Last summer, a friend and I walked the Pennine Way. We thought we were cutting a bit of a dash to do the whole thing in 12 days.
Until we heard about Jasmin Paris, of course. She was winning the Spine Race at the same time as we were in the Pennines and doing so in a new record time of just a smidge over 83 hours.
Stopping only to breastfeed her baby.
And taking a week off from writing her PhD thesis.
Enough already!
We managed it in good time because, unusually for us, we didn’t get lost once and mainly that was because the Pennine Way is quite a well-trodden path. We benefited from the efforts of previous generations of hikers whose superior map-reading skills had kept them on the straight and narrow where we might have strayed.
In his brilliant play, Mnemonic, Simon McBurney suggests that a vast, wild landscape is a much better analogy for the memory than a huge filing cabinet, which is how we used to conceive it.
We can quickly re-trace our mental steps and re-locate information only when the path is well-established. Neglect it for a while and it grows over, meaning you have to thrash about in all the boggy bits again.
Though sometimes that means you approach a place from a new direction and that can be refreshing and rewarding.
These ideas are in my mind because I’ve been reading a brilliant book called Make it Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel and many of the points they make about the ‘science of learning’ chime with McBurney’s image.
Fundamentally, for them, learning must be effortful. If you really want to find the way, you have to do the hard yards yourself.
And you have to keep doing them. Regularly. And spaced over time. Ideally, interleaved with other activities.
Otherwise, the path quickly becomes unclear again.
Their insights are well-supported by clinical evidence as well as by anecdote and they are very convincing, not least because they seem to me to echo much of the brilliant work done by Carol Dweck on the Growth Mindset.
And yet, their ideas seem somewhat unfashionable in a profession, supported by an edtech industry, which strives to make learning ever easier for our students. Time and again, they demonstrate how many common study techniques are actually counter-productive; and yet they persist, passed on from cohort to cohort without much scrutiny or reflection.
I’d urge you to read it, not least because it serves as a powerful reminder that retrieval practice - or testing as it’s more commonly called - should be a tool primarily for the benefit of students and not for teachers.
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