Practical Developmental Ideas October 2004
This
issue is about accelerating learning. I have wondered for a long time how
infants learn so fast and what we could do to keep learning as fast as they do.
This ezine is mostly about my ideas about this with links to other resources.
This is a huge field, so it is impossible to do it justice by skimming over the
many approaches. I have decided to share my best thinking and give you some
other places you can look for more ideas, if you want.
This
will help you share directly with each other your own developmental ideas, ask
each other for ideas and share your experience of using them. There are 150+ of
you, with a very wide range of interests, roles and experiences. This will
support the ezines and make us feel more connected too.
The
more of you that join, the richer the conversations will be. To join, or just
have a look, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pdideas/
My
ideas on
Accelerating Learning
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.
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. Most
people think this learning 'gap' is inevitable and biological, therefore
unchangeable. This seems a pessimistic point of view.
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 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 great 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 to think about how intelligence operates.
Human beings as infants have enormously flexible intelligence. 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 we may then do
stupid things that hurt others or ourselves. 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 blocked 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 often 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.
When a young person has learned something new she or he will 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 and Development
We could create better conditions for learning to take place. These conditions
would as far as possible be similar to those that surround young people ideally.
There would be more play, more support, more tailoring to the learner 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. We can help our students and
ourselves 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.
A
request
I
would very much appreciate your thoughts about the ideas in this article. I have
tried some tiny experiments and the basic idea seems to work. However, I would
love some suggestions about how to test these ideas properly or just ideas for
people I could talk to. Can you help?
Other
resources about accelerating learning
SEAL
The
SEAL website is a good place to start http://www.seal.org/
SEAL is the Society for Effective Affective Learning it is an international
networking organisation for those interested in all aspects of learning. They
produce a regular newsletter, have active groups in the UK and elsewhere and a
first class annual conference.
SEAL
have produced a book "Transforming Learning" compiled by Susan Norman.
This book describes over fifty different approaches to accelerating and
transforming learning with rich links to other resources.
Its
ISBN is 1 901564 06 1and it is available from Saffire Press, seal@saffirepress.co.uk
or http://www.saffirepress.co.uk/
Re-evaluation
counselling
There
is an excellent and very thought provoking chapter in The
Human Situation by Harvey Jackins (1973) that explores the nature of
the learning process. Just three of his ideas are: -
"A
human being cannot intelligently take in information that he or she cannot
relate to what he or she already knows"
"The
learner must talk. The learner must have the opportunity to think about the new
information. The most effective way is to talk about it."
"Learning
itself is motive enough - almost all tests, examinations, warning slips and even
honours interfere profoundly with the ability of students to learn"
I
plan to cover the subjects below in the next ezines. Which, if any, appeal to
you? I always welcome your feedback.
Designing
learning events
Developing
your people
Improving
working relationships
Stimulating
creative thinking
Thinking
tools and processes
Tuning
up your mind
If
you have any particular developmental interests, you would like me to cover,
please let me know. I will try to respond if I can.
Commercial
I
am a facilitator of change and development in organisations. I recently reviewed
the work I had enjoyed doing most and found that I enjoy helping
people in organisations find creative ways to be more productive. I like working
in a way that maximises my impact and that is usually with senior individuals or
teams. The best people to work with are open-minded risk takers who care about
people and want to change their organisations for the better.
If
you want to contact me, call +44 1707 886553, or email mailto:info@nickheap.co.uk
If you want to read about my work, or ideas, or read back issues of the ezines
you can also visit http://www.nickheap.co.uk/
I always enjoy informal chats.
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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 the web
site, www.nickheap.co.uk
or email info@nickheap.co.uk.
This will help these positive ideas to spread, and help my business, too.
Best wishes,
Nick Heap
43 Roe Green Close
Hatfield
Herts AL10 9PD
UK
01707 886553
Web, with many resources: www.nickheap.co.uk
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