Educating Ruby (12 page)

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).
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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.
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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!

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'.
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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:

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, California
7
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.

The other strand that should begin in KS2 is an introduction to the vast number of ways which grown-ups find of making a satisfying living. Some children develop unconsciously very limited – and limiting – ideas about what they could be: what they could dare or hope or aspire to be. Even casual remarks can close off an avenue: “Oh, that's not for me – or for people like me,” “I could never do that,” “That's not a feminine or manly thing to do so I'll cross it off the list of possibilities.” From age 7 onwards, we think schools should be beginning to seed young minds with all sorts of possibilities, so children can see that ‘people like me' do ten thousand different kinds of things to make a living, and have happy, fulfilled, responsible lives. Many parents and members of a school community talk well about their job, and a quick presentation followed by lots of questions is a good way of sparking children's interest. After-school clubs run by specialists tend to be even more effective as they develop longer term relationships and tend to involve children in real-world activities together relating to the target vocation.

As pupils begin their secondary career, we envisage project work of diverse kinds, some designed by teachers to stretch certain learning habits of mind (there is an example of this in
Chapter 5
) and some designed largely by the students in response, this time, not just to personal interest but to some ‘commissions' from the local community. Students, working in teams, provide genuine consultancy and research in response to issues that might be vexing local people. For example, they could include concerns arising from proposed housing developments, where the students research the likely implication of the development for local wildlife, road usage (e.g. parking, traffic jams, rat-runs) or increased pressure on local amenities such as sports facilities, doctors' surgeries and schools. Again, skills of enquiry, interviewing, data analysis and presentation will all be stretched and developed.

At primary school we would hope that all children will have understood deeply that being a ‘good person' and a ‘good learner' are themselves learnable. By the time they get to secondary school they will already be well on the way towards developing these habits. It should have become second nature to own up to a breakage or to finding lost property, to behave kindly towards new arrivals in the school, to be able to stay focused on a task despite some distractions, to listen carefully to others in a group, to persist in the face of difficulty and so on. In thousands of schools around the world, pupils may have encountered this ‘habit-building' way of teaching in the guise of Building Learning Power (many of our examples are taken from this approach)
or from other approaches with similar philosophies.
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At some stage, no later than Key Stage 3, it is especially helpful if the techniques and attitudes of the ‘powerful learner' are made explicit so that they are widely coached and discussed across the curriculum. Children are being helped to learn how to learn. There are many different ways of doing this, and all we would want to suggest here is that schools bear in mind two things.