Connecting to learn!

The essence of shared learning

There is an interesting phenomenon that is central to learning from another person.  Here are two quotes (from Dehaene, Stanislas. How We Learn (p. 168 & 169). Penguin Books 2020).

“From the earliest age, infants gaze at faces and pay particular attention to people’s eyes. As soon as something is said to them, their first reflex is not to explore the scene, but to catch the gaze of the person they are interacting with. Only once eye contact is established do they turn toward the object that the adult is staring at. This remarkable ability for social attention sharing, also called “shared attention,” determines what children learn.”

And the second quote:

“(A) nine-month-old American child who interacts with a Chinese nanny for only a few weeks acquires Chinese phonemes—but if he receives exactly the same amount of linguistic stimulation from a very high-quality video, no learning occurs.”

Pierre Auguste Renoir - Gabrielle and Jean-1895

This is one of the reasons why teacher-student relationships are so important.  If the relationship is there, signified by eye contact then the student will pay attention to what the teacher is paying attention to.  In other words, the student’s brain is primed: “this is important, pay attention to it” and the brain starts the process of learning this thing and not any of the other things that are in its environment.

This mechanism would seem to diminish as we grow older – hugely important for babies, much less so for adults, but I suspect it never goes away.

We learn best from people we deeply trust.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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