How can teachers capture unplanned learning?
How do we learn? The past few months have given everyone who educates time to ponder this conundrum. Robert Bjork asks a different question in his forward to David Didau’s book What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
He asks, ‘How do we think we learn?’ He says that where we see learning as what is produced as an outcome it is actually measuring performance and is not necessarily learning that will be retained over time. Learning is not a one-dimensional process and it is not something that just happens when the learner is in school; it is a life long process built through a myriad of experiences and opportunities for acquiring knowledge and having the skills to apply and access that knowledge. The experiences of the past six months and those that will emerge moving forward from here will shape all our lives and it may be a very long time before we truly realise what we have learnt along the way.
It is essential that teachers at any stage across the education spectrum recognise that their learners have had a variety of experiences and certainly older children will have found out quite a lot more about themselves, how they have made use of time, learnt to work independently, kept in contact with friends, learnt new domestic or other skills, talked to their parents more, learnt to live more harmoniously with their siblings or grandparents, learnt survival tactics when faced with adversity. Acknowledging that learning can take many different forms needs to be a part of the recovery process and part of building a new normal that does not dismiss that past six months but uses the experience as integral to the learning process for both teachers and their pupils. We have created a 15 top tips guide for ensuring learners can make the transition from home schools learning to the classroom.
Download the PDF here. We have used a variety of pieces of research to put together these top tips some of which will be included in the resources section of our new newsletter.
