Caleb Gattegno: Pedagogical Approach - Roslyn Young
Caleb Gattegno’s pedagogical approach is characterised by propositions based on the observation of human learning in many and varied situations. This is a description of three of these propositions.
Learning and Effort
Gattegno noticed that there is an “energy budget” for learning. Human beings have a highly developed sense of the economics of their own energy and are very sensitive to the cost involved in using it. It is therefore essential to teach in ways that are efficient in terms of the amount of energy spent by learners. To be able to mathematically determine whether one method was more efficient than another, he created a unit of measurement for the effort used to learn. He called this unit an ogden, and one can only say an ogden has been spent if the learning was done outside of ordinary functionings, and was retained. For example, learning one word in a foreign language costs one ogden, but if the word cannot be recalled, the ogden has not truly been spent. Gattegno's teaching methods were designed to be economical with these ogdens, so that the most information can be recalled with the least effort.
Memorisation
Certain kinds of learning are very expensive in terms of energy or ogdens, while others are practically free. Memorisation is a very expensive way to learn. The energy cost can be especially high when the content is of no particular interest to the learner. Memorizing dates in history, or major exports of foreign countries can fall into this area. But school is not the only place where this kind of learning is found. Learning somebody's name, or telephone number, is equally arbitrary. We have to use our own energy to make arbitrary facts like these stick in our memories. The “mental glue” necessary is expensive and this type of learning uses up a lot of energy.
Not only is this type of learning expensive, it is also very fragile. It is typically difficult to remember these kinds of facts. Even when we make a great effort, we do not always succeed. We often recognise a face without being able to remember the name of the person. Not to mention all that we have forgotten of what we learnt at school. We forget much of what we memorise very quickly.
Retention
However, there is another way of functioning, which Gattegno called retention. An example of retention is the reception of sensory images. When we look at something – a street, a film, a person, a fine view – photons move from what we are contemplating and enter our eyes to strike the retina. When we listen to something, we create auditory images in a parallel way. In these cases, energy enters from the outside and we have to use only a tiny amount of our own to retain it; the amount is so small we are not aware of any effort. Such images are easily acquired and remain for long periods. We all have experiences similar to these examples given by Gattegno:
First experience: "I recently visited a village in the south of France where I had not been for over 10 years and I was able to say, 'Oh, yes, I know. The pharmacy is over there beyond the baker’s.' I went to see and there it was. I had made no effort to memorise this village square. It had entered my mind during my previous visits and it had remained there."
Second experience: "I visit a supermarket and go down the aisles. I see an unexceptional woman with a trolley. Three aisles further on, I see her again. I have not tried to remember her, but I have seen her and I can recognise her again a little later."
This system of retention is extremely efficient. We keep in our minds a huge quantity of information simply because we have seen, heard, tasted, smelt or felt it. This ability is part of human nature. This is what enables us to walk about our town without getting lost, to ski or to read a book.
Gattegno proposed that we base education not on memorisation, which has a high energetic cost and is often unreliable, but on retention. The learning tools and techniques Gattegno proposed rely systematically on retention.
Only Awareness is Educable
Gattegno found that only awareness is educable in human beings. On the path to learning, several awarenesses must be reached. The first is the awareness that there is something to be learned, some unknown to become known. The next awarenesses are triggered by experience with the subject matter. For example, rather than ask a student to write "2+2=4", Gattegno might ask them to create the number 4 in as many ways as possible with coloured rods. The student can then clearly see, feel, and describe the characteristics of the number 4. Instead of memorising "2+2=4", the student has had a mathematical experience, and become aware that "4" can be broken into parts, and that the process of breaking apart and putting together can be described in several ways.
We are constantly becoming aware of new things. When it is something significant, the awareness is often audible in the form of the “Ah!” so typical of an important realisation. However, most realisations are made much more discreetly. Indeed, as we live our everyday lives, we become aware of all sorts of things at great speed throughout the day: the price of bananas, that these bananas are not ripe enough, that the price of the yoghurts has been reduced because they are close to their sell-by date …. All our life is a succession of tiny awarenesses. Until we become aware of something, that thing remains totally unknown to us. As soon as we become aware of it and integrate it into our lives, we often no longer pay attention to it. But, the moment of realisation, the act of learning is an act of awareness.
The role of the teacher in acts of learning is not to inform their students of this or that piece of information, but to help them to discover it, to perform a conscious act to become aware of it.
The four stages of learning
Gattegno suggests that learning takes place in four stages which can be described in terms of awareness.
The first stage consists of a single act of awareness: the realisation that there is something new to be explored. As long as I am unaware that there is something to be known, I cannot start to learn.
The second stage: As soon as I start to learn, I have to explore the situation in order to understand it. As I am not yet an expert in the field, I make many mistakes. These mistakes enable me to progress because by observing what happens and becoming aware of it I can adapt my attempts in relation to the feedback given by the environment. This stage ends when I know what I have to do, but I only succeed when I am wholly present in what I am doing.
The third stage is a transitional stage. At the beginning, I am able to do what I want if I pay attention at each instant. At the end of this stage I no longer need to pay attention: the new skill has become completely automatic and because it is automatic, I am free to give my attention to learning other things.
The fourth stage is that of transfer. For the rest of my life, what I have learnt can be used for all the new skills I may wish to acquire. When I learnt to run, I used the know-how I had acquired from learning to walk. Both of these, walking and running, were useful to me when I decided to learn cross-country skiing. Each skill remains available, except in the rare cases of accident or injury, for a lifetime.
The Subordination of Teaching to Learning
Gattegno argued that for pedagogical actions to be effective, teaching should be subordinated to learning, and the absolute prerequisite for this is that teachers must understand how people learn. Rather than present facts for memorisation, teachers construct challenges for students to conquer. If the student cannot conquer the challenge easily, the teacher does not give the answer, but observes and asks questions to determine where the confusion lies, and what awareness needs to be triggered in the student.
The role of teachers is not to try and transmit knowledge, but to engender acts of awareness in their students, for only awareness is educable. Gattegno created pedagogical materials designed to provoke awarenesses. The materials are intended to be used along with techniques aimed at leading students through a succession of awarenesses. As the students progress, teachers who observe their students can see when and how they can induce a new act of awareness.
All the materials created by Gattegno were designed to allow teachers using them to place the accent systematically on the students’ learning rather than on what they, the teachers, do. Teachers watch their students deal with the challenges they are given, and provide them with feedback on their trials and errors. Teachers thus actively base their work on the awareness and awarenesses of the students, in the here and now. It is therefore very difficult for a teacher to closely follow a detailed lesson-plan, since the students are actively exploring the domain and have the freedom to take the lesson wherever they need it to go. The class becomes a kind of guided improvisation in which the teacher launches a challenge at a suitable level for the students, and if necessary nudges them into the awarenesses they need to have in order to learn. This is the case whatever the subject being dealt with, and is what is meant by Gattegno’s expression, “the subordination of teaching to learning”.
"Caleb Gattegno's Pedagogical Approach" by Roslyn Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.