by Guy Claxton
● Creative thinking – students understand what is meant by being entrepreneurial and initiative-taking, and how to develop their capacities in these areas.
● Risk-taking – students understand how to manage risk and uncertainty, including the wide range of contexts in which these will be encountered and techniques for managing them.
You could theoretically just replace subjects with competences and end up designing a curriculum of one-hour blocks looking at time management or risk-taking. But such an approach would clearly be (a) silly and (b) entirely against the spirit of what Opening Minds is proposing. These competences need to be developed through rigorous projects and enquiries of the kind that we were suggesting would feature in a Key Stage 3 curriculum.
Think of one of your pupils (if you are a teacher) or your children (if you are a parent) and the situations they encounter, or think about yourself and the kinds of things you need to manage in your own life. Whether it’s the weekly shop, homework, getting ready for a holiday or football practice, we all need to be able to manage time. Similarly, in a fast-moving world, we all need to be able to deal with change. Do we embrace it? Do we get grumpy and resist it? Do we ask for help? Do we find out more? Do we think of different ways in which we could react and select the most appropriate one? We think it is clear that these examples of managing situations are manifestly things that help life go more smoothly and effectively and, therefore, qualities you’d want the next generation to have.
This highlighting of useful habits of mind, and weaving them more systematically into lessons, is no great revolution. Both New Zealand and Australia, for example, have chosen to organise their schools by foregrounding the capabilities they want students to acquire in the course of studying important things. You cannot teach competences in isolation; they have to have content too. Opening Minds schools tend to assume that the organisation of the school day may, in part at least, be about creating chunks of time where pupils can work with teachers, employers and others on rigorous, challenging enquiries or projects. By doing this, pupils learn ‘how to’ at the same time as they think about the whys and whats of any discipline.
Here’s one more example of a charitable body creating optimism on the ground. The Sutton Trust describes itself as a ‘do tank’ (as opposed to a ‘think tank’). We think it has a place in this chapter because of its close links to the real world of schools. It is trying explicitly to use research to change policy and practice. Above all, the Sutton Trust is trying to help children who are less well-off do better at school and then in life – what’s often referred to as improving social mobility.
A practical example of what they produce, in collaboration with the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is the Teaching and Learning Toolkit for teachers.22 The toolkit takes a number of different teaching methods and then distils the research on its effectiveness into a really clear ‘dashboard’ that signals its degree of impact, cost to implement, the strength of the evidence in its favour (the icon that looks like a weight or possibly a fashionable handbag!) and then gives it an overall score in terms of the number of months by which it might accelerate pupils’ progress. Not all the teaching methods they have evaluated are directed at building up students’ habits of mind – some are only assessed in terms of their effect on traditional examination grades – but some of them are.
For example, the screen grab above shows the dashboard for teaching strategies that develop metacognition and self-regulation – two of the most powerful habits of mind we have been focusing on. Strategies for building metacognition involve getting the students to think more explicitly about their own learning. For example, they are asked to set goals, anticipate how much time a task will take, evaluate their own work or step back and check the way they have been working or discussing to see if they can improve their modus operandi. (We looked at some of the strategies for building self-regulation in Chapter 3.) For example, they might include learning how to manage distractions or how to use motivational self-talk in the way that athletes and sportspeople regularly do. The evidence for the effectiveness of these strategies is strong, especially (but not entirely) with children who have been making slower progress. Overall, adopting these kinds of strategies in the classroom accelerates students’ progress by as much as eight months. And the costs are relatively low, mainly relating to professional development that shows teachers how these strategies are best implemented. If teachers can help students to get better test scores, and at the same time give them mental habits that are useful in all kinds of real-life situations, how could anyone possibly object?
To sum up: the future of schools, as we suggested at the start of this chapter, is already here, even if it is not yet equally available to all of our children. In the next chapter we offer a few suggestions of things that can be done by parents at home and then, in the final chapter, invite you to consider taking action on a broader stage.
1 Ofsted, Inspection Report: Miriam Lord Community Primary School (15–16 July 2014).
2 For a clear explanation of where TASC came from, see Belle Wallace, Teaching thinking and problem skills, Educating Able Children (Autumn 2000): 20–24. Available at: http://teachertools.londongt.org/en-GB/resources/Thinking_skills_b_wallace.pdf.
3 Sarah Harris, There are many ways of being smart … Headteacher writes to pupils saying not to worry about exams, Daily Mail (15 July 2014). Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2693045/Primary-school-headteachers-inspirational-letter-pupils-ahead-test-results-earns-praise-parents.html.
4 Ofsted, Inspection Report: Barrowford School (11–12 September 2012).
5 See www.northshoreacademy.org.uk/about/vision-values.
6 Ofsted, Inspection Report: North Shore Academy (12–13 December 2013).
7 We have created an alliance, the Expansive Education Network (www.expansiveeducation.net), and we have written a book telling the stories of schools across the world who are expansive educators: Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton and Ellen Spencer, Expansive Education: Teaching Learners for the Real World (Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research, 2013).
8 This body has been renamed twice in its short life in ways that clearly point to prevailing political opinions. First it was the National College for School Leadership, then the National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services. It became the National College for Teaching and Leadership in 2013.
9 See Alison Lock, Clustering Together to Advance School Improvement: Working Together in Peer Support with an External Colleague (Nottingham: National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services, 2000).
10 CBI, First Steps: A New Approach For Our Schools. End of Year Report (London: CBI, 2013). Available at: http://www.cbi.org.uk/media/2473815/
First_steps_end_of_year_report.pdf.
11 See www.greateducationdebate.org.uk/.
12 ASCL, Leading for the Future: A Summation of the Great Education Debate (London: ASCL, 2014). Available at: http://view.vcab.com/?vcabid=geaSeneagSclphnln.
13 ASCL, Leading for the Future.
14 We have contributed two pamphlets to the Redesigning Schooling campaign: Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas, What Kind of Teaching for What Kind of Learning? (London, SSAT, 2013). Available at: http://www.ssatuk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Claxton-and-Lucas-What-kind-of-teaching-chapter-1.pdf; and Bill Lucas, Engaging Parents: Why and How (London, SSAT, 2013). Available at: http://www.ssatuk.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/RS6-Engaging-parents-why-and-how-chapter-one.pdf.
15 See http://www.redesigningschooling.org.uk/campaign/campaign-hopes/.
16 See William Stewart, How PISA came to rule the world, TES (6 December 2013). Available at: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6379225.
17 See, for example, OECD, PISA 2015: Draft Collaborative Problem Solving Framework (March 2013). Available at: http://www.oecd.org/callsfortenders/Annex%20ID_PISA%202015%20Collaborative%
20Problem%20Solving%20Framework%20.pdf.
; 18 See Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer and Guy Claxton, How to Teach Vocational Education: A Theory of Vocational Pedagogy (London: City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development, 2012). Available at: http://www.skillsdevelopment.org/PDF/How-to-teach-vocational-education.pdf.
19 See http://uk.pearson.com/myeducation/my-education-report.html.
20 RSA, Education for Capability Manifesto (London: RSA, 1980).
21 See www.rsaopeningminds.org.uk/.
22 See www.suttontrust.com/about-us/education-endowment-foundation/teaching-learning-toolkit/.
Chapter 6
What parents can do at home
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman:
The Kindly Ones, Vol. 9
Preparing young people to thrive in a tricky world is not just the job of schools and teachers. Parents are educators too. The way we talk to our kids, the kinds of rituals we create for them around mealtimes and bedtimes, the activities we encourage, the role models we provide, the materials we place within their reach, the kinds of ‘fun’ we lay on for them: all of these carry messages that influence their growing minds – for good or ill. Before we try to think about how we can help to shape the education system itself – what we can all do to encourage the spread of the kinds of schools that our kids really need – we need to look closer to home (literally). What is the informal ‘domestic curriculum’ we are providing for our children, and could we do a tiny bit better?
We should say, of course, that, just as the earlier chapters were written for the purposes of stimulating debate, so this chapter on home learning is meant to do likewise. There are hundreds of excellent books on parenting and parental engagement in children’s learning and we certainly do not intend to duplicate them here.1 Instead, we offer this as a starter-for-ten to get parents and teachers thinking about the ‘how’ of learning at home. Remember Ruby and her seven Cs? We will use her description of the attributes she values as a way of organising our discussion. Naturally, you may not like our seven Cs and might prefer to come up with your own. We’d love you to do that!
The domestic curriculum, as we have implied, is like the one children learn at school; but it is conveyed more by the way things are done than the specific ‘lessons’ we might try to teach. You can play a family game of Scrabble, for example, in a way that models your total engagement in a good game; or as a coach, less interested in winning and more in making suggestions to your children as to how they can make good words, with all your letters visible to all so that everyone can think through their options out loud; or as a fiercely competitive test of your own verbal ability; or as an exercise in dutiful, half-hearted involvement with your family while you quietly check emails on your phone. It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it!
Confidence
Being confident involves developing and using a growth mindset, being a can-do person and being able to act independently. A growth mindset, as we saw in Chapter 2, is founded on self-belief. Children who believe they can get better at things, it turns out, normally can – with practice and determination. The fixed mindset makes you fatalistic, so you don’t think it is worth doing the very things – practising and struggling – that could help you to improve. The best ways in which you can encourage your child to develop this kind of self-belief is to avoid too much generalised praise (Well done, Guy) or ‘ability’ praise (Guy, you’re just a natural at this), and concentrate instead on giving really specific feedback to your child when he does things well (I really liked the way you spent extra time on your homework, Guy, and used the ideas your teacher had given you for writing interesting sentences). Guy, in this final example, is hearing that his effort paid off and, over time, he will see how valuable it is to go the extra mile. Another important job for parents and family members is to share things with which they are struggling. In this way, children learn that struggling and making mistakes are normal and healthy aspects of learning.
You can’t give a child a magic injection of confidence! For sure, you can make them feel loved and secure, but real inner can-do confidence comes from the experiences of planning and seeing difficult tasks through. A key part of such success involves the ability to set goals and then plan how you will achieve them. So, from an early age it is helpful if you can get into the habit of making plans as a family (What shall we do while we are on holiday? Who’d like to suggest what we do today?). Once children are at school, homework (not always a helpful activity if poorly set) provides a good opportunity to help your child break a task down into its smaller components, think through how long each part might take, make a plan, do it and then, whenever possible, talk about how it went.
When they are very young children want and need you to hold their hand. But as they grow you can help them to practise acting independently. To begin with you can be quietly there in the background – for example, while they cook a simple meal ‘on their own’. Then you can set them simple jobs to accomplish as they grow in confidence – walking the short distance to a local shop and buying you something, taking the dog for a walk (with you seeing them safely over the main road first), getting everything ready for school the night before.
A good read to help you understand more about developing confidence is Carol Dweck’s Mindset.
Curiosity
Curiosity is at the heart of all learning. Being curious involves noticing things, reading avidly and, obviously, asking good questions. Young children have curiosity in great abundance, constantly pestering those around them with questions (Where does dew come from? Why does it get dark? Who is God?). But it is all too easy to dampen children’s insatiable appetite to find out more. It can be wearying to answer yet another question, but if you can possibly manage to show genuine interest in the enquiry, such role modelling will be a powerful influence.
Being able to notice things is an essential component of curiosity. For some children (and adults) it seems to come naturally. For others it may need to be actively coaxed into life. If you have ever been to an art gallery you will have an idea of what we mean. Some visitors seem to be able to see things in pictures that others completely miss. It’s the same with children. On a walk to school, for example, some children chatter away naming things as they go. Others talk less but you can tell that they are noticing for they tell you about it later. A third category of child (and adult!) seems to walk through life without obviously noticing what is new or different or interesting. Parents and family members can help by playing games (the obvious one is I-Spy) and explicitly talking out loud as they go about any daily tasks. It can feel very odd, but it helps (Can you see the …? Isn’t it interesting the way that …? What do think that is?). Family walks and car journeys are great ways of practising noticing. And with a smartphone in your hand children can be motivated by taking photos which they can return to later and discuss.
Reading for pleasure is probably the most important habit you can instil in your child. Some children take to it and need little encouragement, just a ready supply of books from the library. Others need lots of patient encouragement. There is nothing more powerful than a whole family reading their books together. Children see their parents engrossed in a book and inwardly record the importance attached to the activity by the grown-ups. Routines help – for example, making uninterrupted time after lunch at weekends and in the holidays can work. Before they go to sleep is a good time to take the opportunity to practise reading together. If your child is reluctant then you will need all your skill to find topics of interest. One neat way of persuading reluctant children to read is to give them the
chance to turn off their light really late occasionally at a weekend only if they are reading a book. Reading aloud to your children for as long as they will let you is vital. It helps if you can have lots of children’s books at a low height throughout your home.
Questions are the outward expression of our curiosity, and the home is the obvious place to give them full rein. Simple things that work include: watching a wildlife programme together and then talking about it; making sure you have a good supply of simple reference books around the place – dictionaries, atlases, guidebooks and so on; getting your children to create a treasure hunt around your house/garden and make up the clues; sitting beside your child and doing an internet search for something that one of you is curious about.
A good resource for encouraging curiosity is the BBC iWonder website or the Discovery Channel, and a wonderful book is Michael Rosen’s Good Ideas.2
Conviviality and collaboration
Conviviality and collaboration are core attributes of human beings. Conviviality is close to what Malcolm Gladwell helpfully calls ‘social savvy’, and it seems that the home is a really good place to develop it. Young children can be very sensitive about who their friends are, worrying that they are in the wrong crowd or that someone does not like them. In the home we can provide children with a safe environment to practise interacting with people of all ages. We can show them how we are all individual and different and how to value such differences. Whether it’s being part of a tribe, group, team or family, we need to be able to get on with people, even those we don’t like very much. Spotting an acquaintance across a room at a party, Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” That’s a good attitude to model to our children. Whether on Facebook or in the playground, children cannot help encountering hostility, prejudice and the rush to judge. Being convivial – a good collaborator – requires us to be able to listen empathically, show kindness to others and give and receive feedback well.