How do people learn?
Before you read this article, pause for a moment to answer the question above.
The main purpose of coaching or instructing is to help people learn. All coaches and instructors should have a clear understanding of how people learn, in fact, the most effective coaches and instructors are fascinated by the question – How do people learn?
This level of understanding enables the coach/instructor to know why they do what they do and to make more effective decisions in creating an experience a student can learn from.
Neuro-biology and learning theory
There are many theories of how people learn, and many people hold their own personal view on the question, usually derived from their own experiences of trying to learn something. Most of the theories have come from psychologists observing people trying to learn and then summarising, in a theory, what they see happening. This is referred to as an ‘external perspective’.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a different perspective was taken from a very prominent Neuro-Biologist called Walter Freeman III, who asked: ‘What happens in the brain when people are learning?’
To carry out his research, he used scanners to measure brain activity during learning activities. His findings challenged many of the popular learning theories.
What did Walter Freeman III discover?
The brain scans enabled Freeman to observe that the brain was continuously making ‘predictions’. These ‘predictions’ were then tested as the individuals carried out tasks, providing the brain with information as to whether the ‘predictions’ were correct or false.
Freeman noticed that when the ‘prediction’ was ‘false’, an ‘orientating response’ was activated in the brain, effectively saying ‘Pay attention, what you expected to happen didn’t. There is something to learn’.
When the ‘prediction’ was ‘correct’ the ‘orientating response’ wasn’t activated, as what was expected to happen did happen. This serves as confirmation that we know what is happening around us and therefore our brain doesn’t need to ‘orientate’ our attention to something unexpected.
This ‘Predict-Test-Sense’ process takes place continuously and allows us to make sense of the world around us, learn from the outcome of events and is the foundation to our learning. It explains why we learn by doing, something most instructors and coaches know from experience.
Is that the answer you thought of at the beginning?
So what does this mean?
Beyond the beginner phase, coaching should require those we teach to go through the following phases:
- Make a Prediction
- Provide opportunity to Test their prediction
- Help them make Sense of the result
By carefully creating exercises in our sessions, we can encourage our students to make predictions, providing them with an experience to test that prediction and through feedback discuss if the test result was correct or false.
Putting it into practice
An example to explain how this can be used in sailing to teach students is: ‘how to spot a layline’.
Exercise: Judging Laylines
- Lay a windward and leeward mark, the longer the beat the more challenging the activity will be.
- Split your group into 3s.
- The sailors line up in a follow-my-leader style round the leeward mark.
- They sail on port directly to the layline (one tack beat).
- The boat in the middle has to judge (Predict) where the layline is and tack on it (Test).
- The boat ahead and the boat behind respond by tacking as soon as the middle boat tacks.
If the middle boat has judged (Predicted) it correctly, then the first boat will be over and the third boat will be under the layline.
In this example, the first and third boats are providing feedback (the Sense element), as well as a bit of pressure!
A common misunderstanding
It can sometimes be assumed that using Predict-Test-Sense means that the coach isn’t providing the learner with feedback or support. This isn’t correct. Freeman’s theory states that we learn by doing and trying to solve the problems that we come across whilst doing.
Referring this back to the layline exercise above, by asking a student to judge a layline they are having to solve problems like:
- Where is the layline?
- How might the wind shifts be influencing the layline?
- How will the other boats around me influence the layline?
- How does my boat speed and pointing influence the layline?
- And many more!
Some predictions and tests will work, and some won’t. But each outcome provides rich insights from the experience, enabling our students to make sense of the task and providing opportunity for the instructor or coach to give feedback and encourage them to have another go.
Now that we’ve answered “How do people learn?”, we are ready for the next question, when are our students ready for predict-test-sense experiences? Would this type of experience help a beginner learn? That’s for another article.
For more instructor resources and ideas, visit the CPD Hub on the Training Support Site.
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