A Common Language for Learning

Faculty spent two days with a learning scientist to sharpen how St. Andrew's teaches, mentors, and advises.

When faculty returned to campus in August, they didn’t head straight to their classrooms. They sat down together to study how learning actually happens—and why.

For two days, St. Andrew’s hosted Michael Chapman, the dean of teaching and learning at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader with the Klingenstein Summer Institute for Early Career Teachers at Columbia Teachers College. Chapman, who has spent his career at the intersection of cognitive science and the classroom, engaged with faculty on the science of learning: the research on how the brain takes in information, stores it, and, with the right conditions, keeps it.

The session is the opening move in a yearlong project tied to the school’s action research project on professional development. “One of the things we were really excited about in our focus on the science of learning is that it’s simultaneously related to all of our work as educators,” says Dean of Teaching and Learning Emily Pressman. “It’s not just about classroom learning. It’s about how we work with students in the dorm, or what we do as advisors or coaches.”

It's also, she said, something that gives everyone “a shared foundation and language” to build from before the work branches into individual paths—self-selected areas of focus for future research driven by each faculty members’ interest in advancing their work as teacher, mentor, coach, advisor, or dorm parent—as the year progresses.

Associate Head of School for Academic Affairs Gretchen Hurtt ’90, P’22,’24 says faculty members came away with department-specific applications. “The presentation involved interactive activities that helped the material sink in,” Hurtt says. “As we were learning about retrieval practice, cognitive overload, working memory, and attention, the activities modeled and demonstrated what we were learning.”

In the first moments of his presentation, Chapman asked faculty to name something they knew how to do well. Faculty members raised their hands and called out tasks like tying a shoe, rowing a crew shell, or planning a trip. Then he asked them to trace how they’d learned it. The exercise set up one of his central points: that the brain physically changes as people learn. “Every brain has the ability to grow and adapt during our lifetime,” Chapman told the room, describing the neural connections that strengthen with practice and repetition.

He also cleared up some misinformation. The idea of “learning styles”—the idea that a student is fundamentally an “auditory” or “visual” learner—persists in education, but Chapman was direct about the research: “One of the biggest misconceptions in education is that learning styles are a thing,” he said. “In fact, learning styles are a myth. There’s really not evidence that people learn better through a particular learning style.” Students may have preferences, he noted, but learning itself—moving information from working memory into long-term memory—works the same way regardless, and the research shows that all students benefit from learning in multiple modalities.

By the second day, the sessions turned toward application: what educators can actually do with a deep understanding of the research. Departments and advising groups spent time naming what they already do that the science affirms, and where there’s room to sharpen practice.

That question of application is where Hurtt sees the widest reach. “One whole branch of this learning is about the intersection of belonging, motivation, and engagement,” she says. “The science points to how important the work on belonging is—creating a culture in which every voice feels honored—and how that actually advances student learning. The way we build a dorm culture, a classroom culture, or a team culture lays the foundation for how much a student will learn and grow over the course of the year.”

Pressman sees the same principles at work even before students set foot in a classroom, in something as non-academic as a new ninth grader learning to live on a dorm. “How do we help them develop a schema—a way of understanding what happens on the dorm each night and why—and break it into pieces they can actually digest, practice, and get feedback on?” she asks. The skills faculty associate with classroom learning, she says, are applicable across all aspects of boarding-school life.

Hurtt says the sessions sharpened many things St. Andrew's educators already sense and practice.  “We all have insight on what good teaching and mentoring look like,” Hurtt says. “This gave us a better foothold on the ‘why” and a common language about learning.”

That foothold, both say, traces back to what St. Andrew’s is trying to build in its students. “Central to our mission is the idea of preparing students for lives of citizenship, service, and purpose,” Pressman says. “That preparation is  not just the content students are learning, but how they’re learning it—in a way that isn’t driven by simplistic memorization of facts, but by empowering them to do the critical, authentic, hard thinking of mathematicians, of scientists, of historians.”

The aim, Pressman says, is for that thinking to outlast their time on campus. “We’re instilling habits of mind and heart, ways of thinking that stay with them, that they’ll draw on as citizens in service to a world that desperately needs them,” she says.

“St. Andrew’s is about powerful teaching and learning and a sense of purpose,” adds Hurtt. “This work enhances and deepens what we do, always with an eye to the human being who is coming out of this experience.”

The work continues through the year: departments and individuals will choose their own threads to research and test in practice, Chapman will return to campus, and faculty will gather again in the spring to share what they’ve learned.

“We value opportunities like this for reflection and discussion of our work as educators,” Hurtt says. “We’re constantly learning from one another and refining our understanding of this important work. Teaching, coaching, and mentoring are very much an art, and our focus on the science of learning only enhances our impact.”