Caleb Gattegno
[1] He is best known for introducing new approaches to teaching and learning mathematics (Visible & Tangible Math), foreign languages (The Silent Way) and reading (Words in Color).
[4] He took external examinations when he was 20 years old and obtained a teaching license in physics and chemistry from the University of Marseille in Cairo.
[2] Gattegno's pedagogical approach is characterised by propositions based on the observation of human learning in many and varied situations.
Human beings have a highly developed sense of the economics of their own energy and are very sensitive to the cost involved in using it.
It is therefore essential to teach in ways that are efficient in terms of the amount of energy spent by learners.
To be able to quantitively determine whether one method was more efficient than another, he created a unit of measurement for the effort used to learn.
[7] They produced one-minute television films that featured animation contents that presented: 1) raw data on how the English language works; 2) the language's spatial ordering; 3) the effects of transformations; and, 4) the concepts of insertion, reversal, substitution, and addition.
[7] For Gattegno, certain kinds of learning are very expensive in terms of energy, i.e., ogdens, while others are practically free.
We often recognise a face without being able to remember the name of the person ... not to mention all that almost all of us have forgotten much of what we "learned" at school.
When we look at something – a street, a film, a person, a fine view – photons move from what we are contemplating and enter our eyes to strike the retina.
We keep in our minds a huge quantity of information simply because we have seen, heard, tasted, smelled or felt it.
Gattegno proposed that we should base education, not on memorization, which has a high energetic cost and is often unreliable, but on retention.
His methodology is based on the idea that education is built around the acquisition of awareness obtained from the elements of learning.
The materials are intended to be used along with techniques aimed at leading students through a succession of awarenesses.
[9] Here, Cuisenaire rods are used, particularly with beginners, to create visible and tangible situations from which the students can induce the structures of the language.
The teacher is thus able to propose a sequence of pedagogical challenges adapted precisely to the evolution of the students' learning.
It is therefore very difficult for a teacher to closely follow a detailed lesson-plan, since the students are actively exploring the domain and have the freedom to take the lesson wherever they need it to go.
The class becomes a kind of guided improvisation in which the teacher launches a challenge at a suitable level for the students, and if necessary nudges them into the awarenesses they need to have in order to learn.
This is the case whatever the subject being dealt with, and is what is meant by Gattegno's expression, "the subordination of teaching to learning".
Indeed, as we live our everyday lives, we become aware of all sorts of things at great speed throughout the day: the price of bananas, that these bananas are not ripe enough, that the price of the yoghurts has been reduced because they are close to their sell-by date .... All our life is a succession of tiny awarenesses.
Gattegno suggests that learning takes place in four stages which can be described in terms of awareness.
These mistakes enable me to progress because by observing what happens and becoming aware of it I can adapt my attempts in relation to the feedback given by the environment.
