Learn to Learn

I’m not at all sure what my oldest son does at his work. He’s twenty two and it has something to do with money. Anyway this evening he said its time I sorted out what people learn at schools. I think he overestimates my actual role and abilities….Also understand here that he’s had a lifetime of switching off when I go into school chat mode….

We’ve had a hoot over the past few days with Derren Brown’s exploits and for years we’ve watched repeats of many of his shows over again, working out the minutiae of what he does. Both of us enjoyed his book with memory training stuff in it – all the visualising stuff etc, but the bold boy puts it into practice. So at the moment he’s been studying for some investment type exams – really dull stuff (to my mind at least) and he’s been waxing lyrical about how helpful these techniques have been to his studying. The point he made was to do with practising any such technique (which he’s been doing and I haven’t), and he referred me to Gladwell’s Outliers (which I reminded I’d bought him!). He asked why he hadn’t learned this stuff at school. Now I think his schools did a great job of developing his ability to learn, but I also think we’re getting even better at it now. What he suggested we need to do is help people learn how to learn and really push that! Is that not CfE in a nutshell? And does it maybe not also remind us that what we’re trying to do is build on the great practice out there, becuase they did a pretty good job with him before CfE? When quizzed further on this he said that they had done stuff similar to this at school but the thing was they never got to try it out – so maybe in primary he’d been taught some mnemonics but they never got to make up their own and he reckons that’d have made a difference. Active learning maybe?

Meanwhile I’m feeling busy at the moment lots of HMIe follow through activity, training, improvement plan visits and the like. But finding, thanks to a wee push from Jaye Richards and Ollie Bray that I’m loving twitter. It’s really helping my job and helping develop my personal learning network further. I don’t think you have to use such things to develop your pln and learning but I do think (and this becomes an even more embedded thought as time goes on) that the technology itself is not just a tool, or add on to what we do as teachers. The act of using the technology develops something quite different and important in our learning and gets us right to the core of what our key purpose is. Have a look at J Connell’s recent article, his way with words is ever so much better than mine. But also his article talks about the “creepy treehouse” syndrome and I do think we need to consider that really carefully. When the younger son spies me cavorting around on my laptop – he and his pals snort and say – aha “Momma Reid on twitter, Momma Reid on myspace..Momma Reid playing with i google” and they see my efforts as the worst kind of that syndrome, because for them anything I am catching up to understand is for them already past tense….