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Lecture 2: Outside of School
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Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction
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Continuing to Learn in a Changing World
This week focuses on ways that we can help children to live and learn in a world of change. We will consider the importance of cultivating creativity and acknowledging multiple types of intelligence. We will also look at learning that takes place informally outside of school. We will identify key features of excellent practice in schools and look at the benefits of professional development. This is the final week of this course. If you have stayed with us to the end, congratulations! This may be an ending but it is also a beginning as you move on to the next course.
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Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK
[MUSIC]
So far, we have talked a lot about learning in classrooms and in schools,
and we've talked probably a little bit less about learning out of school,
learning in other environments - in the family or in the community.
We've also talked about David Perkins, the Harvard scholar, who talks about
learning in the wild, as opposed to learning in captivity.
There's a very nice metaphor here about fleas performing in a flea circus,
something you may never have seen, and something I've never seen, but I have
read about, and one of the things I have read is, as
you see in this slide, that fleas kept in a jar will jump and
hit the lid of the jar and they learn to jump just as high enough
so as not to be able to hit the heads off the lid of the jar.
What happens when they're released? These fleas have the whole sky above
them, but now they do not jump any beyond their own self imposed limits.
Even though they're now free, they have made their own limits, because of
learning in captivity. And it's posed as a metaphor for children
in schools and classrooms. When they are set free, do they jump and
excel, and achieve as high as they can? So, we have to think about learning
beyond the classroom door, and to think about what are the opportunities that are
offered in the environment around the school,
in the home, in the community, in public sites, in urban centers, in and
around the countryside where children actually spend most of their time before
they come to school? After they come to school on non school days or holidays?
What learning is going on then, beyond the classroom door?
Remember the poster in a school which said, learning starts here?
Well, learning may go on here or take a new turn here, but it certainly doesn't start
the day children walk through the school doors for the first time.
And it's too easy to forget, how much learning actually takes place beyond the
school. Have a look at this house in Ghana with
the world painted on the side of the house,
opening up what lies beyond the classroom walls, using that as a kind of a stimulus
to think about, what do we know about the world depicted in this too flat,
two-dimensional image. Is it a stimulus to see what we know
about what happens here and in other countries?
We sometimes talk or have talked already about the 5Ws plus H, the when, the what,
the who, the why, the where and the how. Let's go back to that again, that very
crucial set of questions that teachers should always be asking and that they
should be encouraging their students to ask.
Think about for a minute, what matters most do you think - the when of learning,
the what of learning, the who do you learn from, and with, the why?
Why am I learning this today? The where of learning and the how of
learning. Which of these do you consider most important?
Take some time to think about how you
would order these, perhaps from 1 to 6. Which would you see as the most and least
important? And you might like to discuss that with
other teachers even in your own school or when you engage in forums in this course,
What matters most? You might want to use the protocol we've
talked about, the routine, if you like, of think, pair, share.
What do you think? Pair up with somebody else, have that
discussion, and share your different ideas.
Well, here is one group who came up with this answer.
It's not the right answer. I think there'd be very different responses
to this question in different places, so, there is really no right answer to
this, but here's one answer to think about.
This group who discussed it put the who first, thought who you learned with and
who you learned from, isn't that the most important thing in learning?
And there's certainly a lot of research to suggest that the peer affect, children
learning with other children, or children learning with their parents.
And of course, the who includes their, their teachers as an important, and for
some of the most important, source of their learning.
And this group put the how second, saying that how we learn is the thing that takes
us beyond school. Once school lessons are over and we've
left school, and we're in work or in any other kind of further education,
the how is incredibly important. And of course, the why.
We have to constantly come back to that question.
Why? Why am I doing this, why should I be
doing this? Is this the most useful thing for me to
be doing or could I be doing something different?
And the where we learn, we know the where.
It's important, the what we learn and how we learn in the classroom, and we take it
into another context beyond the classroom.
It's often very difficult to apply that same learning, so the where is also
important and the when. in some places Mathematics is the first
thing in the day, because it's said, that's when children are most alert, but
not all children are. We know that there are morning, and
afternoon, and evening rhythms of learning when some people are at their
brightest first thing in the morning, but others it's later in the evening.
So, we have to think about the when and you may be surprised that the what comes at the
bottom of this list. But the what perhaps is, in a sense, the
least important because the what is something that can often be simply
learned in one particular context, but doesn't really stay with you or travel,
and we constantly revisit the what of our learning in different situations.
This little more complex diagram revisits all of those six questions again,
and it's worthwhile for you to take a little time I think, to think about the
dimensions in this diagram. So for example, if you take the dimension
of the where, at one end you have the classroom seat, and at the other the
natural, and the social world. Along that dimension, how much of
children's learning is in the captivity, if you like, of the classroom seat, and
how much of it is in the wild of the natural and social world?
If you look at the how, how much of your teaching, and how much of learning
is passive consumption, simply remembering, repeating, and even
regurgitating what's been learned or if the other extreme of the spectrum,
multiple avenues of inquiry, thinking, exploring, finding out, learning in
different ways through a whole range of different intelligences.
And then if you look at the who on that dimension, at one end,
the individual pupil learning on your own, inside your own head, at the other end of
that a community of learners. To what extent did your teaching
encourage children not just to be individual learners, but to be part of
that whole community of learners? And as a teacher, how does that apply to
you? So look at those six dimensions again.
Take a little time to think about how this relates to your own learning, and
your own teaching. What is the difference in learning in
school and out of school? Carol Dweck is an American
researcher, has four different qualities she talks about when she compares school
and not-school. She talks about the individual cognition
in school, that is individual thinking that takes place in a school context,
as opposed to the shared thinking, the shared cognition that takes place in
family and community, and among friends when they're in a different kind of
context. She talks about pure mentation, that is
pure thinking, mental thinking in school as against the use of tools often
outside of school, where we do our thinking with, whether it's writing, or
filming, or talking, or using other kinds of tools to help us to get better at what
we do. And she talks about symbol manipulation
in school as against contextualized reasoning outside.
So a lot of, for example, in mathematics children are introduced to symbols, very
early, and a lot of our learning in school is at the symbolic level, and if
you go back and you think about, we talked about earlier about Jerome Bruner,
and the enactive, the iconic, and the symbolic,
that much of our learning outside of school is enactive and iconic picturing,
and doing rather than always at the symbolic level.
And the fourth thing Carol Dweck talks about, is generalized learning in school
as against situations, specific competencies outside school.
So, it's very much about the application of our knowledge.
Well, here's something that I did when I went onto the website and tried to
download some images of learning and teaching.
And if you look at these images, take a little time to think about what is
actually happening in these examples? What are people doing when they're
teaching and when they're learning would be a very useful discussion to have
with other people when they look at these images, and think about learning in other
contexts than the classroom.
Again, you might want to think, pair, share,
if you do this with colleagues in your own school or if you do it with
colleagues in the forum. Here are some of the things that other
people have said when they've looked at these images, that the learning and
teaching is embedded in relationships. Relationships, an important part of this
course, which you will revisit, or visit later on.
The contextualized nature of learning. We don't learn to swim in a classroom,
we learn to swim in a pool. We don't learn to ride a bicycle in a
classroom, we learn to ride a bicycle by getting on a bicycle.
And if we look at the images again, go back and look to what extent they are
learning in context that they are learner centered,
that they are concerned with skills and dispositions, attitudes.
It seems to be somebody there, who's a little bit wary about jumping into that
pool. Supportive and challenging, that if you
look at that person who is about to jump into a pool, you'll see that someone
with their arm around them or helping them to get over that initial kind of
trepidation. Yes, enjoyable, but risky,
relaxed, alert, and age blind. So, when we come back to the central
question of our classroom learning and out of school learning, how do we make
the connections? It's all very well to say, how wonderful
it is for children to learn in the wild, but our job as teachers is to make the
connections. How do we draw on and capitalise on the
out of school learning, which we bring into the classroom?
Who makes those connections? How do we make the connections?
And how do we know how to make them, unless we have that kind of dialogue with
young people? And what is it we can do to make the
connections? Jean Piaget, intelligence is knowing what
to do, when you don't know what to do.
[MUSIC]
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