Making it ‘stick’

What is ‘effective’ learning? Well, briefly, it’s getting knowledge (or skills, or values, or a combination of these) into your long-term memory and making that knowledge your own. Integrating it into the rest of your knowledge so that you not only remember it in the long term, but you can apply it in new or unexpected situations. You can reflect on it, evaluate it, reason with it, use it to act in the world. In a real sense, it becomes part of you, fully integrated with everything that you know.

Teaching is complex because human beings are complex. We go into any learning experience with all the physical, emotional, psychological and cultural baggage that goes with being human. In any classroom, pupils will have very different family backgrounds, peer culture, communication skills and degrees of self-confidence, to instance just some of the potential differences.
So let’s remind ourselves of the complexity of the challenge most teachers face. They’re engaged in a task – ‘imparting knowledge’ – which is far more subtle and dynamic than is usually acknowledged. It is, as much as anything else a social process, in which a class of 25 or 30 individuals, including the teacher, is engaged in an effort of mutual comprehension, constantly using language and negotiating understanding, while monitoring – whether aware of it or not – their own feelings and needs, and those of many others. In all this they are, above all, making meaning, both individually and as a collective.
With our programme, LearnPhysical, we go one step further: we argue that reason, and therefore learning, is embodied, and that the way children are taught should reflect this. In this we are going beyond the notion of creative movement as the kinaesthetic element in a ‘preferred learning style’ approach, and suggest that putting personal movement metaphors at the heart of learning is a powerful way of engaging children and creating, we speculate, simultaneous activity in multiple neural pathways in relation to conceptual material.
Movement is inherently multisensory, engaging vision, sound, touch, and proprioception (a sense of muscular position). Movement and physical perception are also closely allied to emotion, and we know that events that are emotionally coloured are more likely to be remembered. Incorporating movement in everyday teaching simply extends the way that we experience the world all day to teaching and learning.
LearnPhysical and its companion programme LearnPhysical interactive (which uses digital technology to add another layer of resource and stimulus) take as axiomatic the idea that teaching will be more effective if it engages children physically and emotionally as well as intellectually.

By encouraging creative meaning-making in movement and integrating this with a structured focus on language skills, we can create lessons that treat children as feeling, sensing, thinking and social human beings, and not just ‘brains in training’ with annoying fidgety bodies that have to be subdued, or let out to play every now and again on the sports field.