Centre stage papers – Days 3, 4 & 5: Extending the vision

Creating the conditions for deep learning: reflections on our experience so far

Introduction

What is deep learning? One way to define it is: “learning that lasts”. In the 21st century how can we make sure that learning lasts and what sort of learning do we want to last?

At Villiers High School we think that learning how to be a good learner is one of the essential components of a modern day education so that young people leave school with a love of learning.

Do you ever get frustrated by students who appear not to be able to tackle learning without ‘spoon feeding’ from their teachers? At Villiers, we felt that students appeared to need a kind of never-ending saline drip of pre-packaged knowledge, when we wanted them to be independent learners. But, when we tried to encourage this in lessons and through homework, we found that the majority of students couldn’t do it. They did not know how to organise their time; select resources to use, find out relevant information from text, work together in groups, connect ideas together, plan and so on.

The frustration felt by all of us at Villiers was most acute, and happened every year, between October and March when the year 11 students were in the final stages of preparing for GCSEs. We recognised that by then we were fighting a losing battle. We decided we needed to start in year 7 and that we needed to teach our students to learn explicitly by including in our curriculum the attitudes, skills and knowledge they need, to become expert learners.

The result of all of this, at Villiers is that over the past four years we have been devising the ‘ASK’ (Attitudes, Skills and Knowledge) approach to Learning to Learn so that it forms the cornerstone of our thinking, our means of helping teachers to help students become effective learners. The ASK curriculum is designed to teach the skills of learning explicitly and in such a way that students become good, confident and successful learners. The curriculum is not only designed to maximise progress at school but it also equips and inspires students to continue their learning above and beyond school and throughout life.

Our experience shows that students who have been exposed to learning to learn, through ASK, begin to develop the skills to help themselves, they understand learning and are more motivated and determined to succeed.  So, it is justified even against the narrow objective of improving exam performance. But we also know that most teachers have a much broader vision and passion for education than this. This is most easily seen when teachers talk about their aspirations for the futures of the young people they meet and work with in their schools.  This is where learning to learn is at its most powerful. Imagine the lifelong potential of any learner who has the ability to respond confidently to challenging and unfamiliar situations, who can think effectively and creatively, plan and solve problems and make a positive impact on other people’s lives. In our view these are the life skills that we all need, and we often hear said that it is what society needs for its citizens of tomorrow.

The more we develop learning to learn at Villiers the more amazed we are with the capabilities of our students and of their readiness to embrace a learning partnership with their teachers.

What is the ASK curriculum?

The ASK curriculum is a map of Villiers’ learning to learn curriculum consisting of seven strands of learning to learn knowledge and skills and five attitudes integral to these. 

The seven skills of ASK

1. Understanding self as learner      
2. Learning with and from others                 
3. Planning                                          
4. Investigating resources                 
5. Developing memory                                   
6. Thinking
7. Adapting

The five attitudes of ASK

1. Resilience
2. Reciprocity
3. Reflectiveness
4. Resourcefulness
5. Responsiveness

ASK started from a blank sheet of paper and the first draft was devised by a group of 3 Advanced Skills teachers working at Villiers with Paul Ginnis. The final version has been derived through a process of experimenting in many classrooms at Villiers and much drafting and redrafting. It has been influenced by thinkers like Guy Claxton, Bill Lucas and John Abbot.

In ASK we set out to teach the students the techniques of learning at the same time as they learn subject knowledge. This way students can be very deliberate in the way that they approach their learning and we help them to do this rather than expecting them to discover it on their own.

The Villiers approach is to integrate learning to learn into all subjects across the school. The experience of teaching discrete study skills programmes convinced us that students need to learn learning skills through specific subject content so that they have meaning and relevance. However we knew it would be very important for the ‘learning skills’ to be taught explicitly so that students would be aware that they were learning a particular approach or technique and that they would be able to talk about it and analyse it and improve it and to choose to use it again. So a very important part of the ASK lessons is the meta-learning element. This is when students and teacher together reflect on how they have been learning and what learning to learn skills, knowledge and attitudes they have been developing. It is the time when the student and teacher take a good look at the learning process, to see inside the black box of the mind, to unravel the mystery of learning, to share their secrets with each other.

Initially Villiers introduced ASK to all year 7 classes in every subject in the curriculum. To begin with, students had a minimum of one ASK lesson every fortnight. Since then ASK has been extended to Years 8 and 9. At Villiers teachers are not only History teachers or Science or Maths or English teachers they are teachers of learning. The transformation of Villiers teachers from subject experts to subject and learning experts has been a long process taking a period of over four years and it is still continuing.

An example of teaching ASK

An example of ASK in action in teaching history to Year 7. A young history teacher describes how he incorporated the skill of connecting ideas into his lessons.

“The learning to learn curriculum is something new to me and I decided that I wanted to try out lessons on Connecting Ideas and Information because I thought it would fit in with what we were teaching at the time:

‘Why did William win the Battle of Hastings’.

With this topic there are various key factors which you have to be able to identify in order to go on and answer an essay question later. And I realised from my teaching practice last year that pupils found it very hard to connect ideas together to identify those key factors. One key factor would be that William was lucky and there are various pieces of evidence that fall under that category. Pupils seem to have difficulty working out what evidence goes with what category. So this is where I decided that connecting ideas fitted in.

I thought I could take two approaches, either just tell the pupils about connecting ideas and then get them to do it with information about the Battle of Hastings, or I could teach them a lesson about connecting ideas first as a concept on its own and then apply it to a history specific lesson. I decided to develop a learning to learn lesson on Connecting Ideas and teach this first.

I came up with two main activities for the first lesson. The first activity was to give the pupils single words e.g. plane, car, boat, bicycle and other methods of transport, a cat, a bolt etc. and I simply asked them to group them. Connect them. The majority of pupils in the class did this in the obvious way: methods of transport, animals and so on. We had a brief discussion about how they grouped them and the general feedback was:

“Obviously, Sir, we look for similarities and we look for differences.’

After that we moved on to the next exercise. In this one they were given sentences on cards and asked to answer the question:

‘Why am I the best teacher?’

Well off they went and after about 6/7 minutes they came up with different groupings for the sentences such as: some are about your personality, some are about what your lessons are like. I asked them how they worked out the categories and one group said we had to infer the meaning. This surprised me as we had not considered inference yet in history lessons, so I put inference on the board and we talked about what it meant. Then another group said:

“We didn’t do it like that, we looked at the words and all the sentences and worked out that those that began with ‘He is…’ were about you and we looked for key words in all the sentences, what words meant the same thing’.

Which is a kind of inference.

We finished the lesson by summarising the fact that, to connect ideas, you need to:
- look for similarities and differences,
- infer meaning and
- look out for key words or things that mean the same thing.

The next lesson I told the class : right we need to answer the question

‘Why did William win the Battle of Hastings?’

I gave each group in the class an envelope with twelve pieces of evidence and asked them to sort them into categories. They had been learning about the Battle of Hastings but they hadn’t connected the evidence to explain why William won the Battle. We started the lesson by reminding ourselves how to connect ideas – what do we do.

Now, because I taught this topic in two other schools as a trainee last year I had something to compare it with and it was obvious to me that this time they had a much better understanding and were able to say which bit of evidence went with what reason for winning. I knew they found it easier to understand because they were actually saying things like:

“Well this can’t go with this. If you look at it this is what it means – how could they go together?’

And they were actually using the ideas from the previous learning to learn lesson from the lesson to apply it. I knew it had had some impact on them. They actually were able to understand how to go about applying those skills in a History context.

And I have a year 10 group with very able students. They had to write an essay and I presumed that they would be able to categorise the evidence for the essay they were writing, but when I told them to do this they didn’t know what to do. They are high achieving so eventually they got it but they were asking for a lot of help. So I see why learning to learn is so important”.

This example is just one approach that teachers at Villiers have used to integrate ASK across the curriculum. Sometimes teachers take part of a lesson to teach a skill and go on to develop it within a subject specific context and sometimes the skill can be worked on over several lessons. You will notice from the account given that the teacher stops to talk about the skill of connecting ideas at regular intervals throughout the lesson so that the students and teacher take the time to, as it were, hold up the skill to the light and examine it, so that they understand it and can use it when they need to. This critical examination of learning processes is what we refer to as “meta-learning”.

Outcomes of ASK

In devising the ASK curriculum at Villiers we have defined each of the skills, knowledge and attitudes that make it up. Further, we have worked out how the development of these skills progresses from a novice to a more advanced stage. The staff have undertaken a tremendous amount of training to be able to teach ASK. We are now at the start of our third year of implementation and the impact of teaching learning to learn will become clearer as the students move up the school and take standardised tests and GCSE examinations. However there are already benefits of developing learning to learn over and above the specific skills and knowledge that students learn. These appear to be generalised effects and unexpected benefits resulting from the introduction of the ASK curriculum, in addition to the benefits of specific teaching of learning to learn.

These generalised effects are:

• firstly students are much more overtly conscious of their own learning and so they pay it more attention and this means that they are more in control of their learning than before and hence more motivated. Their maturity, ability and willingness has not ceased to impress us and others outside our school. This has started to raise questions about whether we, in our school and the system itself underestimate students, whether we dumb down our students natural capacity to excel as learners.

• secondly, teachers at Villiers are more focused on students’ learning than on their teaching and they themselves have a much better understanding of learning and awareness of the interaction between their own teaching and students’ learning. This has provided a means of generating greater professional expertise and creativity within our school. Our system needs highly expert teachers, particularly in this modern day knowledge economy. What better way to achieve this than to create the conditions for a truly ‘Learning Profession’ in both senses. Learning to learn is not only helping our students to become good learners but also our teachers to become expert ‘learning professionals’.

To find out more

To find out more about ASK , to read about each component of the curriculum, to get access to sample learning plans, training activities and a guide to how to introduce student lesson observers see our book coming out in November. The title is “ASK: how to teach learning to learn. Meeting the challenges of 21st century learning in secondary schools” Crown House ISBN:1-845-90024-3.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juliet Strang is headteacher of Villiers High School, an 11-16 comprehensive school in Southall, West London.

She has taught in five schools in different parts of the country, including as an Assistant Headteacher at George Abbot School in Surrey and Deputy Headteacher at Cranford Community School in Hounslow before moving to Villiers High School in January 1997.

She has also worked as an Advisory Teacher in the London Borough of Ealing and in educational research at King’s College, London, firstly working for the Assessment of Performance Unit and then for the Consortium for Assessment and Testing in Schools.

 

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