e-help Seminar 33 World class schools for the 21st Century
Toulouse 8-10 June 2006
At
the
start
of
the
millennium
the
Vision
2020
group
of
UK
specialist
school
headteachers
published
One
World:
One
School.
The
ideas
in
One
World:
One
School
were
informed
by
conference
discussion
with
specialist
schools
nationwide
and
had
a
significant
impact
on
national
education
policy
and
practice.
The
Futures
Vision
group
within
what
is
now
the
Specialist
Schools
and
Academies
Trust,
in
conjunction
with
a
similar
group
of
Australian
educators,
is
re-visiting
the
questions
still
facing
us,
taking
on
board
the
many
changes
that
have
taken
place
worldwide
in
the
last
five
years.
The
Futures
Vision
network
exists
to
stimulate
thinking
amongst
educators
and
policy
makers
through
questioning
current
practice
and
by
presenting
thought-provoking
calls
for
innovation
from
practitioners.
We
wish
to
engage
in
debate
with
all
those
in
schools
facing
up
to
meeting
the
needs
of
young
people
in
the
21st
century.
As with Vision 2020 the underpinning belief
running through the work of Futures Vision is that if we are to build
world class schools for the 21st Century then it is not sufficient to
tinker with existing structures. We believe we need to transform
schooling, the ways in which students learn and the ways in which
schools are led and managed – ultimately to the benefit of our present
and future communities. To illustrate some of the elements of
transformation we have made use of the conceptual framework of
innovation and abandonment to emphasise that we need not only to do
certain things differently – but that we also need to make a conscious
effort to abandon, or cease, certain existing practice.
One World One School recognised the need for a radical re-think of what
we mean by ‘a school’, where it is located and what it does. This
document addresses similar issues, as well as taking into account the
rapid technological progress and some of the other dramatic changes in
the world that have affected our lives since the beginning of this
century. Our intention is to ask key questions that address the need for
transformational, systemic change to meet the needs of current and
future learners.
Through its international network, iNET, The Specialist Schools and
Academies Trust now debates these issues with educators worldwide. The
Futures Vision group is now engaged in developing a publication that
reflects current thinking in the UK and Australia around the essential
questions in leading the secondary school of the future. The publication
has been informed and influenced by debate undertaken at workshops and
conferences in the UK during 2005 and 2006. Our aim is to stimulate
further debate amongst all schools affiliated to the Trust and iNET
across the globe.
The challenge: why change?
“The system we work in today was invented 100 years ago for another
time and another mission – the processing of large numbers of students
for rote skills and the education of only a few for knowledge work. It
was never designed to teach all children to learn to high levels. Caring
and dedicated teachers, administrators, and parents work hard every day
within this system to educate our children for more ambitious thinking
and performance skills - and yet their efforts are often stymied by
outmoded institutional structures, most notably the large, impersonal,
factory-model school.” (Linda Darling-Hammond, School Redesign
Network, Stanford University, California: USA, www.schoolredesign.net)
Much has been written about potential futures for the planet and for
education. Whichever one you believe, and some have more likelihood than
others, the implications for schools are huge. The only certainty is the
future will be different to the present. How will a model of secondary
education, rooted for most of us in the past in terms of its rigid
subject divisions, its hierarchical structures and its ageing building
stock, provide for the divergent needs of all learners in the future?
How will we ‘personalise’ learning if we stick with a system that
tests students en masse at the same age and time? How can we best create
genuine life long learners with the skills and competencies to respond
flexibly and cooperatively to the phenomenal changes that face us in the
future?
One simple answer is: not by doing what we do now, or by what we always
have done in the past – even if it delivers results that please
newspaper editors, parents and politicians or meets the narrow
requirements of the standards agenda. To equip our young people to
thrive in their future life as productive citizens with social
responsibility, contributing globally to the wellbeing of the fragile
planet we live on, more is required of us.
The moral and professional imperative for change is strong. If we
anticipate a world transformed even further by technology, a world that
is shrinking daily and becoming increasingly globalised, then we need to
meet these challenges in schools through what we teach and how we teach
it. If we are to lift the life chances of those most vulnerable in our
society so that they can make a worthwhile contribution and enjoy the
rewards that come with that, then the way that we are failing them
currently needs to change.
What are the other drivers for change? When the students themselves are
asked, they invariably say in their own way, that what’s on offer is
not coherent. To them it’s a means to an end. Many have a sense of
playing the game in order to get the magical paper qualifications to go
on and do something more meaningful - others may disengage and
disappear. When students enter employment, they often find their
qualifications get them through the door, but once in, the skills and
competencies they need to function effectively and flexibly within
highly competitive global organisations can be sadly lacking. The big
question isn’t how we manage and engage with change but, rather, what
are the dangers if we don’t?
Essential questions
• Why is education configured in the way it is? What do we take for
granted that we might question and change?
• How can schools justify much of what they do? How do our students
develop a sense of identity and belonging?
• Why does the UK curriculum, despite all the reform and innovation,
still look very similar to that on offer at the start of the 1900s?
• Why do so many students still leave at the end of compulsory
education with so little to show for it?
• If much learning can take place anytime/anywhere, why do schools
generally consist of buildings in one place that are usually only open
to everyone for learning from 9-3, 190 days a year?
• Is the traditional classroom based single timetabled lesson the best
way to organise the majority of our students’ learning?
• Why is so little of what is now known about learning used on a daily
basis to plan experiences for students?
• How will the new technologies transform learning?
• Why do we still depend on outmoded, industrial age thinking, when
working with complex organisations?
• Where can we find inspiration and examples of change from which we
can learn?
• What are the current and future leadership challenges for secondary
school leaders?
• Does one school, operating in isolation, have the capacity to
transform itself?
• What are the consequences for students in meeting the challenges of
the 21st century if we do not transform our current practice?
• What are the consequences for society if our students are unable to
meet these challenges?
• How can transformation in education create greater cohesion in our
society and globally?
• How can transformation in education create a greater chance of
survival for our planet?
Why is education configured in the way it is?
David Hargreaves (2004) has challenged us to question many of the
assumptions about education that we take for granted through developing
the concept of ‘educational imaginary’. In this context, an
imaginary is a set of generally unquestioned assumptions about the way
education is configured. Hargreaves contrasts the 20th century
educational imaginary, where aims and outcomes were well known and
uncontested; intelligence was a fixed innate characteristic, and
teachers and student roles were sharply defined, with the 21st century
imaginary. Here, identities and destinations are fluid, intelligence is
multi-dimensional as well as learnable and the roles of teacher and
learner have become blurred. In the 20th century imaginary, schools were
designed and organised along factory lines like a production line, with
predictable inputs and outputs, coupled with a distinct lack of choice
about learning for the student.
The challenge for school leaders today is to reconfigure education so
that it is fit for the 21st century. What makes the task significantly
more taxing is that the pace of change from one educational imaginary to
the other is happening now, in real time. School leaders are currently
living with the transition and faced with leading and managing the
transformation. Hargreaves sees the personalising learning agenda (for
example, Leadbeater 2004, Hargreaves 2005) as the driver to get us from
the 20th century imaginary to the 21st century.
Hedley Beare (2001) presents a similar challenge, of moving from factory
based, parochial schooling to a new kind of future school. The drivers
for this change – which is coming, whether we like it or not – are
radical shifts in post-industrial economies, information technology and
globalisation. Beare (in Caldwell 2005) has repeated the urgent need for
school systems to rid themselves of the military analogies – of power,
rank, compliance, and obedience, as well as the still persistent
industrial age metaphors of old, and replace them with a new imaginary
and new forms of systems thinking. Caldwell calls this ‘new enterprise
logic’. The challenge for school leaders is to oversee the
transformation of schools, rather than their reform. Simply recycling
the same components will not go anything like far enough.
We know that top-down, command and control managements systems have had
their day – other than in the army or in prison – so why does
hierarchy, status and department or pastoral affiliation still matter so
much in teaching? How can professional people end up counting 1265 hours
and how many meetings a week they’re attending? Local authority and
support staff still get appointed to ‘officer’ grades in the UK.
Leadership and management structures in schools have changed relatively
little over the years. They remain intensely hierarchical, inflexible
and multi-layered, with the relatively recent introduction of some
accountability for attention to the core purpose of the school - that is
improvements in learning and the social development of the students. The
department structure in secondary schools creates units that militate
strongly against seeing the student as a whole – and can add to the
lack of coherence by having different stances on the school’s values
and core purposes.
The new UK legislation around the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda has
the potential to radically shift the focus of secondary schools from
teaching subjects to each and every student. It also broadens the range
of agencies that schools will have to interact with but unless funded
properly risks diverting schools from their core purpose, which is after
all, is learning and personal development.
How do schools justify what they do? How do our students develop a sense
of identity and belonging?
These are profound and very serious questions for the school of the
future. One way of looking at the choice facing us is to decide whether
we want value centred or rule bound communities. Value centred
communities define what constitutes acceptable attitudes and behaviours
from an agreement about the real purpose of the school – from the
inside-out as far as the community and the individual are concerned.
Attitudes and behaviours which are out of synch, or not congruent with
what has been agreed, can be challenged by reference to some deeper
moral purpose – rather than from the position of seeking to defend an
arbitrarily imposed set of rules. This has the potential for much more
powerful engagement with students as the core values of the school
become a living, everyday force and some of the detail becomes easier to
justify and to some extent more flexible.
Rule bound communities define what’s acceptable in terms of lists of
do’s and don’ts – from the outside-in as far as the individual is
concerned. This can result in an outbreak of sad teacher mentality, with
arcane debates about the number of ear-rings that students are allowed
to wear– or the ‘do it because I say so’ mentality that has
alienated so many students over the years.
A considerable amount of work has been undertaken by Julia Atkin (1996)
with schools in Australia and New Zealand around value centred practice
and principles, but much of it has yet to reach the UK. Tallangatta High
School in rural Victoria has transformed staff-student relationships
through just such an approach, whereas far too many schools in The UK
are implacably wedded to the rules and regulations model of mass
schooling for purposes of control, rather than learning. This should
come as no real surprise as The UK is the world leader in this respect,
providing the public school system and the trappings of school life such
as uniforms, to many parts of the world during the colonial era. Why are
homework and uniforms still seen as a test of how strong a school is on
standards?
A rule bound culture is ultimately disempowering for both the students
and the staff – as authority is externally imposed and relates to
lists of regulations which someone else, at some time, thought were a
good idea. Virtuous attitudes and behaviours should arise from – and
be congruent with - an agreed set of core values that the whole
community has played its part in shaping. Students’ behaviour can then
be defined and debated within a framework that has real veracity, not by
an imposed set of rules that may have little credibility in the eyes of
the students themselves – or just as importantly with the staff whose
task it is to impose them. For a profession supposedly so committed to
values and student centred education, why are so many of our schools
bound together by externally imposed (to the individual) rule driven
cultures?
These questions go right to the heart of how we want our students to
develop a sense of identity and belonging – and these are crucial
issues in an era when identities are being formed in new, multiple ways
that are no longer under the control of the school or indeed the family.
Furthermore, in a profession that has a reputation for shortening
one’s life expectancy the longer one works in it, how we motivate,
engage with and retain the teachers and staff of the future also seems
crucial. Why does the actual job of teaching burn people out? How can
educators retain the passion and desire that they had to make a
difference throughout their working lives? See Schofield (2004) for an
analysis of Julia Atkin’s work applied to UK school and staff
leadership.
Schools which react to societal changes by trying to increasingly
control what students learn and do within a continued model of mass
provision will find themselves facing great difficulty appealing to
students, who identities are constructed within an expectation that they
have individual rights – often as consumers, and that services will be
personalised to their individual needs. The school system is now faced
with increasing numbers of students who are challenging accepted norms,
are alienated or disengaged, or in The UK, have been lost to the system
by 16. A producer dominated model of education, which tells students
what to do en masse, is inappropriate for the world in which we now
live. It causes massive stresses in the system for those that work or
study there, as well as a massive wastage of talent.
More practically, how does the layout of the average secondary school
encourage socialisation and civilised behaviour? If we expect students
to develop a sense of belonging and identity then why do we mass them
together in enormous year groups and expect them to eat in and make use
of other facilities that are sub-standard. Is it any surprise that
secondary school students can easily feel a sense of alienation and
isolation when they have no place or workspace to call their own, live a
nomadic life going from classroom to classroom, and make use of tiny
canteens and grotty toilets? Botany Downs, a newly opened purpose built
secondary school near Auckland, New Zealand, has been designed around
social units called Whanau Houses (in Maori meaning communities), which
develop the concept of the ‘school within a school’ and a ‘home
away from home’. In the USA, the home of enormous state schools, there
is now a movement, backed up by research, towards smaller schools
(McKinney et al, 2002) - aimed at reducing a sense of alienation and
isolation. The Small Schools Network actively promotes and researches
smaller secondary schools in the USA.
The academic-pastoral divide in secondary schools is also notorious,
with countless teaches with pastoral responsibilities getting the blame
for, and left to feel guilty about, the failings of classroom teachers,
their departments or the school itself to effectively engage with
students. Maybe the recent workforce reforms in the UK will change some
of this but pastoral systems in themselves are not especially efficient
or effective, and it could be argued that they touch only the minority.
Some schools, such as Peacehaven Community School in East Sussex, have
been designed without the one-size-fits all 1:30 ratio of form tutor to
form group – replacing it with individual tutoring or mentoring. Some
schools have opted for vertical tutor groups, as opposed to all members
being from the same year group. This can enable cross-age mentoring or
be designed to re-create the family atmosphere that some of our students
are now said to miss at home. In the USA, the small schools network
promotes the replacement of mass produced tutoring systems with
‘advisories’, which have smaller ratios of staff to students and
utilise adults other than teachers in providing guidance.
Why does the UK curriculum, despite all the reform and innovation, still
look very similar to that on offer at the start of the 1900s?
The traditional curriculum in the UK is very similar to the list of
subjects that was prescribed at the start of the last century – with a
few options thrown in at key stage four. The UK national curriculum
enshrined much of this tradition in law and guidance. So much of what we
put into place is from the perspective of those who have succeeded with
traditional, academic education. There are signs, however, that this
type of old-fashioned subject based curriculum is being questioned and
replaced. In Australia, the New Basics in Queensland, Essential
Learnings in Tasmania and the Victorian Blueprint are state wide reforms
which look to significantly transform secondary education. The RSA
Opening Minds curriculum in the UK is a similar attempt to define
essential learning experiences for students around skills and
competencies, rather than subject knowledge per se. These reforms
question the pre-eminence of the subject based nature of secondary
curricula and attempt to define an essential core of skills and
competencies that will result in more independent, emotionally resilient
learners. They also inevitably raise questions about broadening the
range of adults that interact with students as well as getting to the
heart of how we can ensure that our students choose to learn.
Tallangatta Secondary College, Victoria, Australia, has had a vertical
modular curriculum since 1979, incorporating a very strong vocational
component. The school has an enterprise centre on site which includes
motor cycle maintenance and horticulture, as well as a mobile
hospitality and catering unit called ‘food on wheels’. Mitchell
Secondary College in Wodonga, Victoria, Australia, planned and
implemented a modular, vertical curriculum from year 8-10 in a single
year during 2002-3. There are modules targeted at switching boys onto
reading fiction in English as well as the usual mix of subject based and
vocationally inspired modules to create coherent programmes of learning.
The school has a fully equipped high-tech motor vehicle maintenance
block, and their vision is ‘everyone included, everyone challenged and
everyone successful’.
The Leigh City Technology College in Dartford, Kent, UK embarked on a
similarly ambitious project to restructure the curriculum during 2004-5
for implementation at the start of the following academic year,
demonstrating that quite radical change can be introduced quickly if
done skilfully. Leigh have designed a vertical curriculum from 8-13,
where it is not compulsory that students of the same age have to be
taught together. There are also many schools in the UK now breaking away
from the traditional 3+2 key stage three and four model during the
compulsory secondary years – and even incorporating key stage five
into the plans, as Leigh have done. Hargreaves (2005) provides other
examples of UK schools that have broken the mould in this way.
Research done in the UK into ‘assessment for learning’ has produced
evidence of the success of personalising assessment (Black et al, 2003)
and revealed the limitations of one-size-fits-all summative assessment.
Summative assessment at given ages will need to be replaced by students
travelling through their learning programmes and being assessed as and
when they are ready, maybe with mixtures of ages in each class
reflecting a really individualised approach to progress. Embedding
formative assessment for learning will help students to track their own
progress through learning programmes which can be rigorously moderated
by teachers or the range of other adults supporting their learning. In
the USA, the Coalition of Essential Schools promotes assessment through
multiple forms of evidence, including demonstration of mastery at an
exhibition in front of family and community members.
Why do so many students still leave after 1500 hours of compulsory
education with so little to show for it?
Despite the claimed success of so many educational reforms over the
years, in the UK we still seem to think it is inevitable that 20% or so
of students leave compulsory education with nothing, many being lost to
education and training, sometimes for good. This is a shameful record
– and one of the worst of any post-industrial nation. The continued
predominance of the so-called ‘academic’ subjects, tied to a heavy
dose of key stage three testing is enough to switch off many of those
for whom learning is not a priority. When schools fail to engage or
provide worthwhile learning activities or courses, some students have
usually voted with their feet by the end of year 11 - many others are
still present, but their minds are elsewhere. Others choose to avoid
work and disrupt. Even the ones who succeed may not be true independent
learners, often relying on a diet of spoon feeding justified by the
testing and assessment regime.
What do we do with students in The UK who are not ready to learn, or
find learning really hard? In years gone by students who found learning
difficult were punished or forgotten about. Nowadays, we readily accept
that students have learning difficulties and most schools have learnt to
help those who find learning hard. However, the non-compliant or the
students who present with a range of emotional or social issues in the
classroom are now the ones targeted for punishment and exclusion. In the
school of the future, maybe it will be as unthinkable to punish a
student for exhibiting distressing signs of behaviour, as it used to be
to punish those who found learning hard. If the UK education system is
so successful, why are there so many exclusions, why is challenging
behaviour on so many agendas and why have schools so blatantly failed to
adapt to the changing nature of the students that now require educating?
Excluding more and more students is not the answer – either for the
individual school or society as a whole.
Collingwood College in Melbourne, Australia, have three sub-schools
(junior, middle and senior) plus three further annexes: The Island,
Richmond No1 and the Alternative School. They are also unique in having
a dual curriculum, with a Steiner stream running up to year 10, which
students and their parents opt into. This provides a range of schools,
with different styles, as well as a school within a school – the exact
opposite of the one size fits all industrial model. The college has a
huge commitment to inclusion and to all their students always leaving
with qualifications. This provision is based on a vision of working
class education that has existed for over twenty years. ‘The Island’
is the work education and training unit for the college, based in a
converted factory, where teaching is to 60 students a day, aged 15+, up
to apprenticeship standards. All who attend have disconnected from other
schools. 95% of these students go into paid employment.
If much learning can take place anytime/anywhere, why do schools
generally consist of buildings in one place that are usually only open
to everyone for learning from 9-3, 190 days a year?
Despite the need to get beyond the school as the basic unit to work with
and focus on the individual learner, many educators still have a n
emotional attachment to the buildings and grounds of the traditional
school campus. Learning is assumed to take place only when students are
physically present on the school site between prescribed times.
Extra-curricular activities are just that – extras, not part of the
core provision. Why isn’t the service being provided the focus of
attention, rather than the location or the time it’s on offer? Schools
might come to the conclusion that it’s actually impossible or
undesirable to provide everything on one site. It is common for older
secondary students to study at other locations, such as college or in
the workplace, but is this just scratching the surface? First day
educational provision for excluded students, now required in some
Behaviour Improvement Partnerships, certainly concentrates the mind in
this respect.
There might be a rich variety of community and home based learning
opportunities that may be much more in tune with a student’s
aspirations and learning style that are being denied to them at the
moment. In addition, schools have to develop skills in teamwork and
co-operation that are so evident in activities children take part in
outside of school such as sports and productions. Often extra curricular
activities have been tacked on to an overcrowded, content dominated
curriculum rather than placed at the centre of a competency based
curriculum that focuses on skills acquired rather than information
remembered.
The pattern of the traditional school year is historic, as the summer
break was originally needed to release labour for the harvest period.
Current patterns of schooling have as much to do with providing
childcare in an effort to cope with working patterns as they do with
provision that might lead to the most effective learning. Why do public
schools and Oxbridge have much shorter terms than state secondaries? Are
their standards of learning worse as a result? Do all students need to
be on the school site from 9-3, 190 days a year? – and if not, how
might we reconfigure schooling so that the structures fit the learning,
rather than the other way round?
Collingwood College, in Melbourne, Australia provides education on five
sites, including ‘The Island’, which is a vocational unit, as well
as an alternative school for disaffected students, which they might
attend for five years or just a week. Many schools in Australia also
have more than one campus, with students engaged in residential
education for part of the year, in a location some distance from the
main school.
Is the traditional classroom based single timetabled ‘lesson’, of
round about an hour in length, the best way of organising students’
learning?
In most UK secondary schools the dominant mode of learning is more or
less the same as it was throughout most of the last century, with one
teacher in a room with about thirty students, more often than not
unsupported by new technologies. At its worst, the teacher is the
transmitter of knowledge and the student the passive recipient. Even the
presence of large numbers of interactive whiteboards or laptops won’t
necessarily guarantee more enlightened types of learning. These modes of
learning remain part of the old factory, producer dominated, model of
education – and then we wonder why students are increasingly
disengaged or unimpressed by what is on offer. The Coalition for
Essential Schools movement in the USA has as one of its core principles
a limit on the number of students any one teacher should be teaching at
any one time in an effort to personalise teaching and learning.
Given the emotional attachment (largely by teachers and parents) to the
‘lesson’ and regular movement during the day, is it surprising that
schools generally consist of long corridors and a series of similar
looking classrooms? Why do most secondary classrooms consist of 15
double desks, often in rows, and 30 uncomfortable plastic chairs? Has an
adult ever tried sitting in one of those chairs for five hours? What
would a school built around learning actually look like? Why are the
vast majority of students required to be in ‘lessons’ all the time?
Will the UK Building Schools for the Future programme simply give us
more of the same old tired designs or will we genuinely see schools
built around student learning and personal development?
Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti – a state secondary school in Christchurch,
New Zealand - opened in 2003 with 400 students on roll in a shopping
centre in the centre of the city. Unlimited has very few of the
conventional trappings that would mark it out as a school – yet it is
an inspiring place to work and learn. It has no fenced off site,
relatively few conventional lessons and no typical classrooms. Every
student has an individual education plan which maps out their learning
around core time and ‘glide time’ when attendance is voluntary but
by prior agreement. Their feeder primary (called Discovery 1) has a
similar unconventional location and a refreshingly thoughtful approach
to learning. In the same city, Christchurch College of Computing was set
up to provide a high quality alternative to the traditional sixth form
education – in an office environment, more akin to the sort of thing
we might expect a private language college in the UK to look like.
However, the college was set up and owned by Burnside High School, which
in other respects is a conventional state secondary school.
Woodbridge High School in Tasmania, Australia has used the impetus of
the new state curriculum framework, known as Essential Learnings, to
provide longer learning periods, alongside trying to combine the needs
of learners with different types of spaces. The school has based these
developments on experience of what worked, informed by their own and
others research. In a conventional secondary school timetable, most
teachers meet so many students in a week that they can’t possibly know
each of their minds well, assess their work properly or personalise
anything. So much of the work that is set for students, either in class
or for homework, is to keep them busy and to get to the end of the
lesson.
The Australian School of Science and Mathematics (in UK terms a sixth
form college), constructed on the campus of Flinders University in
Adelaide, South Australia, is a unique educational environment, with a
number of highly innovative features. There are no conventional
classrooms, with some teaching taking place in ‘learning commons’,
which are adaptable open-plan ICT rich learning spaces.
It would not be too far-fetched to suggest that the whole culture of
schooling could move toward one of active learning centres where the day
is flexible and built around learning needs with extra curricular
activities as part of the package of opportunities and choices that
build up the portfolio of competence that will profile achievement
throughout school life.
Why is so little of what is now known about learning used on a daily
basis to plan experiences for students? If schools are experts in
learning, why are they not better at teaching students how to actually
learn?
Twenty years or so ago, relatively little was known about how humans
actually learned and how the brain worked. Through the use of magnetic
resonance imaging neurologists investigating brain activity now know
much more about how learning happens. This work has given weight to
theories of learning such as Howard Gardner’s ideas regarding multiple
intelligence; David Kolb’s cycle of experiential learning that
requires a shift ‘towards teaching how to do something’; Daniel
Goleman’s seminal work on the impact of Emotional Intelligence on
learning and Black and William’s research on the impact of Assessment
for Learning as an alternative to summative assessment.. All of these
have profound implications for the development of ‘learning’ in our
schools.
Now we know that intelligence is not fixed and it is multi-faceted. We
know that the brain is plastic and that it can be taught to learn, even
if some of the connections inside it that many of us take for granted
have not been made in the years soon after birth. We also know that
there is no such thing as a low or high ability student but many of us
still use the language. Being a good learner is not about being
‘able’ or ‘bright’. In fact all students have the potential to
learn – and it’s the school’s job to find the answer, not to take
part in a self-fulfilling prophecy of doing what we’ve always done and
then blaming or labelling the students as ‘special’ or ‘EBD’
when it doesn’t succeed. Learning more, in relation to one’s own
previous best or level of performance, is all we should really be
interested in.
We know that there is a strong link between the quality of learning and
the level of cognitive and metacognitive activity taking place. We also
know that actually learning about learning has more impact than teaching
something like study skills and those classrooms which operate as
‘communities of inquiry’ produce better learning, thinking and
communication. Although there are different views about learning in
different situations, learning in classrooms is often a social activity,
with the individual student involved with the teacher or other students
in the co-construction of understanding. We also know that student
engagement and interest increases when the context for learning is a
real-life problem or issue. The metaphor of ‘work’ for activity in
the classroom is dangerous, as it can avoid asking deeper questions
about the level of engagement of students and especially about the
degree of cognitive and metacognitive activity taking place. And
finally, we also know that assessment to support learning (known in the
UK as ‘assessment for learning’) is more successful than the old
ideas about testing and examinations with age related formal assessment,
regardless of the learner’s readiness.
In other words, some classroom experiences are consistently more
successful in enabling students to learn. What these experiences are and
why they work should be at the centre of every school’s professional
development programme – and indeed be a stimulus to work across
schools as well. The analogy with the medical profession is a good one
– where professionals research, share and create new knowledge about
how they can be more effective in their practice. Where learning is
concerned, teachers and schools should be the experts – but they so
seldom are. The former UK Minister for School Standards, David Miliband,
commissioned Demos to set up a learning working group to produce a
report on the implications of this type of thinking in 2004. The
resulting report About Learning, whilst having some interesting
observations to make about learning in general, also advocated the need
for regular summaries of research on the brain, learning and thinking to
be made available to schools and for teachers to be engaged in
developing and sharing this increased understanding.
Students (and indeed adults) are all different - are motivated to learn
in different ways and have different learning, thinking and working
styles, in turn deriving from individual aptitudes, needs, likes and
personalities (Prashnig, 2004). Some Primary schools in quite
challenging circumstances, such as Moulsecoomb in Brighton, UK and
Katikati, North Island, NZ, have transformed themselves and the
engagement of their children by systematically applying these principles
in every classroom. The challenge of doing something similar at
secondary level is much greater and as yet, largely undeveloped,
although Cramlington School, a 13-19 upper secondary in Northumberland,
UK has integrated some of these ideas within their year 9 learning to
learn course, as well as having developed blueprints for teachers’
lesson planning across the curriculum.
The education system has traditionally been one dimensional, rewarding
those who were good at remembering and sitting still. This is no longer
good enough, as knowledge is changing fast, is more accessible to all
and we do not know what our students will need to know in the future. It
has been argued (Claxton, 2002) that what we should be doing is teaching
students to develop supple and nimble minds, so that they will be able
to learn whatever and whenever they need to in the future. A focus on
how to learn would include students developing an understanding of their
own learning profile and how to use it to raise achievement and develop
their full potential. Students could use this knowledge to develop
transferable skills especially in literacy, numeracy, communication and
self-management in order to become emotionally intelligent, flexible and
resourceful learners in the future.
In response to the failure of much of what is taught in the early
secondary years to produce resilient, independent learners who have
flexible skills and competencies, and who can work well in teams, while
also being able to lead themselves and others, schools have been
searching for alternative ways of organising learning. More widely,
there is a growing desire to find out just what we need to change in our
education system that will make the difference between producing
students who simply pass (or fail) exams and producing independent
lifelong learners who have the potential to thrive in the knowledge
based economy of the 21st century. In the UK the RSA Opening Minds
curriculum is an alternative model being used in the early secondary
years with very interesting outcomes, including improved levels of
literacy, improved behaviour and independence in learning. The
curriculum is taught through projects that are mapped against the
requirements of the national curriculum, and include many cross
curricular links such as citizenship, ICT and literacy. It also has an
important part to play in improving transition from primary to secondary
school as the projects are taught by one teacher, so decreasing the
tendency to fragment learning with students having to meet numerous
teachers in a week. The nature of the early secondary years can lead to
disengagement by year 8 and disaffection for many by year 9. A
competency based curriculum model, scaffolded by a ‘learning to
learn’ approach can develop an academic curiosity and independence in
learning that allows students to take more responsibility for their own
learning and hence dramatically improve engagement and motivation,
especially when combined with a focus on an active student voice
programme that encourages a sense of ownership, enterprise and
responsibility. Opening Minds enables aspects of emotional intelligence
such as persistence, optimism and self management to be explicitly
modelled and taught across the curriculum. Within this context, lessons
taught in brain friendly ways are those where active participation,
variety and challenge combine to make learning exciting but demanding.
Why do we still depend on outmoded, industrial age thinking, when
working with complex organisations?
Why do we still rely on traditional rational planning systems and
policies in helping us determine how to act? Why has some of the latest
thinking on complexity theory failed to permeate schools? Traditional
strategic planning, and the policy and action planning that goes with
it, are problematic because schools are unpredictable, human
organisations. This is an uneasy, messy message, as there is a degree of
familiarity and security with a folder of policies, the conventional
development plan and its grids of actions and success criteria. However,
there is a developing body of work which has exposed the myth of
reducing complex problems to separate, rationally manageable component
parts – as in traditional modes of planning and thinking (see for
example: Brooke-Smith 2003 and Chapman 2004).
A well known analogy is to compare the results of throwing a rock and a
live bird. Both actions are governed by the laws physics but such laws
are hopeless for predicting where the bird will end up. Systems thinking
treats schools in the same way, as complex, adaptive systems and is in
direct conflict with the command and control mentality of the industrial
age. This is also a major challenge to government and their unremitting
production of good ideas for the school system as a whole, coupled with
modes of thinking from a by-gone era, such as target setting coupled
with pressure and support.
Complexity theory says that the best way to improve performance is to
take a range of actions, evaluate the results and learn what works best,
rather than simply specifying policies, targets or success criteria to
be met. What works best would be for teachers, students and parents to
judge, not just the senior management team. This type of approach
requires a degree of innovation and creativity, as well as an
evaluative, reflective style of thinking in relation to professional
practice. School leaders will need a new mindset which allows for a
degree of uncertainty, is not too eager to control the details of change
and which nurtures deep and powerful learning across the school – much
of this being dependent on the quality of interactions between the
staff. The optimum condition for the school is known as the creative
state, a condition on a continuum between rigidity at one extreme, where
everything is controlled and nobody takes risks - and anarchy at the
other, where everyone does as they please. There are similarities in
this thinking with the concept of distributed leadership and the
different types proposed by Hargreaves & Fink (2006). Based on
empirical studies of schools in Canada, they propose a continuum from
autocracy to anarchy, with the most well developed form of leadership,
which they call ‘assertive distribution’, only one step away from
anarchy.
Optimistically, complexity theory also tells us that in the creative
state, small changes (known as those with high leverage) can lead to
major transformations. Using these ideas, school leaders can consciously
work towards the development of the optimum creative state, which may
takes time depending on where you’re starting from, but also seek out
those high-leverage initiatives that may result in transformation.
Ultimately complexity theory gives the leader of the school of the
future a hopeful, positive model within which one can be more at ease
with innovation, risk and a degree of uncertainty.
At a system wide level in the UK, there has been an intellectual
acceptance within government that transformation of secondary schooling
won’t happen through centrally determined, prescriptive policies. Such
a realisation doesn’t, however, automatically translate into the
everyday policy announcements and the latest good idea that politicians
seems so keen on. The tension felt in schools between the desire to
transform schooling, alongside league tables of examination results and
multiple accountabilities is a very real one and is not conducive to
creativity, risk and innovation.
Levers for transformation, innovation and abandonment
“We are operating in the wrong frame of reference and as a consequence
our lives will continue to become more busy, more exhausting, less
humanly productive or satisfying and increasingly devoid of meaning.
Alternative frameworks exist that are likely to serve our human needs
more profoundly and more engagingly: it would be foolish to ignore
them.” (Michael Fielding, Sussex University, UK, 2001)
Key issue Levers for transformation Abandonment
Language of the19th century educational imaginary Re-evaluate metaphors
and language used; cease using those that convey out-moded or
inappropriate messages; choices over learning: content, style and
location Military metaphors and industrial age concepts: officers, rank,
hierarchy, command, control, obedience, compliance, orders, mindless
rules, delivery, line management, rigid job demarcation, teacher as
complete expert, student as complete novice. One size fits all systems
School buildings, sites, opening times and where learning takes place
Virtual learning environments; redesigned classrooms; community and home
based learning; extended independent learning assignments; first day
educational provision for excluded students; regular residential
programmes; specialist vocational provision; specialist additional needs
provision; blurring boundary with extra-curricular; shift times for
different cohorts 9-3, 190 day a year working patterns – for students;
provision on one site; distinction between curricular and
extra-curricular; traditional piecemeal homework timetables;
uncomfortable plastic chairs; traditional lunch times
Values and purposes; students and staff commitment; how students form
their identities; how students develop a sense of belonging Revised
values, attitudes and behaviours statement; the ‘school within a
school’; smaller units; redesigned social facilities, canteens and
locker areas; supervised, civilised, toilets; peer to peer, smaller
tutor groups or 1:1 mentoring; student ownership of desks, learning and
social space; teaching and building emotional intelligence capacity;
advisories and small group tutoring Rule bound communities; behaviour
modification programmes which fail to address teachers’ core values
and beliefs; detailed, arbitrarily created lists of rules; corridors
with lino and lockers; traditional grotty toilets; poor quality food;
uncivilised canteens; punishment regimes and scapegoating of students
who are disturbed; classifying students by behaviour type; 1:30 tutoring
ratios
Learning and the brain Metacognition; activities which challenge and
stretch beyond the comfort zone; assessment for learning; reflective
diaries; ‘learning to learn’ integrated within teaching;
co-construction of understanding; learning styles that impact on
emotions; classroom based development and research; staff research
groups and publications; availability of water; linking diet, exercise
and learning; learning styles; development of emotional intelligence and
habits of mind to include persistence, self-awareness, self management,
optimism and deferred gratification to produce resilient learners Fixed
intelligence and the language of low and high ability; attainment rather
than achievement; conventional models of professional development;
divide between research and practice evidence; teacher as know-all
expert; controlling rather than motivating classrooms; copying;
exclusive use of summative assessment data
Early 20th century curriculum and pedagogy Define absolute
standard/outcomes, then work backwards from 100%; achievement measured
against own personal best; competency and skill based learning
programmes, which explicitly address emotional intelligence; competency
based curriculum; portfolio of achievements; longer periods of learning;
student evaluations of learning; integrating discrete subjects;
individual educational plans; choice over what, where and how students
learn; real life, authentic contexts for learning; integrate subjects;
assessment by exhibition; mixed age teaching; choice in early secondary
years; accreditation for extra-curricular and community based learning;
extended work related learning and internships; rigorous use of data to
track students and combat underachievement; diplomas; learning styles
Incremental models of judging success (eg 55% 5+A*-C to 65%); language
of being busy and doing ‘your work’; fragmented daily timetables
with lots of movement; the classroom, lesson, teacher, timetable or
school that puts any of these units of organisation before the
individual student; teacher as worker, student as passive recipient;
compulsion over what, where and how students learn; traditional key
stage three and four division; traditional age related cohort learning
and testing; key stage three testing for all at the end of year 9; work
experience lasting a week; targeting only certain borderline or high
profile groups; teaching to the test; passive, teacher dominated
learning; lecturing; spoon feeding; random hourly slots for ICT, PSHE
and Citizenship; exclusive focus on ‘standards’; vocational
education as second class
Transition from primary to secondary Transfer when ready; phased
transition; teachers that can teach in primary and secondary schools;
competency based curriculum in year 7; two year key stage three;
teachers teaching across a range of subjects; all through schools
Transfer when 11; primary/secondary divide; transition in September
primary and secondary teaching qualifications which exclude the ability
to teach in each phase; 10+ teachers a week in year 7; three year key
stage three; groupings based on age
New technologies Designing learning on the basis that technology
influences young people’s identity; accreditation for group and team
work; placing proficiencies within the wider context of how technology
impacts upon ourselves and the world; openly debating the morality of
new technologies and digital texts; seeing childhood and adulthood as
more closely linked to behaviours and attitudes; finding out what our
students want and need and then engaging with the developers
Over-confidence in technology solutions; the idea of technology as
merely peripheral equipment; discretely taught ICT; ICT labs;
proficiencies-led learning about technology; stringent views of ‘the
taboo’ and unhelpful age-bound distinctions between child and adult;
Styles of leadership, command and control Distributed and broader
leadership; leadership defined by accountability, competence and impact;
student researchers; student associate governors; student surveys –
including quality of learning; an ethos of creativity; networks,
clusters and federations; engaging with other agencies, professionals
and stakeholders Know-all, heroic leader, macho management; selfish,
inward looking, self-serving, self congratulatory styles of management;
competitive school practice, which lacks responsibility for whole
system; job descriptions which list tasks; management by telling people
what to do; complex, multi-level systems of organisation, control and
accountability; cultures of permission and excuse; individual schools
competing or working in isolation; the concept that educators know best
and have to do everything
Complexity theory and rational planning Systems thinking; achieving the
‘creative state’; relaxing rigid systems; tightening anarchic
systems; networking, learning from and connecting with others;
international benchmarking Rational models of planning; linear thinking,
traditional strategic and development planning; complex, detailed
development plans with tables of targets and success criteria;
simplistic definitions of success, such as 5+A*-C