try to make the conditions as confusing as possible: the same person in the same room doing the same thing…

Even more importantly, children seem to say that the teachers who were good were the ones who cared – cared about the subject, cared about the students. And here’s a question: which learning theory makes this a central feature of learning? None of them. In fact a PGCE requires teachers to endure all manner of outdated and discredited theorising (presumably in an effort to subject them to the same treatment that their students will have to suffer) without ever mentioning the most important feature of learning of all: namely that you care about your subject and your students. Perhaps this alone should entitle people to teach.

Yes, I know that this seems an alien and wishy-washy concept – but that is only because we have a completely distorted model of what learning is and how it works. If  you ask children and grown-ups about  teaching they remember you will find it is invariably associated with teachers who care, or with distinctive episodes. There is a complex mechanics behind this, but we have been ignoring it since Plato.

Now you might be thinking that I am confusing attitudes to learning with learning itself – that a good teacher might create positive attitudes but a bad teacher might equally get students through exams. But let’s be clear here: students pass exams because they cram. A poor teacher may put the fear of God into students, but in the long run all that stuff is lost and all that remains is a bad aftertaste. This is not learning – this is some bizarre ritual. Learning is what remains, influencing attitudes and behaviours in the long-term. This is the gift of the good teacher. And who is a good teacher? Someone who cares about their subject and students, and someone who can construct colourful learning experiences.

Anyway, I have described the Affective Context Model (below) in the hope that we will begin to understand learning, and I’m going to keep on banging on about it until then.