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Jon Severs
“So you have these inbuilt skeletal structures that guide kids’
experience to make sure they get the feedback necessary to fill out
these primary skills and adapt them to whatever their local
conditions are.”
Knowledge acquisition
“So, one of the important distinctions is that the things that are
sufficient for learning primary knowledge, are not going to be
sufficient in learning in secondary domains. There have been
educational theories that have not made that distinction: whole
word, whole maths and so on.”
Different approaches
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“I am not sure anyone knows for sure what the sufficient amount of
experience is needed to make sure it develops,” Geary states. “It is
probably not much - kids can play after school or at recess,
weekends. That is probably sufficient. Their natural bias to want to
play with other kids, and interact in increasingly complex ways, will
naturally result in that.”
“So the phonemes are built into the primary language system, but
kids would not explicitly focus on the different sounds normally.
They do not need them to access language. But associating those
sounds with random letters in secondary [learning] - that is
something a kid is not naturally going to do without some kind of
guidance.
“With the primary learning, kids can hum along, do what they are
going to do, play - all these child-initiated activities - and they do not
have to put much effort into it.
Tricky relationship
“In addition, if kids are just working together, playing, the default
mode of the brain is probably very active. But if you need to learn,
say, algebra, you really need to focus on what the teacher is doing
or what is in the book. That attentional focus kicks in the dorsal
attention network, which actually inhibits the default mode.
“That is why a lot of the child-directed stuff does not work so well.
They are going to slip into the default mode, and concentrate on
things that are much more interesting to them. It is more
pleasurable to be in the default mode.”
“He had the insight to see it explained why he was getting his
effects. It was primary and secondary knowledge. It flowed right
together and it made a lot of sense of his findings,” says Geary.
Jon Severs
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