Coming to the belief that learning is invisible was a threshold moment for many. It feels rather silly looking back on it. How did we ever believe that you could ‘observe’ learning by going to watch a lesson, or evidence ‘progress’ over the course of an hour? Ridiculous. But then, we are loaded with beliefs that appear ridiculous in hindsight.
I cannot pinpoint the exact date that the penny dropped for me. However, I know that in the first INSET day I delivered as a new headteacher in 2013, I rubbished Ofsted’s ‘rapid progress’ criteria for outstanding lessons and argued that learning was invisible, and that all we could hope to see was ‘performance’. I scrapped graded lesson observations and steered the school into what I thought was a new, enlightened period.
It was Kirschner, Sweller and Clark’s definition of learning as “a change in long-term memory” that took hold in subsequent years. This introduced two ideas: that something in the brain must have changed for learning to have taken place and that this change must be semi-permanent. This definition situates learning as being firmly within the black box of the mind; a black box we cannot see inside. The logical consequence of this belief is that we can only infer whether learning has taken place and what we see playing out in front of us is a mere performance.
Kirschner et al’s definition makes sense from the viewpoint of cognitive science. Its pedagogical implications – managing cognitive load, promoting conditions for encoding, retrieval practice – have become the mainstay of professional development sessions and school ‘house styles’ across England.
But as Daniel Willingham points out here, definitions of learning invariably only make sense in relation to specific theories or goals. No definition can be said to be ‘reality independent’. This makes defining learning a bit of a mug’s game. You suggest a definition, I critique it through a different lens. And so we go round in circles.
However, the definition we hold dear can be consequential to how we perceive schools and teaching.
To illustrate this, what if we define learning as ‘the sustained ability to do something you couldn’t do before’ (this is essentially a simply-stated version of Greg Kimble’s definition: “Learning is a relatively permanent change in a behavioral potentiality that occurs as a result of reinforced practice,”)? What makes this fundamentally different to the ‘long-term memory’ definition is that it situates learning not as something that resides in the mind – hidden from us – but as situated in the world.
Visible!
This feels counter-intuitive at first glance. To get our heads around it, consider the following thought experiment:
You find yourself transported to a parallel dimension in which the laws of physics in our universe do not apply. Masses do not attract. Forces applied to objects have strange effects. Energy is created and destroyed in the blink of an eye. Your ability to act in the physical realm is suddenly taken away from you. You are once more like a baby, poking and prodding at the world to see how it will respond. And yet, everything you once knew is intact, stored chemically inside your brain, ready to be activated.
This thought experiment implies that learning must be more than the re-calibration of the brain. ‘Ability’ exists in how matters play out in the world. In other words, learning is context-dependent. Our ‘behavioural potentiality’ is wiped out in this thought experiment, which helps us understand that learning is meaningful only in relation to what we are able to do.
To put it another way, unless it is enactable, it is just a change in brain chemistry.
Now, you may be thinking that not all knowledge relates to being able to do something. We may hold a concept in mind, such as a idea of a ‘bird’, a notion of ‘noisy’, or a mental model of ‘coastal erosion’. But if we ask the question ‘what is a bird?’, or ‘is this classroom noisy?’, or ‘can you explain coastal erosion?’, we will reveal the potential to respond. Similarly, we may need to recognise whether something is a bird, or if coastal erosion appears to be taking place. Potential is only realised when we do something; our minds may be calibrated to make it likely that we can respond in a satisfactory way to these questions or tasks, but that is not the same as saying that this learning resides in long-term memory.
If our definition situates learning within the mind, it is true to say that what we see is a performance from which we can infer that invisible learning that has taken place. But if our definition situates learning in the world, at the point of interplay between mind and reality, in relation to the potentiality of the person in question, then what we observe is learning, not merely a performance. The inference we are forced to make is whether we can conclude from this specific event that the individual has a sustained ability across contexts.
Between these two conceptions, the idea of validity of inference differs. In a conception of learning as invisible, validity relates to our judgements about whether what we see reflects what exists in the mind. In a conception of learning as visible, validity relates to our judgement as to whether this specific instance is reflective of a general ability. This difference has profound implications for how we think about assessment.
None of this means we should once again claim we can see learning take place within a lesson. In both the invisible and visible conceptions, there remains a requirement for longevity and transfer. We need to see pupils doing things repeatedly, over time and in different contexts, to begin to feel confident that they have learnt something.
So, why am I raising this? I do not suggest we get back into circular arguments about the definition of learning. However, we should be cautious about saying that learning is invisible with too much certainty. In some subjects, like PE, D&T, Art and Music, ‘performance’ is arguably the learning, not just a shadow of something that resides in long term memory.
We might also benefit from placing a greater value on the ability to do things. What purpose education if young people cannot go out into the world and change it? Changes in brain chemistry won’t change the world unless they result in action. Behavioural potentiality may be a more powerful concept than changes in long-term memory.
We don’t need to choose our preferred definition, but being open to different ways of thinking about learning may be prudent.
Matthew Evans 