What it really looks like …

Geni never got it — right up until the day when, suddenly, she did.

Geni (not her real name) was one of the underperforming students. A Somali girl from a large family, she was polite and impeccably behaved with a beautiful, endearing smile. She had been at our school since she was four and every year she fell a little further behind the rest of the class. At first we thought she was struggling because English was not her first language but that was the case with most of the children in our school and Geni could understand and speak English well enough. It was then assumed she must have some, as yet undiagnosed, developmental disorder.

She had been given every intervention we could think of: extra group work, support materials, one-to one assistance and even after-school tuition. However, year after year the picture was the same: she was ‘working below expected standard’. If we were being brutally honest, she was way, way below. By the time she came to my class, she was 10 years-old and still really struggling with the basics.

She seemed to be paying attention, she would nod and flash me that lovely smile as I was teaching her and sometimes she would even give the little gasp of realisation that teachers live for — the ‘Oh yeah, I get it!’ that makes the job so worthwhile. But Geni hadn’t got it. She never got it. Ask her a few gentle questions and that much was always clear. She hadn’t understood; she was just trying to please.

And then, one day, Geni raised her hand. That was unusual enough to be encouraging but when she went on, not only to answer the maths question I’d just put, but also to give a really clear explanation of her method to the whole class, I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing.

As I marked her work, I was even more astounded. This girl, who had been working at the level expected of a six-year old just a fortnight or so before was suddenly able to achieve the level of work expected of a nine year-old. And not just in maths, her reading suddenly became more confident and fluent and her writing more comprehensible. Her learning was accelerating like a rocket. What on Earth was going on?

I asked her. She seemed as surprised as me. There had been no extra tuition, she hadn’t suddenly picked up a book that made sense to her or been explained things by a sibling or friend. She just found that, one day, everything seemed to make a lot more sense.

Like most primary school teachers in England, I had to attend termly pupil progress meetings. I would spend long evenings carefully analysing the children’s work and test scores so I could give them a ‘level’. The children were given a year to make one level of progress but each level was split into three sub-levels and if each child didn’t steadily make one sub-level of progress in maths, reading, writing and science every term I would be asked to explain what was going wrong.

The assumption was that all children learned in a really linear way, gradually building achievement on achievement at a regular pace. So if you plotted their age against their achievement level it would look something like this:

One of the first things you might notice about this graph is that it isn’t a curve. The idea of a learning curve first came from a German psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus, who, in 1885, conducted some research on his own memory by attempting to learn sequences of consonant-vowel-consonant ‘nonsense syllables’. Teachers of synthetic phonics, will know the sort of thing he meant: TOV, MUP, FID, LOY and so on.

Hermann would collect thousands of these syllables and randomly assemble them into eight groups of 13. He found it only took him an average of 105 seconds to memorise the first group but then another 140 seconds to also learn the second group. He wasn’t learning at a steady rate. At first he could learn relatively quickly but it took longer for him to learn more information after that, probably because he was trying to retain even more.

He drew a graph of his results and we still have it:

Later on Hermann’s graph came to be known as a learning curve but today we often misuse the term. We sometimes say we are going through ‘a steep learning curve’ when we find something difficult to get the hang of at first.

In fact, a steep learning curve is demonstrating that we are achieving a lot of learning at first and then taking longer to learn more. It’s what usually happens when we learn something new, as Hermann discovered. Consider Scrabble, for example. It doesn’t take you long to learn the rules and start playing but it can take years to get really good at it. This is a genuine learning curve.

But the more we used to study pupil progress in our meetings (and we used to study it a lot) the more it became apparent that children learn in a much less predictable way than either Hermann’s curve or the straight line of the education system’s expectations. They often take two steps backwards before taking two-and-half forward. Their learning progress often looks more like this:

The trouble is every child’s graph of learning progress looks different because (annoyingly for an education system that likes to treat people like products on an assembly line) every child is different.

Sometimes, for example, they learn like Geni: they don’t seem to be making any progress for years and then suddenly everything will come together all at once. Geni’s learning curve looked more like this:

So, when I went into my progress meeting with Geni’s results, I was greeted at first with scepticism and then (once I had shown her improvement was not a one off, an example of cheating or some sort of mistake) with praise.

What a great teacher I must be, the senior leadership team told me, to have helped Geni make such an astounding improvement.

Of course, I accepted the plaudits (you have to take the compliments when you can in teaching) but then I also had to admit I had no idea what I had done right.

In Geni’s case, I soon realised I hadn’t done anything especially right, at least not anything I didn’t normally do. Geni had made progress because of her own hard work and the hard work of all the teachers who had worked with her before. Most crucially of all, Geni, I realised, had made progress simply because she was finally ready to.

Her previous teachers felt they were getting nowhere and in progress meetings would have been asked to explain why their student was doing so badly. But actually their work had paid off, Geni maybe hadn’t been able to express all the learning she had gradually been taking in during this time but she must have been taking it in on some level. I just happened to be the lucky teacher that was there when the magic happened; when the penny finally dropped.

The opposite had also happened, of course. There had been children I had taught who seemed to be making no progress in my class but in later years they suddenly got it. I was always asked why they were not making progress. The truth was it just wasn’t their time. Not yet.

A similar thing happens when children learn to talk and even when they learn to walk. Some children don’t talk much as babies but they are still listening and, when they do decide they have something to say, they soon catch up with their peers.

So this, of course, should be a success story. It shows that children often do catch up, even if they make a slower start than others. The problem is that we have now invented an education system that is in an incredible hurry to push children further and further before they are ready. That means that many of them, when they don’t quite reach an expected standard in time, can feel like failures.

As Sir Ken Robinson noted in his viral TED talk from 2007, children will take a chance. They’re not, at first, frightened of being wrong. But by the time they get to be adults, they are.

If you continually encounter failure you eventually stop trying. This, as fellow Medium writer John Clark explains, is called learned helplessness.

So Geni, who had worked so hard to make such amazing progress in such a short amount of time, fell foul of the system. Although she had massively, almost miraculously, improved, she still hadn’t quite improved enough in time. Technically she didn’t quite pass her SATS — the statutory assessments in maths, writing and reading she was set at the end of primary school. This meant that when she got to secondary school, she was put in a lower set than her efforts deserved. She began to believe she couldn’t do it. She learned helplessness.

She fell back again, sent to a class full of others who also believed they were no good and never would be. Geni did get it, she just didn’t get it in time. So the education system left her behind.

If you have taught someone who had a similar learning curve to Geni’s or perhaps personally experienced a different learning journey to the one the education system expects, I’d love to hear your experience. Please do add it to the comments.