Educating Ruby

by Guy Claxton

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  eyfs_statutory_framework_march_2012.pdf.

  3 Department for Children, Schools and Families, Practice Guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage: Setting the Standards for Learning, Development and Care for Children from Birth to Five (Nottingham: DCSF, 2008). Available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

  20130401151715/https:/www.education.gov.uk/

  publications/eOrderingDownload/DCSF-00266-2008.pdf.

  4 See http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php.

  5 You can read about this in one of the thought-provoking books by Learning through Landscapes: Jacqui Dean, History in the School Grounds (Winchester: Learning through Landscapes, 1999).

  6 P. S. Blackawton, S. Airzee, A. Allen, et al., Colour and spatial relationships in bees, Biology Letters 7(2) (2011): 168–172.

  7 See Ann Brown and Joseph Campione, Guided discovery in a community of learners. In K. McGilly (ed.), Classroom Lessons: Integrating Cognitive Theory and Classroom Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1994), pp. 229–270.

  8 See Chris Watkins, Classrooms as Learning Communities: What’s In It for Schools? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).

  9 Building Learning Power (BLP) is a programme inspired by Guy which explicitly helps young people to become better learners, both in school and out. It helps schools to create a culture that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable young people to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently and creatively. For examples of schools putting BLP ideas into practice, see Guy Claxton, Maryl Chambers, Graham Powell and Bill Lucas, The Learning Powered School: Pioneering 21st Century Education (Bristol: TLO, 2011). For more general information about the underpinning research and practices, see www.buildinglearningpower.co.uk.

  10 See Peter Freebody, Eveline Chan and Georgina Barton, Curriculum as literate practice: language and knowledge in the classroom. In Kathy Hall, Teresa Cremin, Barbara Comber and Luis Moll (eds), International Handbook of Research on Children’s Literacy, Learning, and Culture (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 304–318.

  11 See David Leiser, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde and Rinal Benita, Human foibles or system failure: lay perceptions of the 2008–9 financial crisis, Journal of Socio-Economics 17 (2010): 2–39.

  12 John Lanchester, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (London: Penguin, 2010); John Coates, Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf: Risk-Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust (London: Fourth Estate, 2012).

  13 George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning (London: Penguin, 2007); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin, 2007).

  14 Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (London: Harper Perennial, 2007).

  15 David Brooks, The Social Animal (London: Short Books, 2012); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2012); Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

  16 Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen, Borders: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  17 John le Carré, The Constant Gardener (London: Hodder, 2005); Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2010) and Bring Up the Bodies (London: Fourth Estate, 2013).

  18 John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (London: Penguin, 2014).

  19 Olivia Fane, The Conversations: 66 Reasons to Start Talking (London: Square Peg, 2013).

  20 For a good introduction to theory of knowledge, see Eileen Dombrowski, John MacKenzie and Mike Clarke, Perspectives on a curious subject: what is IB theory of knowledge all about? IB Research Paper (2011).

  21 You can read more about the IB’s TOK at: http://www.ibo.org/contentassets/

  0339a02316d742b7be8c358144ae9856/

  ibtokeng.pdf, as well as see a wider picture of its approach to learning.

  Chapter 5

  Reasons to be cheerful

  The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

  William Gibson

  So far we’ve painted a picture of schools which may be rather different from the one with which you are familiar. If you are a teacher or parent you may have laughed (or cried) out loud at the gap between what we are imagining and the experience you are having of your children’s school. Similarly, if you are reading this wearing your employer’s hat you may be wondering if we are inhabiting the same world as you do, where job applicants regularly show an alarming lack of basic literacy and numeracy, or even basic aspects of self-organisation.

  Or perhaps neither of these imaginary reactions is accurate. Maybe you know schools that are doing much of what we are talking about. Or perhaps you are an employer who has developed a great relationship with local schools and are in active discussions about how the kinds of broader attributes we describe can best be developed. Whatever your response, in this chapter we want to offer you hope; to show you that, as William Gibson suggests, if you look around, you can see many examples of the future of schooling, even if they are not yet locally available for you. Many of them are drawn from schools which have been using approaches to teaching and learning like BLP.

  At school I used to be a good learner but now in my opinion I am a brilliant learner! I have found a part of me where I can just get on and do what I need to do. For example, I always check my work through. Even now I still make mistakes in my work but I edit it and it comes out a lot better than I thought it would. Since BLP I’m more patient, and I have learned that listening to other children helps me too.

  Kieran, Year 6

  BLP not only helps me, but it helps others around me. I have a little sister who is 4 years old and goes to a primary school without BLP. When I use phrases like, “What did you learn?” and “Did you use questioning?”, that really helps her to understand what she is learning about and how it’s helping her in other situations – not just the one she’s in at school. When she’s reading something she can now persevere if she doesn’t understand, and if she doesn’t understand a topic at school, she’ll say, “Well, I have used … to overcome this situation.” It helps you to become your own learner.

  Victoria, Year 9

  I used to get embarrassed and not like talking … BLP has opened new doors for me, it’s made me more confident. Things like listening and empathy – now instead of getting embarrassed, I think of how other people react to things, and learn how I can react when I don’t know something. I mentioned BLP to my friends at ski school, and then the whole week we were talking about how we had naturally used BLP. We were questioning what we could do better, looking for different techniques to improve our skiing, looking out for dangers. It’s something to structure your life on, you use it every day.

  Clara, Year 9

  In this chapter we start by looking at some real examples of where the ideas we have been discussing are already being put into practice – where children are being systematically helped to build 21st century character and, at the same time, are getting better results than ever. We hope you’ll see that there are many reasons to be optimistic. We just need to shout about them and use the examples they offer to encourage other schools to do similarly. We want you to feel inspired to go forth and multiply.

  Pioneering schools

  Miriam Lord Community School is a very large primary school in Bradford. It has high proportions of children for whom English is not their first language, and of those who are eligible for the pupil premium. Many children join the school with skills and knowledge that are well below the national average. In 2013 the inspectors put the school in a category called ‘requires improvement’. In July 2014 they visited again, and now Miriam Lord is ‘good with outstanding features’. Their report says: “The pupils are very keen to learn. They say that teachers ‘make our tasks fun and challenging’, and that ‘the work can be a bit hard, but the hard bits make you learn new things – you don’t learn when you don’t have a
challenge’.”1 The school has used the Building Learning Power framework to build this attitude quite deliberately. Here are some examples of what you might see and hear if you were to drop in to Miriam Lord.

  The Year 2s are developing what they call their ‘noticing muscles’. They have six questions that are guiding their learning:

  1. Am I good at noticing details (e.g. similarities and differences between things)?

  2. Do I want to know more about what we are studying?

  3. Have I got a good question to ask?

  4. How good am I at staying on task?

  5. How good am I at concentrating on what I am doing despite distractions?

  6. Am I interested in what I am doing?

  In a maths lesson, the children are working with blocks of different lengths and colours to represent different numbers (you may know them as Cuisenaire rods). One boy, Arjan, is trying to represent the number 67 – he needs six tens-sticks to represent the 60, and then seven unit-cubes to make the 7. But under the 7 he has put seven tens-sticks. Instead of correcting him straight away, his teacher asks him to ‘notice the details’ of what he has done.

  Arjan: I notice that I’ve put six tens-sticks under the 6.

  Teacher: What do you notice?

  Arjan: [points at the units column where he has put seven tens-sticks instead of seven unit-cubes] That I’ve got this bit wrong.

  Teacher: Well, you’ve noticed something useful. What numbers did you make with the equipment?

  Arjan: 60 and 70.

  Teacher: So, now can you revise your answer?

  Arjan changes the units column to correctly show 7 unit-cubes. His teacher asks him to explain what he now notices.

  What do you notice about that little exchange? You may have been struck by the fact that Arjan does not get upset about having made a mistake; he just spots it and uses his observation to think how to correct it. He isn’t just being helped to get the right answer (although he does); he is being coached to be more attentive to what he is doing, to think more clearly, to correct his own mistakes and not to get upset just because he didn’t get it right first time. Cumulatively, this ‘coaching’ will make Arjan a better learner: more confident, enthusiastic and perceptive about his learning so he will learn faster and more effectively.

  The Year 3s are getting toward the end of a unit focusing on ‘How to live a healthy lifestyle’, and to consolidate their learning they have been asked to plan and run a successful ‘healthy cafe’ to which their families will be invited. They are using a tool called the TASC wheel (Thinking Actively in a Social Context), which was created by Belle Wallace.2 The TASC wheel helps them orchestrate the task; their teacher is doing very little to guide or rescue them from the considerable difficulty of the assignment. Instead pupils respond to a series of helpful prompt questions such as:

  ● What do I know about this?

  ● What is the task?

  ● How many ideas can I think of?

  ● Which is the best idea?

  ● How well did I do?

  ● What have I learned?

  The wheel provides a colourful and pupil-friendly way of structuring planning, thinking and progress.

  The children set to work researching menu choices, budgeting the cost of various ingredients and designing and writing the invitations. They also design a questionnaire to gauge customer satisfaction with various aspects of their performance. Then they learn how to set the tables, prepare the food and drinks and, when their cafe opens its doors, gather orders from the ‘customers’, serve the different dishes, write out the ‘bills’, give them their change and dish out the questionnaires. After the event, they analyse the results from the questionnaires, and, as a whole class, use the information gleaned to reflect on their performance and to draw lessons for the future.

  Bryan Harrison, the head teacher, wrote, “The event was well attended by parents who commented on how professional the event was, and how much confidence the children had shown. There were genuine moments of deep pride shared between the children and their families.”

  Nobody could do anything other than applaud this as a wonderful piece of education. The children are being stretched and are rising to a significant challenge. They are undaunted by this because their previous learning has cumulatively built up their capacity to cope and to be independent, resourceful and collaborative. They are using their maths and their English in meaningful ways that deepen their competence. They are learning to plan, reflect, make collective decisions and take responsibility – all habits that will benefit them in later life. They are utterly engaged and, at the end, bursting with pride at what they have managed to achieve. The community is involved and impressed. The parents see the growth in their children, and are totally supportive of the school. The children, let us remind you, are 7 and 8 years old.

  Whether it is Blackawton bees or a healthy cafe doesn’t matter. What does matter is that teachers are finding questions and creating challenges that engage children’s interest and energy, and are skilled enough to structure the activities that follow in a way that systematically stretches valuable, transferable habits of mind. At Miriam Lord, the children are learning something really useful – to understand the basics of a healthy diet – and they are using this topic as an exercise-machine to drive the development of other, really useful attitudes and capabilities. What’s not to like?

  Further up the school, the Year 5s are studying the Amazon. All kinds of useful and interesting discussions and understandings can flow from this topic, and do: the different beliefs of indigenous peoples, the threat to wildlife, forests as ‘the lungs of the world’, the complex politics and economics of developing countries such as Brazil, and so on. But at Miriam Lord, this topic is also being used to develop more sophisticated learning habits and skills, such as internet research and note-taking. The children are given a text and challenged, both alone and in small groups, to distil out the key points (an ability that had been noted as underdeveloped in these children by an earlier assessment).

  Within the topic there are a range of tasks that offer different degrees of challenge, and the children are encouraged to reflect on their own abilities in relation to the tasks, and select the ones that give their ‘learning muscles the best stretch’. This not only gives the children a greater feeling of ownership and engagement, but also develops their ability to assess their current levels of understanding and ability for themselves. In a similar vein, children are encouraged to decide for themselves when to work on their own, when it would be better to join a group of other children and when they really need some help and guidance from the teacher. Over the course of the term, the children made 3D models of key features of the Amazon which the head teacher describes as ‘stunning’. They wrote articles about some of the environmental issues and stretched their mathematical competence by working out rainfall averages and presented these in a variety of formats using ICT.

  Any ideologically driven rhetoric about the inadequacies of project work, or the absurdity of ‘expecting children to be experts’, utterly fails to do justice to these sophisticated classrooms, and to the interwoven development of knowledge and understanding, technical skills and habits of mind, which is palpably taking place. There is no opposition between ‘gaining knowledge’ and ‘learning to think’. They form a double helix. Knowledge deepens and broadens at the same time as the capacities to think, learn and be creative are being cultivated.

  A few miles west of Bradford, across the Pennine Hills, lies the village of Barrowford, where the primary school has also made extensive use of BLP ideas. The school hit the headlines worldwide in July 2014 because the head teacher, Rachel Tomlinson, sent to every pupil in Year 6 a customised version of a letter that had originated in America. (Teachers – along with scientists and artists and athletes – are always borrowing and adapting each other’s ideas; that’s how good practice spreads.) Here is an extract from Rachel’s letter:

  Dear …

&nb
sp; Please find enclosed your end of KS2 test results. We are very proud of you as you have demonstrated huge amounts of commitment and tried your very best during this tricky week.

  However, we are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you – the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do. They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten up the dreariest day. They do not know that you can write poetry or songs, play or participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school … They do not know that you can be trustworthy, kind or thoughtful, and that you try, every day, to be your very best … The scores you get will tell you something but they will not tell you everything.

  So enjoy your results and be very proud of these but remember there are many ways of being smart.

  The letter went viral on the internet – because, we must presume, it rang a deep bell with millions of people. The letter praises the children for their achievement on conventional tests (the so-called Key Stage 2 SATs), and told them to be proud of their results and of their willingness to work hard and try their best. But it also reminded them of the other accomplishments and layers of their character that they should be proud of too: trustworthiness, diligence, cheerfulness, kindness, artistic flair.

  There is nothing in the letter that could possibly be read as encouraging the children to devalue their education. However, Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, was quoted in the Daily Mail on 15 July as saying: “They’re undermining confidence that the children may have in the education system. … It’s an indirect attack on the Government. The message that the school is sending to the children is that somehow they are being betrayed by the system. … Schools should not be a platform for promoting political ideologies – they should be neutral.”3 Hmm, you have to work quite hard to see it that way. And you have to be rather uninquisitive, at the very least, to see why such dangerously seditious and anarchic extremism should appeal so strongly to millions of regular mums and dads.