How does learning happen best?

I've been teaching or rather trying to facilitate learning about theological reflection. I keep an eye on research as best I can to help me to reflect ongoingly on things learning. One of the things I put before students is a bunch of models of theological reflection. The main one of these is an adaptation of the Kolb cycle; the pastoral cycle or spiral (there are others) One of the things I have said to students is that we should regard this as a tool for making sure that the things that happen when we reflect at our best are built into our reflection and become second nature to us: they are the ingredients of good reflection and that therefore we may notice that things are not as tidy as the models would seem to imply. This was simply being honest on my part: my observation of using the pastoral spiral to facilitate reflection on critical incidents or aspects of placement experience showed me that things that fit under the different phases of the spiral/cycle simply do not appear in the 'right' order often. A thought about an action point may actually feed back to analysis because it enables us to see a dimension of the situation afresh. Or it may feed back to reflection by exposing a theological assumption or opening up a theological vista not previously noted. The same kind of feed-back or feed-forward things can be seen with all of the staging points on the spiral/cycle.

So I felt affirmed to have been pointed to this article,
How does learning happen best? in which Phil Race makes a consonant observation: "I maintain that human brains are much more sophisticated than merely to perform sequential operations in any particular order. Our brains work on overlapping areas all at once. Whatever we do, we have feelings about it. We're always making sense of the feedback we get as we do things or as we think things. We're always in the process of making sense of the experience of what we try to do or try to think. In short, all the stages in our learning are going on all the time. Certainly, we may focus on one aspect of learning more than others at a given time, but we don't suddenly stop doing one thing and switch to another."
No argument from me!
He offers instead a ripples on a pond model. I'm not actually convinced that this is better in terms of the diagram, but the idea of feedback is at least conceptually built in. I note, too, that he is looking at learning through a different set of staging points (helpfully recognising the emotional side of the matter too). I'm going to be thinking about the modelling even more now, though ....