Enliven Education

Who’s leading the way?

May 102013

I came across a twitter ‘live chat’ run by #UkEdChat and hosted by @informed_edu on the theme of The Royal College of Teaching. Having read through the archive I’m now indulging in some longer sentences to clarify my thinking.

The idea that a Royal College could bring greater respect and recognition for the profession, as well as protection from ill-informed political interference, would seem like a pretty uncontroversial premise upon which to build it. But working out how to achieve this in practice is already provoking wide and sometimes heated debate.

One of the tweets that caught my eye was from @mberry who suggested that the concept of ‘collegiality’ could be a useful one where we might find ‘the authority of a master craftsman rather than a leader’s power’.

Whether we are teachers, senior managers, inspectors or teacher trainers we all have responsibility to guide and lead. So perhaps the duty of a Royal College could be to set the standard for us by modelling the kind of leadership that Ken Robinson identifies in his televised TED talk this week where ‘command and control’ is substituted by ‘climate control’.

The College could demonstrate the difference between authoritative leadership and authoritarian leadership. The former setting clear bounds within which creative, intellectual and innovative development could happen, and the latter limiting possibilities by building a culture of fear and resentment (of which we have plenty if the #ukedchat twitter stream is anything to go by).

It’s suggested by one of the contributors to the RCoT introductory booklet, that teachers should not get automatic entry as they did with the GTC but that instead “more experienced/accomplished teachers would be able to undergo ‘rigorous selection processes’ to gain the approval of the college through a tiered structure of memberships and fellowships.”

I would suggest that the College ought instead to operate a more inclusive approach to membership in the same way that any good non-selective state school would do. It should welcome all those who’d like to belong and then work hard to build its own ‘climate of possibility’ where members are inspired to work within clearly defined values, high expectations and rigorous professional standards.

The Genius of Collaboration

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Apr 232013

I couldn’t begin to do the job I do today if I hadn’t spent my whole career developing ideas by listening to; working with; reading about; discussing; being challenged by … what other people think. Intellectual or imaginative break through might sometimes come in moments of private reflection but none of us, not even those we regard to be geniuses, achieve those awakenings all by ourselves. In 1676 Isaac Newton wrote the following in a letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke:

‘What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’

In their book ‘New Kinds of Smart’, Claxton and Lucas have a great chapter titled ‘Intelligence is Social’. In this they make the point that, despite the world being more networked today than at any other time in history, we still see schools promoting individual achievement above all else. Highly competitive systems of rewards, target setting and testing have contributed to a culture in schools where students have precious little opportunity to experience the wealth of learning that comes when we shape ideas together.

The personalised learning agenda of recent years may also have inadvertently contributed to this. It sprung from the good intention of redressing an educational culture that was overly mechanistic and incapable of meeting the range of human needs that inevitably present. But it was patched on to system that was not fit for purpose and would seem instead to resonate with a wider societal culture that’s increasingly obsessed with the needs and rights of the individual.

We are currently facing the most challenging problems that humanity has ever known and we have no clear sense of how the world will unfold over the coming decades. What is certain is that all our futures will depend on our ability to access our most imaginative and creative thinking. It is undoubtedly the responsibility of any school to support each student to achieve their best. But I suggest that we also look to the likes of Isaac Newton and remember that our greatest human potential will be achieved when we make time and space for those individual minds to come together.

Summer is a time for growth

Autonomy, Co-creating Curriculum No Responses »

Apr 142013

As a class teacher I was always struck by how small the children looked at the beginning of a new term. Before the holidays I said goodbye to children who had been almost visibly expanded by their work together – confident in their capacity to raise their own questions; to shape their own ideas; to argue the case; to think for themselves. By the end of a term they were the experts in whatever project we had explored together and in that respect they stood, in my mind, as tall as I did. And so, when I greeted them at the beginning of a new term there was always a fleeting moment of surprise as I was reminded that my students were physically still quite small.

It’s a challenging convention for it to be the job of just one adult to manage the learning of 30 students and it’s not surprising that schools have developed systems that appear to make the job more doable. Telling kids, for example, how exactly to go about a given task would seem very sensible if we want teaching and learning to remain manageable.

But in my experience the opposite is not only true but also critical if we are to really see our children grow. JW Brehm’s research and ‘reactance theory’ of the 1960’s provides good evidence of how a culture that provides the possibility to choose and which trusts us to take responsibility for our own decisions, is also likely to be one that enjoys high levels of cooperation and success. Without the challenge that comes with choice and responsibility we risk creating generations of children who are alienated from a system that holds them back.

We’re heading in to the summer term. It couldn’t be a better time for growth. Here are a few thoughts on how to shape some fertile ground in your classroom:

Put some of your predetermined plans to one side and start the term with experiences that stimulate ideas and questions from the group. Use these questions (rather than any you might have already thought of) to shape how a project proceeds. And then, rather than designing activities for your class, ask the group how they think it will be best to set about their learning journeys. You may not be able to agree to their every suggestion (you are best placed to judge the inevitable limits of resources etc) but it will be possible to work with ideas that come from the group at least to some extent. Your reward will be a class full of students working with high levels of motivation and with ideas that have the best possible chance of engaging lively minds.

The Power of Authenticity (in six minutes)

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Feb 252013

This week I’m giving a six minute talk at a CPD event at Walthamstow Academy. Hard to keep this big theme brief but I’ve given it a go!

In the 1930’s Henry Ford revolutionised the manufacture of cars with his innovative and efficient assembly lines. Until then cars had been individually crafted, and pretty much the reserve of the very wealthy. The new assembly lines meant that cars would now become affordable for many.

Over the last 25 years or so education has undergone a similar process of ‘modernisation’. In an attempt to make schooling more effective for everyone, we have seen the building of a National Curriculum packed with important skills and knowledge for our teachers to deliver. Weekly Timetables have been divided up to accommodate disconnected chunks of learning and students have been processed through it all in the hope that they will all emerge as highly accomplished individuals ready to make their way in the adult world.

What we’ve seen instead are increased levels of stress and disengagement (amongst students and teachers) and many students failing to achieve what they are capable of. The fact is that people are not cars and that a mechanistic approach to education is not a suitable one for developing the complexity of our human minds.

Along with a growing number of educators, I want to urge schools to reconnect learning with what goes on in the real world. I’d like to see students of all ages having opportunities to do things authentically and in ways that make sense within the context of the real lives that they live.

Here’s just 1 good reason why I think the real world is the best possible resource for learning:

It’s about respecting a young person’s inclination to inhabit ‘the here and now’. Teachers are motivated to a large extent by their duty to ensure that each student acquires what they need to leave school one day as competent skilled young adults. Learning objectives are shared with students in the hope that this will make it more likely that the necessary progress is made. But for young people, the idea that learning is important because it will be useful one day simply isn’t enough. In his book ‘Making Learning Whole’ David Perkins describes this really well when he uses the analogy of learning at school being all too often like doing batting practice without ever playing a real game.

Let me put this in to the context of something that I worked on recently with a primary school teacher: His class had been learning about the Saxons. They had made and used a replica Saxon loom. Next on the teacher’s plan for the term was to teach the skill of ‘explanation text’ and he wanted to use their knowledge of the loom to do this. He made a worksheet for the students to complete which outlined the objectives that he was hoping each of them would achieve. They were asked to:

‘Explain a process and ensure that items are clearly sequenced and relevant details are included.’

In addition they were told that the teacher would want to see:

•Separate paragraphs for each stage of the explanation

•Question marks and commas in a list

•A range of time and causal connectives

This approach is rooted firmly in the assembly line approach to education. Once the worksheet is completed the teacher will be able to tick off some objectives and rest easy that ‘explanation text’ has been covered at least for the time being. Whether the students will retain any real benefit from the experience is another matter.

In order to come up with an alternative, I spent time with this teacher puzzling out where ‘explanation text’ fits into the real world; where this kind of writing could be used authentically. And this is what we came up with:

We decided that the group could instead make a simple documentary. For the documentary they would need a script. The process of writing the script would naturally require them to develop the skills that the teacher had in mind to teach in the first place (such as causal connectives or the judicious use of questions marks and commas) because without these the script just wouldn’t make sense. The class would be excited by the idea of making a real documentary that would be viewed by a real audience, and because of this they would be motivated to work really hard until the job was done. At the end of it all the teacher would also be able to add some new objectives to his plan. In the making of a documentary the students would, for example, also have needed to . . .

use curiosity to puzzle things out (how should we organise our different ideas for the film? Would it work if we filmed it and then recorded the sound afterwards? . . . )
use courage try something new (it’s quite scary being filmed but let’s try it and see if we can manage – perhaps we’ll find it easier when we’ve had ago . . . )
use imagination to generate and explore possibilities (what about the idea of making the film in Saxon dress? Perhaps we could talk about the costumes and explain that they’ve been made using woven fabrics . . . )
use reason and discipline to craft things and to balance the more creative thinking (learning the technical skills to make a script and a good film – perhaps we’ll seek advice from someone who does this kind of thing . . . )
collaborate to share ideas and resources (shall we divide up the film in the different themes and have different groups take responsibility for different parts? . . . )

Making a documentary would take a bit longer than completing a worksheet but it wouldn’t need to involve a real camera crew or months of crafting. It would be a junior version of the real game of documentary making.

Allowing students to do things for real (to be historians who make a documentary; or scientists who put on an exhibition; or be writers who publish a book . . . ) , would have the potential to drive the learning with an energy that they and their teacher might never have enjoyed before.

Kids will eat out of your hand if they get to do something for real!

Authenticity, Autonomy No Responses »

Jan 232013

Covering the skills and knowledge that are outlined in the National Curriculum is quite understandably a major preoccupation for schools. But is it the case that in our attempts to do this we are organising learning in ways that leave children feeling disengaged and unreceptive?

This week the RSPB are inviting schools to take part in their annual bird watch – an important national survey of our garden birds. When I last looked birdwatching wasn’t on the NC and I know there will be some schools who simply don’t feel they can spare the time.

But here are a couple of reasons why I think it would be a false economy not to!:

Students love doing things for real. The opportunity to take part in a real research project alongside real scientists is one that they’ll be excited to grab. Authentic projects motivate students to work hard for the common good – a skill that the world could never have too much of!

Because of the pressures on schools we are all too often teaching skills out of context – with the well-intentioned rationale that what the students learn will be useful one day. But young people operate largely in the here and now and will work with much greater enthusiasm and application if they can see the point of what they’re learning.

Here (courtesy of the RSPB Community website) is a lovely example of the kinds of riches a birdwatching research project could bring to your classroom!

We are the education system

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Dec 042012

Disgruntlement is growing about what the new Primary Curriculum will include when it finally emerges. The latest I’ve heard (via the twitter grapevine) is that it’s currently characterised by inaccuracies and typos and that it won’t encourage high achievement.

It seems likely that it will fall short of what many of us might in an ideal world have hoped for. But on the other hand I’m inclined to think that it could be time to take these guidelines a little less seriously. Can we instead put our energies into what we can do ourselves to make this game of learning more meaningful and effective?

In a recent talk ‘Let us Venture … just to see’, Ken Robinson reminds us that if we want education to meet the needs of the 21st century we need to think in terms of radical transformation. And that transformation of the kind we need (in fact he calls it revolution) will come, not from the redrafters of policy but instead from the grass roots. He explains that it’s the practitioners who are best placed to really change things because it is they, not the politicians who are the education system.

And that transformation I believe can be achieved no matter what the dictates from above.

We can, for example, and no matter what the new curriculum says, allow students to raise their own questions within a given topic rather than predefine those questions for them; we can let students to do things for real (they can be writers who (self) publish books or scientists who make (simple) documentaries); we can provide opportunities for students to experience the value of collaboration and the wealth of learning that becomes possible when we have genuine dialogue with each other; we can allow time and space for making mistakes – for trying things out, for taking risks and for learning from experience rather than from instruction; we can give students the opportunities to learn that it is through discipline and rigour that we take the most imaginative ideas through to the most sophisticated outcomes.

Let’s not wait for the politicians to get it right – let’s show them how it’s done and hope that they have the sense one day to recognise what really works.

My TEDx talk: reinventing education in practice

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Jul 182012

My form teacher at secondary school told me that I’d get myself into trouble one day by talking too much and sure enough sticking to the TED golden rule of speaking for no more than 18 minutes at the TEDxSWPS was once such occasion! The result was a more garbled ending than I’d planned so here is the list (that I’d intended to conclude with!) of what I think we should be doing in our schools if we want our education system to nurture the brilliance of our human capacity:

We need to . . .

provide opportunities that nurture open and curious minds – where students can raise their own questions and pursue ideas that are of real interest to them
provide opportunities for students to do things for real – to be writers who publish books, to be historians who put on exhibitions, to be scientists who make documentaries
provide opportunities where students can experience the value of collaboration – and the wealth of learning that happens when we are willing to have dialogue with each other
allow time and space for making mistakes, for trying things out, for taking risks – for learning from experience rather than from instruction
provide opportunities that teach how discipline and rigour are what take the most imaginative ideas through to the most sophisticated outcomes
provide opportunities for students to experience the intrinsic reward of doing something exceptionally well and of then sharing it with a real audience

If you’d like to hear the whole talk click here to find it on Youtube.

Teaching reading: mechanics or meaning?

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Jul 022012

There’s an article on the BBC News website today about the findings of the All-Party Parliamentary Literacy Group Commission who have, after much deliberation and research, concluded that boys need more help if they are to become successful and enthusiastic readers. The same article quotes the schools minister Nick Gibb talking about the importance of encouraging kids to read for pleasure and the great work that the government is doing in asking teachers to focus on the teaching of phonics as a means of achieving this.

In his book ‘Making Learning Whole’, David Perkins describes how the tendency in schools to abstract skills from meaningful contexts ‘is like batting practice without knowing the whole game’ and the surest way of disengaging lively minds. Reading is a rich experience and what we need is an approach to the teaching of it that allows students to enjoy its complexity from the outset. What we are being offered instead is an approach where pleasure is only available to those who manage to survive the tedium of the phonics lessons. I wonder if the Commission looked in to whether boys are less inclined than girls to engage when learning is abstracted in this way.

From the earliest years through to the latest, all students need opportunities in school to do what any reader who reads for pleasure does. They need, for example, to choose books that they really like (rather than be told what to read); they need quiet time set aside for reading and opportunities to talk with their friends about the books they like (rather than reading only to the teacher in order to be assessed); they need to experience from the earliest experiences with books that learning to read is something worth doing.

For years now I have been encouraging teachers to run ‘book clubs’ in schools where small groups of students meet on a weekly or fortnightly basis to share books that they are enjoying in just the same way that adults join book clubs in their local communities. Students are asked to prepare for the clubs in advance by choosing an extract from a book they’re enjoying and then thinking of something to say about it. The teacher facilitates the group and at the same time observes and supports the development of a wide range of skills (including phonics). Children come to the clubs with an expectation that it will be fun and demonstrate high levels of motivation to become more proficient and sophisticated readers.

The following extract, written by a 10 year old boy in preparation for his book club, is a great reminder of how much boys can enjoy reading if they are given the right opportunities to engage with it:

In my extract the main character Percy Jackson is in hell with 2 of his friends called Annabeth (a half blood) and Gover (a satyr). They’re in front of Hades the God of the Underworld, and their only escape route is 3 pearls which take you to wherever you want to go if you crush one under your foot. Oh did I mention that his mum is there as well? So only 3 of them can get back to the surface of the world and I wanted to know what you’d do in a situation where 2 of your closest friends and your mum and you are in hell (not that it’s very likely that you ever will be) and only three of you can get back. Who would you leave behind? Tell me after I’ve read because then you can put yourself in more of the same situation.

If you would like to discuss having a workshop on why and how to establish ‘book clubs’ in your school please get in touch via the ‘make contact’ page

Going for gold

Growth Mindset 2 Responses »

Apr 252012

A colleague has invited me to do a TEDx talk in the summer. It’s an exciting opportunity and I was inspired by the useful list of tips for speakers that included the invitation to ‘dream big’ and ‘give the best talk you have ever given’. I love a challenge and am grateful for the reminder that in the spirit of the Olympic athlete there’s always the possibility of beating your personal best.

But achieving your best ever is a lot easier said than done. It’s not just a question of working hard although undoubtedly that’s important. For lots of us it’s also about wrestling with the unhelpful voices in our heads that ask whether it might be safer to quit while the going’s good.

Since many of us experienced school systems that constantly judged and measured, it’s perhaps inevitable that we find ourselves oscillating between the exciting possibility of success and the troubling fear of failure. In her book ‘Mindset’ Carol Dweck persuades us that, no matter what our prevailing habits of mind, we can decide to move from a ‘fixed mindset’ (that is overly informed by a fear of failure) towards a ‘growth mindset’ that embraces challenge as opportunity for new learning.

I’m convinced that she’s right and that we can choose to be less defined by the judgments (good and bad) that have been made about us over the years. The challenge for teachers (and parents) of course is how to help our children avoid the ‘fixed mindset’ in the first place. Despite the fact that the school system requires us to judge and measure perhaps more than ever before, I believe there is still a lot we can be doing to bring about important change to the way our children learn. My key priorities would be to . . .

Ensure that children have opportunities to learn in the context of purposeful and engaging projects. (I find ICT skills a challenge to master, but I would be willing to work hard to learn the skills for building a web-site if it’s something I have a use for now. If I’m asked to learn about it now because it might be useful one day there’s a risk I’ll lack the motivation to apply myself to the challenges I’ll inevitably encounter.)
Trust and support children to take greater responsibility for their learning. (If I am to make progress with my work I need to have the freedom to make my own decisions about such things as who it might be good to team up with; what specific areas I want to research; how I can best share what I have learnt; when I want to keep going all day because I’m on a roll; and when I could do with a break . . .)
Develop dialogue in the classroom that encourages open, rigorous, and collaborative thinking where ideas can be explored rather than judged. (I do my best thinking when I’m rolling ideas around with other people. I find the dynamic of a larger group especially useful because of the time it allows for listening and reflecting when a range of ideas are being shared.)

Click here to listen to Carol Dweck talking about Mindsets and here to find out more about the course that teaches the practical skills for the ideas described above.

What the scientists say

Authenticity, Autonomy, Creativity No Responses »

Mar 082012

I didn’t get on that well with science when I was at school. My strongest memory is the smell of my singed eyebrows after I’d been fiddling absent-mindedly with a Bunsen burner. But over the years I’ve enjoyed having to learn more about what it is to think scientifically and I’m now quite fascinated by a subject that provides such fertile ground for creative thinking.

So I was concerned the other day when I heard a science teacher on Youtube describing her volcano model demonstration as an ‘experiment’. I wondered whether the teacher in question was suffering from ‘aboutitis’ that David Perkins warns of in his book ‘Making Learning Whole’. The main symptom of the condition being a disproportionate tendency to teach children about things coupled with a near total absence of opportunity for them to really experiment and find stuff out for themselves.

It’s probably not surprising that in an era dominated by targets, teachers have developed strategies for getting through the curriculum in what might feel to be as efficient a way as possible. Skipping some of the experimentation and being satisfied instead with a well explained demonstration is, perhaps, just one of the inevitable outcomes.

But recent developments in neuroscience and social research, is increasingly dispelling old myths and forging new understandings of why creative thinking is not something that we can afford to put to one side when the pressure’s on. I’m very excited about what this work implies for the educational world and how it is inspiring teachers to take a fresh look at their practice.

If you’d like a taste of what some of this research has to offer click here for a captivating discussion paper by Dr Paul Howard-Jones from the Higher Education Academy, University of Bristol.

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