John Hattie once described learning as a ‘staccato’ business. What he meant was that it’s not neat and linear, it’s full of starts and stops and two steps forward and a large step back – in other words, it’s really messy.
Progress – the amount of learning that happens between two points in time – is messy, too. In his book, ‘What if everything you knew about education was wrong?’ David Didau describes progress as ‘halting, frustrating, and surprising’ and he references the cognitive psychologist, Robert Siegler, who developed the theory that learning is like ‘overlapping waves’. The notion of waves that ebb and flow and mix together in a whirl is a helpful metaphor for how learning happens, and it contrasts sharply with the Paigetian model of learning as being like a staircase that we climb neatly and progressively as we grow.
This leads me to the first of my two key points: learning is hard. It’s hard because it’s effortful, it’s uncertain (no guarantee that when we embark on a learning episode that we will ‘get it’ or that it will stick), it’s unpredictable (people frequently do not learn what we think they will learn from our teaching) and often it’s just not ‘fun’. Running through definitions of key concepts in Science, doing 15 questions to practise adding fractions, repeating scales in music, and sitting down to Look/Say/Cover/Write/Check/Repeat on the key stages of the design process are not laugh-a-minute activities – but they are necessary for learning things in school. I remember feeling pleased, a long time ago, when one of my students in French told me he often found the work I set ‘really easy, Sir’ – he literally flew through the work I gave him to do and he got everything right. Looking back, I know he felt I was teaching him well; I felt that too, at the time! I now realise, and I say to students when I get the chance, that if they are typically finding the work really easy, they’re doing the wrong work.
Accepting that learning is hard, expecting it to be hard, can help us roll up our sleeves and put in the cognitive effort that is required to make learning stick. Daniel Willingham describes memories as ‘the residue of thought’ – essentially, we learn what we think about, with focus, and repeatedly – which is why retrieval practice (going over key learning again and again at regular intervals) is the number one activity for promoting learning.
My second key point is that ‘failing’ as we are learning is crucial. It’s not just that making ‘mistakes’ in learning a thing is okay and people shouldn’t worry etc…; it’s that making mistakes is an essential part of learning. Here’s an example: I’m trying to learn how to describe my character in French. I do some practice of the key vocabulary; I do a listening activity and a reading activity on the topic and I do a bit of Look/Say/Cover/Write/Check of the key words I want to use. Then I have a go and I write this: ‘Je suis assez bavard et tres sportif. Je suis travailleuse mais quelequefoi j’ai un peu impatient’ (I’m quite chatty and very sporty. I’m hard-working but sometimes I’m a bit impatient). This is pretty good, but there are 4 mistakes in it. Getting feedback on those mistakes, so that I understand not to make them again, is essential for my learning. That IS the learning.
Another point to make about my French task is that I was clearly able to have a go at it, but it wasn’t too easy for me – I made three spelling mistakes and one significant grammatical error (writing ‘J’ai’ instead of ‘je suis’) – the point is that the level of challenge in the work should be such that I will probably make some mistakes. Getting the level of challenge right, so that learners struggle – but not too much so that they give up – is at the heart of good teaching.
Michael Jordan was making these points about learning and mistakes when he famously said, in a 2012 Nike advert: ‘I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’
To learn well, we need to test ourselves constantly; and make mistakes; and plug the gaps in our learning that we uncover; and pause for a while (do something else etc), and then do it again – and again…
Samuel Beckett sums it up nicely:
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter, Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
Take-away quiz questions:
1. Why is learning hard?
2. Why should learning be hard?
3. Why is ‘failure’ essential for learning?
Mark Patterson
