Future Learning Now

 I have just returned home from the 2008 Learning@School conference. One of the major messages hinged around changing our focus to teaching to learning. Traditionally teachers have thought primarily about the content to be taught and then how it will be taught and this guides their classroom practice. The challenge is to think first about the learning that is to happen and how children learn then let this govern child/teacher interaction. It is interesting to see how this approach fits so well with the broad aims of the 2007 NZ National Curriculum yet in most Ministry of Education document the phrase that occurs continuously is “teaching and learning”. Surely this phrase passes messages like:

• teaching is more important than learning
• learning always results from teaching
• the focus is on what and how we teach rather than the learning.

This is more than mere semantics because words convey messages. I would love to see this phrase turned round in Ministry of Education documents and a more consistent message being sent to teachers and communities.

As teachers we carry a vast accumulation of professional concepts, understandings, ideas and assumptions about learning. The foundations of some of these were formed by our own childhood learning experiences. Others were formed during our formal teacher training period. Some have been formed over years of practical experience while others have come from professional reading, discussion and in-service training. Some of this knowledge and understanding we are likely to hold as fairly rigid and fixed while other aspects we hold in a more flexible manner and are open to change as we encounter new ideas, concepts, information and challenges. Reading this book by Graham Nutthal, based on years of evidence gathered from working classrooms, has been a challenging experience. The book has informed, provoked, and challenged me to reconsider a number of aspects of my professional understanding and has provoked reflection on the implications for classroom practice. In the areas of inquiry learning and implementation of curriculum this material also requires me to ponder on some reflective questions. From my initial reading of the book I have a number of issues that challenge me. 

• “Students learn what they do” (P36, 104).
• The role of prior knowledge versus ability in learning (P98).
• The impact of self generated experiences on learning (P156)
• The natural “shift from social talk to … thinking” (P74).

 Today I will cover the first of these challenges.

 “Students learn what they do” (P36)On page 36 Nuthall makes the statement “ What they are learning … is what you see them doing”. My initial reaction was that this was such a basic concept as to be almost inane, however as I began to understand the underlying principal this has crystalised a challenge for me and gives me the basis to query aspects of how I have taught, how I teach and some of the ways we expect students to learn in our classrooms.

The concept, as I understand it, requires us to think beyond the context and content of any learning experience we provide for our pupils and to critically examine the methodology involved because the most powerful, and long lasting learning comes from what the students do.

For example we may be considering a science lesson where our goal is to increase the student’s understanding of a range of scientific concepts. If we set a learning activity that requires the students to copy and write notes from an overhead, or slide show, then we need to realise that what the students are doing is ‘writing notes’ and the most powerful learning that will occur is to do with writing notes rather than the scientific concepts.

This understanding is like switching on a light in a darkened corner of a room and causes me to take a whole new look at many aspects of the learning experiences we provide for our students.

I have to ask these questions:

What is the learning we want to take place?

The first aspect of this challenge requires us to have absolute clarity of the learning objectives, because we can’t create high quality learning experiences for vague learning intentions. The learning intentions may be contextual knowledge, process understanding or skill development, but whatever they are clarity is needed.

 What do the students need to do?

This second aspect is where the major challenge lies. Too often I believe we follow the learning objective question with “How will I teach it?” and this leads us to choose a range of learning experiences or, perhaps more truthfully, teaching practices. Now I realise that I have often posed the wrong question. Instead of asking myself how I will teach to achieve the learning goal, I need to establish what the learner will need to do to achieve the learning.

If for instance the learning goal is to gain an understanding of the scientific concept of ‘fair test’, then I need to establish what a learner will have to do to gain that understanding.

The most obvious answer would be that the learner needs to engage in developing, implementing and evaluating a range of fair tests. On the basis of this answer I can construct a powerful learning experience to support the learning goal.

It now becomes obvious why “How will I teach this?” can lead to a range of learning experiences and teaching practices that have little benefit for the learner in terms of the original learning goal. If my answer to this question, for instance, focuses on the students carrying out research on fair tests then the major learning will most likely be in the area of research skills because that is what the students are doing.

For me this deceptively simple, yet deep insight, is going to have many implications as I work with schools around the aspects of inquiry learning, thinking skills, questioning, curriculum development and implementation, as well as effective classroom practice.

I am going to need to remember that ‘students learn what they do’ and use this as a critical criteria in the development of powerful learning experiences.  

The last month has flown by aided by a great visit to California, LA, Fountain Valley, San Francisco and a road trip down the Pacific Highway.

Since being back in New Zealand I have been involved in a Literacy conference in Napier where I contributed a keynote on 21st Century Learning and 21st Century Literacies. This was supported with workshops on Inquiry learning and Questioning.

The last two weeks have been spent in Wellington where I have had the privelege of becoming involved with PDPC (Principals’ Development Planning Centre). This has already been a huge learning experience that has challenged me in many ways, and I look forward to the ongoing learning and challenges it will provide for me. For any principals thinking of being involved I can offer nothing but support and praise for the centre and would highly recommend this professional development opportunity.

This week I am working with Waltham School in Christchurch, and then Saturday takes me to the BEST conference in Rotorua.

I have been doing some reading over the last month and will submit a post shortly outlining some of the aspects that have challenged or impacted on my thinking.

Today I spent the day at Waltham School in Christchurch, looing at the school, meeting with the leadership team and discussing strategic plans for a process of revising the school vision, clarifying beliefs about learning and teaching, and developing and implementing a new school based curriculum. this was a great day and I look forward to working further with the school.

This day was spent working with the Inquiry team at Nelson Central School.

It was an exciting day spent discussing the visits that the team had made to Brightwater and Wakefield school, and planning for some of the identified issues around implementing Inquiry Inquiry Learning. We are looking forward to instigating this process at the start of 2008.

June 12 doesn’t seem long ago, but the calendar tells me differently. A lot has happened in the intervening weeks and a short summary is all I feel that anyone would have the slightest interest in reading. During the intervening weeks, apart from keeping up with the demands of house and property as well as business issues like GST, accountants, accounts, invoices, and paper work there has been a lot of time spent preparing for the different sessions with schools, different workshops and also preparing a keynote address for a conference. During this period I also did the following sessions:

July 13:     Worked with Heretaunga Futures ICT Cluster in Wellington running a session on Inquiry Learning and questioning.

July 23-24:    Spent two days with Wakefield School in Nelson as ‘Designated Friend’ of the school during an ERO Review. This was really a celebration of the three years of work we have put into developning and implementing a strong learning vision, inquiry learning, thinking and questioning into the school. Congratulations to the leadership and teachers for all the hard work, innovation, professionalism and commitment that has gone into the change process. It was great to be part of sharing the outcomes in terms of children’s learning and also to clarify the next steps as we continue the process.

July 25th and 26th: Worked with Ashgrove School in Christchurch as a continuation of the process of implementing Inquiry learning. A lot of hard work was done by all involoved in planning and preparing the next inquiry units.

July 30th: Worked with a group of teachers from the Nelson City ICT cluster on Inquiry learning, the SAUCE model, and the practical issues of implementing Inquiry in a school.

31st September to the 3rd August: I spent four days working with Tapawera Area school, Wakefield school and Hope School  on a range of aspects that included thinking, Inquiry learning, the SAUCE model, questioning and the QuESTioning Rubric and the practicalities of embedding these into classroom practice. We also looked at School Strategic planning and the prcesses for ensuring that development continued after the ICTPD contract had finished at the end of 2007.

August 8th: Spent time working with the staff of Otonga Primary (Rotorua) as part of an ongoing process to provide professional development for teachers on learner and teacher questioning skills. We are just about ready to do a schoolwide base line assessment of questioning skills and then will start using a range of strategies and the QuESTioning rubric in all classes across the school.

August 14th: I had a session working with Allandale School staff (Whakatane) on further development of their school learning vision. This was a productive session in which we made some clear progress towards a commonly held vision that outlines what we want to achieve for their pupils as we seriously look at the issues of their future.

August 20th: Mairangi Bay Primary School (Auckland). This day was spent on further developing and clarifying  their learning vision. We ended the day with the vision statement drafted, some basic ideas towards a graphic to capture and display the vision and also began to develop the succes criteria for one of the starnds of their vision.

August 21st: Campbell’s Bay School (Auckland). This day was spent on further developing and clarifying  their learning vision. We ended the day with the vision statement drafted.

August 22nd: Lynfield College (Auckland). This session was with teachers from a number of schools from the Blockhouse Bay ICTPD cluster and addressed questioning, questioning skills, facilitating questioning in the classroom, assessing questioning, and the practicalities of supporting children to effectively research their questions on the internet.

August 28th and 29th: I worked at Onerahi School (Whangarei) over the two days in two different roles. The first was working with the leadership team and the staff on their vision development, and we made some good progress in clarifying 5 major aspects that we could agree on as being the focus for future learning at this school. The second role was working with the Board Of Trustees on the aspect of Principal Appraisal. This includes carrying out the current principal appraisal and assisting the Board Of Trustees in reviewing, developing and refining their appraisal policies and practice for 2008 and onwards.  

August 30th: On special invitation I visited Pillan’s Point School (Tauranga) to view the outcome of some advice I had supplied a number of years ago when they were doing some strategic planning in terms of ICT devlopment linked with building and clasroom re-structuring. It was exciting to see how the things we had talked about have worked out in reality. Thanks to Pillan’s Point for the invitation, it was much appreciated!

August 31st: I presented a Keynote (’The 21st Century Classroom’) and 2 workshops (’The Practicalities of implementing Inquiry Learning’ and ‘Questioning skills in the classroom’) at the Waimarino ICT cluster conference. What a great conference, my congratulations to the organisers for a wonderful and well organised day.

September 3rd: Was spent at Lucknow School (Hastings) working with groups of teachers reviewing progress in implementing Inquiry Learning and in planning and preparing the next inquiry units.

September 4th: Campbell’s Bay School (Auckland) This was a continuation of working with staff on the development of their learning vision, and working with the leadeship team on strategic planning for the process of implementing that vision and bringing it into being in that daily life of the school.

September 5th: Onerahi School (Whangarei). Today was spent working with the leadership team on strategic planning for the implementation of the vision across the school and also included a further whole straff session to further capture and clarify what it is that we see as being important for the future of the students at this school.

All in all a very busy and exciting time as we are seeing visions tightened up, staff coming together with unified visions of what we are trying to acieve for pupils, staff implementing and becoming more comfortable and skilled with approaches like Inquiry Learning and developing students’ questioning skills.

This was the first session with the staff of this school. The session introduced the two tools that will be used during the process, then we looked at changes and trends in society and our understanding about learning. From this we discussed questions about the changing role of school and used this as a springboard to start reviewing the school vision. the aim is to come to a commonly held vision in terms of what is important for the school to address as we look towards empowing the pupils for their future. There was some very interesting discussion as we started thinking about our beliefs about learning and the role of the school in today’s society. It was a great evening and I really enjoyed the participation and discussion. What a privelege to be involved in these exciting and deep professional discussions!

I worked with Hikurangi school over these two days as part of their ongoing process. So far we have revised the school vision and this is now a powerful aspect of the school that drives daily practice. The vision has been captured into a graphic that features obviously as you enter the school and in every classroom. Teachers now use the vision as a guideline for classroom acivities. We have also implemented inquiry learning using the SAUCE model. Friday was spent on reviewing progress to date, determining next steps, and carrying out initial planning for the next Inquiry unit. Part of Saturday was spent on discussing the practical issues of implementing Inquiry. One of the most powerful activities we went throuh on Saturday  was to re-examine our learning beliefs, and determine from each belief what we value, what attitudes should be demonstrated as a result of those beliefs, and the related skills and behaviours. Up till now we have had real problems trying to determine our ‘values’, we had found that it has been very difficult to define what a ‘value’ is. This time we had a change of approach and started to define what we ‘value’ based on the specific belief. This made things much easier and we found that we could easily agree on a range of concepts, attitudes, behaviours and skills that we ‘value’.the other aspect was we found that when we stopped trying to talk about our ‘values’ and focus instead on what we value, we were now incorporating some very important aspects that we would otherwise not have listed otherwise. A simple example comes from our examination of our beliefs about the place and role of thinking in Learning. When we listed what we ‘value’ based on our defined beliefs we found that we value ‘questions’. Previously we would never have listed ‘questions’ as a value, but we do ‘value’ questions highly when we look at the outcomes of our beliefs on practice. As an aside, it is interesting to note that a major dictionary (Webster’s new 20th Century dictionary, Unabridged, 2nd edition, 1971) does not define ‘value’ as a noun. As soon as we changed tack and stopped trying to define our ‘values’ and started to treat the word as a verb and began defining what we ‘value’ the whole process became much easier and much more powerful as we move forward with implementing beliefs into daily classroom practice.

I ran an afternoon/evening session for the Wanganui East ICT cluster on questioning. We had a good session where we covered a lot of material with the intent of giving the schools involved enough of an overview so they could make a start on going deeper with pupils in the area of questioning skills.

The morning was spent with the leadership team at looking at the issues surrounding implementation of the Draft NZ curriculum and establishing a set of initial steps to take.

The afternoon and evening was spent withPorritt School. The session which finished after 7pm (now there is dedication to professional development!) included a section on some background theory to Inquiry Learning, a discussion of the issues faced by schools in school wide implementation, and an introduction to the SAUCE model. This was my first chance to work with the staff at Porritt school and I was impressed with the in-depth way they are looking at a range of the issues, models and skills of inquiry as they prepare to implement Inquiry Learning.