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The Subordination of Teaching to Learning
Roslyn Young
The workshop took place in a quite extraordinary and very pleasant room -a former dance
studio with a beautiful view. There were ten participants for the whole four days and three
who were only able to be present for one or two days. All were more particularly interested in
language teaching.
It was the first time that I had ever run a workshop in which the common language between
some of the participants and myself was so tenuous. I have only the merest smattering of
Japanese, whilst, of the ten people participating full time, one was a native English speaker,
four spoke good or at least halting English, and the other five could only understand partially
what was being said, and certainly not the subtle nuances required by a workshop of this
nature. Nevertheless it was decided that the workshop would not be translated in full, and
very quickly a satisfactory way of operating was found in which I would launch an idea or a
concept and the participants would discuss it until they were satisfied they had understood,
checking back with me from time to time on points they reached or questions they had in
order to have my reaction. This mode of functioning proved to be quite successful, especially
because one or two of the participants had already had a lot of exposure to Dr Gattegno's way
of thinking and could lead the discussion as well in Japanese as I could in English. However,
it was an interesting experience for me as it allowed me to work intensively for four days on
my intuition.
It seemed to me that, in order to study the subordination of teaching to learning, the easiest
entry would be through a detailed examination of learning, so the workshop began with two
days devoted to the four stages of learning: stage one, the basic awareness that there is a field
to be explored; stage two, the exploration of the field; stage three, practice and stage four,
mastery. These four stages were explored in detail, many, many examples being furnished by
myself and then by the participants from our everyday lives until everybody seemed at home
with this description of learning. Then the stages were re-examined from the point of view of
what the learner does with his presence during each stage. During stage one, which may last
just a few seconds, he is present to the discovery of the new field to be investigated. Stage two
is also characterized by the presence of the learner as he explores this new field. During stage
three, the learner becomes less and less present as he makes more and more progress, and we
know we have reached mastery when we no longer need to be present at all while performing
the action. Examples were produced in which only stage one is present and in which only
stage one and stage two can be found -human relations are of this nature, since we don't want
to automatize our relationships with people. Similarly, some learning requires only an initial
awareness and mastery is immediate, since the process itself is already known.

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Once the notions of presence and awareness had become more than just empty ideas for the
participants, once they showed they had a feel for moments in their lives in which presence
and awareness are manifested, it was possible to expand the notion of presence to include the
stage presence of a great musician or actor who can galvanize his audience the moment he
comes onto the stage. This is a good example of induction and most people have had this
experience at least once in their lives. It helped the participants grasp what induction is.
We then had enough tools at our disposition to allow us to begin a study of the self at the
helm. The third day was given over to this study. Since the self can be studied most easily
during a learning activity, the participants were provided with tennis balls and given a simple
task to learn -how to throw a ball from one hand to the other, the difficulty being that the
throwing had to be done from behind the back, over the shoulder and into the waiting hand.
The participants were asked to learn to throw the ball and catch it, but also to examine the
content of their awareness during the learning process in order to catch themselves
functioning. This activity took a good hour and was very fruitful. The learners could see
themselves being selectively present in different aspects of the act of throwing, using their
awareness in order to learn. In our beautiful dance studio classroom, the students were
surrounded by mirrors. Some tried to use the mirrors to study their throwing, but they soon
understood that they could not study the throw from the outside, looking in the mirror,
because this created a split in their presence to themselves, and that they had to concentrate on
feeling how to act rather than watching themselves acting. They also became aware of how
they know they are making progress.
After a time, when everyone had made some progress in learning to throw, the group was
divided in two and each sub-group had the opportunity of observing the other half of the
group learning. The observers were asked to watch the learners not as fellow-learners but as
teachers. However this exercise proved to be too difficult for most of the participants. With
only one exception, they described the progress being made by the learners compared to their
own learning, rather than thinking about the type of advice they could give each learner in
order to speed him in his task of learning. They were not yet in a position to be able to think
technically about the act of learning to throw.
The afternoon of the third day was given over to a study of feedback. The student tests his
environment -this is what led people such as Dewey to state that learning takes place through
trial and error- and reads what the environment sends back to him as a response, thus creating
a feedback loop. Each loop allows the learner to make a new trial which is more adequate
then the previous one because he is already aware of the response of the environment to the
previous trials and can thus adjust his trials one after the other. This feedback loop is used in
learning anything which requires trial and error, from windsurfing to throwing balls to
French. However, in the language classroom, the teacher is the environment. Thus, the teacher
watches the student testing the environment and provides the feedback selectively, adjusting
what he does in function of the trials the student makes. Thus, the teacher and the student are
linked in a double feedback loop. The teacher watches the student make his test and furnishes
the feedback necessary for the student's next test on a moment-by-moment basis.
By the end of the third day, the participants had a feel for most of the notions that I felt should
be worked on during the seminar. It only remained to tie them together into an understanding
of some of the processes involved in the subordination of teaching to learning. This was the
activity of the fourth day.
To begin day four, we returned to a notion already in circulation since the first few minutes of
the workshop -a quote from Dr Gattegno on teaching: "Teaching is making the students
independent, autonomous and responsible. I do not free students all at once, but moment by
moment and step by step." Having spent three days studying learning, we now spent an hour

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working on teaching in preparation for watching a French lesson.
Since four of the participants in this course had also studied French in the previous workshop
the week before, circumstances were such that we could do a more advanced French course,
rather than a first lesson. The aim of the course was to furnish the participants, both those
learning French and the observers, with the opportunity of studying subordination of teaching
to learning actually functioning in a class.
The French lesson was at the same time a complete success and a total failure! I had hoped -I
had expected- that it would allow observation of the students' presence but also moments of
absence, moments when a student's self was at the helm but also moments when the psyche
took over and slowed down his learning, moments when the whole class was present but also
moments when no one's self was at the helm. However, the class was unusually successful as
a French class in that the students were completely present all the time. Even when pressed
into activities which could be socially difficult for them or could lead to embarrassment, each
student remained completely focussed on the lesson. Only at one moment did the class,
including the teacher, become aware of the observers and become self-conscious. We all
laughed.
Unfortunately, this incident took less than a second to come and go and was only noticed by
one of the observers who captured the change in energies in the class, but did not understand
what had happened to the point where he was in doubt as to whether he had actually felt
something or not. It was so quick that he did not really have time to grasp what had taken
place. The participants, when asked later if they had felt it, were aware that it had taken place,
but had immediately been swept back up into the lesson and had thought no more about it.
Thus this most subtle level of subordination of teaching to learning was not clearly
demonstrated during the lesson.
However the presence of the students was obvious to all the participants, and many individual
awarenesses were pinpointed very easily, so that this second level of subordination of
teaching to learning was obvious to all. The third level dealt with in this workshop, the use by
the teacher of the double feedback loop, was also obvious for all the participants.
The last afternoon was given over to some remarks about memory and retention and about the
difference between practice and repetition, since the participants had questions concerning
energies which could only be answered by entering this field.
At the end of the workshop, it seemed that the participants had gained an entry into the notion
of subordination of teaching to learning and why Silent Way can be considered an example of
it. Obviously much more needs to be done, but the groundwork was laid for an understanding
of the subtle transactions involved in Dr Gattegno's proposition.
© Roslyn Young Besançon, 1993 The Science of Education in Questions - N° 9 - June
1993
"The Subordination of Teaching to Learning" by Roslyn Young is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.