The one thing that we can give children that guarantees their success in school and in life.

I have worked out that I have taught well over a thousand children during my career as a teacher.

I have taught children from pre kindergarten to university level.  I have worked with children from many different backgrounds and cultures, including Romany children, abused children, privileged children, immigrant and refugee children.  I have taught children with severe and moderate learning disabilities, children classified as gifted learners, and all types of children in between.

Throughout this long and varied teaching career, a career that I have Ioved and feel privileged to have had, I kept searching for the secret to what made some children more successful than others.  What was it that helped some children better learners than others, made them better able to reach their learning potential and be happy, eager, students ready to do their best and to be all that they could be?

What makes the difference between a student who underachieves in school and one who reaches his or her leaning potential?

There are the usual suspects; the quality of the teaching a child receives, the type of school they attend, and the expectations of parents and teachers.  I know that all these have an influence on how well a child learns, but none of them could explain why I knew that some children I taught were going to make it, to be successful, and others were not. What was it that made a child who was part of a large, socially deprived family, attending in an inner city school that was scare of resources, be able to reach their learning potential when students from more privileged backgrounds, attending schools with many resources, did not?

It took me a long time to find out, and when I did the answer was so simple that it came as a shock.

The children who succeed in school and in life are the ones who know how to learn.

No matter how bright or privileged a child is, unless he or she knows how to learn they will never reach their learning potential, they will always be underachievers, and they may never know why.

I have read somewhere that fish have no concept of water, it is just something that is so much part of their lives that they never think about it – assuming fish think!  I believe that the same thing happens with children and learning.  Learning is just so much part of what they do, of who they are, that the idea of children needing to learn HOW to learn hardly ever arises.

But people learn how to learn all the time.  For instance, before you took a car out on the road to learn how to drive safely in traffic you needed to have learned where the brake pedal was, how to switch the engine on, how to signal left or right, and how to use the mirrors.  You needed to learn how the car worked before you took it on the road and learned how to drive.  Imagine what would have happened if you had not learned how to handle the car before driving off.  Do you think you would have learned how to drive well?  Probably not.  You would have been so busy trying to work out how to brake, signal, or watch other cars that you would have great difficulty learning how to drive.

It is the same when children are trying to learn.  They need to know HOW to learn before that they can concentrate on WHAT they need to learn.  Children who don’t know how to learn are always struggling to keep up, to be all that they can be, to reach their learning potential.

The sad part is that it needn’t be this way.

All that is needed is an awareness that children do not just learn, they need to learn how to learn, and we need to help them. It is not difficult to teach children how to learn, it does not need detailed training or specific skill to be able to help children learn how to learn.  What is needed is an understanding of how to help children learn how to learn, how to ensure that children have the skills they need to become the eager, happy learners that they are meant to be.

The one thing we can do that guarantees success is to help children learn how to learn.