Educating Ruby (14 page)

The ideas in this chapter are not intended to be remotely definitive. Rather, they are presented to start some different conversations about what we might want young people to learn at 5, 7, 9, 11, 14 and 19. Our intention is to populate the curriculum with challenges to think about, and to stretch young people's abilities to think, to critique, to communicate and to act effectively – not just to mug up bodies of received opinion simply in order to open a gate into the next field of learning. We want to bring knowing, thinking, feeling and acting back together, as a powerful launch pad for a thoughtful, responsible and adventurous life.

Chapter 5

Reasons to be cheerful

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.

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.

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:

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 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.
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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:

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: