How do people really learn?

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.