Building Learning Power

Let the politicians tinker – they’ll never get close to the heart of good teaching and learning, argues Guy Claxton…

Another Secretary of State for Education – another missed opportunity! A lot of flurry about how much time we should spend teaching fractions – and no time at all spent wondering whether being able to add a half and a third is a relevant life skill for the 21st century! Lots of anxiety about whether we are going to beat Finland or Singapore in the international tables – and no mention of those countries’ own dissatisfaction with the narrowness of their children’s technical ability! Much ado about children’s levels of reading ability – no apparent awareness of how the national Literacy Strategy damaged children’s pleasure in reading!

Here is something very obvious and straightforward that seems too complicated for the likes of Mr Gove to understand: learning in classrooms happens simultaneously at a range of different levels or layers. At the same time as children are learning facts and cultivating skills, so they are also developing attitudes and traits of their ‘learning character’. They are becoming more or less confident in the face of uncertainty; more or less frightened of making mistakes; more or less imaginative and resourceful; more or less keen to look at what they have done and think about how to improve it; better or worse at collaborating with people who are not their friends; and so on. And it is these lasting attitudes that are the really important residues of education. Dozens of countries around the world – including Singapore – are now aiming their curricula at these deeper layers of learning. This does not mean that they no longer care about spelling or long division; it means that they care about the way these things are being taught, and the values and habits that are being developed, as well as the brute test scores at the end. You can teach history in a way that gets good results and develops tolerance, empathy and imagination; or you can teach history in a way that gets good results and develops a narrow, anxious and instrumental attitude towards learning. That is the important choice – and that is the obvious thing that very clever and powerful people like Mr Gove seem unable to grasp.

In this together

Every teacher is a player at these deeper levels; you can’t not be. You can never just teach Maths (say); you are always teaching “Maths + Collaboration” or “Maths + The Enjoyment of Finding and Correcting Your Own Mistakes for Yourself” or “Maths + An Anxious Dread of Not Getting the Right Answer”. You can opt out of the awareness that this is what you are doing – but you can’t opt out of doing it. For good or ill, we are all shaping children’s attitudes towards learning, all the time. If the children have to ask you every time they want to use the dictionary, you are missing an opportunity for them to develop their own resourcefulness. If you rescue them the minute they meet difficulty or frustration, you are depriving them of opportunities to strengthen their resilience. If you always tell them exactly what equipment they are going to need to do an experiment, you are training them to become dependent and mindless; you are thinking for them, not creating opportunities for them to learn how to think for themselves.

Building Learning Power (BLP to its friends) is an approach to teaching and learning that gets positive outcomes for children on all the different levels at once. Over the last 12 years, I and a growing army of innovative teachers have been discovering a whole lot of small, practical ways in which we can get good results, but do it in a way that also builds children’s confidence, independence and appetite for learning – in school and out. Some of these shifts are very simple. For example, we have found that children’s levels of engagement increase markedly just by changing a single word – replacing ‘work’ with ‘learning’.

And that you can make children more thoughtful and creative about their paintings and drawings just by displaying their drafts and sketches alongside their finished products. BLP has uncovered a wide variety of ways in which teachers can adjust their classroom habits so that we develop the attitudes we want, at the same time as children are hitting their targets. Indeed, the more confident and articulate they become about their learning, the more their achievement accelerates. Help them fit the learning turbocharger, and they will naturally go further and faster.

And the good news is: these subtle shifts are too small-scale for inspectors to monitor or control. The most important aspects of classroom life fly below Mr Gove’s radar. He is busy pushing and pulling the big levers of the curriculum, while we get on with the job that really matters: laying those deeper foundations for a learning life. His tinkerings with the content and the forms of testing may be welcome or they may be irritating – but they are no more than that. We will keep on doing the things we know to be important. And if the results go up at the same time – well, what’s not to like?