Educating Ruby

by Guy Claxton

  If you are as bemused as your children and pupils about the point of learning some of the things that are still on the curriculum (as they were in our day), take heart. Asking schools (and ministries) to justify them is an absolutely valid and important thing to do. We have heard of one brave school where every term the children are each given a ‘joker’ they can play at any point of any lesson during that term. When they do so, the teacher has to stop teaching and try to give the class their best explanation of why that topic is important enough to be taking up the children’s time. The explanations are listened to respectfully and evaluated by the class. Trads might well be appalled by this apparent show of disrespect or lack of trust. Mods, however, will be open to the possibility that the thinking involved, and the discussion that could ensue, is a better preparation for life than passively accepting what you are told. This is not an opportunity to be ‘cheeky’ or ‘disruptive’ but to learn to be a more active and critical – in the best sense – consumer of your education.

  Do you think school is teaching us how to think for ourselves? No. School teaches you how to answer how other people want you to answer. It’s not about your thinking, it’s just about giving the right answer to get the marks. If you think about it differently it’s just wrong straight up. Have to do it their way ’cause otherwise you lose loads of marks. It’s teaching people that life is ‘one dimensional’.

  Adam, Year 11, London secondary school

  They definitely close your mind more than open it. Learning is actually a really powerful thing, but when you are taught like that, learning feels like a bad thing; you don’t want to do it.

  Chloe, recently left school

  The purpose of school is to give people the tools and skills to think for themselves, and to engage with the people and ideas around them … But by A levels, all of the teachers were reading us the notes, telling us what to write in our essays, and then marking them. In the upper school it was all about being analytical in exactly the right way to pass the exam.

  Josh, recently left a state school

  Bones of a 21st century curriculum

  We are going to make some suggestions about what a curriculum for this century might be like. Please take these as illustrative, not definitive – and certainly not exhaustive. We will divide our remarks into six age groups, using the current English key stages (KS). Again, these are only rough suggestions of age-appropriateness for various goals; often children will be grouped not by age but by the stage of their developing expertise and understanding. KS0, or the early years foundation stage (EYFS), concerns young children from 3 to 5 years old; KS1 corresponds to Years 1 and 2 in primary school, and KS2 to Years 3–6; KS3 covers the first three years of secondary school, Years 7–9; KS4 covers the two years, 10 and 11, currently leading up to the GCSE exams; and KS5 is old-fashioned sixth form, Years 12 and 13, currently leading up to A levels.

  Before we make some brief suggestions about what the central job of each of these stages might be, we need to make a preliminary point about project work, also known as problem-based or enquiry-based learning. We think that this approach, done well, is vital for three reasons: (1) for getting children’s engagement in learning, (2) for accelerating their conventional achievement, and (3) for developing the habits of mind which we think should be at the core of education. The ‘done well’ is vital. It is as possible to do project-based learning badly as it is to do chalk-and-talk badly. Neither method by itself guarantees success; it all depends, as with so much in life, on how you do it. We will illustrate what ‘done well’ looks like as we work our way through the stages.

  Be warned, though, that the Trads will start huffing and puffing at the very mention of projects. They think that project work means throwing children in at the deep end of unstructured, unsupervised learning, which is often way beyond their capabilities, and letting them drown. Their straw man is what they call ‘minimally guided’ project work, in which the teacher just does a whole lot less than they ‘ought’ to be doing, so they like to quote a research paper by Paul Kirschner and colleagues which finds that minimally guided project work doesn’t work.1 But that’s just ill-thought-out project work, quite untypical of what you will find in most schools. Between ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘total teacher control’ there are hundreds of ways in which guidance is provided, and varied judiciously, and children are more engaged, independent and inquisitive than in the old-fashioned schoolroom. We go into lots of schools, and that is what we usually find. Trads tend not to go into schools much (or not schools other than their own) because the complexity and sophistication of what they might see would muck up their tidy oppositions.

  Age 3 to 5 – EYFS: Serious play

  Currently in England there are four guiding principles that underpin the early years foundation stage:

  1. Every child is a unique child, who is constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured.

  2. Children learn to be strong and independent through positive relationships.

  3. Children learn and develop well in enabling environments, in which their experiences respond to their individual needs and there is a strong partnership between practitioners and parents and/or carers.

  4. Children develop and learn in different ways and at different rates.2

  Nothing wrong with all of that, but the current framework goes on to make the EYFS sound very like ‘pre-school’; that is, there is lots of emphasis on literacy and maths, and lots of assessments that children are expected to reach at different ages. We much prefer the less micro-managed specification that the EYFS originally had. The earlier guidance stated that through well-planned play, both indoors and outdoors, children can:

  ● Explore, develop and represent learning experiences that help them make sense of the world.

  ● Practise and build up ideas, concepts and skills.

  ● Learn how to control impulses and understand the need for rules.

  ● Be alone, be alongside others or cooperate as they talk or rehearse their feelings.

  ● Take risks and make mistakes.

  ● Think creatively and imaginatively.

  ● Communicate with others as they investigate or solve problems.

  ● Express fears or relive anxious experiences in controlled and safe situations.3

  This sounds as if it was written by people who knew and liked small children, and we would like to see it back. Note that it is not afraid to use the word ‘play’, because the writers do not oppose ‘play’ to ‘serious learning’. It is much closer to the globally respected and widely copied early years curriculum from New Zealand called Te Whāriki, which means a woven mat in Maori. The image suggests that content and process are woven together; skills and attitudes develop alongside knowledge and understanding as children work on interesting challenges and subject matter.

  Age 5 to 7 – Key Stage 1: Growth mindsets for success and collaborative learning

  In Chapter 2, we introduced you to some important research by Carol Dweck about how what we believe about ourselves really matters. Dweck, you will remember, has shown that there are two kinds of learners, those who have a fixed mindset and those she describes as having a growth mindset. Fixed mindset learners like to prove what they can do and tend to be averse to risk (you might look stupid) and hard work (struggling means you aren’t very bright). Growth mindset children are all about improving what they can do. They don’t mind in the least that, in the course of getting better at things, they make mistakes, struggle and don’t look good. Babies are born with a growth mindset. By the time they start school, many children have already started to value looking good over finding out. It is vital that we make sure that children retain, or regain, their membership of the second of these two groups.

  Exactly what subject or subjects children might be studying – the specific exercise-machines that will help them to develop self-belief, the ability to keep persisting with tricky questions and a willingness to practise and try
things out – is, we believe, a matter for schools to determine. It’s important that teachers help all children to feel that getting something wrong is not a cause for embarrassment, but an opportunity for learning and development. A ‘mistake of the week’ accompanied by an explicit attempt to tease out the insights it can bring the class is an example of the kind of curriculum we think children of this age need. And experiencing the satisfaction of ‘getting it right’ is crucial too.

  At the same time, it is important that children learn to think, play and compete with each other. In the real world much of what we do requires us to collaborate. But it isn’t easy. You have to learn to listen; to see that other people have different perspectives; to wait your turn and find out how to jump in skilfully and respectfully; to disagree graciously; to keep track of different threads and participants in the conversation. One of the reasons that learning in groups in schools can be ineffective is simply that the children have never been shown how to work in groups! Between the ages of 5 and 7 they can begin to practise different roles – coordinator, timekeeper, ideas person, fact-checker, planner and so on. Some schools use the popular technique known as Six Thinking Hats, created by Edward de Bono, as a basis for making switching roles fun (the children wear different coloured hats to signal which ‘mode’ they are currently in).4 But while we like this approach for its creativity, we suggest that the give and take of working and learning together is so fundamental that it needs to imbue more of primary school life so that the habits of reading the moods of others, progress-checking and constructively giving and receiving feedback become deeply embedded.

  Of course, children at this age also need to be well-grounded in the basics of number and words, but by far the most important things are that, by the time they are 8, they will have acquired the habit of reading and writing for pleasure, discovered the power of stories, and begun to develop a fascination for numbers and the extraordinary patterns and connections they bring with them. At the same time, as proto-scientists, artists, engineers and inventors, they will have needed lots of practical opportunities to make things. They will also have begun to understand that their bodies need to be looked after (in terms of diet and exercise and their interaction with other little bodies!).

  A few years ago we worked with a teacher in a school in Milton Keynes who undertook some research into ways of making reading and writing fun for her Year 1 children in ‘Elephants’ class. The teacher chose Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss as a book to read together (a good choice given its central character is Sam-I-Am who is reluctant to try things out but gradually learns to ‘give it a go’). She equipped the Elephants with paper, pencils and clipboards and asked them where they’d like to do their writing. They chose to try in the classroom with the lights off and powered by torches, in the staffroom (achieved after a bit of negotiation!), lying on the floor in the library, in the school grounds and even in the local park. This simple but imaginative approach worked well. Accompanied by the normal phonics and handwriting practice, the confidence of the Elephants class increased, the teacher told us, as did the fluency and skill of their writing.

  Another similarly adventurous example which we liked was the decision by teachers at Coombes School, in Berkshire, to teach the Great Fire of London by having the whole school (and parent body) construct a scale model of London outside in the grounds, then to orientate it so that the wind was blowing in the same direction as it was on that fateful day, then to light it in Thomas Farynor’s bakery and see what happened. The children and assembled throng of parents potentially learned as much about the passage of fire as they did about the fragility of a capital city largely built of wood. The whole thing was filmed so that the learning could endure beyond the few minutes of the playground conflagration.5

  There are two simple truths about learning that seem to escape the odd Trad. The first is that children learn best when they are fully engaged with what they are doing. For this to happen they have to be interested; to want to be able to do something that they can’t yet do. The second truth is that they mostly want to do things that older people around them obviously enjoy doing, whether it be kicking a ball, reading a book or telling jokes. So they need to be surrounded by people they like who, for example, frequently and visibly read books for pleasure. And through this and other smart methods, they need to be coaxed to want to master things, not to be afraid of not doing so. Fear prevents you from locking your attention on to what you are doing – and that obviously slows learning down. The worst thing you can do with a child who is slow to read is to turn him into a ‘problem’, because being a problem makes you anxious and upset, and that stops you concentrating and trying. It’s not rocket science!

  Age 7 to 11 – Key Stage 2: Projects driven by interest

  Key Stage 2 will need to continue the apprenticeships in reading, writing and calculating, but we think that there could be two other strands. The first would involve a series of projects that are principally driven by interest in topics and questions that are intrinsically interesting to children of this age. Here’s a lovely example about the Blackawton bees:

  On 22 December 2010, the prestigious science journal, Biology Letters, produced by the Royal Society, published a paper entitled ‘Colour and spatial relationships in bees’.6 The paper reports an experiment which showed that bees could use an intricate synthesis of colour and pattern information to select the most pollen-laden flowers. The paper has 30 authors, 25 of whom are 8 to 10 years old. Three are teachers, one is a researcher and the lead author, P. S. Blackawton, is the name of their school, Blackawton Primary School. The experiment was initiated, designed, conducted and written up by the children (with a small amount of help). They described their ‘principal finding’ like this: “We discovered that bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

  The researcher, Dr Beau Lotto of University College London, notes in his introduction to the published paper:

  The process of science is little different from the deeply resonant, natural processes of play. Play enables us to discover and create relationships and patterns … This is science: the process that enables one to reveal previously unseen patterns of relationship … But, because the outcome of all such [enquiry] is unpredictable, supporting this ‘messyness’, which is the engine of science, is critical to good science education (and indeed creative education generally) … We have learned that doing ‘real science’ can stimulate tremendous interest in children in understanding the processes by which we make sense of the world.

  Knowing more about bees is not the point. Knowing how bees find flowers is not useful for all children, and nor does this knowledge have a stronger claim to be an essential treasure than a million other facts and ideas. But studying bees captured these children’s interest, and with some guidance they were able to use this study as an exercise-machine to learn truly valuable skills and insights about the processes of enquiry and discovery. They stretched their abilities to notice carefully, to collaborate, to record observations, to reason and draw conclusions, to refine technique, to communicate their findings and to deeply enjoy this learning. They are not just learning skills; they are strengthening their dispositions to learn in disciplined ways.

  Nor is getting their findings published in a prestigious journal the point – though it must surely have given those children great pride and a huge amount of encouragement to pursue such enquiries still further. In their desire to work with a real scientist, to create new knowledge and ‘do stuff that no one has ever done before’, they fully commit their intelligence and stretch their learning power in the process.

  Surely, only the most unreconstructed of Trads would prefer these children to be sitting obediently in rows, reciting their times tables (though they can certainly do that as well, if it is effective and enjoyable). Two researchers, Ann
Brown at the University of Berkeley, California7 and Chris Watkins at the Institute of Education in London,8 have shown how, by deliberately seeking to set up classrooms as communities of enquiry, the level of understanding and quality of questioning becomes much deeper. Whether by teaching children how to function in a research team or through a technique known as ‘jigsaw’, it is possible to take young learners to the next level in their journey to becoming really effective learners. (Jigsaw learning organises large enquiries into component sub-tasks to be carried out by different groups, and then requires each group to collaborate with the others. A simple example would be writing, designing, printing and distributing a class newspaper which will call on groups to take on the different interdependent functions of a real newspaper.)

  Sugata Mitra, who we introduced in Chapter 2, would have us go one stage further. He believes we should set up what he calls Self-Organised Learning Environments (SOLE) where children can work in groups, accessing the internet and other software, following up on a class project or taking them where their interests lead them. Mitra’s research shows that this self-organised enquiry works brilliantly – unless interrupted by adults. The world is divided as to whether this is a brilliant idea or a supreme act of folly. Trads hate it, Roms would love it and Mods like us think that we should be bold enough to try versions of SOLE from time to time and monitor its effects on the children. You can make up your own mind by googling the many descriptions of Mitra’s work.