One of the most important things that we need to know is where we fit in our world. When we are clear we can direct our energies in the right way without confusion or ambiguity, and free of anxiety.

The ancient Greeks put this in terms of the ‘agent-arena’ fittedness. We can illustrate what this means if we think of a football player (agent) in a football stadium (arena).The player knows what the sticks at each end are for, what the lines on the grass mean, what the whistles or sirens signify and, with their skills of kicking and handling the right shaped ball they feel at home. They fit in this world.

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When TV first appeared, it was seen as a great educational tool (and I am old enough to remember televisions being used in classrooms). Advertising perverted this great promise. Programming became oriented towards attracting advertising, became more entertainment than education, it became what would keep people watching, largely through familiarity.

It is the exact same narrative with the internet.

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Last week I introduced Stanislas Dehaene’s How We Learn. He proposes four pillars of learning: attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation.

A friend was describing (he has the students’ attention and active engagement – through the relationships he has built) how he has been using peer feedback and formative and summative feedback (in a very sophisticated way) to increase the error feedback that students receive. At the same time, he has put measures in place to gain a detailed understanding of how his students’ learning (in English composition) is developing. His measures cover level achieved plus rate of growth over time.

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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 Ltd.)

“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.”

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