Responsible Learners?

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.

 Caleb Gettagno

As I was working on my newest assignment I stumbled across an approach to foreign language teaching that I haven't heard about before, Silent way, created by Caleb Gattegno. I felt I had to investigate it further - and I'm glad I did. Not only is the "Silent way" interesting and relevant for me (who can be a bit too talkative sometimes), but Gettagno has many other interesting approaches to learning in general (and for specific subjects) and it seems as if he was somehow ahead of his time (born in 1911 in Egypt).

I have copied the following from Wikipedia:

Gattegno suggests that learning takes place in four stages which can be described in terms of awareness.

The first stage consists in 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.