On Meaningful Learning

When I look back at my professional life, I am in no doubt that my development as a teacher is a slow ongoing process, with no real watershed moments, just a constant stream of new experiences and ideas that continuously help me improve as a teacher. 

However, there is one idea that changed everything for me, an idea I scarcely came across during my training and ECT years - Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory, or to be more precise Sarah Cottingham’s ‘In Action’ interpretation of it.

The short book reframed my thinking about teaching, and whilst I could write a very long blog about this, I want to narrow it down to the one key idea that changed the way I planned, taught and reflected as a teacher. 

 

We cannot learn anything without it connecting to something we already know

 

This point terrifies me in a way. When I look back to my early teaching, I 100% saw each lesson as an isolated event, completely different to the previous lesson and the subsequent one. Cottingham shows us that what the students already know is perhaps the most important thing that the teacher should consider before moving onto the lesson itself. This completely reframed the way I use the time in the classroom. Previously, I might do a 5 minute ‘settler’ task for recall, before jumping straight into the new topic with no warning. After reading Cottingham, I now consider the following three questions: 

 

-How does what we are learning today relate to what we have learnt before? 

-What do we need to retrieve and review in order to make this meaningful?

-What are the connections I need to make explicit to the students?

Me and my colleagues call this 'planning backwards' - we know where we are going, but we probably need to take a few backward steps to get there.

 

Consequently this means that sometimes I can spend more than half the lesson doing retrieval in order for the students to have something for the new idea to cling to. A colleague once told me that ‘knowledge is sticky’ - I am now more than happy to spend a large part of lesson making sure that the new knowledge has some old knowledge to stick to! 

 

Of course, there is clearly an issue with what I have talked about so far – what if the content cannot be connected to something learnt previously? What if it is at the start of a scheme of learning? First lesson of the year? Or you need something more than just previous learning?

The best option you have, in my opinion is to use a concrete example, and crucially, try to use a narrative (Ausubel calls these ‘narrative advanced organisers'). As Willingham has stated, the mind is predisposed to understand stories, so start with a story. For example, I recently taught a lesson about why the Birth Rate has fallen in Western countries. Rather than try to look at a variety of sociological graphs, I wrote a short narrative about Georgia, a career driven women, with a high level of independence with no interest in having children. This concrete example gave students something to cling to, as we looked at some abstract ideas around feminism and individualism as reasons for low birth rates. We were able to keep coming back to Georgia in order to make the learning meaningful. Of course, the challenge is to make sure the students can understand the concepts outside of Georgia’s example, and apply to different contexts.