Gagné'S Nine Events

Every good teacher does nine things, whether they realise it or not.

Before they start the lesson, they do something to get your attention, because nobody learns while they are thinking about lunch. They tell you, more or less, what you are about to learn, because a person who knows where they are going can tell when they have arrived. They remind you of what you already know that connects to this, because new ideas need somewhere to hook onto. They present the new material in a way that is organised rather than chaotic. They guide you through it with hints and prompts rather than dumping it on you and hoping. They ask you to do something with it, because watching someone else do the thing is not the same as doing it. They give you feedback so you know how close you got. They check, at some point, whether you can actually perform. And they help you connect it to other situations so that what you learned in here has a chance of coming out there.

A psychologist named Robert Gagné wrote this list down in the 1960s as a checklist for designing instruction. People have treated it ever since as if it were a rigid sequence, a lesson plan template, a tyranny of nine boxes to tick. That was not his point. The nine events map onto nine separate cognitive processes that have to happen inside a learner for real learning to occur. A good teacher does not follow them as steps. They arrange the situation so that each process gets the support it needs, which sometimes means doing one of the events quickly and another one slowly, and occasionally skipping one because it has already happened. The checklist is not the lesson. The cognitive processes are the lesson. When you think of a teacher who really got through to you, how many of these nine things were they quietly doing without you noticing?

Last week we listed the moves a good teacher makes. This week we look at what learners themselves have to do, because doing something is not yet the same as learning from it.