A Quiet Revolution in Teaching and Learning: Once seen … Never forgotten.
By Executive Director Dr Gerard Gaskin
On Monday 24 July, some 1,400 Catholic Education Tasmania (CET) educators gathered in three sites: Devonport, Launceston, and Hobart to participate in a system-wide 'Insight' professional development opportunity. The entire day featured presentations and workshops provided by Australia’s leading experts on the basics of high-quality teaching – grounded in the Science of Learning.
Our educators are energised and excited by what they are learning. To watch a lesson designed around the Science of Learning lesson is to see high energy and active participation by learners and teachers alike. The great majority of our teachers and students love this new approach.
Staff at the 'Insight' professional development
The Science of Learning is built upon recent discoveries from neuroscience about how the brain learns and remembers. Its scientific data confirms the work of the Ancient Greeks and the medieval scholars in unlocking the cognitive architecture of teaching, learning and remembering. It is a process that uses all our senses, our imagination, our emotions, our rational intellect and our will.
The science lies in the fact that human working memory is quite small, so all learning needs to be broken down into bite size chunks for our brains to be able to process them and learn from them.
I first became exposed to this thinking in the 1980’s when I was undertaking some academic research into the specific pedagogy of religious education that could be extracted from the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. St Thomas had drawn from the epistemology of Aristotle and the Ancient Greeks to conclude that we all learn in the same way. Modern neuroscience now provides conclusive confirmation of this understanding about how people learn and remember.
Dr Gerard Gaskin presenting at the 'Insight' professional development
We take in all our information via the senses. Later, we use our imagination to retrieve this sense information. This activates the emotions as we begin to process the sense information with our intellect. The intellect looks for meaning and understanding, for connections and contradictions – the building blocks of 'learning'. The human will is necessary too - because to learn takes effort and repeated practice – something we don’t always find easy. This is because we need to employ many different activities and recall practices to ensure that what we have learnt remains permanently in our memory for accurate, future recall.
Critical to the Science of Learning are three key ingredients. These apply no matter what subject is being taught – especially in the teaching of our Catholic faith.
- The first is a knowledge-rich curriculum to equip our teachers and students with all the things they need to know for this life – and the life to come.
- Second is a comprehensive pedagogy based on tested, proven and successful teaching techniques that enhance learning – Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.
- Third is the intensive, comprehensive and expert coaching presently being provided to hundreds of volunteer CET educators in effective teaching practice.
The mission of Catholic education is to spread the Gospel of Christ. We now have a highly effective set of teaching tools to amplify this great work.
