Best Practice

The process of learning: What is learning? (Part 1)

Support staff Curriculum Pedagogy Teaching staff
Teaching is the input and learning is the output. But what goes on in-between? In this new 10-part series, Matt Bromley will be dissecting the process of teaching and asking what learning looks like – offering practical advice for school staff. In this first introductory piece, he defines what he means by ‘learning’

What is learning? It’s a simple question, isn’t it? And surely, as teachers, our understanding of what we do – the act of teaching – is contingent on having first developed a fundamental understanding of what we are paid to produce – learning.

After all, we wouldn’t attempt to assemble a flat-packed cabinet without first looking at a picture of the finished product and without then following step-by-step instructions that take us from flat-pack to fully assembled furniture.

In short, if pedagogy is a process whereby teaching is the input and learning is the output, then we need to know what the output should look like in order to decide what raw components to use and in what sequence to put them together.

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