All Learning Happens in Small Steps

A theory

I have a little theory. All learning happens in small steps. All new learning is a small step, building on what students already know.

Small steps have become one of the central ways I look at learning. I'll get to the implications in a minute. First, a story.

Evolution

Charles Darwin's discovery of the theory of evolution is one of the marvels of the human mind. The idea that species change over time might seem obvious to us today, but it was a massive conceptual leap at the time.

One might think that Darwin's discovery contradicts my thesis, that all learning happens in small steps. The theory of natural selection feels like a radical breakthrough, the kind of idea that arrives fully formed in a single stroke of genius. Fortunately, Darwin kept incredibly detailed notebooks during the time he was formulating his theory, and those notebooks give us a window into how the discovery happened.

The truth is, there was no eureka moment. Darwin's insights emerged slowly, over years and hundreds of pages of writing. He built on contemporaries like Thomas Malthus, whose essay on population growth sparked Darwin’s thinking about the struggle for existence, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who had earlier suggested that species might change over time. Darwin combined those influences with his own painstaking observations on the Galápagos Islands and elsewhere.

His journals show him wrestling with the pieces that became his grand theory, tiptoeing around an idea that seems obvious today. Reading his journals, it becomes surprising he didn’t discover evolution sooner. The discovery of evolution by natural selection was not a single leap, but a staircase of small steps that added up to something remarkable.¹

Classrooms

My theory is simple. There are no large conceptual leaps, no eureka moments, no huge realizations. There is the slow, steady accumulation of learning. It’s not as flashy as big a-ha moments, but there’s magic in getting all the pieces to fit together in the right way.

There are a lot of corollaries of the “all learning happens in small steps.” Here are a few:

• The most important variable in student learning is what they already know. Each small step builds on one or several steps that came before it. The best thing I can do to help students learn something is figure out what that learning builds off of and make sure the foundation is secure. If I'm teaching two-step equations, give students some practice with one-step equations. If I'm teaching angle theorems, make sure students have a good intuition for the size of angles.

• Students often arrive to class with experiences or intuition that academic learning can build off of. Everyday experiences with numbers, proportions, unknowns, and more can act as extra building blocks, and using those building blocks smooths the learning process.

• When students appear to pick something up quickly or make a big leap, it's typically because they already know a lot about a topic. Maybe one student comes in knowing a lot about tips and discounts, and knows what increase and decrease mean. To a teacher it seems like they pick up percent increase and decrease problems quickly. Really, they already knew a lot about the topic. They're still learning one small step at a time, they've just already taken a bunch of the steps. It might be tempting to watch that student and wish that every other student could make the same leaps. But another student who speaks English as a second language, doesn't know what increase and decrease mean, and isn't familiar with tips needs you to guide them through each of those little steps along the way. The best way to facilitate an a-ha moment is to give students all the pieces they need to make the leap a small, manageable step.

• If I try to teach something that isn't connected to the step before it, students will struggle to remember and apply it in the future. If I try to bash that piece of knowledge into their brains without making any connections, it ends up as inert, rote knowledge. This is what people often mean when they talk about memorization. Avoid teaching like this. Get students thinking about the connections between ideas, and make sure each new idea is connected to something students already know.

• If I push students to take steps that are too big, they will need much more practice for the learning to stick. When the steps are small and all fit together, students need less practice. Practice is still important. I’m a big believer in practice. But when I get small steps right, students need a few rounds of practice with a handful of questions each, and we can keep moving. I don’t want to spend time grinding through long rounds of practice and still finding that students struggle to remember.

• Trying to teach too many things at once leads to fragile learning. From the teacher's perspective, it might seem obvious that if you know A, then B must be true, and B leads to C, and then D. But students need time to consolidate each step along the way, and rushing means the whole thing will fall apart. It might seem in the moment like students are following along, but trying to teach A → B → C → D in one go just means you'll show up to class the next day and realize you need to start at B again. Or, more accurately, some students who already knew A and B and C remember everything, and students who didn’t felt lost. Take one step at a time, practice and consolidate, then take the next step.

• Learning builds on what students already know, so if students arrive with misconceptions they need to be addressed directly or learning will reinforce those misconceptions. Since learning happens in small steps, misconceptions that become ingrained are hard to change. Avoid rules that expire, build the foundation slowly, and address misconceptions directly before moving on.

An Architect

I don’t have any proof. This is just a theory. But it’s a theory that makes a lot of sense to me, both with my experience as a teacher and my knowledge of how learning works. Most importantly, the idea that all learning happens in small steps is actionable. If I see my students struggling, I have a few clear ways to respond. I can slow down and make sure each step is secure before moving on. I can step back and break the learning down into smaller steps. I can find ways for students to see how what they are learning is connected to something they already know.

I also think focusing on small steps changes how we look at teachers and teaching. The assumption that teaching is about creating a-ha moments creates an image of the ideal teacher as a passionate, inspiring storyteller who dazzles students with big ideas. Through the lens of small steps I think of a great teacher more like an architect. Someone working slowly and patiently behind the scenes, making sure the pieces fit together. Maybe no one will ever appreciate that work but it makes the whole structure strong and lasting. The architect’s work isn’t always flashy, but it endures. In the same way, great teaching often means carefully designing a sequence of small steps so that understanding holds up years later, even if students never remember exactly how it was built.

1. The book Darwin on Man is a great tour of Darwin’s discovery and all of the thinking that led to it.