Thanks for another provocation. I think your suggestion regarding cognitive science is spot on. Being is so important. Learning to care, be curious, courageous etc do require time. Whilst your suggestion that this is not another subject it does suggest to me that if there is too much content to ‘deliver’ there is unlikely to be time for young people to exercise their own curiosity or work out what they care about and why.
Absoluytely, I think this is what's happening - in secondary schools especially, because they are so much more atomised and partitioned off into subject areas. Often the 'pastoral' stuff is outsourced to a separate team
I recently observed some lessons in a different school, something didn't quite feel right in the room; what was missing was a sense of a class of leaners who had a sense of togetherness, where they were encouraged in oracy ; instead there was a procedural "well laid out" learning. Some vitals dimensions of learning to be were absent....I found myself getting impatient and bored..I wondered how the young students would describe thier class. Where was the fun, the mutual recognition, the excitement?
Yes I have observed lessons such as these. Well planned, professionally delivered, but lacking something... an essential sense of human connection perhaps...
Phenomenal take. This is what I mean when I say I want to see a more holistic, student-centered education system. How are we taking the magnifying glass off of test scores and cognitive achievement and moving the focus to be more on the personhood of the child? One thing I do wonder, though: who decides what qualities are important for “being”? How do we avoid the white-washing eurocentricity that’s already inherent to our mainstream curriculum? Relatedly, I also think one of the main points to add to your list of qualities to learn is “how to be respectful and curious of other cultures and their different ways of being.”
Thanks Melanie. I think we're on the same page. This is a strong and important challenge. Are you familiar with Lyfta? they are doing phenomenal work on this front...
You should read Purdie & Hattie's 2002 paper called Assessing Students' Conceptions of Learning. They found six conceptions of learning: Gaining Information, Development of Social Competence, Personal Change, Unbound by Time & Space, Duty, and Remembering, Understanding, & Using Information. I wrote a whole chapter in my recent book about what I call the exclusion delusion which is when we neglect to account for legitimate conceptions in our theories. Any theory of learning that fails to account for all six conceptions is not complete. Incomplete theories are not going to produce reliable results.
I love these ideas about learning and making this work explicit. As you know James this all fits into a pedagogy that I champion and have experienced to great success with my kids.
I think that pointing out it is not "another thing to teach" or just more "curriculum content" is so important.
There is a crucial misconception that traditional, fixed content curriculum/assessment with a very structured, reward and punishment based classroom management style does not have an implicit curriculum as well that addresses all of these points but not necessarily as we would want. Teachers and schools don't get to decide what kids learn from, kids do, and they are always absorbing. This is precisely why these types of learning are not "a class on Wednesday" they are all day every day. Every interaction in a school is showing a student whether empathy, compassion, kindness, curiosity, mindfulness, vulnerability, creativity, etc etc etc is valued or not.
It really can't be assessed in a truly quantitative way obviously and shouldn't be in my opinion. That is the hurdled to get over for large education systems.
I love reading about what you have been up to. I have been a little disheartened at the lack of appetite for real change with the new government but continue to follow and read and be hopeful.
Hi Kimberly! Nice to hear from you. Yes I have been somewhat underwhelmed by the DfE so far. But there are promising signs here and there. And this Welsh initiative is *super exciting*. Stay tuned!!!
I was so please that you landed on 'learning to be'. I was afraid that it would be overlooked once again. In the run-up to the section I actually said out loud, 'Where's learning to be?!'
Playing with a definition - Learning: The intentional and constructive process of becoming.
You may be interested in my English class in the core curriculum of our school. At its heart, it's a writing class, but it provides holistic development with a focus on self-expression. I don't teach information; instead, we look inward to draw out what is already there trying to find expression. The foundational tenet is, "The project is you!". All classes begin with the body, move through the breath, to arrive at the mind. Half of every class are these elements, while the other half is writing. The first assignment of the year is "What do you wish to become?" Not a list of careers and talents, but qualities that we intend to embody; a compass of sorts. All work is done in class (no homework). No submission is longer than a page. Assessment is by portfolio, which results in an individual student publication. Pedagogy of play.
The students love the class and I love teaching it. It quickly becomes an intimate space - a classroom family. The impact has been profound.
Ryan this sounds *amazing*!!! I LOVE the idea of a modular curriculum - I've been advocating for this for years but haven't really seen one in action. Have you published anything else on this? Where can I find out more?
Thanks James, I haven't published much on modular curricula but I'm happy to share more details if you're interested. I mention it in passing in my article about LALTech Lab, another course I've created and am running in the core curriculum under the banner of English.
The lab is a canvas for a student created, student directed company. Students are partners, decision-makers, and beneficiaries. They lead the class, set the aims, assign the deadlines, hold each other accountable, an problem-solve. Portfolio assessment. The product is modular curricula created by students for students. We are prototyping this concept, building out our infrastructure, and also working with external partners. At the moment, that includes a 3D printer manufacturer and a brain-computer interface start-up. Here's a link to that project:
Learning to Listen might be another to add to the list. The ability to actively listen without interrupting someone is life changing in all relationships from family and friends to business.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts - they’re sparking off more thoughts in me and I look forward to seeing them make an impact in learning placez around the world.
Yes indeed I should have included that. Often overlooked even within kracy education. In the Welsh initiative I mentioned in the blog, we have an explicit focus on learning to listen.
Thanks Dr James, this resonated with my thoughts and experiences. Is there a potential category error at a deeper level, that we perceive ourselves as machines, rather than beings? I wonder whether that’s influencing how we teach, learn and interact.
I think at some level this must be true. When I read about Gove's idea that on any Monday morning at 9 am every Year x all over England should be doing the exact same thing with the same outcomes, I could not help but wonder if he had ever met a young person. Constructing a school program that does not understand that every group of young people and a teacher will behave differently and respond differently across time and place and make space for this reality I believe is doomed to fail at some level. Certainly in learning to be these accommodations would be critically important.
I’d love to chat about the Portrait of a Learner- there are many models that aren’t co-created and many organizations doing this work. In different ways. I’ve been supporting this work in many schools but my belief is that it needs to be co- created with stakeholder feedback or you run the risk of a committee developing it without feedback and then spend the next year trying to get buy in from stakeholders- but the challenges you mention exist with degree of emphasis and grading, but when done well, it’s through feedback and evidence of growth determined by students
Thanks for this. Love the idea of triple wellbeing!! This strongly resonates with the focus on relational learning in the Welsh project I'm working on - developing a positive relationship with yourself, with others and with the wider world...
I have been examining learning to be through what’s been called The Portrait of a Learner. It includes content knowledge but also learning to be -an effective communicator, critical thinker, physically and mentally well, respectful, etc. Communities co-create these concepts of learning to be through feedback from students, parents, teachers, coqnnubity members. All agree they are necessary, but you bring up the challenge- should they be central to schooling? Many create their portrait of a learner and hang it up in the schools but struggle to implement and allow time and space for these ways of learning to be or they want to grade them just as you mention. Where I have seen it most effectively take place is in project based learning and community partnered projects where learning is more authentic and with relevant connections to the larger world around them. I’ve listened to students share their big anxieties about what comes next after high school and it all has to do with learning to be. I always loved a model called “Responsive Classroom”- it weaves ways of being into learning to know and do. It creates a community of belonging, trust, and compassion every day. Another concept I have been exploring is learning to be well. - the idea that being well is more than attending to individual well-being, rather, it’s attending to self, community, and planet that creates overall wellbeing ( Thoughtbox Education). Thank you for sharing your thinking! I too have been examining this deeply.
This shift makes complete sense, knowledge whilst still important, is easily accessible now. I've forgotten most of what I learnt at school, but I remember learning how to learn, how to socialise, how to manage stress, how to be with difficult people, learning my values and boundaries. That is what makes me who I am, not the definition of a cumulus nimbus cloud.
This feels like a throw back to 'learning to learn' and the virtue signalling of the early 2000s. Of course all of these qualities are important but I have not been convinced they can be explicitly taught and instead these qualities come through routines and the relationships we build with our pupils.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see what your revised definition of Learning is. Without this definition it's impossible to test your hypothesis. For example, a commonly accepted definition of learning is a change in long-term memory. For example, learning to be polite is entirely knowledge dependent. Politeness is also contextual; what's polite as a teacher to a student is not the same as politeness to your parents. These are domain-specific knowledge issue.
Likewise, learning to be a critical thinker - as much research has indicated - is again domain specific. It's not a generic skill as you need something to think about.
Again, I align with your desire to teach these qualities. My issue is that the line of argument is a repetition off the progressive argument that seeks to dismiss knowledge or proponents of a cognitive science based approach to learning. It goes along the lines of 'sure knowledge and cognitive science is important, but what the human soul?'. It's a strawman argument typified by your statement that much of what you learnt is school has been forgotten. That's not the point. You didn't just learn politeness or critical thinking; you're very knowledgeable and experienced so you have the curse of expertise where you don't see the thousands of facts that underpin your ability to be polite or critical in these circumstances.
Any argument that tries to dismiss the centrality of knowledge is on shaky ground.
Thanks for your comment. Apart from the bit where you described my blog as virtue signalling. That was kind of annoying, but I’ll look past it.
You are correct that, in a sense, this thinking shares some features with the tradition of ‘learning to learn’. A few years ago I did a PhD which was an 8-year controlled evaluation of a whole-school learning to learn initiative which involved 400 taught lessons over a 3-year period. That initiative had a significant impact on subject learning across the curriculum - those students went on to achieve the best results that school had ever seen, by some margin. And it was especially beneficial for disadvantaged students. At the end of Year 9, the gap in the control group was 25%. In the L2L cohort, it was just 2%.
These results are all the more remarkable when you consider that the control group had 400 more lessons of subject-based learning. And yet in subsequent measures of subject learning, the L2L cohorts significantly outperformed them.
I also think you are right to be sceptical of Learning to Learn. Many well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective ideas have been implemented under the umbrella of 'Learning to Learn' over the years. I wrote a book in 2020 where I explored this in detail, in two chapters called ‘A Brief History of Learning to Learn’ called ‘Learning to learn on Trial’.
The book is called 'Fear is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn Deserves Lesson Time - And How to Make it Work for Your Pupils'. I think you'd find it interesting and reading it would perhaps make you a bit less dismissive. The book was very well received by many people who advocate for a ‘knowledge rich' curriculum - see review comments by people like Dylan Wiliam, Peps Mccrea, Mary Myatt, Mark Enser here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fear-Mind-Killer-teaching-Learning/dp/1911382772.
More recently, my thinking has evolved a bit. This work goes by many names - learning to learn, learner effectiveness, self-regulated learning... Internationally it's often referred to as ‘competency-based learning’. But the more time I spend working in this field, the more I find myself reflecting that it's not just about learning. When it's done well, this work does seem to make people better at passing exams. But it's really about taking broader personal development seriously - alongside the teaching of subject knowledge. Hence my decision to start framing it in the language of “learning to be”.
You say you are yet to be convinced that these things can be taught explicitly. I think it's good to be sceptical. But I hope you are an open-minded sceptic. Because I've been working on this for 15 years and my experience - and the evidence I have collected and published to date - suggests that these things can *absolutely* be taught explicitly.
As to my revised definition of learning, I plan to address this in my next post. Stay tuned!
Thank you for your reply. I will definitely look into the shared resources as I do appreciate you know far more than me! I am definitely open to having my mind changed if the evidence changes.
Apologies if you felt my comment was annoying; my concerns stems from what your post implies and the credence I feel it gives to certain persistent myths in educations. These myths tend to be supported by the progressive side positioning the skeptics of these myths as aspiring Grangrindian dispensers of knowledge into the empty vessels of pupils whilst positioning themselves as fighting for the Romantic ideal of the innate goodness, curiosity, and intuition of children. Not only is there little evidence to support a progressive approach but also it fundamentally disadvantages the least advantaged pupils. From my brief foray into your posts
these concerns remain. Notably:
- support for self-directed learning or project-based learning when confronted with the opportunity cost of not delivering the same content
- the idea that the knowledge taught in school or the curriculum generally is obsolete or 'not relevant'
From my reading of Wiliams, Willingham, Sherrington, Didau, and Christodolou there is much to discredit these approaches.
I will read your book and your posts with an open mind. As I said above, if the evidence changes I will be compelled to change too. Thank you for your time!
Interesting. In at least 3 of the people you list I have found very clear support for these ideas in various forms. Wiliam - not just in his comments on my book but also in two of his five formative assessment strategies - 'Activating students as learning resources for one another' and 'Activating students as owners of their own learning'. As neat a definition of learner effectiveness as you're likely to come across. Sherrington in his Mode A vs Mode B teaching. As for Willingham - here's an extract from Fear is the Mind Killer, from the chapter 'Learning to Learn on Trial':
Knowledge is foundational.
We agree. The problem with this argument is not that it's wrong; it is that it is only half-right. This point is perhaps best illustrated by comparing what people say about the work of Daniel Willingham, with what Willingham says himself. Let’s remind ourselves of what the two UK politicians who have most influenced education policy in the last ten years have said about his work:
‘One of the biggest influences on my thinking about education reform has been the American cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham… [who] demonstrates brilliantly in his book, memorisation is a necessary precondition of understanding…’
(Gove, 2012)
‘Daniel Willingham talks about [how] an educated person has vast amounts of knowledge in his or her long-term memory which you can retrieve instantly… As Daniel Willingham has said, education is about… ensuring that we have facts and knowledge securely embedded in long-term memory.’
(Gibb, 2017)
Now let’s examine Willingham's own words. The following excerpts are from the same chapter as the line about how ‘factual knowledge must precede skill’ that was quoted by the prosecution:
‘The implication is that facts must be taught, ideally in the context of skills…’
‘We want our students to think, not simply to memorise. When someone shows evidence of thinking critically, we consider her smart and well-educated. When someone spouts facts without context, we consider her boring and a show-off…’
‘The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge in parallel with practicing critical thinking skills…’
‘In this chapter I describe how cognitive scientists know that thinking skills and knowledge are bound together...’
‘Our goal is not simply to have students know a lot of stuff – it’s to have them know stuff in service of being able to think effectively.’
He even includes the following quote by J.D. Everett (1873):
‘There is a great danger in the present day lest science teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding.’
Clearly, a closer reading of Willingham’s work reveals a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between knowledge and skills than these politicians acknowledge. In short, knowledge may be necessary for critical thinking, but it is not sufficient. It is abundantly clear that Willingham’s central message is one of balance, and he could not sum up the twin insights of cognitive science more clearly:
‘It is certainly true that facts without the skills to use them are of little value. It is equally true that one cannot deploy thinking skills effectively without factual knowledge.’
If our aim is to create a knowledge-rich curriculum, it is important to be clear about what we mean by knowledge, and also what we mean by skill. Does knowledge-rich mean skill-poor, or does knowledge-rich mean skill-rich because skills are rooted in knowledge?
Thank you for your reply and providing some nuance to Willingham's argument. I think we align on a fair amount!
I completely agree that the spouting of facts disconnected from synthesis and understanding is unhelpful and not desirable. Equally, undesirable though is the idea we can teach a skill - say analytical writing in English or mental maths - detached from deep domain-specifc knowledge. I think the latter approach is more common in education than the former. A knowledge-based approach can certainly be done poorly but starting with skills is a recipe for disaster if not underpinned by deliberately sequenced knowledge. Often kids are asked to write analytically with poor knowledge of the text or with only a PEE scaffold and some sentence starters to insert their shallow ideas into. Likewise, mental maths can't be taught detached of number bonds or multiplication knowledge but kids are asked to do it as if it's a teachable skill on it's own.
My question would be if it's helpful to think about skills as complete packaged items that can be taught. I think that it's liable to being hijacked by those who start at the end goal. David Didau says skills = knowledge + practice. I agree skills are our end goal but as a word I think it's helpful to think of 'skill' as a short hand for vast amounts of knowledge that create a complete whole at the end. Once we are skilled we no longer see the connecting facts and nuggets of knowledge and therefore as experts we think we can teach it in it's whole. A knowledge-rich curriculum should ultimately lead to wider skills but these are broken down into much smaller knowledge components.
In terms of the 'way of being' that comes up in Carl Rogers' work, I'm struck by a few things. The first is that your 'learning to be' is surely directly derived from Rogers. The second is that the English secondary schools that I've worked in have been fundamentally reductive in their approach, all behaviour-led while anything about 'being' is restricted to school values that are glued to the wall and talked about in assembly but otherwise forgotten about. The third is that pupils learn about 'being' in primary schools, but they get it beaten out of them in secondary, becoming as a result less mature and less autonomous, as if the leadership of secondary schools believes that enforcement of uniformity and conformity is good preparation for 'real life'. And the fourth came from chatting with an Australian mother, whose friends' children visiting London from back home seemed to her so much more at ease with themselves and their schooling.
Thanks for another provocation. I think your suggestion regarding cognitive science is spot on. Being is so important. Learning to care, be curious, courageous etc do require time. Whilst your suggestion that this is not another subject it does suggest to me that if there is too much content to ‘deliver’ there is unlikely to be time for young people to exercise their own curiosity or work out what they care about and why.
Absoluytely, I think this is what's happening - in secondary schools especially, because they are so much more atomised and partitioned off into subject areas. Often the 'pastoral' stuff is outsourced to a separate team
I recently observed some lessons in a different school, something didn't quite feel right in the room; what was missing was a sense of a class of leaners who had a sense of togetherness, where they were encouraged in oracy ; instead there was a procedural "well laid out" learning. Some vitals dimensions of learning to be were absent....I found myself getting impatient and bored..I wondered how the young students would describe thier class. Where was the fun, the mutual recognition, the excitement?
Yes I have observed lessons such as these. Well planned, professionally delivered, but lacking something... an essential sense of human connection perhaps...
James might you share one or two strategies for each section of the wheel in another post soon?
Phenomenal take. This is what I mean when I say I want to see a more holistic, student-centered education system. How are we taking the magnifying glass off of test scores and cognitive achievement and moving the focus to be more on the personhood of the child? One thing I do wonder, though: who decides what qualities are important for “being”? How do we avoid the white-washing eurocentricity that’s already inherent to our mainstream curriculum? Relatedly, I also think one of the main points to add to your list of qualities to learn is “how to be respectful and curious of other cultures and their different ways of being.”
Thanks Melanie. I think we're on the same page. This is a strong and important challenge. Are you familiar with Lyfta? they are doing phenomenal work on this front...
I am not, but I will certainly look them up. Thanks again for writing, really enjoyed it!
You should read Purdie & Hattie's 2002 paper called Assessing Students' Conceptions of Learning. They found six conceptions of learning: Gaining Information, Development of Social Competence, Personal Change, Unbound by Time & Space, Duty, and Remembering, Understanding, & Using Information. I wrote a whole chapter in my recent book about what I call the exclusion delusion which is when we neglect to account for legitimate conceptions in our theories. Any theory of learning that fails to account for all six conceptions is not complete. Incomplete theories are not going to produce reliable results.
Ooh cheers Don, will check it out!
I love these ideas about learning and making this work explicit. As you know James this all fits into a pedagogy that I champion and have experienced to great success with my kids.
I think that pointing out it is not "another thing to teach" or just more "curriculum content" is so important.
There is a crucial misconception that traditional, fixed content curriculum/assessment with a very structured, reward and punishment based classroom management style does not have an implicit curriculum as well that addresses all of these points but not necessarily as we would want. Teachers and schools don't get to decide what kids learn from, kids do, and they are always absorbing. This is precisely why these types of learning are not "a class on Wednesday" they are all day every day. Every interaction in a school is showing a student whether empathy, compassion, kindness, curiosity, mindfulness, vulnerability, creativity, etc etc etc is valued or not.
It really can't be assessed in a truly quantitative way obviously and shouldn't be in my opinion. That is the hurdled to get over for large education systems.
I love reading about what you have been up to. I have been a little disheartened at the lack of appetite for real change with the new government but continue to follow and read and be hopeful.
Hi Kimberly! Nice to hear from you. Yes I have been somewhat underwhelmed by the DfE so far. But there are promising signs here and there. And this Welsh initiative is *super exciting*. Stay tuned!!!
I was so please that you landed on 'learning to be'. I was afraid that it would be overlooked once again. In the run-up to the section I actually said out loud, 'Where's learning to be?!'
Playing with a definition - Learning: The intentional and constructive process of becoming.
You may be interested in my English class in the core curriculum of our school. At its heart, it's a writing class, but it provides holistic development with a focus on self-expression. I don't teach information; instead, we look inward to draw out what is already there trying to find expression. The foundational tenet is, "The project is you!". All classes begin with the body, move through the breath, to arrive at the mind. Half of every class are these elements, while the other half is writing. The first assignment of the year is "What do you wish to become?" Not a list of careers and talents, but qualities that we intend to embody; a compass of sorts. All work is done in class (no homework). No submission is longer than a page. Assessment is by portfolio, which results in an individual student publication. Pedagogy of play.
The students love the class and I love teaching it. It quickly becomes an intimate space - a classroom family. The impact has been profound.
Here's a link to an introductory overview:
https://ryanbromley.substack.com/p/introducing-the-dojo-high-school
Ryan this sounds *amazing*!!! I LOVE the idea of a modular curriculum - I've been advocating for this for years but haven't really seen one in action. Have you published anything else on this? Where can I find out more?
Thanks James, I haven't published much on modular curricula but I'm happy to share more details if you're interested. I mention it in passing in my article about LALTech Lab, another course I've created and am running in the core curriculum under the banner of English.
The lab is a canvas for a student created, student directed company. Students are partners, decision-makers, and beneficiaries. They lead the class, set the aims, assign the deadlines, hold each other accountable, an problem-solve. Portfolio assessment. The product is modular curricula created by students for students. We are prototyping this concept, building out our infrastructure, and also working with external partners. At the moment, that includes a 3D printer manufacturer and a brain-computer interface start-up. Here's a link to that project:
https://ryanbromley.substack.com/p/introducing-laltech-lab
Learning to Listen might be another to add to the list. The ability to actively listen without interrupting someone is life changing in all relationships from family and friends to business.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts - they’re sparking off more thoughts in me and I look forward to seeing them make an impact in learning placez around the world.
Yes indeed I should have included that. Often overlooked even within kracy education. In the Welsh initiative I mentioned in the blog, we have an explicit focus on learning to listen.
Thanks Dr James, this resonated with my thoughts and experiences. Is there a potential category error at a deeper level, that we perceive ourselves as machines, rather than beings? I wonder whether that’s influencing how we teach, learn and interact.
I think at some level this must be true. When I read about Gove's idea that on any Monday morning at 9 am every Year x all over England should be doing the exact same thing with the same outcomes, I could not help but wonder if he had ever met a young person. Constructing a school program that does not understand that every group of young people and a teacher will behave differently and respond differently across time and place and make space for this reality I believe is doomed to fail at some level. Certainly in learning to be these accommodations would be critically important.
It's weird isn't it, this desire for control and uniformity. As you say, it does make you wonder whether such people understand human nature...
Thanks Danny. That is super interesting. I think you might be on to something!!
Here are links to some resources that I referenced:
www.responsiveclassroom.org -Responsive Classroom
https://thoughtboxeducation.com - Thoughtbox Education Triple Wellbeing Manifesto
I’d love to chat about the Portrait of a Learner- there are many models that aren’t co-created and many organizations doing this work. In different ways. I’ve been supporting this work in many schools but my belief is that it needs to be co- created with stakeholder feedback or you run the risk of a committee developing it without feedback and then spend the next year trying to get buy in from stakeholders- but the challenges you mention exist with degree of emphasis and grading, but when done well, it’s through feedback and evidence of growth determined by students
Thanks for this. Love the idea of triple wellbeing!! This strongly resonates with the focus on relational learning in the Welsh project I'm working on - developing a positive relationship with yourself, with others and with the wider world...
I have been examining learning to be through what’s been called The Portrait of a Learner. It includes content knowledge but also learning to be -an effective communicator, critical thinker, physically and mentally well, respectful, etc. Communities co-create these concepts of learning to be through feedback from students, parents, teachers, coqnnubity members. All agree they are necessary, but you bring up the challenge- should they be central to schooling? Many create their portrait of a learner and hang it up in the schools but struggle to implement and allow time and space for these ways of learning to be or they want to grade them just as you mention. Where I have seen it most effectively take place is in project based learning and community partnered projects where learning is more authentic and with relevant connections to the larger world around them. I’ve listened to students share their big anxieties about what comes next after high school and it all has to do with learning to be. I always loved a model called “Responsive Classroom”- it weaves ways of being into learning to know and do. It creates a community of belonging, trust, and compassion every day. Another concept I have been exploring is learning to be well. - the idea that being well is more than attending to individual well-being, rather, it’s attending to self, community, and planet that creates overall wellbeing ( Thoughtbox Education). Thank you for sharing your thinking! I too have been examining this deeply.
Thanks for this Carolyn. Is there anything online about any of this? I'd love to find out more!
This shift makes complete sense, knowledge whilst still important, is easily accessible now. I've forgotten most of what I learnt at school, but I remember learning how to learn, how to socialise, how to manage stress, how to be with difficult people, learning my values and boundaries. That is what makes me who I am, not the definition of a cumulus nimbus cloud.
Indeed Helen! Though to say so is heresy in some circles!!!
I hope, perhaps naively, that the tides will turn!
They will if we make them!!
Revolt!
This feels like a throw back to 'learning to learn' and the virtue signalling of the early 2000s. Of course all of these qualities are important but I have not been convinced they can be explicitly taught and instead these qualities come through routines and the relationships we build with our pupils.
Perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see what your revised definition of Learning is. Without this definition it's impossible to test your hypothesis. For example, a commonly accepted definition of learning is a change in long-term memory. For example, learning to be polite is entirely knowledge dependent. Politeness is also contextual; what's polite as a teacher to a student is not the same as politeness to your parents. These are domain-specific knowledge issue.
Likewise, learning to be a critical thinker - as much research has indicated - is again domain specific. It's not a generic skill as you need something to think about.
Again, I align with your desire to teach these qualities. My issue is that the line of argument is a repetition off the progressive argument that seeks to dismiss knowledge or proponents of a cognitive science based approach to learning. It goes along the lines of 'sure knowledge and cognitive science is important, but what the human soul?'. It's a strawman argument typified by your statement that much of what you learnt is school has been forgotten. That's not the point. You didn't just learn politeness or critical thinking; you're very knowledgeable and experienced so you have the curse of expertise where you don't see the thousands of facts that underpin your ability to be polite or critical in these circumstances.
Any argument that tries to dismiss the centrality of knowledge is on shaky ground.
Hi James
Thanks for your comment. Apart from the bit where you described my blog as virtue signalling. That was kind of annoying, but I’ll look past it.
You are correct that, in a sense, this thinking shares some features with the tradition of ‘learning to learn’. A few years ago I did a PhD which was an 8-year controlled evaluation of a whole-school learning to learn initiative which involved 400 taught lessons over a 3-year period. That initiative had a significant impact on subject learning across the curriculum - those students went on to achieve the best results that school had ever seen, by some margin. And it was especially beneficial for disadvantaged students. At the end of Year 9, the gap in the control group was 25%. In the L2L cohort, it was just 2%.
These results are all the more remarkable when you consider that the control group had 400 more lessons of subject-based learning. And yet in subsequent measures of subject learning, the L2L cohorts significantly outperformed them.
My PhD is available online if you’d like to dig into it: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/7c7155e2-600b-4f3a-a66b-c2ca542310e8.
I also think you are right to be sceptical of Learning to Learn. Many well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective ideas have been implemented under the umbrella of 'Learning to Learn' over the years. I wrote a book in 2020 where I explored this in detail, in two chapters called ‘A Brief History of Learning to Learn’ called ‘Learning to learn on Trial’.
The book is called 'Fear is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn Deserves Lesson Time - And How to Make it Work for Your Pupils'. I think you'd find it interesting and reading it would perhaps make you a bit less dismissive. The book was very well received by many people who advocate for a ‘knowledge rich' curriculum - see review comments by people like Dylan Wiliam, Peps Mccrea, Mary Myatt, Mark Enser here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fear-Mind-Killer-teaching-Learning/dp/1911382772.
More recently, my thinking has evolved a bit. This work goes by many names - learning to learn, learner effectiveness, self-regulated learning... Internationally it's often referred to as ‘competency-based learning’. But the more time I spend working in this field, the more I find myself reflecting that it's not just about learning. When it's done well, this work does seem to make people better at passing exams. But it's really about taking broader personal development seriously - alongside the teaching of subject knowledge. Hence my decision to start framing it in the language of “learning to be”.
You say you are yet to be convinced that these things can be taught explicitly. I think it's good to be sceptical. But I hope you are an open-minded sceptic. Because I've been working on this for 15 years and my experience - and the evidence I have collected and published to date - suggests that these things can *absolutely* be taught explicitly.
As to my revised definition of learning, I plan to address this in my next post. Stay tuned!
Hello,
Thank you for your reply. I will definitely look into the shared resources as I do appreciate you know far more than me! I am definitely open to having my mind changed if the evidence changes.
Apologies if you felt my comment was annoying; my concerns stems from what your post implies and the credence I feel it gives to certain persistent myths in educations. These myths tend to be supported by the progressive side positioning the skeptics of these myths as aspiring Grangrindian dispensers of knowledge into the empty vessels of pupils whilst positioning themselves as fighting for the Romantic ideal of the innate goodness, curiosity, and intuition of children. Not only is there little evidence to support a progressive approach but also it fundamentally disadvantages the least advantaged pupils. From my brief foray into your posts
these concerns remain. Notably:
- support for self-directed learning or project-based learning when confronted with the opportunity cost of not delivering the same content
- the idea that the knowledge taught in school or the curriculum generally is obsolete or 'not relevant'
From my reading of Wiliams, Willingham, Sherrington, Didau, and Christodolou there is much to discredit these approaches.
I will read your book and your posts with an open mind. As I said above, if the evidence changes I will be compelled to change too. Thank you for your time!
James
Interesting. In at least 3 of the people you list I have found very clear support for these ideas in various forms. Wiliam - not just in his comments on my book but also in two of his five formative assessment strategies - 'Activating students as learning resources for one another' and 'Activating students as owners of their own learning'. As neat a definition of learner effectiveness as you're likely to come across. Sherrington in his Mode A vs Mode B teaching. As for Willingham - here's an extract from Fear is the Mind Killer, from the chapter 'Learning to Learn on Trial':
Knowledge is foundational.
We agree. The problem with this argument is not that it's wrong; it is that it is only half-right. This point is perhaps best illustrated by comparing what people say about the work of Daniel Willingham, with what Willingham says himself. Let’s remind ourselves of what the two UK politicians who have most influenced education policy in the last ten years have said about his work:
‘One of the biggest influences on my thinking about education reform has been the American cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham… [who] demonstrates brilliantly in his book, memorisation is a necessary precondition of understanding…’
(Gove, 2012)
‘Daniel Willingham talks about [how] an educated person has vast amounts of knowledge in his or her long-term memory which you can retrieve instantly… As Daniel Willingham has said, education is about… ensuring that we have facts and knowledge securely embedded in long-term memory.’
(Gibb, 2017)
Now let’s examine Willingham's own words. The following excerpts are from the same chapter as the line about how ‘factual knowledge must precede skill’ that was quoted by the prosecution:
‘The implication is that facts must be taught, ideally in the context of skills…’
‘We want our students to think, not simply to memorise. When someone shows evidence of thinking critically, we consider her smart and well-educated. When someone spouts facts without context, we consider her boring and a show-off…’
‘The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge in parallel with practicing critical thinking skills…’
‘In this chapter I describe how cognitive scientists know that thinking skills and knowledge are bound together...’
‘Our goal is not simply to have students know a lot of stuff – it’s to have them know stuff in service of being able to think effectively.’
He even includes the following quote by J.D. Everett (1873):
‘There is a great danger in the present day lest science teaching should degenerate into the accumulation of disconnected facts and unexplained formulae, which burden the memory without cultivating the understanding.’
Clearly, a closer reading of Willingham’s work reveals a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between knowledge and skills than these politicians acknowledge. In short, knowledge may be necessary for critical thinking, but it is not sufficient. It is abundantly clear that Willingham’s central message is one of balance, and he could not sum up the twin insights of cognitive science more clearly:
‘It is certainly true that facts without the skills to use them are of little value. It is equally true that one cannot deploy thinking skills effectively without factual knowledge.’
If our aim is to create a knowledge-rich curriculum, it is important to be clear about what we mean by knowledge, and also what we mean by skill. Does knowledge-rich mean skill-poor, or does knowledge-rich mean skill-rich because skills are rooted in knowledge?
Thank you for your reply and providing some nuance to Willingham's argument. I think we align on a fair amount!
I completely agree that the spouting of facts disconnected from synthesis and understanding is unhelpful and not desirable. Equally, undesirable though is the idea we can teach a skill - say analytical writing in English or mental maths - detached from deep domain-specifc knowledge. I think the latter approach is more common in education than the former. A knowledge-based approach can certainly be done poorly but starting with skills is a recipe for disaster if not underpinned by deliberately sequenced knowledge. Often kids are asked to write analytically with poor knowledge of the text or with only a PEE scaffold and some sentence starters to insert their shallow ideas into. Likewise, mental maths can't be taught detached of number bonds or multiplication knowledge but kids are asked to do it as if it's a teachable skill on it's own.
My question would be if it's helpful to think about skills as complete packaged items that can be taught. I think that it's liable to being hijacked by those who start at the end goal. David Didau says skills = knowledge + practice. I agree skills are our end goal but as a word I think it's helpful to think of 'skill' as a short hand for vast amounts of knowledge that create a complete whole at the end. Once we are skilled we no longer see the connecting facts and nuggets of knowledge and therefore as experts we think we can teach it in it's whole. A knowledge-rich curriculum should ultimately lead to wider skills but these are broken down into much smaller knowledge components.
How would you distinguish between the two?
In terms of the 'way of being' that comes up in Carl Rogers' work, I'm struck by a few things. The first is that your 'learning to be' is surely directly derived from Rogers. The second is that the English secondary schools that I've worked in have been fundamentally reductive in their approach, all behaviour-led while anything about 'being' is restricted to school values that are glued to the wall and talked about in assembly but otherwise forgotten about. The third is that pupils learn about 'being' in primary schools, but they get it beaten out of them in secondary, becoming as a result less mature and less autonomous, as if the leadership of secondary schools believes that enforcement of uniformity and conformity is good preparation for 'real life'. And the fourth came from chatting with an Australian mother, whose friends' children visiting London from back home seemed to her so much more at ease with themselves and their schooling.