Chess Champs have Superior Memory !!

or do they?

It seems obvious – surely Chess Champs are champs because they have superior memory?  Or maybe they have mastered their learning style?  Or perhaps they just have better genetics?

Such claims are the enemy of hope.  Students that hope to excel. Parents that dream for their children. And teachers looking to inspire future doctors, poets and innovators.  It’s kind of akin to cutting down the Amazon rain forest… all that lost opportunity…

Tesia Marchik tells us, in simple terms,  that the secret to ‘expert learners’ can be learned. And it has nothing to do with our ‘learning style’.  Such myths, for myths they are, only serve to stand in the way of knowledge that works.

Learners learn by making meaning.  Knowledge is constructed and co-constructed. Discourse builds learning. Patterns, built in to theories – tested, reformed, challenged, amended – allow us to learn quicker.

Teachers, parents and pupils – all need to throw aside self defeating, deterministic views of learning.  Most of all in the UK where the best indicator of your later educational success is your familial socio-economic background. This travesty is not fixed in stone. If it were, it would be the same across other rich countries; and it is not.

This is a poverty for us all in the UK where children’s success is defined in a narrow and homogenized way. This world suppresses thousands of creators, makers and dreamers and leaves us all poorer for it.

What’s the answer?  Education needs a mind-shift in to a new mind-set. This has to include communities, parents, employers and teachers. We need to collectively examine what works. We need to extinguish discourses of despair. Most importantly teachers must reclaim their profession.