From the Head of School

Approaches to Learning

Edward DeBono, the pioneer of thinking skills, denied that “practice made perfect.”  He pointed out that if you started typing with two fingers, you could practice until you were 85; you would never become a touch typist.

But “the correct practice makes perfect” is not quite so pithy.  Despite DeBono the phrase remains popular because it does carry some truth to it. The more we do something the better we become.  In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, argued that the Beatles performed together for about 10,000 hours in the early sixties before their unique sound emerged; Bill Gates had his 10,000 hours programming before founding Microsoft; and Mozart as a child had composed for the same hours before creating his most famous works.

Some people pointed out that 10,000 was too literal or that it depended on the skill; others made DeBono’s point: it depended on the nature of the practice.  It had to be deliberate.

But the point remains - working hard at a skill makes you a lot better at it. 

The same is true about school.  Most people leave school with high levels of literacy.  Why?  Because they read day in, day out.  They don’t have a subject called ‘Reading’ in which they specifically learn how to get better.  They practice it in a range of subjects.  Skills which are more specific and time limited are not so comfortably transferred into adult life.  How many of us are still comfortable using trigonometry?

That is not to say that these other skills and knowledge shouldn’t be taught but that they are the content of more fundamental learning: how to think, and the discipline of learning.

How we learn is probably more important than what we learn, but in most education systems it is barely considered.  Within IB programmes from kindergarten to Grade 12 ‘approaches to learning’ (ATLs) are consciously embedded into the curriculum - a reminder to teachers to consider ‘the how’ of learning alongside the ‘what’.

Students need to organise and discipline themselves (self management).  They have to discover ideas (research skills), and think them through with peers (collaboration), they process them using critical thinking or expand their knowledge using creative thinking or refine their ideas through reflection.  Finally they express their learning (communication skills).

Just as reading isn’t confined to ‘English’, none of these fundamental skills is learnt in just one subject but used and thought about in all of them.  The content changes, but students are constantly practicing ways of thinking of learning, which will last them a lifetime.

You may notice the ATL posters around school - or the reflection portfolios across Grades 6 to 10 which use them as a basic structure.  As an IB school, we believe that if students are consciously aware of how they learn, and deliberately reflect on how to improve, then practice really will mean perfect.