When I was earning my living in the world of education I needed to compromise to some extent with conventional approaches to teaching and learning. But now that I have retired I have no such inhibitions. So Beyond the Ramshackle Hodgepodge takes an uncompromising and radical approach in analysing what needs to change in our education system
Below, in this last post in How Do People Really Learn?, is a thematic guide to the previous posts, which were written between 2008 and 2014. I believe that many of the issues I explored in this blog remain highly relevant in the third decade of the century. But be warned; quite a few of the hyperlinks in these blog posts are now, alas, dead.
A very short post just to direct you to the latest interesting post on Martin Fautley's blog (which focuses mainly on music education) and my reply to his post.
I do think it's important that we challenge the dominant vocabulary used in educational discourse (e.g the words listed at the start of Martin's blog post) and the assumptions behind this vocabulary.
This post is a quick reflection on a form I was asked to fill in this week.
I have just started a course (Jazz harmony, ear training and ensemble playing) at the excellent City Lit adult learning college here in London. At the first session I was asked to fill in an 'individual record of learning' form, and one of the questions was: What are your specific learning goals?" This is how I responded:
I don't wish to sound difficult, but I do not find the concept of 'specific learning goals' a useful way of getting to grips with the complexity of human learning. The world is surely over-populated with 'learning objectives' and 'learning outcomes'. What I believe the keen learner should seek out are 'environments conducive to things happening'. I trust that the course will provide just such an environment. At the moment my main focus is to develop my ability to improvise, but who knows what I might learn in a suitably conducive musical environment:-)
Now anybody who decides to commit to a substantial programme of learning (4 hours per week for 31 weeks in this case) must have some notion of what they hope to get out of it. But it is, I suggest, a mistake to think that this notion has to consist of a set of clearly formulated learning goals. And there is surely a danger that if both teachers and learners are encouraged to focus too much on reductionist learning goals this will actually limit the possibilities for real learning. I am all in favour of people reflecting on their learning and using refleciton as the basis for making plans for future learning, but this does not have to be framed in terms of 'bullet point' learning goals/objectives/outcomes. Focusing our attention on learning goals tends to narrow our vision of what can be learned. But what is exciting about starting on a programme of learning is that the learner cannot know what is going to happen and cannot know how s/he will be changed by the experience. Rather than obsessing about specific learning goals we need to open our hearts and minds to the possibilities of the unexpected that can occur in any learning encounter.
The starting point for this post is an interesting discussion over the last couple of weeks on the Association of Learning Technology members’ mail list. (It is a closed list at [email protected])
The title of the discussion was “Do hybrid courses incubate mediocrity?” But one of the themes that emerged during the discussion concerned the awarding of grades/marks etc. In my posts I was critical from three different standpoints of what I see as the centrality of marks, grades and rank order assessment within current educational practice and discourse:
Firstly, I was critical of the ‘instrumental’ view of education:
“… the view that one learns not because of the intrinsic value of the stuff one is learning but because of the perceived benefits that accreditation brings - so any 'effort' that is put into learning that does not provide 'marks' is regarded as 'wasted'. I would suggest that it is the prevalence of this attitude that is the real 'incubator of mediocrity' in higher education and indeed in schools also. Without commitment to the intrinsic value of the stuff of learning there can only be mediocrity.”
Secondly, and closely related to this, I questioned the value of what I call ‘extrinsic motivation’ for learning:
“… we should do all we can to promote the intrinsic rewards of learning (e.g. students feeling "they are gaining something from participation" and "getting genuine learning") rather than the extrinsic rewards (e.g. "marks for participation").”
Thirdly, I challenged the meaningfulness of marks and grades:
“Using a number to describe someone’s learning is at best a crude abbreviation. At worst it is a failure to understand the complex nature of human learning. Scientists have been showing us for nearly a century now that complex systems (like human learning) cannot be understood in linear and reductionist terms, and therefore cannot be described by simple numbers. I believe that it is about time the world of education moved away from its obsession with numbers/grades/marks/rank order assessment, rooted as they are in an outmoded and scientifically disproved seventeenth century Cartesian world view.”
In a contribution to the discussion thread Alison Bulbeck picked up on the final sentence above (“I believe…”) and questioned whether the issue represents a “wicked problem”. Alison also pointed out, quite correctly I think, that the obsession with marks, grades, rank order assessment etc. can be found across wider society, not just within a narrowly conceived “world of education”.
Now I am not sure if this issue constitutes a ‘wicked problem’ as described/defined by the systems thinker Charles West Churchman. But I do think that consideration of the issue points us towards the need to develop a new educational paradigm, and indeed Alison hints at this in her message when she says “everyone is still thinking in the old paradigm [my emphasis] of marks, grades”.
To explain what I mean let me start by going back about 470 years to the publication by Copernicus of “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”. In this book Copernicus challenged the accepted view at the time that the earth was at the centre of the universe. He suggested an alternative picture, that the sun was at the centre. This was a challenge both to common sense (‘it’s obvious, init, that the sun goes around the earth – we would fall off if we were spinning around the sun’) and to those who held power at the time – the Catholic Church with its insistence on the literal truth of the Bible. It was over 200 years before the idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe was generally accepted, but crucially this acceptance went hand in glove with one of the most important advances ever in scientific thinking: Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation.
Fast forward 470 years, and I will try to use similar language to describe the need I see for a changing educational paradigm. Many educators (not just me) are challenging the accepted view that marks, grades, rank order assessment and performance tables are at the centre of the educational universe, and they are presenting an alternative picture, in which the intrinsic value of learning and narrative descriptions of the achievements and capabilities of individuals are at the centre. This is certainly a challenge to common sense (‘it’s obvious, init, that kids go to school to ‘get the grades’ – they would fall off the economic greasy pole if they didn’t’). Challenging the centrality of marks, grades, rank order assessment and performance tables also challenges those who hold power in the contemporary world. For not only are politicians obsessed with these so called ‘measurements of performance’ but senior staff in institutions, and indeed anyone who wishes to further a career in education, dare not challenge the centrality of the numbers – they dare not suggest that maybe the marks and grades are not at the centre of the educational universe, even if deep down they know this to be the case – to do so would be professional suicide.
Perhaps what we now need is a genius like Newton to formulate and propagate a comprehensive basis for a new paradigm. I just hope that it will not take 200 years for this to happen! I just hope that it will not take 200 years for a new paradigm to be accepted, a paradigm that will go hand in glove with placing real learning at the centre of the educational universe.
A postcript to the discussion of educational 'standards' in that blog comes from an article in today's Guardian. A former primay headteacher is quoted as saying
measuring perceived accountability has become more important than children's well-being and education.
He is surely right. We have reached a dreadful situation where the focus on 'standards' and 'perceived accountability' (both of which are just posh ways of talking about test results) is in direct conflict with wellbeing and real learning. As educators we need to decide which side of this particuar fence we are on.
The starting point for this post was a BBC Radio 4 Life Scientific programme this week during which Mark Miodownik called for public libraries to be replaced by public workshops in which people could make things. Then, in an online conversation with other members of the Everything Unplugged group it was suggested that it would be better to leave libraries alone and set up the proposed public workshops in schools or colleges.
This got me thinking about the fact that schools and colleges are locked shut for far more hours in the year than any other public building I can think of. Just look at the table below.
Open to users
Hours per year
Hospital A&E department
24 hours a day, 365 day per year
8,760
Royal Festival Hall public spaces (where the Everything Unplugged group meets each week)
From 10 in the morning until about 10 at night every day except for Christmas day
4,368
My local supermarket
84 hours per week
4,300
My local library
64.5 hours per week except for public holidays
3,200
A school
About 6 hours per day for 190 days per year
1,140
I accept that some schools do extend their opening hours slightly for various forms of community use but this is the exception rather than the rule, and it makes little significant difference to the scale of underuse indicated in the final column of the table above.
We the public have paid for the schools and for the expensive facilities and resources they contain. So why are we the public kept away from these resources while the buildings remain locked shut for most of the time? Surely the way in which schools are currently underused represents a huge lost opportunity as well as an enormous waste of capital expenditure.
But actually the situation is even worse than this! Not only are children and adults alike locked out of schools most of the time, but children are, in effect, locked into schools for every one of the 190 days that schools choose to open each year. And any parent who does not ensure that their child attends on these 190 arbitrarily chosen days runs the risk of being fined or imprisoned. Such sanctions are being enforced with increasing rigour, as this BBC new item explains.
But is there any evidence that children learn best in 5-hour chunks on 190 days of the year? No there isn’t. Is there evidence that different children have very different rhythms of learning (so that some children might, for example, learn better in smaller chunks of time spread over many more than 190 days)? Yes there is. Is there any evidence that most real learning takes place outside of school lessons anyway? Yes, there certainly is.
So we surely need to re-imagine schools and colleges as much more flexible and open places, as places where children and adults can tap into resources, facilities and expertise in a variety of different ways and at a variety of different times to suit their own particularly needs and interests.
Why don’t we start a campaign called ‘4,000 hours’? Central to the campaign’s manifesto would be a call to make all publicly funded schools, colleges and universities open to the public for at least 4,000 hours each year.
The results of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 tests are being made public today. I have very little interest in the test results themselves – they have little to do with real learning. But I am fascinated by the assumptions and discussions surrounding PISA as they give an insight into the dysfunctional nature of much contemporary educational discourse.
This first post relating to PISA reflects some thoughts arising out of reading a Guardian article last week about Andreas Schleicher, the man responsible for PISA. He seems to be very proud of his catch-phrase: "Without data, you are just another person with an opinion.” But here’s another neat catch-phrase:
"WITH data, you are just another person with a spreadsheet.”
We are drowning in data these days. Yet how much of this data really helps us to addresses important questions about real learning? Serious doubts have been raised about the statistical methodology behind PISA. But the problems go much further than this. As the Guardian article suggests, there is real danger in “the imperatives of efficiency, calculability, predictability and control”.
Both spreadsheets and opinions can be useful, but if I had to ditch one or the other, I would rather hang on to my opinions than my spreadsheets.
I recently took part in in an interesting discussion in the JISC Moodle-UK email list. During this discussion I suggested that the manner in which the use of the online learning platform Moodle had evolved:
has been to some extent dominated by modules with lots of functionality (e.g. complex enrolment systems) for controlling people's learning.
I implied that there was an ethos of ‘command and control’ in the world of education that was at odds with the original ideal behind the development of Moodle, namely:
to build a platform that could promote social constructionist/constructivist learning.
A later message in the same thread (posted by my good friend Philip Butler) implied that my advocacy for ‘opening up’ access to learning resources meant that I might not be living in the real world.
I have chosen to take the suggestion that I am not living in the real world as a great compliment. Who would want to live willingly in a ‘real’ educational world in which (to quote Sheila Lawlor writing in the Guardian):
… thanks to the interference of officialdom, teaching is barely a profession: the teacher must follow the strategies, frameworks and tasks devised by semi-educated officials for careerist politicians.
As an independent practitioner aged 63 I can, of course, define (and to some extent live within) my own ‘real world’. But what are those who are younger and employed within institutions to do? How can they help to move the ‘real world’ forward? Alison Wolf, in her book An adult approach to further education, seems pessimistic about the possibility of improving the system:
The current system is opaque, wasteful, unjust, fails to achieve its own narrow economic objectives and is effectively unreformable.
The main driving force for change in England has become fear: fear of poor exam results, fear of poor inspection grade, fear of sliding down the national league tables, and fear of public humiliation and closure. Fear is inimical to learning.(p.48)
…
The relationship between, on the one hand government and government agencies and, on the other, institutional leaders is... that of a parent dealing petulantly with wayward children…
(p.50)
The ‘real world’ of education is, I think, so strangled by 'top-downism', by the command and control myth that I find it hard to know what individual practitioners can and should do. I hope to return to this in the future and to be able to make some positive suggestions. In the meantime, if you, dear reader, have any ideas, please do submit a comment to this post.
"Creativity, in this instance, means developing new ways of seeing, thinking and behaving."
It strikes me that this description should not be limited just to a single HE course. "Developing new ways of seeing, thinking and behaving" could surely be a pretty good statement of what the aim of all real teaching and real learning should be.
This post is slightly unusual in that its initial purpose is to act as a resource for my 'Knowledge Café' session at the NIACE Innovating Learning event on 4 Dec 2012. That's why it's a bit longer than many of my blog posts. But I certainly hope that what follows will also be of interest to those not attending this event.
Sugata Mitra, Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, is perhaps best known for his 'hole in the wall' experiments, in which children organise themselves and use a computer to learn successfully without the need for a teacher or indeed any adult supervision. (Read page 1 of this document for a brief description of these experiments.)
Sugata's work has led to an interest in 'self-organised learning'. But what exactly does 'self-organised' mean in an educational context? I suggest that the term is used with three different (but related) meanings:
1 The individualistic meaning: the self-organised learner as an individual, independent learner
the autonomous or self-organised learner [is] able to ‘learn how to learn’ and possess[es] a disposition to do so. Such a learner can analyse his/her own learning strategies and outcomes as well as support the learning of others.
They seem to be thinking of the 'self-organised learner' as an individual who is capable of taking control of his/her own learning, in other words the independent learner about whom much has been written, particularly in the context of higher education (e.g.here and here). This notion of the individual self-organised learner also fits in with the idea of 'personalised learning'. Leyden and Dearden do, though, acknowledge that there is a social aspect to being a self-organised learner:
S/he also knows how to make an effective contribution to and benefit from the processes of teamwork and working with others.
2 The social meaning: the group taking control of its own learning
This is perhaps the most common way in which the term self-organised learning is used. In traditional learning environments it is the teacher and/or the institution who are very much in charge of what learning takes place, how it takes place and where it takes place. Self-organised learning refers to the idea that groups will take charge of their own learning, but this need not always preclude teachers and institutions. As David Jennings has written:
... self-organised learning is not necessarily unsupported or self-supported; it's not wholly self-service. There is certainly space in self-organised learning for teachers, but possibly with the tables turned. Instead of the teachers setting the parameters of the learning and containing it within a space that they run and own, a group of learners with common interests may come together, agree their parameters and preferred learning environments, and then hire in a teacher to help them achieve their goals.
3 The scientific meaning: learning as a 'self-organising system'
In the field of systems thinking and complexity science the term 'self-organising' has a very particular meaning. I can think of no better way of starting to understand this concept of self-organisation than watching this short video of a flock of geese in flight.
Nobody teaches the geese how to fly in a V-formation and nobody tells them to do it. If you examined, analysed or dissected an individual goose you would find nothing that would suggest that a group of geese will self-organise into a V when they fly together. The whole system (i.e. the flock) is, in quite a literal and scientific sense, greater than the sum of its parts (the individual geese). Similar self-organising systems can be found throughout the biological, physical and social world. (In a way the flock of geese is not a typical example of a self-organising system because its V-formation appears so simple. Many self-organising systems exhibit very complex behaviour - just think of a colony of honey bees and how they organise themselves!)
Sugata Mitra is one of the first people to have applied the concept of the self-organising system to social learning. This powerful idea provides a basis for understanding how people can very often learn better in a self-supporting group without a teacher than they can as individuals (even with a teacher!)
Self-organised learning and technology
The powerful networked technology of the 21st century can facilitate and support self-organised learning in ways that were simply not possible in earlier times, when individuals had little choice but to depend on teachers and institutions for their learning. It seems to me that this applies regardless of which of the above three meanings of 'self-organised' one favours.
For individuals it is easier than ever before to organise and take responsibility for their own independent learning and to customise and personalise resources to suit their needs because of the availability of so many rich learning resources on the Internet and the relative ease with which these can be accessed and indexed.
Groups of learners can use the powerful communication capabilities of the Internet as well as its mutiplicity of learning resources to facilitate their self-organisation.
And those working in the field of systems thinking and complexity science tell us that for a self-organising system to function it must have feedback mechanisms and a source of energy input from outside the system - both of which can be provided as never before by today's technology.
Yesterday I attended the final dissemination event of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) research project, held at the Royal Society in London. The evening followed a fairly standard pattern for such events: key-note speeches, opportunity for debate and discussion, and an exhibition with demonstrations of various examples of whizzy educational hardware and software.
My friend and colleague Alastair Clark also attended and has blogged about his reaction to the event here. I agree with Alastair's reservations about whether the project will help to shift inertia in the implementaton of educational technology, but for me the event triggered a slightly different chain of thought. It made me wonder if we have got the relationship between technological innovation and education back to front.
The project seemed to be concerned with the following question, and this is how we seem to usually frame our thinking about technology and learning :
Q1. How should we use technological innovation to improve how we might achieve existing educational purposes?
But I wonder if we should really turn this question around and ask:
Q2. How should we change our existing educational purposes to improve how we might live in an age of disruptive technological innovation?
I have spent much of the last nine years of my professional life trying to help people to address Q1, how to use technology effectively for teaching and learning. But I now feel there is a great need to move on to Q2, to examine how we must change our assumptions about what education is for in the light of the hugely disruptive effect that technology (and other aspects of the 21st century) are having on the way we live. Keri Facer addresses this issue with both passion and clarity in this Learning without Frontiers video:
A friend of mine has been doing the rounds of university open days with his daughter, who is considering studying art and design. When they went to Goldsmiths, University of London they were told that the ethos of the Art and Design Department was:
to develop students who are thoughtful, creative and critical. By "critical", we mean "questioning the ways things are".
It strikes me that this is an excellent statement of purpose, not just for a university art and design department but for all education. Of course it reminds me of one of that things Noam Chomsky said in the video featured in my previous post:
Do we want to have a society of free, creative, independent individuals able to appreciate and gain from the cultural achievements of the past and to add to them? Do we want that, or do we want people who can increase GDP?
I take my hat off to Goldsmiths for expressing its purpose and ethos in terms of thoughtfulness, creativity and questioning the status quo. We definitely need to hear more of this sort of thing from educational institutions.
I find this video quite inspiring (even though it is rather visually over-produced, IMHO).
Here are some of my favourite extracts that relate to real learning:
04:10: "In schools do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative enquiry?"
11:29: "Cultivating
[the] capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question
whether you're on the right track - that's what education is meant to be
about."
12:15: "Do we want to have a society of free, creative, independent individuals able to appreciate and gain from the cultural achievements of the past and to add to them? Do we want that, or do we want people who can increase GDP? They're not the same thing."
16:30: "I've been on admissions committees for entry into an advanced graduate programme... and we of course pay some attention to test results, but really not too much. A person can do magnificently on every test and understand very little.
17:40: "If [assessment] is just a set of hurdles you have to cross it can turn out to be not only meaningless, but it can divert you away from things you ought to be doing."
19:40: "Passing tests doesn't begin to compare with searching and enquiring and pursuing topics that engage us and excite us. That's far more significant than passing tests."
When public concern about this year’s GCSE exam results first became evident immediately after their releases on 23rd August, a friend of mine, who is in an English teacher, said that she thought the whole furore might prove to be a storm in a teacup.
Well if it is a storm in a teacup, it’s turning out to be a pretty big teacup. A month later the story is still running and developing. In fact the pace of this story has been increasing in the last couple of weeks, as the following news stories show:
28 Aug – Parents of pupils at Golden Hillock School hold a protest outside the school about the GCSE results. (Actually parental protest about schooling seems to be quite big in the West Midlands this year. Check out a couple of other examples, nothing to do with GCSEs, here and here.)
19 Sep – The Guardian newspaper devotes its entire letters page to the ‘reform’ of GCSEs. All but one of the 18 letters are critical of Gove’s proposals - and the exception was a letter written by a coalition MP!
21 Sep – Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme Any Questions, Lisa Jardine expresses the view that exams at 16-plus are simply unnecessary. She receives a round of applause.
22 Sep – It’s reported that local authorities, teaching unions and schools are mounting a legal challenge to the refusal by OFQUAL to regrade the English GCSE results.
So why I am I writing about all this in this blog? What has the GCSE furore got to do with how people really learn?
First, let me say that I have nothing against exams as such. Like rats and bacteria, exams are OK in their proper place. It’s only when they take over the environment to the detriment of everything else that they become a problem. Now exams and tests do indeed seem to have taken over to the detriment of just about everything else in schools. We have a plague of exams and tests, just as dangerous as plagues of rats in earlier centuries. What’s really encouraging about what has happened over the last four weeks is that it is the first sign that the exam edifice is crumbling. The public are beginning to reject the dominance of exams and to see through the claims that exams represent some sort of scientifically objective and expertly standardised measure of learning. How can the system claim to be scientific and objective when a pupil on one side of the English-Welsh border will now be awarded a grade C for a GCSE ‘performance’ identical to what would earn a D on the other side of the border? The fact that exam results are open to such blatant political manipulation just detracts even further from their credibility. The parental protests in Birmingham, the applause on Any Questions for the proposal to abolish exams at 16-plus and the legal challenges to this year's results are all evidence, I think, that people are beginning to realise that there is something dysfunctional about how we assess learning and that there is more to education than tests and exams. These still have a place, but portfolios of what learners have created, and narrative descriptions of how learners have worked collaboratively are essential if we are truly to understand and assess real learning.
In one of the 18 letters in the Guardian we read that:
All examination systems are artificial constructs which reflect the aspirations and values of society.
I do hope that the eventual outcome of the GCSE/Ebacc farce will be that our aspirations and values will come to embrace a far richer and wider understanding of learning than can be captured through exam and test performance.
There seems to be so much to blog about right now! A lot has happened for me in the last week in relation to thinking about learning. And the subject of exams for 16-year olds has also been in the news again in the last couple of days, so I feel I the need to add something to my previous post about the GCSE English results.
I will start by devoting this post to a thought that was sparked by attending the Association for Learning Technology's ALT-C Conference in Manchester last week.
I enjoyed the conference, but I came away with a strong impression (gained from several different sessions and from conversations with delegates) that:
Educational institution have become paralysed.
They are paralysed by fear of inspection and audit (and the perceived need to pander to inspectors and auditors).
They are paralysed by over-simplistic and scientifically ludicrous models of learning and assessment (and the perceved need to accept these models unquetioningly).
They are paralysed by the false rhetoric of austerity (and the perceived need to accept that austerity is inevitable).
I do feel this paralysis makes it difficult for educational insititutions really to innovate in teaching and learning. So often what is called innovation boils down to clever new technological ways of doing the same old things.
This might sound rather negative, but the other, and very positive, side of the same coin was that I met the inspirational Fred Garnett again at the conference. I had not been in touch with Fred for several years, and I was very interested in his ideas about heutagogy, or self-directed learning, and about how learning can often take place successfully outside of institutions. This fitted in with my own contribution to the conference - a pechakucha on 'digital hedge schools':
Just over a week ago the results of this year’s GCSE exams were announced. (GCSEs are the main exams taken by nearly all 16-year olds in England and Wales.) Each year since 1988, when the GCSE was first introduced, the percentage of candidates getting grades A* to C has been higher than the year before, rising from 42.5% in 1988 to 69.8% last year. But this year there has been a reduction in the success rate, and the drop has been particularly marked in English. It is estimated that about 65,000 candidates who were expected to get the all-important C grade in English were awarded a D grade. Failing to get a C in English can have serious consequences for a young person because they will probably be unable to progress to the next stage of their education. And a reduction in the proportion of pupils getting a C grade can have serious consequences for a school because this is one of the main performance measures upon which schools are judged. Arguably the stakes are higher for the school management than for the individual pupil. A young person who misses out on a college place may well get a second chance to get their educational progress back on track. A head teacher whose school misses out on the performance measures may well get no second chance – s/he is quite likely to be sacked.
It is little surprise then that this year’s English result have been greeted with shock and anger by pupils, parents and teachers. But the whole situation was entirely predictable, in fact inevitable. I have been waiting for this to happen for a few years. Here’s why:
It all goes back to the so-called ‘grade inflation’ that has been taking place each year since 1988. Some say the relentless increase in the numbers getting higher grades is because standards have dropped; some say it is because young people are working harder each year; others say it is because the quality of teaching has improved. In reality it may be a mix of all three (although like Frank Coffield I think there is a lot more to teaching quality than the ability to get kids to pass exams). Now, as I explained in the first paragraph, the stakes are so high these days when it comes to exam results that if individuals or schools feel they have been unfairly treated then they are bound to want to find somebody to blame (and, if possible, to sue!) But as long as the results kept on improving each year then (a) there were relatively few disappointed individuals and schools (b) any who did feel that they might be the victim of unfair grading did not really have a convincing case, given the perceived improvement in overall exam performance. But of course grade inflation could not go on forever. And it is entirely to be expected that as soon as the brakes were put on grade inflation (i.e. this year) there would be a chorus of outraged pupils, parents and head teachers all crying ‘foul’ at the top of their voices.
When I started this blog (back in 2008) I promised that it would be positive and optimistic. So what is there to be positive and optimistic about in the story of exam grade confusion? I will explain in my next post!
It is common practice for teachers and trainers to make the ‘learning objectives’ for a particular lesson explicit at the very start of the lesson. Indeed a friend of mine who is a schoolteacher has told me that in his school senior managers have recently been making unannounced visits to classrooms with the sole purpose of checking that the learning objectives are on display. Woe betide any teacher whose flip-chart or whiteboard is devoid of lesson objectives! (What a pity the senior managers didn’t focus their attention on the complex process of teaching and learning rather than on what was written on the wall.)
On the face of it, this all seems very logical: the teacher breaks the subject/curriculum down into small chunks; s/he decides exactly which chunks are to be taught in a particular lesson; s/he makes this explicit by stating the learning objectives at the start of the lesson; at the end of the lesson teacher and learners can decide whether the objectives have been achieved, and whether the learners are ready to move on to the next chunk of learning.
This ultra-rationalist approach to learning seemed to lie behind the thinking of a recent contributor to a ‘LinkedIn’ discussion I was part of when he promoted the importance of ensuring the ‘most effective and most efficient way’ for:
individual, long term, learning and transfer of critical, must know, information, aligned to strategic, individual and organization objectives.
But does real human learning actually work like this? I recently read Balancing Act: Capturing Knowledge Without Killing It by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.This suggests that real learning takes place in a very different, far less rationalist, way. The paper is an account of Julian Orr’s research into how the engineers who repair Xerox photocopiers learn how to do their job effectively:
Orr began his account of the reps' day not where the process view begins—at nine o'clock, when the first call comes in—but at breakfast beforehand, where the reps share and even generate new insights into these difficult machines. Orr found that a quick breakfast can be worth hours of training. While eating, playing cribbage, and gossiping, the reps talked work, and talked it continually. They posed questions, raised problems, offered solutions, constructed answers, laughed at mistakes, and discussed changes in their work, the machines, and customer relations. Both directly and indirectly, they kept one another up to date about what they knew, what they'd learned, and what they were doing.
Now this learning could not have taken place by a trainer deciding beforehand what ‘critical, must know, information’ had to be transferred in ‘the most effective and most efficient way’. The complex and idiosyncratic nature of the photocopiers meant that the required knowledge could only be developed because:
in the course of socializing, the reps develop a collective pool of practical knowledge that any one of them can draw upon. That pool transcends any individual member's knowledge, and it certainly transcends the corporation's documentation.
So in a very real sense the learning that was necessary for Xerox’ commercial success happened outside of the company’s control and outside of the company’s time. And we can be absolutely sure that the engineers did not start their breakfast with a statement of learning objectives!
"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?
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.
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!
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".
