This post explores and records a few ideas my guitar teacher shared with me that I’ve been thinking about

Cumulative dysfluency

I’ve been aware of gaps in my knowledge but never really appreciated how these gaps limit my ability to progress. This is a known concept in education - “cumulative dysfluency”.

There are serious consequences for pupils when a curriculum is not sequenced or designed effectively. Gaps in pupils’ knowledge accumulate as they become layered on top of one another in a curriculum sequence. This accumulation of gaps, known as dysfluency, limits pupils’ ability to acquire the complex skills that depend on them, and may even prevent them entirely from gaining those skills. This problem is sometimes called ‘cumulative dysfluency’ (Ofsted School Inspection Update 2019)

This has been a big problem for me as an independent learner - it’s very difficult to avoid a scattergun approach when you’re learning without guidance.

Curriculum and progress

It is necessary to sequence learning towards a given goal - and that’s why curriculum exist.

Learning has been defined in cognitive psychology as an alteration in long-term memory: ‘If nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned’. Progress, therefore, means knowing more (including knowing how to do more) and remembering more. When new knowledge and existing knowledge connect in pupils’ minds, this gives rise to understanding. As pupils develop unconscious competence and fluency, this will allow them to develop skills, i.e. the capacity to perform complex operations, drawing on what is known. (Ofsted School Inspection Update 2019)

Ofsted have a working definition for curriculum that is:

  • the framework for setting out the aims of a programme of education, including the knowledge and skills to be gained at each stage (intent)
  • the translation of that framework over time into a structure and narrative, within an institutional context ( implementation)
  • the evaluation of what knowledge and understanding pupils have gained against expectations (impact/outcomes).

Procedural memory and learning

A goal is to bring our playing skills into procedural memory

Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory (unconscious, long-term memory) which aids the performance of particular types of tasks without conscious awareness of these previous experiences.

And here’s how we get things into procedural memory

Procedural memory is created through procedural learning, or repeating a complex activity over and over again until all of the relevant neural systems work together to automatically produce the activity. Implicit procedural learning is essential for the development of any motor skill or cognitive activity.