Everyone can learn.

As an educator and a parent, I love this. As a reader, I often pursue insight from research and books to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the optimal conditions and requirements for learning. One of my favourite recent reads is ‘Hidden Potential – The Science of Achieving Greater Things’ by organisational psychologist Adam Grant. While I absolutely recommend the book if you can find the time, I cannot resist the opportunity to share a couple of his important insights relating to habits for learning.

Interestingly, a variety of research suggests that excellence depends less on talent than we might expect. A study investigating the determinants of exceptional talent concluded that what we often perceive as natural ability actually arises due to differences in opportunity, motivation and behaviours.

From a study that involved 79 schools and over 11,000 students, success beyond school was correlated with learner behaviours as far back as kindergarten. Researchers found that student capacity to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined and determined (as measured in kindergarten, Year 4 and Year 8) mattered 2.4 times as much as early maths and reading performance! Examples of these capacities are identified below:

• Proactive:
  • Taking initiative to ask questions, volunteering answers, seeking information from books or engaging with the teacher outside the class.
• Prosocial:
  • Interacting and collaborating with peers, explaining concepts to others, studying with friends.
• Disciplined:
  • Paying attention and resisting the impulse to disrupt or distract the class, regular home study.
• Determined:
  • Consistently taking on challenging problems, doing more than the assigned work, persisting in the face of struggle/mistakes.

Understanding the power of these behaviours highlights the importance for us as teachers and parents, to encourage and support our young scholars in developing and practising these capabilities to establish them as self-motivated and enduring habits.

Of course, there is more to successful learning than the above behaviours and it is important for students of all ages to understand that mistakes made along the way help us remember the correct process, it also strengthens the learning and it can typically take seven or more practice sessions before mastering a new concept (particularly as difficulty increases in maths, science and languages). As Adam Grant identifies,

“You don’t need to get comfortable before you can practice your skills.
Your comfort grows as you practice your skills.”

I hope everyone is as excited as I am about the year of learning ahead.

Reference (and recommended read):
Grant, A. (2023). Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. New York: Random House.