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Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It) 1st Edition Alex Quigley
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Why Do Banks Fail and What to Do About It 1st Edition
“This is an important book and a reassuring read for teachers and school leaders. Failure is an integral part of the learning process, but it can be frustrating for the teacher, students and parents. Quigley ofers a wealth of helpful advice rooted in evidence with his own classroom and leadership experiences shining through. From memory to misconceptions and much more, this book covers the challenges and barriers faced in the classroom with advice as to how we can overcome them to enhance teaching and support learning.”
– Kate Jones, Senior Associate for Teaching and
Learning with Evidence Based Education
“Why Learning Fails sets out what many teachers will instinctively know: that teaching is not a production line, brains are not empty vessels to be flled and that as far as pedagogy goes, A plus B does not always equal C. This unreliability of learning necessitates failure.
In this book, Quigley not only articulates the exact reasons why students fail but also gives evidence-informed and workable responses for teachers. For CPD leads, the end of chapter ‘Refection questions’ are a useful and practical resource.
Whilst the process of learning might be unreliable, Quigley is reliably brilliant, distilling complex ideas into engaging prose that is immediately relevant and applicable to the classroom.”
– Caroline Spalding, Deputy Headteacher
“Do you think learning is difcult? If so, this book is for you, because Alex Quigley reveals the barriers that make learning difcult for everyone and the tools anyone can use to overcome them!”
– Professor John Dunlosky, Director of SOLE Center in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Kent State University
Why Learning Fails
(And What To Do About It)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that pupils do not learn all that they are taught. They may learn something, they may even learn a lot, but it may not be a lot of what we think we have taught them or they may struggle to apply knowledge successfully. In this book, bestselling author Alex Quigley characterises how the long and winding road of successful learning is paved with many failures along the way.
In presenting eight key reasons why learning fails, alongside concepts from cognitive science and research evidence explained concisely and accessibly, the chapters span issues of pupils’ limited memory, their patchwork prior knowledge, fawed planning, struggles with independent learning, motivation, limits of attention, and more. Each chapter explores real-life examples of key learning failures and what can be done about it, before ending with fve steps to success, along with practical teaching strategies and tools that can be used to secure success in every classroom.
Packed with practical advice and examples for teachers across all phases at every stage of their teaching career, this book ofers a vital guide to support pupils to overcome common barriers to learning and to go on to fourish while challenging the societal stereotypes that see us shy away from failures.
Alex Quigley is Head of Content and Engagement at the national educational charity, the Education Endowment Foundation, UK. Previously, he was Director of Huntington Research School and an English teacher at Huntington School, York. He is also a columnist for TES and writes at this website: www.theconfdentteacher.com.
Why Learning Fails
(And What To Do About It)
Alex Quigley
Designed cover image: Caroline Tye
First published 2024 by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Alex Quigley to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Quigley, Alex, author.
Title: Why learning fails (and what to do about it) / Alex Quigley.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2023054739 (print) | LCCN 2023054740 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032648774 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032648767 (paperback) | ISBN 9781032648804 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054739
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023054740
ISBN: 978-1-032-64877-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-64876-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-64880-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781032648804
Typeset in Celeste and Optima by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To Katy, Freya, and Noah – our family is without a doubt my biggest success. You give me the optimism, energy, and motivation to always keep trying.
To my Mum and Dad – thank you for understanding my failures and for fuelling me with the self-belief that I could cope with any failure and achieve any success I put my mind to.
Acknowledgements
There are so many researchers, authors, and teachers who have informed this book that it would be very difcult to do them all justice in a list. Any omission is an error on my part. Researchers in education that have clearly infuenced my thinking include the late, great Graham Nuthall, Professor John Dunlosky, Professor Dan Willingham, Professor Barbara Oakley, Professor Susan Gathercole, Professor Rob Coe, Professor David Ausubel, Professor Mary Kennedy, Professor Katherine Rawson, Professor Sarah-Jane Blakemore, Professor Amy Edmondson, and many more. Any errors or misrepresentations of their expert research is a fault of mine.
Thank you to the team at Routledge, including my ace editor Annamarie Kino, for believing in me and continuing to ofer me a platform to share my ideas about teaching and learning.
Thank you to all the teachers I have worked with, past and present, whose ideas and expertise have shaped this book.
A fnal thanks to Katy Gilbert, my partner, frst reader, and the person whose support makes my book writing happen.
Please Note: No names of actual pupils have been used in my book –I use pseudonyms and create composite “characters” that represent my teaching experience.
Introduction
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
Henry Ford
“I am optimistic about our capacity to learn from what has not worked, not to keep on repeating the same mistakes, and to use what knowledge we have about what seems most likely to make a diference.”
Professor Rob Coe, “Improving Education: A Triumph of Hope Over Experience”
It is a truth universally acknowledged – and bemoaned – that pupils do not learn all that they are taught. They may learn something. They may even learn a lot. But it may not be a lot of what we think we have taught them.
If you multiply these learning failures thirty times in the classroom, then you capture the near-infnite challenge – and the unpredictable brilliance – of learning and teaching. The reasons for these learning failures are complex and multifaceted, but if we can better understand why they occur, then we can do a better job of addressing them. When we can more accurately diagnose when learning is likely to fail, we can adapt our teaching with a greater likelihood of success.
As a society, we can stigmatise struggle and shy away from failure. Indeed, in our school system – shrouded by high-stakes accountability measures and constant media scrutiny – we laud our successes but bury
our failures. In this way, we miss countless opportunities to learn and to improve both across our school system and inside the classroom. Pupils implicitly take on the mantle that struggle and failure are to be avoided.
A change in thinking about the origins and the usefulness of failure is required. Instead of assuming that failure is bad and caused by blameworthy personal attributes, we need to recognise that failure is a natural occurrence that attends new learning, particularly when undertaking tasks at the edge of our competence. Failure is ever-present when we learn because our brain is brilliant but unreliable. We have a limited working memory, our attention naturally wanders, and too often, a curious case of too much confdence in our learning. When teachers and pupils better understand these cognitive foibles and likely failures, learning can be more efective.
When we begin to see failure as something not to be associated with blame or shame, we liberate ourselves to recognise how we can better learn from failure. For both teachers and pupils, better understanding failure and struggle ofers the vital foundations for what Henry Ford characterises as responding ‘more intelligently’ to challenges and to learning. It may just be that approaching learning failures intelligently can provide the key to educational success.
What does it mean to approach all learning and teaching with intelligent failure in mind?
A brilliant New Zealand education researcher named Graham Nuthall opened the ‘black box’ of the classroom and its many near-hidden failures. Along with his colleagues, Nuthall flmed over 10,000 hours of classroom footage. They captured not only teachers’ explanations and the activities they engineered but also recorded the side-conversations and misunderstandings of pupils that are typically obscured from view. With painstaking transcription and analysis, the team revealed the chastening truth that teachers expend signifcant eforts to teach, but pupils are not always learning.
Nuthall’s seminal research, summarised in the brilliant book – ‘The Hidden Lives of Learners’ – describes a legion of examples of compromised learning. Their observations suggested that students already knew about “40 to 50 percent of what the teacher is teaching”,1 but a vital
problem was that it was a diferent 50 percent for each pupil! Think about the reality of this when it comes to the complex range of prior knowledge and learning that each pupil brings to the classroom every day.
For example, take learning the topic of ‘cells’ in science, and consider how learning may fail. First, we can recognise how problematic gaps in knowledge can emerge over time. In primary school, pupils may hear the word ‘cells’ used in relation to the human body and circulation, reproduction, and photosynthesis (alongside contexts outside of the science curriculum). In secondary school, they may look in awe at a cheek cell under a microscope. Their potent memory of the microscopic world may overpower the more humdrum act of labelling cell walls, vacuoles, and the like.
Teachers can try their best to sequence the learning so that there is a cumulative understanding, but pupils experience learning about cells in very diferent ways. They learn from diferent teachers with their own methods of explaining. They work with their peers, with all the wonderful insights – and miscommunications – that they share with one another. They fnd some tasks interesting and some dull. Sometimes they try hard, but at other times, they quietly give up. As a result, the best-laid lesson plans can see some pupils learn about cells successfully, whilst at the same time, apparently similar peers struggle and fail.
Pupils’ prior knowledge proves so variable that the act of teaching a new topic can be devilishly difcult. On top of this, Nuthall shows that our attempts at teaching are received and remembered very diferently by pupils based on their unique and variable beliefs and motivations to learn. Nuthall makes a sober revelation about the reality of persistent misunderstanding:
You are probably aware that one of the greatest enemies of efective teaching is pupil misunderstanding. No matter how well you describe something, how well you illustrate and explain it, pupils invent some new way to misunderstand what you have said.2
It is a chastening truth for hardworking teachers that pupils unwittingly invent new ways to misunderstand what they have been taught. They may remember an experiment but not understand the underpinning scientifc concepts. They may remember what clothes were being
Introduction
bought in the shop for the maths problem but not be able to deploy an apt mathematical strategy to solve it. They may remember that their friend joked about the ‘Peasant’s revolt’ but have scant memory for the careful explanation expertly crafted by their teacher.
Our brains can do wonderful things, but our memory – and by extension, our learning – can also prove to be maddeningly miserly. Teachers can work hard on a clear lesson plan along with a well sequenced curriculum, but ensuring students learn what we teach is not a quick and easy fx. Expert teachers learn to quickly adapt their best-laid plans and to manage misunderstandings, but even the very best teachers must grapple with the unpredictable nature of pupils’ learning and the many inevitable failures that attend it.
Pupils inventing new ways to misunderstand or failing despite the arduous eforts of their teacher can sound frustratingly familiar. These classroom failures are not infrequent – they are the norm. But crucially, if we can characterise learning from failure as playing a necessary role on the pathway to success, then these eforts no longer appear in vain. Instead, understanding pupils’ failures becomes instructive about how we can go on to maximise valuable teaching time. This may require a change in mindset not only about teaching and learning but also about struggle and failure. It may also require emotional support given that our innate aversion to failure can put us of, even considering that our eforts are not always rewarded in the classroom.
Teaching may be difcult. Detecting when pupils’ learning fails, along with successfully addressing these failures, may plausibly be one of the most difcult professional acts. Still, it is ultimately worth all of our eforts. Spotting the many small failures that attend learning should mean that we stop greater failures from happening later down the line. The rewards from learning intelligently from failure and not repeating the same mistakes can make a defnitive diference to the ultimate success of our pupils.
Eight reasons why learning frequently fails
Teaching trends, along with assumptions about what makes learning successful or a failure, are constantly changing. Every so often, glossy new
teaching resources or compelling research messages become shared with great excitement. New teaching approaches and learning activities emerge buoyed by great enthusiasm. However, all too quickly, the initial energy and promise wane as the complex and difcult reality of classroom implementation forces its way back into view. The latest fad does not live up to its promise, so we quietly brush past the many failures that occur in its wake before we shift to the next shiny new thing that promises success.
In recent years, schools in England have been asking what knowledge should be taught in the curriculum and for whom. During this curriculum wave,3 knowledge has been privileged and prioritised. But what if teachers carefully sequence the science curriculum and pupils still are not translating this knowledge into their writing? A focus on curriculum may ofer a necessary foundation for learning or even reduce the frequency of some learning failures, but it is a mere piece of the learning puzzle.
As Nuthall’s classroom research reveals, a high-quality curriculum is necessary, but it is unlikely to be enough for successful learning. He describes how “diferences creep in because of the diference in pupils’ background knowledge, interests, motivations, and experiences.”4 If we do not attend to these diferences, along with the many small failures along the way, then we can have a brilliantly crafted curriculum, but pupils still fail to learn. In focusing so hard on curriculum – and considering what teachers teach – have we given sufcient attention to how pupils learn? Have we considered pupils’ motivations and emotions as much as their prior knowledge and memory capacity?
When we focus on creating the conditions for how pupils learn best, we recognise that pupils attend school with diferent levels of prior knowledge (and misconceptions), diferent motivations and interests, and diferent beliefs about themselves and what they can learn. Given this brilliant complexity, we recognise that adaptive teaching is necessary and that every teacher requires a strong shared understanding of learning – how it routinely fails – and what to do about it. When we support teachers to combine the ‘what’ of curriculum, ‘how’ pupils learn, and ‘why’, ‘when’, and ‘how’ their learning might fail, we begin to complete a fuller picture of teaching and learning needed to support teachers and their pupils to succeed.
This book draws upon an array of practical examples and research evidence to tackle eight of the most common reasons why learning fails:
1 The narrow limits of working memory
2 Patchy prior knowledge
3 The nagging nature of misconceptions 4 A curious case of overconfdence
5 Faulty planning strategies
6 An inability to learn independently
7 Wandering attention and miserly mental efort
8 Falling motivation in the face of failure.
Seldom is there a singular problem that pupils are grappling with at any one time. For this reason, it is common for these eight reasons to interact and infuence one another. For instance, possessing limited prior knowledge is likely to dampen motivation and inhibit independent learning. Similarly, the limits of working memory can infuence pupils’ ability to apply learning strategies efectively when faced with a complex maths problem. By better characterising these eight failures in isolation, we can then understand how they may interact and crucially, how teachers can begin to address these failures.
By better understanding these eight common reasons for failure, we start from where the learner is rather than resting on assumptions, based on labels, or focusing on what class they have been allotted. It is too easy to make assumptions about a pupil based on what group they were assigned to months ago – or even years before – rather than being sensitive to how they are learning a specifc task in the here and now.
Schools are seeing a rising number of pupils being allocated labels for specifc special educational needs (SEN). Over 1.5 million pupils in England have special educational needs – with an increase of 87,000 since 2022.5 We should ask: are we supporting teachers to understand and address the root causes of what makes learning difcult for these pupils? Issues such as ADHD are complex and multi-faceted, so for teachers, a deep understanding of attention (see Chapter 8) and the limits of working memory (see Chapter 2) prove vital. In truth, we are failing teachers if we are not supporting them to possess the necessary knowledge and skills to ensure that every pupil they teach can succeed.
In short, teachers understanding the reasons for likely learning failure is a prerequisite for teaching success.
Throughout human history, we have embraced the challenge of learning from failure. In fact, it has characterised many of our greatest discoveries. The American scientist Thomas Edison is famed for his prodigious ability in scientifc breakthroughs, from long-lasting lightbulbs to alkaline batteries and the movie cameras that we still use today. Indeed, you are likely reading this book in a room lit by the infuence of Edison. Although Edison is commonly viewed as the greatest ever inventor – and a celebrated genius – he also has a legion
Introduction
of failures that did not make the pages of the history books. Take, for instance, his noisy electric pen that was decommissioned, his easily breakable talking dolls, or his Netfix-style approach to bringing music to the masses.6 All of these failed inventions were quickly shelved and are seldom shared.
Paradoxically, it was Edison’s many failures that laid the vital groundwork for his lauded successes. Perhaps Thomas Edison should be best known for his determination in the face of failure and not just his inventions. Whilst working in his laboratory on his latest battery invention, he toiled over 9,000 experiments that had not devised a working battery. Rather than being disheartened by the grim results and many apparent failures, when questioned by a sympathetic observer about his failure, he replied with a smile, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”7
Edison’s optimism and approach to failure is a lesson for us all. It feels particularly apt for teachers trying to support pupils to succeed in the complexity of the classroom.
In the following chapters of this book, I characterise the many failures that can attend learning and ofer optimism-fuelled practical strategies and solutions that we can experiment with in our pursuit of success. Like Edison, we can learn intelligently from our failures, be determined in our pursuit of success, and go on to achieve brilliant breakthrough successes.
Notes
1 Nuthall, G. (2007). The hidden lives of learners. Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press.
2 Ibid.
3 Allen, R., Evans, M., & White, B. (2021). The next big thing in school improvement. Woodbridge: John Catt. Educational Ltd.
4 Nuthall, G. (2007). The hidden lives of learners. Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press.
5 Department for Education. (2023). Academic year 2023: Special educational needs in England. Retrieved September 20, 2023, from https://exploreeducation-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/special-educationalneeds-in-england#dataBlock-f6985648-7393-45e0-56f8-08db6d916588-tables
6 Hendry, E. R. (2013). 7 epic fails brought to you by the genius mind of Thomas Edison. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved January 6, 2023 from www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/7-epic-fails-brought-to-you-by-thegenius-mind-of-thomas-edison-180947786/
7 Dyer, F. L., & Commerford, T. (1910). Edison: His life and inventions (Vol. 2 of 2). New York: Harper & Brothers.
Learning failure #1 The narrow limits of working memory
The problem . . .
Every teacher and pupil has experienced a moment where an important name or fact sits on the tip of their tongue, but they cannot fully recall it. For over a century, the ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon1 has been recognised, and it has proven to be a problem in the classroom for even longer.
‘Katy – if it forms a right angle, what would we call it?’
‘Er . . . um . . . I know this – I know it . . . ’
‘Come on – we did it last lesson . . . it’s perpendicular!’
Though there is no easy fx to eliminate this frustrating phenomenon, it does reveal a fundamental constraint on all learning. For the few seconds that we are thinking hard, for example, having difculty in retrieving a tricky maths term, we are using our ‘working memory’. The problem is that it is a limited cognitive resource, and it is prone to failing.
Our working memory – as the name suggests – is the mental workbench where we receive information in our ‘short-term memory’. It can be thought of like a post-it note where we quickly capture information: it ofers useful processing, but it has very limited space. With our working memory, we make rapid judgements to process and remember information, with the aim of successfully transferring important DOI: 10.4324/9781032648804-2
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory information in our near-limitless ‘long-term memory’. Crucially, the natural limits of our working memory do not make the learning process easy. In efect, due to the limited post-it note-like parameters, even the most well-planned teaching or well-sequenced curriculum needs to be squeezed through the narrow eye of the working memory needle.
Not only is our working memory limited but also our entire architecture for remembering is fawed. For instance, our brain has developed to fnd more meaning in physical events than in more cerebral tasks, such as reading or listening to the teacher in the classroom. As such, we remember emotive experiences (otherwise known as ‘episodic memory’) better than hard thinking about tricky abstract concepts such as ‘adaptation’ in biology/geography (what is termed ‘semantic memory’). This favouring of certain types of memorable experiences can result in pupils recalling a fun science experiment but not the fndings. It may even be why years later, we can remember – often with curious vividness – a random dog wandering across a school feld, whereas multiple hours of physics formulae learning is lost to the ravages of time.
The unreliable nature of our memory can easily deceive. In experiments, researchers have shown that people can be easily convinced that they saw signage that they did not see.2 Researchers have even found that experiment participants can be convinced that they were lost in a shopping centre as a child3 when no such experience occurred! The next time a pupil ofers a compelling story of how they undertook their homework with unwavering efort but then simply forgot to bring it to school, we may have to accept the natural failings of their limited memory.
Our memory for experiences, images, words, and ideas is not made equal. Typically, we have a better recall for images than for abstractions, such as words or maths formulae. This can be helpful when we are seeking memorable symbols of images to help recall a difcult concept in the curriculum. Still, we can also develop a false memory for seductively familiar images. For instance, when presented with a closeup picture in an experiment, we can remember more of the actual scene than was present. Why does this happen? Our limited brain knows that memory can be fragmentary, so it gets around this limitation by
Learning failure
#1
the narrow limits of working memory
creatively flling in these gaps with what psychologists’ call ‘boundary extension’ (or the ‘boundary extension illusion’). These creative additions to help us make sense of the world are broadly helpful, but in the classroom, they can lead to misunderstanding, overconfdence, and learning failures.
Remember Nuthall’s research-informed insight that pupils will ‘invent some new ways to misunderstand’ what they have been taught? Well, the narrow limits of our memory are a key reason for this frustrating failure.
Understanding the limitations of our memory can be helpful in recognising how its many foibles can lead to learning failures. There is a wide span of research on working memory that ofers us handy shortcuts for teaching and learning. For instance, depending on the nature of what is being learned, our working memory can handle between approximately four and seven bits of information before it is forgotten or stored, depending upon factors such as whether the material is familiar. Of course, all information is not created equal. We may have a memory for seven compelling images but struggle with a single multi-step maths equation that is abstract, dull, or just plain difcult for pupils.
A common example to exemplify our working memory processing in simple terms is remembering number strings. Look at this number sequence for around 20 seconds. Then, close the book and try to remember as many numbers from the sequence as you can:
32911990202210004223
How did you do?
If you remembered more than nine digits, then well done. You are already outdoing the typical limits of your working memory. For fewer than nine, blame your working memory. If you reached double fgures, then you likely applied a clever memory strategy or two to help you. Well done for being both knowledgeable and strategic. Perhaps the most popular strategy for processing number strings is ‘chunking’. This describes how we cluster together larger sequences of 12
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory information, such as numbers, into more manageable and memorable chunks. For example, you could chunk the previous number sequence in the following ways:
3291 = Marathon time – 3 hours, 29 minutes, and 1 second
1990 = Italia ’90 football World Cup
2022 = Two years ago
1000 = A millennia
4223 = Slow marathon time – 4 hours, 22 minutes, and 3 seconds. Suddenly, armed with a relatively simple strategy, most people can spend a mere few minutes and begin to remember substantial number strings. The hoary old excuse, ‘I haven’t got a mind for numbers’, can fall away when we become more intentional with our memory strategies. With some instruction, the limits of our working memory can be consistently outmanoeuvred. In research by professors seeking to understand expertise, they found that they could train students to go from remembering seven digits to nearly a record-setting 70 digits.4
Can you simply stretch your working memory to ensure comprehensive understanding of the entirety of the school curriculum? Alas, when memory experts who had trained on remembering number strings attempt to replicate their success with strings of letters, the switch in content proved problematic.5 The general approach to chunking and connecting information into more manageable packages is a useful principle for remembering, but strategies are persistently subject-specifc. For instance, remembering lines from a poem requires subtly different chunking than number strings or physics equations. Applying the right memory strategy is therefore nuanced, and our novice pupils require support and explicit instruction on a subject-specifc basis.
Consider the working memory demand of this classic quotation from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth, from ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’, Act V, Scene V
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory
Every teacher who has taught a Shakespearean play recognises the usual complaints about understanding the archaic plays and their tricky poetry. With this speech from Macbeth, pupils’ working memory is likely to be working overtime. Pupils are mentally juggling whether the ‘brief candle’ is real or imagined before grappling with the lengthy extended metaphor of life being like a gloomy stage actor. They are also attempting to decode the words from the page to understand unfamiliar vocabulary, such as ‘player’, ‘struts’, and ‘frets’, all whilst aiming to infer meaning from the lengthy clause-laden sentence. Sentence length matters to working memory limits. Eleven-word sentences are considered easy to read, but sentences with 21 words are viewed as difcult, and sentences with 29 words or longer are deemed ‘very difcult’.6
Just how tricky are 35-word lines from Shakespeare? Make your own judgement.
Working memory is essential for complex tasks such as academic reading. Of course, in the classroom, pupils are expected to read, write, listen, compute, compare, discuss, refect, and more, often concurrently or in quick succession. As a result, pupils’ working memory undertakes a near constant workout that can exhaust the mental energy of even the most industrious pupils. There are intermittent adverts for the transformational power of ‘working memory games’, along with various apps, but they simply do not translate to improved classroom learning.7 The working memory demands of listening to Shakespeare, processing number skills, or writing notes in religious education are so diferent that only deliberate, explicit practice with these specifc tasks in their domains is consistently efective. Of course, this is difcult, time-consuming work riddled with likely failures along the way.
It is unsurprising that the proportion of low-achieving pupils with a poor working memory is three times higher than the general population.8 Struggling with working memory is related to pupils’ ability to plan, to problem solve, and to sustain their attention.9 Around 41% of pupils who struggled in national tests in Key Stage 1 for English had poor working memory, and 52% of pupils achieved the same low levels in maths at the same age.10 Depressingly, the situation is not magically
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory
resolved by maturity. Working memory failure persists and is a key reason why learning routinely fails in adulthood.
Professor Susan Gathercole and colleagues found that 41% of children who achieved below-average scores on National English tests at 6 and 7 years of age had working memory scores in the defcit range, as did 52% of children who achieved the same low levels in National Mathematics tests at this age. Faced with a multi-step word problem in mathematics, pupils can quickly get stuck, fail to hold their calculations in mind, and if it goes wrong too frequently, simply give up trying. Even seemingly accessible instructions – such as ‘Put away your reading books, take out your spelling book, write the date at the top of a new page, and then turn to face the front’11 – can prove too taxing for young pupils to follow successfully. They are not able to chunk the instructions because their working memory is overwhelmed by the excess information.
It is perhaps no surprise that a lack of sleep can exacerbate already narrow working memory limits.12 The feeling of it being harder to think and concentrate when tired is all too common – particularly for teenagers whose body clock is shifting and whose decision making is not always forward-thinking. It is not too difcult for a teacher to imagine a scene where some of their pupils are tired, some are hungry, some are distracted, and some fnd the topic particularly tricky, and as a result, they struggle to remember and to learn.
Is it any surprise then that pupils do not learn what they are taught?
A problem for many teachers is that they do not have a strong understanding of working memory – specifcally, its limits, the factors that inhibit its functioning, and its practical supports. In a survey of 1,425 educational professionals, there was a good deal of familiarity with working memory;13 however, crucially, there was ‘considerable variability’ in not only the factors that identify poor working memory but also the strategies that could assist pupils. That is, teachers need to know more about working memory failures and what to do about them. We need to help teachers close this ‘knowing doing gap’.14 They need to know more about working memory, why it is so important for learning – and the likelihood of failure – and what they can do about it to increase the likelihood of learning success.
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory
There is no easy, quick fx to expand our working memory beyond years of learning and accruing vast stores of knowledge and skill. However, when teachers and pupils know the narrow limits of working memory – along with what they can do to learn more efciently with these limits in mind – they can learn with greater degrees of success.
Summarising Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory
● Pupils’ working memory is their mental workbench, but its capacity is limited, which has signifcant implications for learning.
● Human memory can be fawed and deceptive, and our active reconstruction of the world can lead to unreliable learning or even learning failure.
● Poor working memory is common for underachieving pupils, but these pupils can beneft from teaching that attempts to mitigate the limits of working memory.
What to do about it . . .
It can be easy to explore the mistakes, misconceptions, and memory limits of the learning brain and be grimly pessimistic about the potential for success. Still, pupils and their teachers circumvent these limits daily. There are positive indications that when more pupils and teachers know about the workings of human memory – termed ‘metamemory’15 (or simply knowledge about memory) – they can perform better. Understanding the ‘important peculiarities’16 of working memory needs to be consistently communicated, and strategies need to be explicitly taught by teachers. Even young children in pre-school can talk about and use such memory strategies. Between around the ages of 6 and 11 years,17 many pupils can rapidly develop a range of memory strategies with support and apply them to their learning with success. Communicating with pupils about the natural limits of their memory and developing their metamemory knowledge cannot just be a couple of mildly interesting assemblies. Instead, this must be applied to 16
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory
subject-specifc tasks and deployed judiciously to help mediate specifc learning tasks, for example, pupils’ extended writing, the reading of tricky texts, or independent study, such as homework or exam revision. That is, teachers need to develop a curriculum with memory in mind and consider developing a ‘Knowing about my memory’ curriculum for pupils, with apt subject-specifc guidance where appropriate.
Even with good quality instruction on the limitations of working memory, pupils cannot completely fend of the corrosive impact of forgetting. They probably will not transfer successful strategies for remembering18 from year 5 to year 6 or from year 10 physical education to English literature. Still, it is better when more teachers artfully repeat instructions that circumvent the limitations of the learning brain. By developing their knowledge not only of curriculum content but also of learning strategies that encourage more efcient remembering, teachers can address the failures wrought by the limits of pupils’ working memory.
However, we all know that simply knowing about the limits of memory does not fx every failure. So, what else can teachers do?
It can be valuable to help pupils understand that failing and reaching an impasse with a difcult task can potentially beneft their memory for learning. Professor Roger Schank coined the ‘Failure-Driven Memory’19 theory to describe how failure can often be productive for learning. He explains how when we learn, we create memory ‘scripts’ for solving problems or undertaking tasks. The experience of failure can generate enough interest in pupils to pursue solutions to their learning failures. If they are subsequently successful, then this helps create a new, more memorable ‘script’ to tackle similar challenges in the future. Accordingly, the experience of struggling can stick in our pupils’ longer-term memory in productive fashion if the errors or failures are clearly addressed.
Teachers can draw upon the power of pupils’ episodic memory. As pupils’ natural proclivity is to remember experiences and new learning that is tied to emotional experiences, teachers can be strategic about planning such episodes in the school curriculum. What better way to learn about capital cities or coastal erosion than to visit a place on
Learning failure #1 the narrow limits of working memory
a well-planned school trip? Of course, you do not have to leave the classroom to invoke episodic memory. You can wed a complex topic to powerful storytelling that consolidates understanding. For instance, the striking personal stories of Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale can both illuminate the history of medicine and build emotive connections when learning the history topic.
Let us return to ‘chunking’ and consider how it can apply beyond remembering simple number strings. We can simply make conventional classroom tasks more manageable by translating them into ‘Stepped tasks’(at least whilst pupils are still building their knowledge and skill level). Too often for our novice pupils, seemingly obvious steps are hidden by the overwhelming challenge of new and difcult tasks. For instance, for year 7 pupils learning to draw a self-portrait, some modelling of the steps of the process is essential. Establishing lightly mapped out grids can be followed by shortcuts to ensure proportions, such as ‘egg shapes’, ‘t-zones’, etc. A complex 40-minute task becomes chunked into fve or six smaller, more manageable steps.
A key to helping pupils navigate the narrow parameters of working memory is ‘shrinking the challenge’. Take a year 4 class that is undertaking a narrative writing task. Writing is one of the most demanding activities known to mankind. It is always likely to overload pupils. They must create imagined worlds, compose sentences, consider spelling, write in coherent paragraphs, select vocabulary, edit, revise, and more . . . pretty much all at once. The types of extended writing tasks that we routinely set in classrooms are a classic recipe for working memory failure.
We can shrink the challenge and create stepped tasks for each stage of the writing process. Let us isolate just one important stage: revising to improve your draft. On a consistent basis, teachers complain that pupils do not revise their draft beyond attempting neater handwriting and changing a couple of words. Perhaps they simply do not know what steps to take to revise and to improve their story. We can start by shrinking the editing task with an approach such as ‘Best and better’, which asks pupils to identify their best sentence (explaining why) before asking them to select a sentence they need to make better. With
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Title: The Africanders
A century of Dutch-English feud in South Africa
Author: Le Roy Hooker
Release date: September 23, 2023 [eBook #71707]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Rand, McNally & Co, 1900
Credits: Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
[Contents]
THE AFRICANDERS. [2]
[Contents]
CAPE TOWN, CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
The Africanders
A CENTURY OF DUTCH-ENGLISH FEUD IN SOUTH AFRICA
BY LE ROY HOOKER, AUTHOR OF
“E , P ,” “B ,” ETC.
C N Y : RAND, McNALLY & CO., PUBLISHERS. MDCCCC.
[Contents]
Copyright, 1900, by Rand, McNally & Co. [5]
[Contents]
C .
C P
I T D C (1652–1795), 11
II F C A B D (1795), 26
III F C A B W (1795), 46
IV T A ’ F T N (1806–1838), 68
V S C A B —I N , 87
VI S C A B —N
O R , 98
VII T A ’ S T N , 114
VIII T I A S , 123
IX T C A B —I O F S , 135
X T C A B —I
T ,
XI T A ’ F W I ,
148
165
XII T A R B P , 178
XIII C A ’ S W I , 188
XIV C A ’ S W I
—C , 207
XV C A ’ S W I
—C , 221
XVI C A ’ S W I
—C , 241
XVII T C A , 261
[Contents]
I .
C T , C G H , Frontispiece
P K , Facing page 48
L , D , 72
P S , O F S , 88
T V R ,
D J ,
M H ,
G J ,
P ,
C J. R ,
G B , P ,
J C ,
B ,
G C ,
P S , J ,
C V R ,
[9] [Contents]
FOREWORD.
This is the history, briefly told, of the great Dutch-English feud in South Africa, up to the beginning of the Africanders’ second war of independence with Great Britain, which opened on the 11th of October, 1899.
In writing these pages I have not felt conscious of being in controversy with any one. If I had been susceptible to influences that create prejudice, nearly three centuries of American descent from purely Anglo-Saxon progenitors with no admixture of any other blood would have predisposed me to magnify everything in this long feud that exemplified the prowess and the honor of that race, and to minify in the telling whatever faults it had committed. It will be for such readers of my work as are conversant with the ultimate authorities on the subject treated of to judge how far I have succeeded or failed in presenting a “plain, unvarnished” tale. [10]
I acknowledge, with much gratitude, indebtedness for data to the following distinguished writers:
Canon W J. Little, M.A., author of “South Africa”; George McCall Theal, M.A., Official Historiographer and sometime Keeper of the Archives at Cape Town; Professor James Bryce, author of “Impressions of South Africa,” “The American Commonwealth,” etc.; F. Reginald Statham, author of “South Africa as It Is”; Olive Schreiner, author of “The South African Question”; the British Blue Books and other sources of reliable information.
THE AUTHOR. [11]
[Contents]
THE AFRICANDERS.
CHAPTER I.
THE DUTCH AT THE CAPE.
(1652–1795.)
This is the story, briefly told, of the Dutch Boers in South Africa.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit the shores of South and Southeastern Africa, but they made no attempt to settle the country south of Delagoa Bay. They were traders. The Hottentots had little to sell that they cared to purchase. The route for Portuguese commerce with the East was west of Madagascar, consequently they found it unnecessary to put into Table Bay; the voyage from St. Helena to Mozambique could be made comfortably without seeking a port of supply.
But when the Dutch wrested the eastern trade [12]from the Portuguese, the southeastern portion of Africa assumed an importance to them that it had never before possessed in the esteem of any other nation. Their sea route to the East was south of Madagascar, and it was all but imperative that they should have a port of supply at the turning point of the long voyage between Holland and Batavia. It soon became their practice to call at Table Bay for the purpose of obtaining news, taking in fresh water, catching fish, and bartering with the natives for cattle—in which they were seldom successful.
In 1650 the Dutch East India Company, acting upon the reports and suggestions of influential men who had visited Table Bay and resided in Table Valley several months, determined to establish at Table Bay such a victualing station as had been recommended. In accordance therewith the ships Reiger and Dromedaris and the yacht Goede Hoop—all then lying in the harbor of Amsterdam—were put in
commission to carry the party of occupation to Table Bay, under the general command of Jan Van Riebeek.
On Sunday, 24th of December, 1651, the expedition sailed, accompanied by a large fleet of merchant vessels. On the morning of Sunday, the 7th of April, 1652, after a voyage of one [13]hundred and four days, the site of their future home greeted the eyes of the seaworn emigrants,—Table Mountain, 3,816 feet high, being the central and impressive feature of the landscape. In due time preparations were made to land and begin the necessary operations in establishing themselves in the new and entirely uncivilized country.
The organization of the Dutch East India Company was on a thoroughly military system. It graduated downward from the home Assembly of Seventeen—who were supreme—to a governor-general of India and his council resident in Batavia, and, ranking next below him in their order, to a vast number of admirals, governors and commanders—each having his own council, and acting under the strict rule that whenever these came in contact the lower in rank must give place and render obedience to the higher. It is important to bear this in mind, as it gives a clear insight into the mode of government under which the occupation took place, and which prevailed with little variation for more than a hundred years. The ranking officer of the expedition was Jan Van Riebeek, and next to him in authority were the three commanders as his council in founding the settlement. [14]
Van Riebeek and the three skippers, having inspected Table Valley, selected a site for the fort a little in rear of the ground on which the general postoffice of Cape Town now stands. On that spot a great stronghold was built in the form of a square strengthened by bastions at its angles. Each face of the fort measured 252 Rhynland feet—about 260 feet English measure. The walls were built of earth,
twelve feet high, twenty feet in thickness at the base, tapering to sixteen feet at the top, and were surmounted by a parapet. Surrounding the whole structure was a moat, into which the water of Fresh River could be turned. Within the walls were dwellings, barracks, storehouses and other conveniences that might be required in a state of siege. Around the fort were clustered a walled kraal for cattle, a separate inclosure for workshops, and the tents in which the settlers began their life in Africa.
On the 28th of January, 1653, the last of the ships, the Dromedaris, sailed away and left the colonists to their own resources.
The history in detail of this first European settlement in South Africa is of surpassing interest; but, here, it must be sketched in the briefest outline possible, up to the first contact of Boer with Briton. [15]
For the first twenty-five years the aim of the colonists was to keep within easy reach of the fort at the Cape. Up to 1680 the most distant agricultural settlement was at Stellenbosch, about twenty-five miles from the Cape. Not till the end of the century did they push pioneering enterprises beyond the first range of mountains.
There was a steady though not very rapid increase of population. As early as 1658 the disastrous step was taken of introducing slave labor, performed at first by West African negroes—a step which encouraged in the whites an indisposition to work, and doomed that part of Africa to be dependent on the toil of slaves. To their African slaves the Dutch East India Company added numbers of Malay convicts from Java and other parts of its East Indian territories. These Malays took wives from the female convicts of their own race, and to some extent intermarried with the native African slavewomen. From such marriages there arose a mongrel, dark people of the servile order, which became a considerable element in the population of Cape Town and its neighboring regions.
In 1689 some three hundred French Huguenots came from Holland in a body and joined the colonists at the Cape. These were a valuable [16]acquisition as an offset to the rapidly increasing servile element. They were mostly persons of refinement, and brought with them habits of industry, strong attachment to the Protestant faith, and a supreme love of liberty. Many of the more respectable colonial families are descended from that stock.
The somewhat intolerant government of the Company hastened the blending of the various classes of the population in one. The Huguenots loved their language and their peculiar faith, and greatly desired to found a separate religious community. But the Company forbade the use of French in official documents and in religious services. As a result of this narrow but far-seeing policy, by the middle of the eighteenth century the Huguenots had amalgamated with their Dutch fellow-colonists in language, religion and politics. It was not until 1780 that the Company’s government permitted the opening of a Lutheran church, although many Germans of that persuasion had emigrated to the Cape.
The distinctive Africander type of character began to appear at the time when the settlers began to move from the coast into the interior of the country. There was everything to favor the rapid development of a new type of humanity. [17]For the most part the Dutch and the Germans belonged to the humbler classes; the situation was isolated; the home ties were few; the voyage to Europe was so long that communication was difficult and expensive; and so they maintained little connection with—and soon lost all feeling for—the fatherlands. As for the Huguenots, they had no home country to look to. France had banished them, and they were not of Holland— neither in blood nor in speech. Thus it came to pass that the whites of South Africa who went into the interior as pioneers went consenting to the feeling that every bond between Europe and
