Accelerating
Learning
It
is clearly observable that very young people learn extremely effectively if
given half a chance. We almost all learned how to walk, talk, handle tools,
control our bodily functions and get our needs met in complex social
situations, by the time we were three years old. This is an astonishing
achievement.
It is also observable that our ability and willingness to learn new things
tends to fall off dramatically as we get older, certainly when compared to that
of our earliest years. This learning 'gap' has been assumed to be inevitable
and biological, therefore unchangeable. This seems a pessimistic point of view.
This article explains why and gives some directions for bridging the 'gap'.
How infants learn
Very young children learn in many, many different ways. They observe the world.
They try things out 'for fun' and see what happens. They imitate people. They ask
questions. They ask for help sometimes. They appear to set themselves goals and
go for them with enormous persistence. Their involvement with the learning
process is total. There is no separation between learning, play, work, and
leisure.
Infants do everything, including all aspects of learning, with frightening
intensity. If they hit obstacles, they freely express their frustration in
tears or tantrums. If they have success there will be squeals of excitement or
enormous giggles. These forms of emotional release seem to unlock the energy
required to continue the process of discovery.
The learning environment around young people
Unfortunately, because our society does not value or support parenting, the
pressures on parents make it hard to maintain optimal conditions for learning
for much of an infant's early life. However, something like what follows
happens in most homes sometimes. It is an ideal.
A child is learning to walk. Typically the adults around the child are 1)
paying loving attention 2) being encouraging 3) showing delight at attempts and
'failures' as well as successes 4) being noisily enthusiastic about the child
(you clever girl!) and showing it 5) not 'helping' 6) not judging or
criticising 7) not giving advice 8) not interfering with the child's natural
learning process 9) not directing what should be learned, or when 10)
celebrating success with the child 11) accepting the child's feelings and
allowing their expression.
The effect of this loving and encouraging atmosphere is that the child enjoys
the learning process and responds to others pleasure in her learning. Everyone
finds it enormous fun.
How is the natural learning process degraded?
Learning is one function of human intelligence. In order to understand how it
operates (and is degraded) we need first to understand how intelligence
operates. Human beings as infants have enormously flexible intelligence in that
they take in information open-mindedly from the environment, compare and
contrast it with what they already know and then make a new and appropriate
(for them) response. The flexibility of very young children's intelligence is
legendary; you can never predict what they will do.
This process is available to all of us, and works well except in two
circumstances. We tend not to think well when we are hurting and may then do
stupid things which hurt us or others. We also find it difficult to think when
we are in situations which remind us of times when we have been hurt in the
past. Again, we tend to do stupid things that reinforce the original hurt.
Eventually this leads us to develop rigid (non-learning) patterns of behaviour.
The degradation of intelligence when we are hurting affects all aspects of
human behaviour including our learning processes. We cannot learn effectively
when we are hurting or when the situation where we are trying to learn reminds
us of a 'learning' situation in which we were hurt. Unfortunately, many of
these 'learning' situations were inappropriately managed and hurtful. We were
often judged, criticised, rigidly controlled and humiliated. Many of us are so
damaged by this that we acquire a rigid behaviour pattern of rejecting
voluntary learning altogether because of our association of all learning
situations with painful experiences
The recovery process
When young people are hurt they take immediate action to get rid of their pain.
This process is spontaneous and untaught. Typically a young person will find
another person who is attentive and then actively release the tension. This can
take the form of talking to the other person, crying, angry movements (a
tantrum), sweating or shaking, laughing, or yawning. These processes will
continue, if uninterrupted, for quite a long time. At the end the child will be
bright eyed, energetic, and eager to continue learning.
These processes thoroughly eliminate the painful emotion and lead to the rapid
recovery of the ability to think in the area that was formerly occluded by
negative feelings. Unfortunately, these recovery processes disturb adults and society
and so tend to be inhibited, often in quite unconscious ways (e g the common
injunction "big boys don't cry"). We tend to lose the awareness and
ability to use our natural recovery processes through these inhibitions that
are imposed on us from outside.
Counselling is a natural process in which one person agrees to pay attention to
another as the other "talks through" a problem or situation and
releases their tension using the above mechanisms. In its most powerful form
the counsellor and client then swap roles. This process will shift the
inhibitions around learning naturally using all the modalities available to
young people. It can be learned quite quickly.
When a young person has learned something new s(he) will naturally and noisily
celebrate this fact by crowing about it. The child will celebrate her/his
enormous cleverness in learning this new thing. The expression of
self-appreciation and delight anchors in her/his mind the awareness of the
child's abilities and reinforces her/his motivation towards making the best of
further learning experiences.
This celebration makes most adults feel very uncomfortable because it stirs up
their own feelings of doubt and discouragement. We tend to suppress the child
from 'showing off' and create the very doubt and discouragement that we suffer
from. So the process perpetuates itself.
Implications for Training
We need to create better conditions for learning to take place. These
conditions would as far as possible be similar to those that surround young
people ideally. They imply more play, more support, more learner centred and
much less detailed instruction than is common.
We need to enable our students and ourselves to release any of their tension
about learning situations before we try and teach anything. Tense students with
tense teachers are not likely to learn well. That means they will need to learn
how to counsel each other. We can help our students and ourselves use
counselling to recover as much as possible of our once giant sized ability to
learn.
We need to encourage our students to celebrate their naturally enormous ability
to learn and crow about their successes. Trainers can do this themselves.
'Three reasons why I am an excellent trainer are...'
We need to research more into the nature of the natural learning process, play.
Observe what young people do, listen to how they think and learn from them how
to learn and grow.
Conclusions
The ideas in this note are a hypothesis based on common sense observations.
They now need testing and refining. If they prove to be true, we will design
learning and teaching processes that will enable us to use our innate abilities
to learn. The implications and benefits are staggering.
Using these materials
I am entirely happy for you to use or draw
on any these materials in any way you think will be helpful. I am keen to have
my work, and the work of the people I have learned from, used.
Please will you say where you found them? One way might be to give a link back to www.nickheap.co.uk or to info@nickheap.co.uk. This will help these positive ideas to spread, and help my business, too.
Thank you
Nick Heap