Best Practice

Barriers to learning: What we say, think and do...

Pedagogy
If we are to break down barriers to learning – real and perceived – then we must consider carefully what we think, say and do when working with our students. Lauran Hampshire-Dell advises

Education creates its own tropes and among the most common must be: “Oh I can’t do (insert subject here); I was never any good at it.”

There are around 10 million students in education in the UK and I would be willing to bet that most, if not all, have either heard or said this same sentence at some point during their relatively short lifetimes.

There are a number of reasons behind this problem, which in my experience is especially prevalent in our low ability learners. Maybe being in the bottom set for four years has created a predetermined sense of failure; perhaps low predicted grades have been interpreted by the student as meaning that they are not expected to succeed; maybe students (like me) have decided that because mum says she was not good at maths, they will not be either.

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