How do people really learn?

Trust or Fear?

"The main driving force for change [in education] in England has become fear: fear of poor exam results, fear of poor inspection grades, fear of sliding down the national league tables, and fear of public humiliation and closure. Fear is inimical to learning."

"We trust schools to act in the best interests of their pupils..."

The first of the two quotations above comes from Frank Coffield's excellent new book From Exam Factories to Communities of Discovery. The second is from a statement by the Department for Education, quoted in an article in this week's Observer newspaper. Now the DfE statement was referring specifically to the nutritional quality of food available in schools, but it does raise the more general question of the extent to which central government and its agenices really do trust educational institutions. Is the main driving force for change in education fear or is it trust? It certainly cannot be both, since the more fear there is within any system the less trust can develop, and vice versa.

A climate of fear might just help in the short term to boost shallow learning but it can only detract from real learning. As Coffield says (on pages 41 and 43):

"Young people emerge from 11 years of constant testing better at passing tests but poorer at learning.
...
Those who pass the tests and gain qualifications are not independent, critical thinkers who know how to take responsibility for their own learning, because they have not had the opportunity to play such a role.

If our education system is to help produce 'independent, critical thinkers who know how to take responsibility for their own learning' there is an urgent need to reduce institutional fear and to develop institutional and professional trust.

But how are we to do this after so many years in which trust has been eroded?

"For two decades our computer education has been hopeless."

Under this provocative headline the Observer newspaper devoted no fewer than five pages last Sunday to promoting the idea that we need to 'reboot' the computing curriculum in British schools.

Click here for the main article. The five-page feature also included a manifesto for teaching computer science in the 21st century, profiles of several teenage coders, the views of some experts, a look at what's happening in the rest of the world, and a couple of short article: Girls and Coding and The Teachers' View.

What lies behind all of this is a growing consensus that the way we have been teaching young people about IT (or ICT, or whatever you want to call it) has been both boring and misguided.

Instead of educating children about the most revolutionary technology of their young lifetimes, we have focused on training them to use obsolescent software...

... as passive consumers of closed devices and services...

As Depala Kush, one of the young people profiled in the feature, put it:

"My [ICT] coursework was a 60-page Word document explaining how I made an Excel document and how it worked, and it was painful and tedious."

The Observer feature promotes the idea that gaining a practical understanding of computer science through learning how to code should be at the heart of computer education. I think it is enormously exciting that we could be on the brink of introducing new approaches that should enable young people to understand how they can use and control technology for creative and innovative purposes.

It's also interesting, though, to note that some of the young people featured in the profiles learnt about coding outside the school system. This is what some of them said:

If it was left to the school I wouldn't have done any of this. When it's not forced down your throat at school, I think you can learn it much quicker.

If I'd never gone to Young Rewired State [week-long projects during the school summer holidays] in 2010 and 2011 , I wouldn't have come anywhere near as far as I have. I owe a lot to those weeks.

Two examples of how young people really learn! And it's interesting that the pressure to move away from a boring and uncreative ICT curriculum is coming from young people themselves and from a journalist (John Naughton) rather than from the educational establishment. Although to be fair I should point out that Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, did make all the right points about the IT/ICT/computing curriculum at a speech at the BETT show back in January.

Right now I feel optimistic about the future of IT/computing education!

The picture above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence

"Rather messy, higgledy-piggledy... everything seems randomly connected to everything else"

What would you think of a school, college or programme of learning that received an inspection report describing it as a:

rather messy, higgledy-piggledy design, where everything seems randomly connected to everything else?

You might regard this as a rather damning judgement. But these are the words* used by Danah Zohar to describe the neural net of the human brain, which is arguably the world's most successful learning system. And I would say that much really successful human learning is indeed messy, higgledy-piggledy and somewhat random. Just think about how a child learns its native language - certainly not through a linear series of carefully planned lessons each with a clear-cut outcome. And I would say that the same is true of learning to ride a bike, of learning to play a musical instrument and a host of other real learning experiences. We learn best by being immersed in a rich learning environment and with the support of people who care about us.

So why do headteachers, policy-makers and inspectors demand that programmes of learning should be linear and coherent? Maybe there would be more real learning if we modelled our programmes on the messy reality that seems to lie behind successful learning experiences. Maybe there would be more real learning if teachers were encouraged to take their students off-piste, as described by Rebecca Front.

* The quotation comes originally from the book The Quantum Self, and is cited in Margaret Wheatley's excellent book Leadership and the New Science.  I have just removed one word to make Zohar's words fit my context: the original talked of a "higgledy-piggledy wiring design".

The cult of testing - a modern superstition?

In an article in today's Observer newspaper the writer Frank Cottrell Boyce says:

The cult of testing has its roots in that great modern superstition: competition. Competition might sharpen the knife, but it will never invent the knife.

I like this. It's a neat way of pointing out not just that the emphasis on competition in schooling can stifle creativity, but also - and this is important - that the fixation with testing and competition is just a superstition. Placing one's trust in tests and competitiveness is as unscientific and irrational as hanging a horeshoe over your front door to bring good luck.

We definitely need less testing in schools and more of Frank Cottrell Boyces' story telling.

'Off-piste' learning

Back in July 2009 I quoted the Actress Rebecca Front talking about the school she had attended as a girl:

Academically it was nothing special. But there were enough flashes of brilliance and wisdom and real affection from the staff to offer an education in the truest sense – a drawing out of what was there in us all anyway…

What stays with me as I get older are the off-piste moments from teachers with a little freedom to be iconoclasts or enthusiasts.

I was reminded of this recently when I read this post from the blog of my good friend Andy Miller. In it he talks of an inspirational teacher of his back in the 1960s and of the 'Field Club' which she organised. I think Andy's Field Club was very much an example of what Rebecca Front meant by 'off-piste moments from teachers'. I like this idea of learning 'off-piste', in other words getting away from the set route and the ski-tracks (in other words the set curriculum and pre-planned learning objectives).

The picture above is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence

Welcome back!

I have left this blog to languish for an embarrassingly long period of time (due to the usual excuses about life being busy etc. etc. etc.)

But I have decided to bring How do people really learn? back to life.

Interestingly I have just looked back at the old posts and found that almost all the links in them still work. The only important link that was dead was to Frank Coffield's excellent book Just suppose teaching and learning became the first priority... But I have found a new link to an online pdf version of the book. Here it is.

Activity Theory, targets, The Patients Association, NEETs - and what we need to do to promote real learning - Part 2

A-levels are "definitely not challenging enough – but we don't want them any more difficult or our results would go down!"

Head of Sixth Form, West Midlands, quoted in
Straight A’s? A-level teachers’ views on today’s A-levels, Anastasia de Waal (2009)

Activity theory (see my previous post) is a useful tool for analysing and understanding human work activity. So let's use one of the simplest aspects of activity theory - the triangular activity system diagram - to help analyse what lies behind the above quotation (which surely reflects the often unspoken priorities behind many educational institutions these days).

In my previous blog post I suggested what I will now call 'Activity System 1' (see below) as a model of what is happening in a school or college. Remember that at the left of the triangle we have the subject, the individual or group engaged in the activity, at the right we have the object, 'the raw material or problem space at which the activity is directed, and which is molded and transformed into outcomes' and at the top we have the tools that are used to achieve the object.

Activity System 1

But the quotation from the Head of Sixth Form implies that the learner and the learning are not the object of the activity in a school or college. It states quite clearly that the object of the exercise is to ensure that 'our results do not go down', in other words that the institution does not look bad in league tables, inspection reports etc. So if we want to represent what is really happening (rather than what we pretend is happening) in schools and colleges then the diagram should surely look something like Activity System 2a, below.

Activity System 2a

What is actually quite chilling about the quotation at the top of this post is that the Head of Sixth Form is stating quite clearly that it is more important for the school or college to look good in the league tables than to challenge the students. What have we come to if this is what sixth form education is actually about? And if the organisation puts its own perceived needs ahead of those of the students in this way, then this tells us what we need to write at the top of Activity System 2a in order to complete it (i.e. the 'cultural tools' being used). The sad fact is that the tools of the educational trade are no longer classrooms, lesson plans textbooks etc. No, the tools are the learners themselves. Schools and colleges quite literally use the learners and their learning as tools to achieve their real aim, which is to look good in terms of results, league tables and inspection reports. It's a sort of beauty contest in which the learners and their learning are merely the false eyelashes with which one tries to dazzle the judges. The complete activity system is shown below.

Activity System 2b

In the next post I will explain why this helps to explain why after 10 years of unparalleled financial investment in learning we have so much dysfunction in the system (e.g. record numbers of NEETS* and last week's paradoxical findings that the more help underperforming pupils get from classroom assistants the worse they achieve).

*NEETS are young people 'not in employment, education or training'.

Activity Theory, targets, The Patients Association, NEETs - and what we need to do to promote real learning

This might be a bit complicated :-).

What I want to try to do is to pull together several very different ideas to show why I believe that the target culture actually prevents us from promoting real learning. I will spread what I have to say over two or three separate blog posts, starting today with the theoretical bit.

 

 

Fig 1. Simplified diagram of Activity System

 

Activity Theory was first developed by Aleksei Leontiev, a Soviet psychologist, and then taken further in recent years by Scandanavian academics, notably Yrjö Engeström. At the heart of Activity Theory is the idea of analysing human behaviour in terms of communal work activity. (Interestingly, Activity theory is used both by educational psychologists and by those studying human-computer action so it is highly relevant to those of us who make our living in the field of e-learning - but that is beside the point here.)

Engeström used the idea of an 'Activity System' to focus on how human activity works, and fig. 1 shows a simplified version of this: the subject is an individual or group engaged in a a communal/work activity, the object is

 

the 'raw material' or 'problem space' at which the activity is directed and which is molded and transformed into outcomes

Yrjö Engeström

and the 'cultural tools' can be both physical tools and any other artefacts, physical or abstract, that the subject uses in working on the object.

So here's a simple example. The Activity System for a group of medieval stonemasons building a cathedral would look something like this:

 

Fig 2. One example of an activity system

Note that the 'tools' include not only physical tools, but also more abstract things like plans and the stonemasons' guilds, with their systems of training and cultural expectations.

And if we apply the same idea to a present-day school college or university, we might come up with something like Fig. 3:

Fig 3. Is this the activity system within a school, college or university?

At this stage you may well be asking the question: so what? (I certainly would.) How, you may ask, does all this help us to understand what is happening within our schools, colleges and universities.

I will try to provide an answer (and a rather disturbing one, I believe) in my next post.

The importance of trust

Back in January I wrote in this blog that:

If we want to promote real learning… there's actually no alternative to reliance on trust -- and to rebuilding trust where necessary -- […] in professional ideals and ethics.

Most of this (the bit in italics) was a quotation from an article by Michael E McIntyre. In this article he wrote about the need

to rediscover the supreme importance of trust and responsibility, including professional ethics, despite their occasional abuse.

The tide may be beginning to turn in this direction, at least as far as education is concerned. A recent article on the BBC website by the TV and radio journalist Mike Baker suggests that recent government policy changes may represent a move away from micro-management towards increased trust and autonomy. In the article (called Is it time to trust the teachers?) Mike suggests that 30 years ago we had 'high autonomy and low accountability' in education in the UK. Then we moved to 'low autonomy and high accountability'. He suggests that there is now a realisation that what we need is 'high autonomy and high accountability'. He goes on to say:

So schools and teachers should be trusted more: trusted to devise their own curriculum, their own teaching styles, and their own forms of assessment.

But the price of that freedom is strong accountability. But an accountability that is more intelligent than the rather crude measures we have had until now, which have distorted school behaviours.

Great stuff, Mike!

More criticism of A-levels

Hot on the heels of the article in last week's TES suggesting that A-level teaching stifles independent thinking and creativity (see my previous blog entry) comes an item in today's Independent newspaper putting forward much the same idea. Anthony Seldon and David James argue that A-levels are 'part of a damaged process' that lacks academic integrity, and they refer (amongst other evidence) to the study mentioned in the TES article.

It is a really good sign, I think, that more and more people are now pointing out that (notwithstanding league tables and targets etc.) our present educational system lacks rigour/integrity and is not optimised for promoting independent thinking and creativity. There does seems to be increasing concern about how people really learn, and of course I welcome this.

Seldon and James suggest the International Baccalaureate as an alternative to A-levels. I don't know much about the IB, and must try to find out more. Could the IB help schools to promote real learning? 

Independent thinking squeezed out by a constant focus on boosting league table scores

A survey by ACS International Schools suggests that university admission tutors believe that the need to 'teach to the test' and a constant focus on boosting league table scroes are stifling independent thinking and creativity in A-level teaching. (This was reported in an article in the TES last week, under the headline HE want creativity).

This view is similar to that expressed by Rebecca Front and reported in my last blog entry:

Constant testing leaves little room for independent thought.

Maybe the tide is really beginning to turn, as more and more individuals and organisations realise the importance of promoting real learning.

(The odd thing about the TES article is that it appears to refer to a survey that was published nearly a year ago - I'm not sure why they have waited until now to cover it.)

“Education has to be about more than hitting targets”

Friday’s Guardian contained an interesting reflection by the actress Rebecca Front on what she valued in her own education.

Of her school, she writes:

Academically it was nothing special. But there were enough flashes of brilliance and wisdom and real affection from the staff to offer an education in the truest sense – a drawing out of what was there in us all anyway…

What stays with me as I get older are the off-piste moments from teachers with a little freedom to be iconoclasts or enthusiasts.

She has a very different perception of present day education:

… the strictures of the national curriculum throttle the individualism of great teachers, and… constant testing leaves little room for independent thought. Education has to be about more than hitting targets.

I think we need to be cautious of the ‘golden age’ tendency – the mistake of imagining that things were much better a generation or so ago. There was certainly some dire teaching in schools, colleges and universities in the second half of the twentieth century – I remember being on the receiving end of it at times. But, like Rebecca Front, I also remember being greatly influenced by those teachers whose very identity was partly forged by their enthusiasm for the subject(s) they taught, and who could project this enthusiasm to their students.

For me Rebecca Front’s article suggests one way in which we might seek to understand and define how people really learn. Is real teaching and learning simply about effective sharing and developing of enthusiasm?

What makes for good lesson observation feedback? (part 2)

Back in 1988 Ruth Butler did some interesting research on the effects of different types of feedback on the performance of learners. She found that performance improved if she gave learners comments that described what they had done well, and how they could improve on what they had done. But she also found that if she gave grades, then performance deteriorated. And, fascinatingly, if she gave both comments and grades, the results were even worse (see below).

 

It seems that what happens if you give both a comment and a grade, is that the learner only remembers the grade and forgets the comment (see below).

Butler did her research with school pupils, but the same principle surely applies equally to adults. So, if we really want lesson observation to improve performance (i.e. the quality of teaching and learning) then we need the courage to remove all mention of grades from lesson observation feedback. The way to improve quality is for the observer to simply give honest feedback on what was good about the lesson and in what ways it could be improved. And if the feedback can be the start of an ongoing professional dialogue between the observing practitioners and the observed the practitioner - then that will be even better.

References:

Ruth Butler's research was published as “Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation; the Effects of Task-involving and Ego-involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance”,
British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 58, pp. 1-14.

The two diagrams above are taken from a PowerPoint presentation by Robert Coe that can be found at www.dur.ac.uk/r.j.coe/learnteach/learnteach4.ppt

What makes for good lesson observation feedback?

The trigger for this post is something my good friend and colleague David Sugden wrote in his blog last week (26 January). David described an example of a quite destructive approach to lesson observation, and made a heartfelt plea for a more supportive lesson observation regime:

Surely the purpose of lesson observation is to improve teaching and learning - not to demoralise staff to the point that they become ill. But this is what… is happening all over the country. Instead of treating lesson observations as an opportunity to support and encourage good teaching (and learning), they are used in negative soul destroying ways.

This reminded me of two very different experiences of being observed (or to be more precise of receiving observation feedback) that I had about three years ago. In both cases I was delivering professional development training.

Experience 1

The observer was quite critical of some aspects of what she had seen, but did not express this at all in a destructive way. It was more along the lines of “if you did less of x, and adopted more of a y approach, I think you would become a more effective trainer. What do you think?” She was right, and I honestly feel that by reflecting on her advice I did become a more effective trainer (and three years later I still think sometimes about what she said). The really interesting thing is that no grade was given nor did the observer express an overall view on now good or bad I was as a trainer. She simply concentrated on how I could become better.

Experience 2

The feedback consisted of several rather bland comments on what had been observed and a grade on the usual four-point scale. The grade awarded for the lesson was a ‘2’. I explained to the observer that I would like to be as good a trainer as possible, so I asked what I could do differently in order to deliver a session that would be graded ‘1’. The observer could offer me no practical suggestions at all, but simply talked about some ‘extra spark’ being necessary to get the top grade.

The first observation really helped my teaching to improve, whilst the second did not make a jot of difference. As an exercise in improving the quality of teaching for the organisation concerned it was a complete waste of time and money.

I think a lot of the problems with lesson observations are caused by the absurd notion that each lesson has to be given a grade (and I have thought carefully about my use of the word ‘absurd’ here). In my next blog post I will write about some research that suggests that the act of giving a grade (regardless of the level) actually stops performance from improving.

Sir Tim Brighouse and Bob Drew OBE

I was delighted to read in an article in last week’s TES that Tim Brighouse , former chief education officer of both Oxfordshire and Birmingham, had been knighted in the New year’s honours list.Those of you with a long political memory may remember that in 1994 (I think) the then Secretary of State for Education, John Patten, referred to Brighouse as a madman and a 'nutter'. Brighouse sued and won a substantial out of court settlement which he then donated to educational charities.

Sir Tim's greatness lay partly in the fact that he had belief and trust in teachers. He really put into practice the quotation from Michael McIntyre that I included in my 7 January post:

…there's actually no alternative to reliance on trust -- and to rebuilding trust where necessary -- […] in professional ideals and ethics.

The same TES article tells us that Bob Drew, the Headteacher of Gearies Infant School in Redbridge has been awarded an OBE. Bob is quoted in the article as saying that:

Teaching is about showing people how they can change their life.

This is a nice echo of the quotation from Alastair Clark in my previous post.

I find it really cheering that people who clearly believe in promoting real learning should feature in the honours list.

Two quotations from yesterday's Independent

In an article in yesterday's Independent Education and Career's section, Alan Smithers writes:

Targets and league tables just distort by rewarding teaching to the test.

This is another neat expression of Goodhart's law (which I wrote about in the previous entry in this blog). The key word here is 'distort', because this is precisely what Goodhart claims that targets do.

In another article in this this week's Independent Education and Careers section, my good friend and colleague Alastair Clark from NIACE is quoted as saying:

Learning a new language such as French is more than just wanting to know how to buy a baguette. It's the way people change their view of themselves by learning another language.

I would like to take the key idea here and apply it not just to language learning but to all 'real' learning by suggesting that we might define real learning as:

learning that changes the way people view themselves.

What do you think of this definition?

Goodhart's Law

Last week, while reading a letter to the Independent newspaper, I came across Goodhart’s Law for the first time. (To read this letter, click here and search for ‘Goodhart’.)

Expressed in simple terms, Goodhart’s law states that:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

So, for example, if you set schools a target for the proportion of pupils gaining A* to C passes at GCSE, this will cease to be a good measure of how well the school is functioning because it changes the way the school behaves: as we all know, it puts pressure on teachers to concentrate their efforts on improving the performance of borderline pupils (who might just get a grade C with additional teaching) at the expense both of brighter pupils and those who stand no chance of getting a grade C no matter how much extra tuition they are given.

The logic of Goodhart’s law is that centrally set targets cannot work. If you have a small number of crude targets (like the one I have just mentioned) this will distort the way teachers and organisations work, yet if you try to overcome this by making the targets more complex and more numerous then you cripple organisations with an impossible bureaucratic burden. And of course, all targets (whether crude or complex) take the attention of organisations and teachers away from what should be their main focus – doing their best to promote real learning for each and every pupil/student/learner.

Below are links to a couple of good articles about the negative effects of Goodhart’s Law on learning.

Peter Mortimore writing in the Guardian in May 2008

An article by Michael E McIntyre, Emeritus Professor of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge

 Let me finish this post with a quotation from the McIntyre article. I feel sure this is an idea I will return to again and again in this blog. If we want to promote real learning…

…there's actually no alternative to reliance on trust -- and to rebuilding trust where necessary -- […] in professional ideals and ethics.

Learning and 'performance'

I was struck by this statement on page 28 of Just suppose teaching and learning became the first priority...

a focus on learning can enhance performance, whereas a focus on performance can depress performance

This is, in fact, a quotation from Learning about learning enhances performance, a paper by Chris Watkins that you can access directly here.

There has been such a strong emphasis on results and performance in recent years that the focus of thinking in schools, colleges etc. has moved away from learning as such. Chris Watkins paper suggests that even those whose primary concern is educational  'performance' would do well to concentrate more on how we can promote real learning.

A good read

Although I have some grave concerns about aspects of education and learning in the contemporary world, I hope that How do people really learn? will be a positive and optimistic blog. I will make a real effort not to be dragged towards negativity by the way that current policy and funding tend (in my view) to be encouraging shallow rather than real learning.

So I am delighted to start the blog with a recommendation for an excellent book (or 'pamphlet' as the author has called it). I was introduced to Just suppose teaching and learning became the first priority... by Frank Coffield just a week ago, and was delighted to discover that someone had at long last written a book about the learning and skills sector that:

• promotes the central importance of teaching and learning

• includes several references to my favourite theory of learning (Lave and Wenger's  Communities of Practice)

• is damningly critical,  but in a carefully argued way, of the policies of the government and its Learning and Skills Council (LSC) 

• is written in a delightfully witty and engaging style.

It really cheers me up not just that this book has been written, but that it has been published by a well-known national organisation (LSN). And it's free! You can download a copy (and even order a free hard copy) here.

What this blog is about

This blog has arisen out of my increasing concerns about what has been happening in education and learning in England. Although we have seen 10 years of perhaps unprecedented input in terms of investment and policy, grave concerns remain about whether this is resulting in an improvement in people really learning. What, you may ask, do I mean by 'really learning'? Well, I hope that this will become clear as the blog progresses.

Most of my own work is in what is now called the 'learning and skills' sector (LSS) in England. The LSS includes further education, work-based learning and adult eduction (if I dare use such an old-fashined term) - in other words pretty much all formal learning for those aged over 16 apart from higher education. The content of How do people really learn? will therefore concentrate to some extent on post-16 learning in England. But I hope that the issues discussed may be relevant to learners of all ages and in all parts of the world.

Terry Loane