What is learning?

What is learning?

Levels of Learning In preparing a workshop, a question I frequently put to myself is: ‘what am I trying to teach?’ Which leads onto another question : ‘What do I want people to learn?’

A useful resource is a model of ‘levels of learning’ that was first formulated by Gregory Bateson (Bateson 1972, part 3). What follows is not just an account of Bateson’s model, but my own ideas about it, which take Bateson as a starting point. Let’s dive straight in.

Bateson distinguishes several different levels of learning. I will give his original definitions for reference, Zero learning: a condition in which the individual makes specific responses to specific stimuli and situations.

Right or wrong, these responses are not subject to correction, but are habitual or ‘wired in’.

Example: I learn from hearing the factory bell that it is 12o.c.

Learning 1: a trial and error process in which the individual adapts to his environment, finding a new response or pattern of responses to a given situation. This process involves correcting errors of choice within a set of alternatives.

Example: Pavlov’s dogs learning to expect food at the sound of a bell that habitually precedes feeding.

Learning 2: a process of corrective change in the set of alternatives from which choices are made. It is a change in the ways which the individual construes or punctuates his experience, and therefore in the level one knowledge and skill which is brought to bear.

Example: learning that whether or not I get fed depends not just on whether the dinner bell rings, but also on the mood of the feeder, my attitude to him and other conditions and contexts of feeding.

Learning 3: a process of gaining control of, and therefore changing, the habitual ways of construing situations which are the outcomes of level 2.

Example: deciding that food isn’t really that important to me anyway...

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Comment Level 0: This is the very simplest kind of learning: simplest stimulus­response learning of the kind ‘A is always followed by B’. I hear the factory whistle and ‘learn’ it is 12oc. I see the drops on the window and ‘learn’ that it is raining. I have also learned in the past that if I go out now, I’ll get wet. When I walk into the training room I feel cold and ‘learn’ that the heating is off.

These are all examples of what Bateson calls ‘zero learning’. Much of this learning we take for granted, and having learned it, our response is simply habitual.

Level 1: Level 1 learning is about learning to change zero learning. Level 1 learning is learning that we can change the response we make to a given stimulus. When it rains I don’t always get wet, because I learn that if I wait it will stop, or I can take a mackintosh. The cold training room can be warmed by fetching in a heater from another room, or warmed up by the students doing some exercises. In level 1 learning I develop a flexibility of response, perhaps by trial and error, to a given stimulus over time. This is still quite simple learning – of the kind shown by Pavlov’s dogs, which learned to salivate to a bell signifying food – but it is a response that was not previously there before, and so qualifies as learning.

Much learning of this kind becomes quite habitual – once I have learned to walk, I don’t attend to it in the same way (unless I stumble). If circumstances change, however, the learned response may become ‘extinguished’. For example, If Pavlov stops feeding his dogs when the bell sounds, they will eventually stop responding to it. In fact, it is clear on reflection that level 1 learning presupposes a recurring context. If the experimenter gets bored with the experiment, he might torment the dogs by ringing the bell and feeding them at random. If I lived in a monsoon country, I would soon learn that even my mackintosh would not keep me dry. And if climate change led to the weather being quite violently unpredictable, I would not know what to wear when I went out.

Level 2: Level 2 learning steps back from level 1 learning in that it involves developing a new set of habits that further increase the complexity and flexibility of the level 1 response. One way of putting this is that in level 2 learning, we are learning to inhabit and operate in the contexts in which level 1 arises. Let me explain further.

We have seen that level 1 learning is context bound, in that it presupposes that the situation in which the response is given stays more or less the same. In level 2 learning, the set of habits I acquire is now context­sensitive in that I develop, and choose between, a different range of responses in different situations. For this to happen, I must not just be able to respond flexibility in different circumstances, but be able to recognise different contexts, and choose the correct response­set for the context. In doing this, I have acquired an even greater degree of flexibility. For example: I can check the weather forecast regularly and avoid making plans which would lead to me getting wet, or regularly check that my mackintosh is waterproof so that I am prepared in case I need to go out. Or I can get into the routine of always checking the training room before I start teaching to see it is at the required temperature. This is sometimes called ‘learning how to learn’. This kind of learning easily develops itself into more complex habits of character. For instances, my experiences with being rained on, and encountering cold training rooms make turn me into a cautious person, who checks everything out to avoid surprises.

Level 3: Level 3 learning takes a further step back from level 2 learning in that what we learn about is our whole process of forming, exchanging and losing level 2 habits. In order to do this, we will need to give up fixed ideas about both ourselves and the subject we are learning about. I need to make a shift, not just to acquiring new habits, but to a place where I no longer need them in the same way. What we are talking about, in fact, is moving to a place of enlightenment about ourselves and the world, a place in which old categories and ways of

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thinking become redundant. We move beyond roles and established notions about the world, and ways of being in it. For obvious reasons, this kind of learning is the most difficult to grasp and achieve, and Bateson believes it is relatively rare in human beings. I will return to say more about it later.

Let me give some further examples of the levels in operation in a learning/teaching situation.

Suppose that I am waiting for a training session on Gestalt therapy to start. The trainer slams the door as he enters, and I am startled. (Level zero – stimulus and fixed response). He then proceeds to tell the class some basic facts about the subject matter – for instance, that the word ‘gestalt’ means ‘whole’ , and that Fritz Perls was born in 1893. (Level 1 learning – you learn what answer to give to two questions which might be asked in this and similar situations.)

Next, he invites questions, and someone asks a question about how a gestalt therapist might treat a certain client. The therapist offers an answer, and in response to further questions also says that different therapists might well treat the same person differently, and with the class discusses how and why this might happen. Perhaps the personality of the therapist, or the kind of Gestalt therapy they have learned Are relevant. (Level 2 learning – the students are considering how someone (including themselves) might respond to a client, and the factors relevant to the choice of response. Finally, the discussion broadens into more philosophical issues about what therapy is, and why it is useful or not (moving towards Level 3 learning).

Ways of Teaching Once the idea of levels of learning has become familiar to you, it is, I hope, clear, that different levels of learning call for different learning environments and inputs. Traditional models of teaching, such as what Paulo Freire called the ‘banking model’ of education (teacher deposits knowledge in the empty brain­vaults of the student) are designed to produce learning at levels zero and one. In this kind of teaching, facts are presented or skills are taught, and the knowledge and skills are viewed as an objective truth that the students ‘acquire’. In a school history lesson, students might ask questions, but they would be intended to produce more information. Contrast the student who asks: ‘What is the point of history?

What is historical truth?’ – certainly in most school classes, such questions simply have no place.

Recent changes in approach to teaching have made significant shifts towards greater student participation in the learning process, and greater student responsibility in choosing the curriculum. These, in turn, lead to a shift towards a more facilitative style on behalf of the teacher (‘What would you like to learn today?’) and greater questioning of what is traditionally taken for granted in terms of subject matter. In such a classroom, the very questions that are being asked are themselves called into question, in the manner of the history student above.

The validity of the study itself can be examined, in what might be called a ‘higher’ or meta­ discourse. The end of this is to produce a form of learning and teaching which is self­critical – what is sometimes called a post­modern approach. This is mainly level 2 learning, standing back from, and looking at the contexts in which level 1 learning occurs. The other thing that can happen in this process, and which can be encouraged by the facilitator, is that students learn how to learn: that is, they stand back from, and examine, their ways of learning, with the aim of maximising them. This higher level of learning then helps them devise good learning strategies in a wide range of situations.

What of level 3 learning? Consider Zen masters, who are trying to encourage students into this sphere. What they aim to do is shake their students out of their habitual ways of thinking of and being in the world. They may refuse to teach in any normal way, preferring instead to give students ‘impossible’ problems to meditate on and solve. These are called koans: ‘Silence is the sound of one hand clapping’ would be an example. Alternatively they may teach in parables, stories the meaning of which is not obvious. The aim of this approach is to cause the student to question and eventually transcend some of their most basic assumptions

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about the nature of reality, the self, knowledge, learning, and so on. And the method is indirect and often paradoxical because it is assumed that no logical or direct approach will enable to student to ‘get it’.

From the trainer’s point of view, this is the most profound – because it is the most fundamental and wide­ranging – kind of learning, and yet it has unusual characteristics, as compared to the lower levels. First, it is often acquired by accident. Trying to teach it usually won’t work, and setting learning goals and outcomes is no good, because when you start to learn, you don’t know what it is you might be learning! Second, the student may have difficulties in knowing that they have learned in this way at the time. Any profound or deep learning of this kind may not become evident until days, or even years, after the training occurs. And its integration into the student’s way of life may take months or years. Such learning is often ‘felt’ with one’s whole being, rather than known in the way we know facts or a skill. Finally, level three learning may be difficult or impossible to put into language, for to do so we are using the very categories and concepts that the learning enables us to transcend!

Finally, it can be difficult to recognise when someone is operating at this level – their unconventional responses lead us to ask: “Is he they mad, or a genius?”

This classification of ‘levels of learning’ has helped me to better understand both what I am trying to teach, and the range of ways in which I might teach it. We all need learning at all levels, and it seems clear that more level zero and level 1 learning, traditional teaching methods are usually adequate. Level 2 learning requires the trainer to move away from a teaching in to a facilitation mode: to question the subject matter and the rationale for teaching it, to engage the students in such examination, to encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning, and so on. And compared with lower level learning, level 2 learning is already becoming less predictable and therefore less controllable. Finally, level 3 learning may require teaching methods which have much more in common with those of Zen masters than schoolmasters, methods which often involve frustrating, contradicting, and unsettling students in the attempt to move them into totally unexpected ways of seeing things.

Reference: G. Bateson ((1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Ballantine Books)

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