Learning to learn – Why we won’t sit with one student for 75 minutes

We do not ‘spoon-feed’ our students.

As they progress through year-levels, successful students are those who ‘help themselves’ rather than relying on an overworked and possibly disinterested classroom teacher to explain everything they need to know.

When we focus on building independent learners rather than just imparting content, there are long-term benefits for students which are often not appreciated in the short-term.

‘Teachers gonna teach’

Even though we love to teach, when a student asks for help, we must resist our instinct to immediately sit down with them and start teaching the content. We are more valuable to students if we instead train them to first try helping themselves (ie, look at an example, or a page reference, or find an explanation in a textbook or online). It is these skills that enable them to be successful learners in the +99% of the week that we are not there to jump in and help.

If we automatically teach every time they ask, they’ll come to believe that the only way to learn is for someone else to give them the information. They will develop a dependency on external help rather than developing habits of self-sufficiency and realising that they can learn for themselves.

Asking for help

That said, we also DO want students to learn to ask for help whenever it is warranted, because in a classroom environment students must not let themselves slip under the radar of a busy teacher. But we must NOT be complicit in the bad habit of asking for help immediately when they see something they don’t know. Sometimes, when students ask for help, they haven’t even bothered to read the question. If we jump in and teach in such cases, we’re making them worse learners. And if we are already sitting beside them, they don’t have the chance to practice asking for help.

How we teach

When content teaching is warranted, we assist as necessary… we give them information one-to-one in a way that makes sense to that individual, and we guide them through practice questions together. But to avoid overloading them, and to allow for consolidation, as soon as they are able to continue independently, we let them practice the new skill solo.

It is important to allow students space to make their own mistakes, to learn from, and give the brain the feedback to form the new neural pathways which build understanding and memory. We train our students how to decide what to practice. It is important that they aren’t wasting time by doing ‘busy work’ in their ‘comfort zone’, doing questions which are already easy for them. And conversely, it is crucial that they don’t feel overwhelmed by ‘jumping in the deep end’ with questions they are not yet ready for, usually in an effort to progress faster. We show our students how to check their own work, so that they can ask for help as soon as they need it. Even if they are still too shy to ask, we also monitor students subtly, unobtrusively, and pop back in if we sense confusion or too much hesitancy. But we save sitting with students for extended periods for when it is truly necessary, so as not to foster dependency.

Building brave learners

There are those students who have grown used to the comfort and safety of an adult sitting with them as they work, to jump in and stop any mistakes before they happen. Or those who have developed anxiety around making mistakes, often due to internalising years of negative feedback. (This is especially true for those with extra challenges such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, ASD…) Their opportunities for learning are being blocked by their (completely natural and understandable) aversion to discomfort. They have not yet learned that their prefrontal cortex can safely override the ‘flight or fight’ response their amygdala sends when faced with possible ‘failure’.

These are the students who need us most of all to foster their independence, bravery and resilience in the face of new content. These students have often learned that it is more comfortable to avoid trying than to risk failing. They often learn all sorts of ways to (consciously or subconsciously) and to ‘manipulate’ parents and teachers into ‘over-helping’. They often develop deep abilities to read social queues and context clues or to engineer situations to uncover the expected answer, without having to engage deeply enough with the content to build proper understanding.

All these behaviours make their school life feel more comfortable in the short term, but they aren’t conducive to academic growth in the long term. The longer they sit in this mode of just getting through the school day, rather than learning to learn, the more learning opportunities they miss. And the harder it becomes to extricate themselves from these habits.

So, we talk to even our junior students about how their brain works. We use examples and metaphors to show how their behaviours influence their brain chemistry. We let our students know that some amount of struggle or discomfort is normal when learning – it’s how you deal with it that is important. If you’re not making mistakes, if someone else is overseeing every step you take, you are probably not learning much.

“Be brave,” we say. “Let’s have a go and make some mistakes! Mistakes that come from honest effort are great!”

Mistakes are not evil

In school and in life, there is not someone stopping us from making mistakes. Unfortunately, many students hold the ingrained idea that mistakes are inherently bad. Perhaps the terminology of ‘wrong’ and ‘incorrect’ is overstepping its bounds… creating anxiety about doing anything that doesn’t match the answer section.

However, mistakes are golden opportunities for learning, for adjusting our current understanding. If we are not making mistakes, we are probably not learning much. So, we remind students at every opportunity that mistakes are ok – when we make one, we can evaluate what our brain did so that we can change what it will do next time.