I was watching a semi-pro football team training recently. They definitely spent a fair amount of time building up their capacity in various developmental aspects through different drills and activities. Especially in the area of set pieces and fitness from the short time I manage to observe. Different people were leading different groups. I can sort of make out who the coach, the physical trainer, the assistants, etc. were. They were working with the different groups with different expectations with eventual outcomes probably about contributing to overall play. Picking out any one activity, I try to consider if I will use it for my own students during Physical Education (PE) and the conclusion was probably not exactly but modified to meet an objective that probably wasn’t the original intention of the football team’s. This is also always a thought when I observe my peers at work. I try looking closer at our differences in the way we handle teaching. That got me thinking about how we always seemingly manage to do the job regardless of approach. If we assume that internal learning process effectiveness and outcome quality is related in the same direction, not a realistic assumption, the question arises of how are learners adapting to different approaches.  I am not referring purely to the obvious learning outcomes of what and when but also the why in teaching strategies. 

The next understanding that I wanted was what if the same group of learners pass through different teachers at any one learning phase of their life, e.g. in a term. This also happened to me quite a bit recently as I took classes of colleagues who could not be around. How is it possible that if learners use very specific learning mechanism within themselves, they still manage to get through different teaching environments rather seamlessly despite the different learning landscapes? (Learning mechanisms here refer to the detailed functional and mechanical processes within the body that allows learning to be recognized and locked-in. This is represented by ideas from ecological dynamics, cognition theories, fMRI (functional MRI) studies, etc. – everything that I am not well versed in but trying to know more of at a practitioner level. It does not refer to differentiated learner needs and popular teaching implementation styles that shows learning taking place from an input-output perspective.)

Of course, one probable answer is that learning mechanisms have the ability to adapt to reach an objective that is desired, in spite of what we do as teachers. What influences this adaptation? If we know this, can we better facilitate intentional facilitative constraints, as oppose to creating unintended barriers to learning?

• For example, if internal learning mechanism work by the process of generating an outcome, what happens when we forward-feed a decomposed (deconstructed) action of a desire skill or objective?
• At the one extreme of forward-feeding, does the learning mechanisms change fundamentally or is there ability in the mechanism where the learner will adapt inputs to fit into its original need to generate a response.

This may suggest a teacher connection that can create learning pathways that are not the expected, as opposed to learners learning only in a way dictated by strict scientific laws. Can the teacher in the learner-task-environment action landscape manipulate the learning mechanisms in a big way? The teacher constraint is a directly active one that is different from the task and environment passive constraint, i.e. they exist in the way the lesson is construed by teacher. Can this teacher constraint go as far as changing internal learning mechanisms?

All these seem awfully like inconsequential insights but the interest for me on this came when I keep observing how different teachers can create similar outcomes via very different ways. The jury is out on the efficiency in terms of quality and time needed of such similar outcomes. These different ways are not usually analysed in relation to necessary internal learning mechanisms other than there is a successful outcome and therefore the strategy is effective.

We sometimes see this in the teacher who seem to have successful outcomes in unique ways that we may not all understand and therefore put it to their personality, charisma or just plain old experience.

This is a significant shift in my own personal journey to understand learning, where I spent a lot of time looking at internal (to the learner) learning processes that do not consider teacher personality, charisma or experience as much as perhaps it could. Recently a colleague shared an article https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-what-makes-a-great-teacher-pedagogy-or-personality/2019/09 that suggest the X-factor that we observe from successful teachers cannot be separated from the fundamentals of good teaching, i.e. pedagogy, self-awareness, knowledge of content, passion for content, etc. We do tend to isolate the more obvious teacher behaviour of personality, charisma and experience from the fundamentals of good teaching. One drawback to this is writing off teachers without it and on the flipside, suggesting that it is needed for teachers to succeed.  

My extended thoughts on these are the extent that these holistic combination of qualities able to shape the internal learning processes of learners. For example;

• Can embedded cognition elements also exist effectively when considered as external and facilitated that way, i.e. assuming it’s external influence in lesson design regardless of its actual mechanics,
• Can observable decomposed component skills be just as effective in teaching offerings as generating skills from fundamental needs and movements, and
• Can affective/physical/cognitive education be taught as a stand-alone understanding before being embedded in an authentic or represenattive context (similar to first point)?

If physical/cognitive/affective responses to an affordance allows the learner to fulfil a need to accomplish an objective provided for by that affordance which was designed and put in place by a teacher, will it be reasonable to say that teacher expectations can also significantly influence how a response come about? This might suggest we can get similar learning outcomes from different learning scenarios, i.e. the learning process of reacting to an affordance may or may not be universal but different circumstances can deliver similar outcomes. This can also suggest the existence of multiple internal pathways that might indicate differences in the way learning takes place with different teachers. Are the two-way arrows depicted in Diagram 1 manipulating internal learning mechanisms in the learner possible?

The above may seem reasonable and popular perspectives for practitioners but may not be thought of together with internal learning mechanisms, i.e. a bottom-up approach. Much more effort is usually put into top-down perspectives, i.e. looking at implementation strategies that work and replicating. As a practising teacher, all these are important to me as a person who looks probably a bit too much into the whys (sometimes I feel like that) of learning in a very time-starved profession where lots needs to be done within a class and even more so out of it. I am also seeking out understanding to validate what I have been doing for over two decades, towards both extremes of right and wrong. The later will be a scary thought but necessary to move forward.

My understanding at this point in time is that descriptors like decomposition (deconstructing a skill), generacy (generating a skill from a need or a fundamental movement that represents a basic need), affordances (providing that possibility of a desired outcome), etc. get their significance from well-meaning science and ultimately demonstrate multi-faceted processes. The understanding we have of these descriptors are subjective to us and the learners for whom we offer the learning environment we are designing for. Conflicting processes can be at play in the designing of a lesson and within the learner in it. For example, the learner may face a deconstructed skill introduction (decomposition) but use a skill generating internal mechanism to make sense of it. It might even be the opposite if indeed theories of traditional cognitive sciences are reasonable. Can the way a teacher offers a lesson change the internal mechanism of learning for a learner, resulting in clear alignment between teacher approach and internal learning mechanisms? This question is probably too simplistic to capture what is really happening.

Currently, as teachers, we rely on our field’s current capacity and resource availability to accomplish what is needed in the required amount of time.