How do people really learn?

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