FOREWORD

I first read (or perhaps, more precisely, started reading) How Do We Learn? after hearing Héctor Ruiz Martín speak at a researchED conference in Santiago, Chile, in November 2022.

Having now read the book fully, twice, I am convinced that it will prove to be one of the most important books in education for the foreseeable future, destined to enter the pantheon of must-read books on the science of learning. If you work in education, you simply cannot afford not to read this book. It is indispensable, full stop.

But let me return to my introduction to Héctor and his work. It might not seem especially remarkable to point out that hearing him speak in Santiago caused me to instantaneously buy and read his book, save for the fact that, at the time, it was available only in Spanish (under the title ¿Como Aprendemos?) and my Spanish was rudimentary at best.

Reading ¿Como Aprendemos? the first time entailed six months of hard cognitive labor for me. I struggled phrase by phrase and sometimes word by word. But I persisted. Even through the haze of my partial understanding, the book offered up one insight after another.

Still, I ask myself now, what about Héctor's presentation might have driven me to go to such lengths to read his book in Spanish? After all, I had listened to informed presentations on cognitive psychology before; in fact, I knew a lot of the science Héctor was discussing to some degree or another. I had read dozens of other books on the topic and there were ones in my native language that I could have read in a fraction of the time.

Ironically, some of the things that were so effective about his presentation, and that might also be said about this book, might at first sound insufficiently dramatic to warrant a six-month personal translation odyssey.1 It was carefully explicated. It was thorough and logically and progressively organized. And its style was calm and patient.

Let me begin with this last point, which was remarkable because Héctor, there on the stage, as he often is in this book, was engaged at least in part in quietly dismantling a series of common misconceptions and distortions about how people learn—edu-myths, as you might call them—and this sort of work is often done elsewhere in a style that tends toward judgment and rancor, as if it was a deliberate choice of people who held incorrect ideas about learning to do so.

But Héctor proceeded in Santiago, as he does here, with patience and without judgment, steadily helping his audience to reconceptualize first one key idea and then another. Gradualism, I am reminded, has been a more productive force in the history of ideas than revolution, and that's how Héctor's work plays out. You don't realize at first that he is preparing to shift your worldview. You merely follow as he goes steadily from point to point until the ideas start to coalesce and suddenly you realize that you understand something very well and quite differently than you did previously.

The ideas are not just clear, they are connected, and through those connections a model emerges. It is powerful because it is cohesive. Suddenly you understand not just bits and pieces but something bigger.

Interestingly, this exact topic, conceptual change, or how to change the minds of learners who already believe something else—possibly something erroneous—is a topic Héctor writes about explicitly in this book, and he notes that it requires time and patience.

But also more than patience. Something like trust must also be built up. As Jonathan Haidt points out in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, we are most likely to change our opinions not when confronted by someone who disparages us but in discussion with someone who understands us, whom we have come to trust and feel connected to. The motive in a book like this has to be truth and not ideology, and you feel that right from the outset. “I am a scientist first,” Héctor told me in Santiago, and his is a book for people who are motivated to seek the best, clearest, and comprehensive summary of our aggregated knowledge about human cognition. It's a book for people who want to know what the evidence tells us, whether it's what they expected or not.

The phrase “well-organized” might also seem at first unprepossessing as a term of praise, but like patience, it too is profoundly important. We can only aspire to guide people to understand differently by “building the concepts” one by one, Héctor writes. We have to make sure people understand all the research, but then also connect the pieces together.

In seeking to understand how people learn we are not seeking to understand a handful of useful ideas, but to grasp a body of knowledge, and that means understanding how it fits together. To facilitate that, sequence is highly relevant. The order, the thoroughness, the organization of the knowledge is really, really important. Durable and useful learning, as I learned from reading this book, is built on the connections between the ideas we understand. An organized methodical presentation of connected ideas from an interlocutor whose motives you trust leads to a systematic understanding of the big picture. That perhaps is what this book gives its readers more than any other—the comprehensiveness of it, the thoroughness, the linkages among ideas.

But the gradual, progressive, impeccably organized flow of ideas in the book is important in another way too. “Properly sequencing learning goals and adjusting task difficulty not only has positive consequences for the effectiveness of our memory … but also indirectly affects our motivation. Cognition and motivation are interconnected,” Héctor explains in this book. When you feel things coming together, you grasp that you are building a substantive and useful understanding. Success at learning is one of the greatest sources of motivation to a learner. That you feel yourself understanding deeply and connecting the dots causes you to persist. This is yet another powerful lesson for our classrooms that Héctor will explain in this book. Take it from a guy who read his book in a language he didn't speak.

Earlier I used another potentially unprepossessing term not generally heard in the arts of marketing and persuasion to praise Héctor's work: carefully explicated.

You can count on Héctor to know the science from just about every angle, but one of the best parts of his presentation in Santiago—and which is also true of this book—was the way he not just explained the principles of cognitive psychology but brought them to life. He didn't just tell us why the brain worked the way it did and leave it at useful abstraction; he demonstrated it there in the hall with 400 participants or so, causing us, for example, to remember more from a list of words whose meaning we thought deliberately about and connected to our prior knowledge than from a list we thought deliberately about but didn't try to link to prior knowledge. He ran a live experiment on us to prove the point, in other words. And it worked!

Active learning, he showed us, entailed the brain actively making connections between knowledge that was already encoded in long-term memory and the object of present inquiry.

As he explains it in this book, in one of the most profoundly insightful passages:

The simple yet powerful idea that emphasizes the importance of students actively seeking meaning in what they are learning, trying to relate it to their prior knowledge, reflecting on its implications for what they already know, and ultimately, thinking about it forms the basis of what is known as active learning.

Active learning is often confused with educational practices in which the student “does things”—or what is known as learning by doing. But active learning could be better defined as learning by thinking. It encompasses any learning experience in which the student actively thinks about the learning object, seeking meaning and comparing it with their prior knowledge.

His ability to help his listeners conceptualize ideas through images is another theme you will notice. A photo of Héctor on stage in Santiago shows him making this idea profoundly accessible by presenting it visually.

Memory and learning, he is telling us here, come from the connections created between new information and existing knowledge (or between ideas already present in our memory that had never been connected before). It's the connections—the lines between and among the dots—that represent the building of durable meaningful knowledge.

As his ability to demonstrate—with an ad hoc experiment, with an image to crystallize an abstract idea—shows, he is able to combine vast knowledge with a pragmatic bent, and this is a rare thing. The “curse of knowledge” or the “expert's blind spot” is yet another idea that you will encounter in this book. It is the idea that the more you know about something, the harder it is to explain what you know to a novice or even understand why and how it became clear to you.

So while he is a research scientist of encyclopedic knowledge, he also “speaks teacher” and can translate his knowledge into practical suggestions of what it might look like on Monday morning with 30 14-year-olds.

All of which I suppose explains why I persisted with my ad hoc translation project...