Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

really important topic during period one on Tuesday rather than period four on Thursday because it is when
you
are awake? What might happen if you swapped it around … ?
    Temperature is another one of Dunn and Dunn’s findings, and again, in my experience, in any group at any time there will be a definite splitbetween those who feel the temperature is just right, those who feel it is too hot and those who feel it is too cold. Which brings me to the boiling of frogs. It is said that if you put a frog into hot water it will jump out because, essentially, it’s not stupid, it’s a frog. However, if you really want to do the job properly, the knack is to put it into cold water and then heat it
slowly
. The frog does not have a part of the brain that notices slow incremental change. Nor do we. Have you ever gone to walk into a colleague’s classroom on a summer’s day and as soon as you open the door a wall of heat hits you, yet all the windows are closed, half of the class is asleep and the TA is sitting in the corner wearing just a towel? It wasn’t that hot when everyone walked in, it just became that hot slowly over the course of the lesson and no-one noticed it happening. So, be alert to the classroom temperature and remember that the optimum temperature is a different one for different people. There is even research claiming a six-degree difference between the optimal learning temperature for boys and girls, with a preference of 69 degrees Fahrenheit for boys and 75 degrees for girls (Sax 2006). Maybe opening a window and moving that girl from it and that boy to it might be just what is needed to help everyone learn better.
    Sound is another factor that can split a group with all the severity of the Berlin Wall. For some people, they have to have some form of background noise when they are working to help them stay focused and prevent them from losing the will to live. For others, they are utterly convinced that in order for anyone to concentrate then they must be working in complete silence. We call these people, ‘parents’. For some people, complete silence can be actually either stressful or distracting or both. I once read that the legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov 9 used to take his typewriter to busy shopping malls to write, tapping into the energy from the noise around him.
    (And if you want information about music in the classroom – what to use and how to use it – I can only refer you to my colleague Nina Jackson’s
Little Book of Music for the Classroom
.)
    Another factor identified by the Dunns is what they call ‘mobility’. When you are working on your own do you stay put until you finish a particular task or do you move around quite often, finding any excuse to get up and move? Again, ask a group of people this question and you will see the group divided into two camps. And, again, in the classroom we tend to allow for just the one camp – stay there until you finish the work. Yet, consider the Zeigarnik Effect, 10 that our memory for tasks is improved if the tasks remain incomplete, at least for a while. Students who interrupted their learning to do something unrelated remembered better what they had been learning than those who completed the task without stopping.It may seem nice and neat to get your students to work through a task before they go onto something different, both for you and them, but, as Eric Jensen says in
Super Teaching
, a wonderful book I’ll come back to later, ‘Learning is messy’ (Jensen 1995).
    One teacher told me about what she called her ‘group from hell’, a year ten inner-city school IT group, in which one particular boy was a right little, er, nemesis. However, when she profiled the class using the Dunn and Dunn criteria what came up with this lad was that mobility was high up in his ‘learning mix’. Not only that, but also he liked working with an adult. This is another of the factors that the Dunns identified – some people learn best on their own. Create a little ‘cocoon of learning’ and they will be the first to go to it to work in a solitary way. I know I would. Another friend and colleague, Simon Cooper-Hind, did such a thing when he was leading an ‘estate’ primary school on the outskirts of Southampton. He and his staff brought in patio umbrellas with ribbons trailing down to the floor ‘into’ which children could go to work on their own when they wanted to. Some children, however, like working in pairs; some like