Memory plays tricks. You remember clearly incidents in your life that never happened, or which someone told you about. In fact if you ever want to know why oral history is not to be trusted, just attend any college or school reunion.
Luckily, though, these “tricks” can also manifest themselves as magically beneficial properties of a complicated neural mechanism. I learned this at a recent “Redefining Learning” conference, when Ewan McIntosh of “Notosh” played a clip that I found to be an almost uncanny insight into the nature of memory.
It shows the moment when pianist Maria João Pires, at a concert in Amsterdam, already seated at the piano in readiness for a Mozart concerto, realises that the orchestra is starting a different concerto from the one she was expecting and has prepared.
She is obviously stricken with panic, and during the orchestral introduction, appeals to the conductor. Still conducting, he leans over to speak calmly and encouragingly to her.
We then watch her gradually regain focus, and from the depths of her long-term memory she brings back to her mind and hands the concerto that she had obviously once learned. She squares up to the instrument just in time for her entry and the moment when she plays her opening notes, beautifully, with complete confidence, is very moving.
Any musician with a large repertoire must be able to revive pieces learned long ago. Normally, though, the retrieval takes time and study. Having to do it at no notice, as Maria did, before an international audience, is a huge emotional and practical challenge.
The key to success lies in how well the piece was learned in the first place – and there, it seems to me, is a real lesson for students and teachers, reminding both that good learning requires practice, lots of it, more than most students realise – systematic, analytical, with feedback from the teacher; “mastery” some will call it. The aim is to transfer the learning from short-term to long term-memory, secure enough to be recalled on demand.
Maria’s experience, though, reveals an extra ingredient upon which all educators might ponder. It seems clear that her “remembering” of the piece was, in a sense, in her hands as well as in her head. I’d guess, from my relatively limited piano-playing experience that without the hand movements – if she’d just stared at the piano, for example – the piece might not have returned.
Physical movement clearly has a role in both reinforcing learning and assisting recall. The interplay provides constant two-way feedback. That’s why, when I had a youth choir, I taught them to sign the words of their songs in “Makaton”, because they learned them much more quickly that way.
I should say at this point that this has nothing to do with “learning styles”, nor am I simply advocating physical exercise generally, or the value of standing up in class to do “warm-ups”. What I am interested in is the effect of systematically associating a particular set of movements – gestures, perhaps – with a given chunk of learning (forgive “chunk” of learning, but if you know a better term, please feel free to make the change).
I wonder why I know of no-one exploring this in the classroom? I suspect that I have simply not asked enough people. After all, it seems more than possible that the use of systematic signing by both teacher and student could support both learning and recall at every stage of schooling.
A teacher might well associate a mathematical or scientific formula with a particular group of hand movements, use them in an explanation and then ask the students to repeat the movements and the formula back to help retention.
Similarly, I’ve long believed that speech support systems such as “Makaton”, usually associated with younger children and SEND, have the potential, used by students and teachers, to reinforce learning across all ages and abilities.
It is not easy to find evidence in this area, although handwriting has had some attention, because this is an obvious example of hand movements matched to letters.
Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the haptics of writing by Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay suggests that “...perception and motor action are closely connected and, indeed, reciprocally dependent”.
Then there’s this paper, its main finding revealed in the long title: Gestures, but not meaningless movements, lighten working memory load when explaining math, by Susan Wagner Cook and others. This sheds a modest degree of light on the subject, and suggests that the benefits of non-random gestures accrue both to the teacher and the learner.
So what do I conclude? That if a chunk of learning is connected always to the same sequence of physical actions, there’s a two-way link that will support the learning, and it would be good to hear from any who have more to add, or any classroom experience.
Meanwhile, enjoy Maria’s remarkable professionalism. Okay, maybe preparing the wrong piece was not all that clever, but it enabled her to give a good demonstration of what the too casually uttered claim, “I know this piece”, really means in the professional world.
- Gerald Haigh was a teacher in primary, secondary and special schools for 30 years, 11 of them in headship. You can find him on Twitter @geraldhaigh1. His previous blogs and articles for SecEd can be found via http://bit.ly/1UojJ5B
Further information
- Maria João Pires’ nightmare and redemption (YouTube): http://bit.ly/29451WT
- Digitizing Literacy: Reflections on the haptics of writing, Anne Mangen and Jean-Luc Velay, Chapter 20 of Advances in Haptics, April 2010: http://bit.ly/1FMeA0H
- Gestures, but not meaningless movements, lighten working memory load when explaining math, Susan Wagner Cook et al, November 2011: http://1.usa.gov/29aZhdN
- Makaton: www.makaton.org