What is learning?
Go on, ask yourself, ask other teachers, ask some students: what is learning? It's a pretty big question isn't it? One that I might have felt hopelessly unequal to answering before reading Graham Nuthall's The Hidden Lives of Learners. This book draws together one of the most impressive attempts to find out what goes on in classrooms that I've ever come across. Briefly, Nuthall and his team wired up a range of classrooms and recorded everything that went down over several months before then transcribing these recordings and attempting to crunch the data they gathered. In doing so they learned some [...]