How can teachers move beyond generic pedagogy?
Nobody pays me to spend Saturday evening reading neuroscience papers. Nobody asks me to compare fMRI brain scans with classroom practice. Yet I happily spend hours doing both.
That’s when I realised I’d unknowingly become something I had never heard of until last week: a heutagogical learner.
Who is leading the learning?
Only last week, I discovered another new word for my schema. Not a new teaching strategy. Not another education acronym. A word I’d never encountered in almost 35 years of teaching!
Heutagogy.
I’ve spent years understanding pedagogy in my classroom. Only eight years ago, I discovered andragogy, but I had never known there was a third, possibly higher term.
Watch the video below to learn more.
Definitions
- Gogy means leader
- Pedagogy is a leader of children; how we teach children.
- Andragogy is a leader of adults; how adults choose to learn.
- Heutagogy is self-directed learning; what happens when curiosity becomes self-sustaining.
Pedagogy
In pedagogy, the teacher has primary responsibility for deciding what is taught, when it is taught and how it is learned. This is entirely appropriate when working with children and novice learners.
Andragogy
Malcolm Knowles argued that adults want learning to be relevant, practical and immediately applicable. Adults still value expert guidance, but they expect to adapt ideas to suit their own context – they don’t want their time wasted!
Heutagogy
The learner drives everything. Nobody tells them to learn. Nobody sets the homework. Nobody checks completion. Learning is fuelled entirely by curiosity.
I am not suggesting teachers should make classrooms heutagogical. I suggest that teachers become heutagogical professionals. For example:
Here is a great resource (pedagogy). I cannot force you to use it. In another context, with ‘how to use these ideas’ made clear, you might like these resources because the implementation plans show you how to translate the ideas, and how you might use them in your context (andragogy).
Imagine you enjoy the ideas shared on TeacherToolkit, particularly anything related to neuroscience. One article leads to a research paper. That paper introduces another author. Soon you’re reading books, listening to podcasts and watching lectures entirely because your curiosity has taken over. Nobody has asked you to do any of this. Nobody is checking your progress. That is heutagogy.
One final thought
Every teacher has a “professional hobby”. Some become fascinated by behaviour, SEND, artificial intelligence, questioning, curriculum, or maths mastery.
Not because school leaders told them to, or because Ofsted expects it, but because they are genuinely curious, in some cases, it is that curiosity that changes someone’s teaching.
Over time, their curiosity becomes disciplined expertise.
Expertise isn’t something we acquire simply by being taught everything. At some point, every expert becomes self-directed. The most accomplished teachers I know all have a subject or idea they pursue simply because they want to understand it more deeply. That, perhaps, is the best example I can give you to describe heutagogy.
It’s not common sense, it’s heutagogy – expertise kicking in!
So, whilst this blog hopes to expose you to a new word I have discovered, it isn’t about heutagogy at all. It’s about professional identity. Therefore, the critical question becomes:
What are you learning when nobody is asking you to?
Perhaps the answer says more about your professional identity than your CV ever could?
Looking back over my own career, I can now see that my professional development has followed all three stages.
Pedagogy shaped my classroom practice. Andragogy helped me translate research into my own context. Heutagogy has sustained my curiosity long after any formal qualification ended. Perhaps that’s what expertise really looks like?
Not knowing all the answers, but never losing the desire to keep asking better questions…
