‘SPOTLIGHT’

REPORT ON THE ONE-DAY

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE

SPOTLIGHT ON LEARNING

PUPILS BECOMING RESEARCHERS
INTO LEARNING
ON
26 MAY 2004

REPORT OF ONE-DAY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT CONFERENCE ‘SPOTLIGHT ON LEARNING - PUPILS BECOMING RESEARCHERS INTOLEARNING’

CONTENTS PAGE

PAGE
Welcome and Introduction – Part 1
John Bangs, Assistant Secretary Education and Equal Opportunities (NUT) / 1
‘Still Learning After All These Years’
Professor John MacBeath, Universityof Cambridge / 1
Introduction – Part 2
Clive Carter, HCD Trust / 8
‘Empowering Children as Empirical Researchers’
Mary Kellett, OpenUniversity; with researchers Simon Ward, and Eleanor Denny / 8
Introduction – Part 3
Howard Sharron, Editor Managing Schools Today / 14
Exploration of ‘Pupils as Researchers’ Issues including Case Studies Gregor Sutherland, University of Cambridge and HCD Trust with Jo Quartly, Cardiff High School, Caroline Breyley and Lisa from BurravoePrimary School Shetland, and Maggie Barwell with Lisa Coburn and Josh Butler from Marshland High School, Norfolk / 14
Introduction – Part 4
Stewart Hay, Anderson High School, Shetland / 18
‘Pupils’Perspective of Effective Learning’ – presentation by Learning School Project students: Emma Bengtsson, Nashid Cassiem, Duncan Johnson, Christopher Knight, Moa Malmberg, Ida Norlander, Neil Pearson, Adam Peterka, Jenny Pettersson and Laura Thomson / 18

SPOTLIGHT ON LEARNING – PUPILS BECOMING RESEARCHERS INTO LEARNING

John Bangs, Assistant Secretary, Education and Equal Opportunities, National Union of Teachers, welcomed participants and the partnership between the four organisations hosting the conference. He described the conference as being one element of the high quality, low cost professional development programme, open to all teachers, which the NUT had developed over the last four years.

John Bangs then stressed the importance ‘pupil voice’ to school improvement and pupil motivation. He noted that ‘consulting pupils about their learning’ had been a theme of growing importance over recent years and an important element of the NUT’s CPD programme. Empowering pupils by giving them the means to back up their views with evidence was exactly what this ‘pupils as researchers’ conference was all about. It was the latest stage of giving pupils a voice about their learning and further empowering them by enabling them, through research, to understand more about how they and other pupils learn most effectively.

He said that new approaches, such as pupils as researchers, were important because they were not ‘bolt on’; rather they were integral to teachers’ professional lives and to the learning lives of children.

John Bangs then emphasised the significance of the long term working relationship that JohnMacBeath had established with the NUT. His work on school self-evaluation had been revolutionary at the start whereas now it was an integral part of the school inspection framework. That fact that self-evaluation was now on everyone’s agenda was largely due to John MacBeath’s work.

He then noted the changing thinking about coursework and the emerging view from the Tomlinson 14-19 Inquiry that pupils should be engaged in an extended project, personal challenge, and that gave added significance to the conference. As well as being innovative the theme of pupils as researchers could be an important contribution to policy development with regard to coursework.

He then introduced Professor John MacBeath.

‘Still Learning After All These Years’

(A transcript of the presentation by Professor John MacBeath, University of Cambridge)

“When I gave my title, ‘Still Learning After All These Years’, I was asked if my talk would be autobiographical? Well it will be in part and I’ll start with a bit of autobiography, if you like. I think there are four areas in which personally, after more than half a century on this planet, that I’m still learning about.

So young people here, fifty or forty years on or whatever, you’re going to be still learning about the person that you are and how you actually learn. I’m reminded of Socrates, who said, “Know Thyself”. Know thyself is a starting point, not only for the self evaluation that John Bangs was talking about and the research, but also personally – how do you get to know yourself better. The moral question that Socrates posed to his followers was: “if you had a ring that made you invisible, would you still behave in the way that you do when you are visible?” Now there’s a good test for us all. Imagine sitting in an exam and you’re stuck; if you’re invisible you can just get and walk over and have a look at other peoples’ papers and then come back and do your answer. Would you do that or would you have that moral integrity to think that was cheating?

As I get older, I sometimes surprise myself by how socially responsible I can be – how Iresist the temptation, because nobody’s come around to collect it, to try to use my ticket again next time. How I don’t throw my litter on the ground because nobody’s watching. So you go on and on, learning about yourself and about your own learning.

The second area in which I’m learning is about other people. I’m constantly being surprised by other people – surprised, sometimes incredibly disappointed, by people that I trusted, and I have to revise my notion of human nature. At other times, I’m totally surprised by how generous, self-sacrificial, brave and altruistic people can be.

As to children today I think we’re going to be surprised by what young people can actually accomplish when we give them the space, and when we give them trust and the opportunity to do things. Tim Brighouse, one of my favourite mentors, talks about being surprised into learning; that we’re constantly being surprised by what people can do.

As I walked past St Pancras this morning, I remembered the 12 year old boy, who you may have seen on the television, sketching St Pancras Station. Amazing: he would sit and look at that incredibly intricate station and then go away and draw it absolutely perfectly. Architects were totally astonished and we could not begin to understand that capacity. Something about the brain is just beyond our understanding. David Perkins, the Harvard professor who has done groundbreaking work in learning, says we are still only in foothills of our understanding of how learning works.

The third area in which I’m learning still more, is about how we learn inside institutions. Iwas reflecting on the huge publicity given to Lynndie English, the young American solider who has been condemned for her behaviour in all the newspapers. Her neighbours are saying: “well that’s not the girl we know in the trailer park in the United States”. Suddenly, her behaviour in that prison environment is totally different. I think we know a lot about the way behaviour is shaped by institutions. In the United States, Zimbardo took volunteer college students to be either prisoners or guards in a simulation which took place over three or four days. By the end of it, the prisoner students were acting like prisoners and the guards were acting brutally. They couldn’t believe that they had the capacity to be so brutal. When you enter some institutions, they shape your behaviour – they tell you how to behave. When we apply that to schools, we know that teachers’ behaviour and pupils’ behaviour are very much shaped by the institution that they’re in.

Finally, the fourth thing I think about my own learning is the importance of culture. Margaret Thatcher claimed there was no such thing as society. But I think one of the most important things we learn, or young people can be researching into, is the connections between self, others, institutions and society.

Gregor Sutherland and I had the privilege a few years ago of taking part in the LearningSchool Project. We went to Japan together and stayed with Japanese families. learned a lot about culture and society by the constant mistakes and gaffes I made, for example, letting out the bath water: you don’t do that in Japan. You have a shower first and get clean and when you’re thoroughly clean you go into the bath and the bath water just stays there, so you don’t let out the bath water. And when eating food we were told to keep both hands above the table. If you keep your right hand, particularly, below the table it signals that there may be possibly some threat there, that you may be carrying agun or a knife; it’s just part of a whole tradition. So living in another culture is a way of learning about yourself and learning about society.

I’m reading a book at the moment called ‘William Samuel’. It’s the story of Jesuits going to Japan in the Sixteenth Century. The Japanese were so cultured they looked down on these missionaries, thinking: “how can they tell us anything at all?”. The Jesuits had to learn how to adapt, how to become Japanese, before they could convert people to Christianity.

Still learning after all these years. I’m suggesting for myself and for students as researchers that one of the starting points may be with self and others and, as you move into a third layer, how we understand self and others in institutional settings like schools. How do we understand our social behaviour in relation to others and in relation to the setting of the school? In what way do schools actually shape and constrain our behaviour? And then the fourth layer, looking at ourselves as learners with others in institutions and how that relates to the society at large.

So students as researchers, learning about their own learning, learning about social learning, learning about institutional learning, learning about the learning that happens in society. We need to be constantly exploring those connections between those different layers.

“Imagine yourself on a ship sailing across an unknown sea, to an unknown destination. An adult would be desperate to know where he is going. But a child only knows he is going to school… The chart is neither available nor understandable to him… Very quickly, the daily life on board ship becomes all important… The daily chores, the demands, the inspections, become the reality, not the voyage, nor the destination”.

(Mary Alice White, 1971)

So with regard to the question that John Bangs raised about coursework young peoples’ skills of investigating become a real premium. The skill that young people will need most in the present, and particularly, in the future, is learning how to store and retrieve, analyse and discriminate in this huge world of information that we have. Maybe one day we’ll stop testing children by what they carry around in their head and start testing them in terms of how they’re able to retrieve knowledge and how to use that knowledge.

There’s another element to this. Despite all the technology, despite how much we’re able to store and retrieve through technology, there is what’s called the Transactive Memory. The Transactive Memory is the information we store in other people and retrieve from other people. So as David Hargraves, who was at QCA and before that at University of Cambridge says, ‘social intelligence is the beginning and end of all intellectual development’. I think psychology is telling us – social psychology and cognitive psychology – that we learn very powerfully socially by how we store and retrieve information from other people.

Gregor and I were travelling down in the train this morning and we had both had our little laptops out, working away there. Two guys sitting beside us as we were having our conversation, were obviously listening in, because the guy sitting beside me said, “Oh, you’re going to Hamilton House, you’ll enjoy that”. He was a physician and how he knew about Hamilton House I don’t know. But the guy across from me asked to see my computer and then said he’d show me how to do some things because I had been struggling with various things on it. He took it over and he started to show me how to ‘gull’ this machine, as they say Scotland. I was quite delighted with what I learned and Iasked him if this was something he did all the time. He said, ‘Well I learned this from somebody else on the train’. Trains are great places: you exchange information, and learn things from other people. Transactive Memory allows young people to store their information and to do their learning as a social activity.

In exploring learning, there are five Ws and an H – where, when, who, why, what and how. Where do you learn best? If you explore that issue you get some really very interesting answers. One secondary student, when confronted with this question, was telling me that he does a lot of his learning and revision in the bath. He’s got all these posters up all around the wall and he lies in the bath and he relaxes deeply with all that nice hot water and steam around him. Alpha rhythms in the brain become beta rhythms as you relax and so it’s a very good place to be doing your learning. We know the power of place and the power of context: where you learn is incredibly significant for how you will retrieve information. We know that if you sit an exam in the room in which you learned the subject, you will actually perform better. You will retrieve information better because you’re in the same context.

We are pretty particular about where we do our study or where we do our homework. Years ago, when we embarked on our research into homework, we asked young people where they learned best. Some said: ‘with the television on’, or ‘with people around me’, or ‘I like to be in my own room with my loud music on’, or ‘lying on the floor’, or ‘on the phone to my friends’. We found the power of context was so important and, of course, we know from further research how true that is. Young people who learn in the chemistry lab don’t transfer –don’t take their learning across the corridor to the maths class. Learning tends to be very local and contextualised.

There’s a myth that the best time to teach maths is first thing in the morning. So you have a numeracy hour first thing in the morning. But this isn’t helpful to children whose systems don’t actually start working until about 10o’clock. Their bodies haven’t actually woken up, and they’re not in gear until maybe later in the day. For so many, between 2and 3 o’clock in the afternoon is an absolutely dead time to have to try learn anything – when you’re really just wanting to fall asleep. Of course the southern Europeans have got it right, haven’t they, 2 until 4 in the afternoon is siesta time. Maybe it’s something to do with weather as well.

How do people learn so differently? We were having a conversation last night and one of my colleagues, she said, ‘No I can’t get that until you give me a picture of it. I’m not really good at holding words in my memory. But if I get a picture of it, then I can understand it’. Of course there’s a now huge industry, if you like, now in learning styles and learning preferences and there’s also some mythology around as well. Understanding where and how we learn best is so important and such a rich area for research for young people. And also, who do you learn best with? The Transactive Memory again, who do you go to, to find out or to explore, to have that dialogue with.

And why? Just recently, in the last five years I suppose, the Government has discovered the importance of the ‘why’. That’s why teachers now put objectives on the board at the beginning of a lesson, because they’ve discovered that perhaps children ought to be thinking about why am I learning this today. One of the problems about objectives on the board is that often they don’t address the question of why at all. Just putting up an objective that at the end of this lesson you will remember five things about ocean currents leaves out the ‘why’ altogether. We need to ask about the deeper purpose of learning.

There are a couple of sources, relevant to what I’ve been talking about, that you might want to look at or listen to. I took the title ‘Still Learning After All These Years’, from Paul Simon’s song title, ‘Still crazy after all these years’. Does anybody know the first line? Paul Simon, well I mean, it’s real oldie stuff, isn’t it! The first line is ‘When I look back on all the crap I learnt in high school it’s a wonder I can think at all’. ‘Still crazy after all these years’ has a wonderful line in it, ‘I like to lean on old familiar ways’. You know, when you get on a bit, it’s nice to lean on old familiar ways. But I think one of the challenges to us is to think differently and to challenge the old familiar ways.

Five slightly more serious texts. Firstly, ‘Fine Construction Sites’ by Weiss and Fine. In that book, the authors look at different sites, different physical sites: different places where young people construct their learning. There are some very surprising and very challenging insights in it about how children learn from their parents. Issues that school never addresses. Absolutely wonderful chapters in that book that are worth looking at.