How Learning Really Happens

by Rebecca Thomas

Before you meet your students, you have already been told how learning works.

You have read the books. You have signed up for the PLD. You have nodded along as the language of “what works” settles into your planning, your spreadsheets, your professional conversations. You have traced your finger across the refreshed curriculum — knowledge-rich, carefully sequenced, densely intentional — and wondered, privately, how all of this is meant to arrive intact inside thirty very different minds.

Your assessments are ready. Prepared. Waiting to tell you where the children are at.

And yet, something still feels unfinished.

What you may not yet have done — because no one tells you this part counts — is talk to the previous teacher with genuine curiosity. Read the last report as a story, not a verdict. Sit with a whānau member long enough to hear what school has felt like for their child so far. Notice the relationship each learner already carries with education itself — whether it is trusting, bruised, fragile, or hopeful.

Because the system often speaks as if your job is straightforward.

Your job, it suggests, is to get them there.

To lift achievement.

To close gaps.

To move red and amber cells to green.

In this telling, teaching becomes an act of transfer. You deliver the bullet points from the knowledge-rich pages into the ether and hope — earnestly — that something sticks. That new worlds of meaning are acquired. That grammatical rules are applied. That prefixes and suffixes behave as expected. That retrieval is successful on cue.

If it works, the data will celebrate you.

If it doesn’t, the data will still tell a story.

In this version of the profession, you are an information machine. You are measured by the numbers you generate, not the smiles you exchange, the photos you take, or the memories you quietly help form. You will be judged by spreadsheets rather than by whether a child feels safe enough to return tomorrow.

Is that the job you thought you were signing up for?

From a political distance, this version of teaching is deeply appealing. It can be controlled. Attendance can be tightened. Judgement can be standardised. Percentiles can be produced in time for election cycles. Learning can be turned into evidence of performance.

That is the churn the system drives.

Those of us, a little silver around the edges — a little creased at the corners of our eyes when we smile — know this mirage well. We have watched people chase it for years, convinced that if they just perfect the system, the humanity will somehow follow.

But experienced teachers know how the year actually begins.

Day one does not open with a structured literacy showcase.

Week one is not defined by a textbook hour of maths delivered at pace.

Even week five is rarely about coverage at all.

It begins with thirty unblinking eyes.

They are not looking for your slides. They are reading you. They are working out what kind of adult has arrived in their lives. They want to know your favourite colour. Whether talking is allowed during learning time. If there is a leadership role in the room that might fit them. They are wondering whether you will notice if they are absent tomorrow — and whether that would matter.

They want you to smile at their whānau. They want you to understand what makes them angry, upset, defensive, or overwhelmed. They want you to know where their frustration lives. They are quietly hoping you are the kind of teacher who cares.

They will not care about the assessment you slide under their noses. They will not care how many objectives you cover in an hour, a week, or a month.

They come to school to connect. They come hoping you know something beautiful and surprising about the world they haven’t yet discovered.

They will also remember the camp.

The disco.

The water fights and the songs.

The way you flick your hair nervously when the principal enters the room.

The stained coffee mug you carry on duty.

The oversized luminous jacket they beg to wear.

The bag of plasters.

The phone call home when their tummy hurts.

The moment you joined in the latest playground craze instead of shutting it down.

This is how learning really happens.

And this is where the language of the science of learning so often begins to falter — not because curiosity about how minds work is misguided, but because the human conditions in which learning lives are too easily stripped away.

In Aotearoa, learning has never been merely transactional. It has always been relational.

It lives in whakapapa and place, in who stands beside you and who walked before you. Te Ao Māori does not ask what knowledge has been delivered; it asks who this child is becoming, and who walks with them as they grow. Learning is not something done to a learner. It is something formed between people, over time, through trust, story, repetition, and care.

This is why attempts to universalise “what works” so often feel hollow in real classrooms. Research can tell us important things about memory, attention, and practice — but it cannot tell us who this child is today, what they carry into the room, or whether school has been a place of safety or harm for them so far. It cannot see the tightening of shoulders when a name is called, or the relief when a teacher remembers a dog’s name, a nana’s illness, the reason for last week’s absence.

These moments are not soft extras to be layered on once the real work is done. They are the conditions under which any learning — scientific or otherwise — becomes possible.

For new teachers, this matters more than you have been told. Because the pressure arrives early. Fidelity over judgement. Coverage over connection. Pace over people. Slowly, quietly, you may begin to doubt the instincts that drew you to teaching at all. You may wonder whether spending time building relationships is indulgent, inefficient, or professionally risky.

Every experienced teacher knows otherwise.

The time spent learning who your students are repays itself again and again — not neatly, not predictably, but deeply.

And there is something else the spreadsheets never show.

On the days when you are exhausted — when planning never quite matches reality, when the emails stack up, when your body carries more than your head can hold — it is these moments of connection that steady you. A child who seeks you out to share something small and precious. A shared laugh that lands unexpectedly. A quiet thank you from a whānau member who felt seen.

These moments do not erase the fatigue. But they give it meaning.

Curious minds do that — for children and for teachers alike. They invite you to notice, to listen, to wonder rather than rush. They soften the sharp edges of a system that often asks too much and gives too little back. They are the reason many teachers stay — not because the work is easy, or efficient, or well-measured, but because it is deeply, unmistakably human.

And that, perhaps, is the science we have always known.

So perhaps the question is not whether children will learn grammar, structure, or precision.

It is this.

Are we ready to spend five hours a week teaching subordinate clauses and the correct placement of a comma — isolated, assessed, and practised until compliance is achieved — or are we willing to spend five hours a week immersed in a well-loved story? A story children recognise themselves in. A story that introduces them to lives, places, and voices they did not yet know existed. A story that quietly expands their understanding of the world while they are busy caring about the people inside it.

Are we more concerned with whether a child can name a grammatical feature on demand, or whether they can sit with complexity, recognise injustice, feel joy, notice courage, and articulate what moved them — even imperfectly?

Are we prepared to accept that punctuation can be learned because meaning matters, not in spite of it? That syntax deepens when language is alive, purposeful, and shared — not when it is reduced to drills detached from story, culture, and context?

These are not questions about rigour.

They are questions about priorities.

Because children do not fall in love with learning through worksheets and slide shows. They fall in love with learning when language and relationships opens doors — when it gives them words for feelings they have already lived, and windows into worlds they have not yet seen.

And when they care, deeply, the learning follows.

If you care about the human heart of how learning works, don’t forget to make your submission before midnight tomorrow. Show our children how much you care.