Learning. How does it work?
One of the most interesting things anyone said to me about learning was a friend from college. I’d just decided to give up working in chem/IT and move into teaching - with some sense of promise about that, working with young lives etc - he was regretting not having backed his promising career as a pianist.
So the scientist and musician at our first career change; our common ground had been the pub as uni students (there’s an integrated unit for you).
Anyway, we got talking about learning.
Hmm, seems like learning is not a like smooth line, constant growth, he said
NOT like this :
more like this - periods of flat line, then sudden jumps :
now, I've learnt since that there’s some neurochemistry involved at this "aha" moment. Some chemical is released at point of an insight – that binds to the neural pathway just formed, and tells it to stay around.
But we have to do something with the insight in the next 24 hours, act, build, revise – or we can still lose it (the pathway gets pruned).
also, we should avoid trying to stuff another 29 things into the mind on top it - a golf lesson in the morning, followed by a tennis lesson in the afternoon, will interfere with patterns laid down in the golf lesson, (really).
At about that time, I’d read an interesting little book by an art teacher – “Drawing on the right side of the brain”.
She had some similar graphics, that were, in essence like this :
The idea being, we can cultivate the “aha” moment, by priming ourselves, with immersion in a problem. And then have to follow it with application. Both hard work.
the "aha" moment often occurs when the analytical (“left”) hemisphere of the brain is distracted – and she described how physicists often get an insight in the “bus, the bath, or the bed” – when they’re not “trying” to solve it, but the mind keeps turning it over anyway.
it works for me - I know often if I’ve been struck on a problem, tried a few angles, sometimes the solution comes when I finally give up - maybe go for a ride - as the problem keeps ticking over, almost unconsciously
Food for thought for schools – maybe we need much more reflective space, to allow more of this pondering time?
So that discussion years ago, and the art book – and a bit more brain science since - are some of the best insights into learning I’ve heard.
(lots more though, here, at a great blog (and this doco mp3 series) Anyone who can use learning theory to top the market with lots of best selling books on difficult topics is probably onto something.)
and my friend did say, maybe you can sort of have a straight line, if you let be jumpy and broken - bit like chunky computer graphics
(long periods of immersion and applicaton broken by aha moments).
works for me