A Model Of Learning

Hey

Hope you’re having a nice week (I am). Time for a new series, about cognition and teaching…

Big idea 🍉

Teaching is about making learning happen. The better we understand how learning works, the greater our potential for impact in the classroom. Just as a doctor who understands the body can better diagnose and treat, a teacher who understands cognition can better plan and respond.

The big challenge is that learning is invisible. It's mega hard to build a rigorous mental model of cognition through classroom experience alone. Which is why we must also lean on insights from research.

Here is the mental model I’ve refined over 20 years of reading, thinking, and practising:

1. Accumulating knowledge across generations is what makes humans successful — this is partly what school is for.

2. Academic knowledge is hard to discover — speaking can be learned naturally but reading must be taught.

3. Attention is the basis of developing knowledge — what our students attend to is what they learn.

4. Human attentional bandwidth is limited — we can only attend to a few novel items at once.

5. Prior knowledge constrains learning — we understand (and misunderstand) through what we already know.

6. Fluency frees attentional capacity — when recall becomes effortless, we have space for more thinking.

7. We naturally filter and forget — our brains discard what isn't connected, repeated, and valued.

8. Understanding arises from connection and variation — by seeing links between ideas and across different examples.

9. Memory and fluency arise through spaced retrieval — each act of remembering strengthens our access to that idea.

10. When we talk and write, we better understand what we have watched and heard — overt thinking supports learning.

11. The ideas we develop are rarely perfect first time — feedback refines our understanding.

12. We attend to what we value — motivation arises through success, rewards, emotion, and social signals.

No model of learning will ever be fully accurate. But I've found this one simple enough to use and complex enough to be powerful. Every instructional move is a bet on how learning works... might as well make it an informed one.

🎓 For more, check out Willingham’s paper on mental models of learning.

Summary

• Mental models that combine research and classroom experience help maximise our impact in the classroom.

• Knowledge, attention, and motivation (and how they interact) are at the heart of a useful model.

• No model is perfectly accurate, but these principles offer balanced guidance for effective teaching.

Little updates 🥕

• Review of attendance research → argues for a clearer way to measure absence to help schools address attendance difficulties.

• Systematic review of assessment → finds that low-stakes practice tests generally improve student achievement however active learning methods may be more effective.

• Paper on peer learning tasks → suggests that effectiveness may depend on gender roles, team structure & individual characteristics.

• Research on how teachers attribute behaviour → highlights that when teachers view behaviour as changeable & partly within their control they may be more likely to respond with supportive interventions.

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