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

Deep learning: at the heart of education

 

 

The emerging ambition for personalising learning and the growing identification of the conditions for deep learning within the personalisation agenda is of great interest. When academic research meets practice in the classroom, each informing the other, it provides a powerful opportunity to understand what works to improve the quality of learning experience for all. In my schools, as a deputy and as a principal, I have worked with colleagues who are committed to their students and convinced that learning is at the heart of what education is about. We strive to ensure that the conditions are right for deep learning but, like others, we are still grappling with what deep learning might actually be: how can you recognise it and measure it? Can we reconcile the longer term agenda of deep learning with the immediate concerns of assessment accountabilities?

So what might deep learning be? Perhaps it is easier to define what it is clearly not. Superficial learning simply means that the objectives of a single lesson or topic are learned in order to meet the assessment criteria applied at the time. There is value in this and it is easy to measure. Deep learning, however, surely implies that what is learned has a formative value well beyond the mechanisms and assessment demands of the education process. Deep learning is achieved when what is learned is retained and used by the learner. Skills and knowledge which are deeply learned become inherent in the learner. Deeply learned skills and knowledge become pieces of the jigsaw or DNA that empower the learner for further learning and constructive life.

At the age of 15, I could list the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century and had memorised sufficient of the Latin set text to pass any translation examination with ease. I went on to gain a higher degree in medieval history but in no way was my teenage experience of history or Latin of any appreciable value. I had learned superficially but gained little beyond the reluctant capacity to rote learn. Things have moved on in UK now but elements of this experience are still embedded in our schooling.

What have begun to transform our delivery of learning in schools in the last decade are the joint initiatives of Assessment for Learning (AfL) and Learning to Learn. Any number of ‘good’ teachers found their practice revolutionised by the notion that students needed ownership of their achievement and their progress. The definition of learning styles and multiple intelligences, although not without their critics and qualifiers, have undoubtedly filtered into the consciousness of teachers, appeared in personal development lessons and, with varying degrees of success, signalled that the notions of uniformity in teaching and learning have had their day.

The deep learning agenda, as proposed by Emma Sims and David Hargreaves, moves us on again. Why is it that, particularly assessment for learning, is widely accepted as good practice and seen to work? As practitioners, we know that its strengths are that it places the emphasis on learning and the learner and not on the teacher or teaching. AfL empowers students; it gives them some control over the hitherto mysterious world of progress and achievement. Learning to Learning provides the tools and motivation that empower students to manage their own learning. Learning is all about learners and not about teachers and that is a fundamental shift in our pedagogical thinking in the UK.

The advent of student voice completes the trio. Given value by Ofsted and requirements for school self-evaluation, there is a real feeling that, perhaps for the first time, the system itself is giving due credence to the views of the learner.

What are the conditions for deep learning? It seems to me that deep learning is offered when teachers plan for student voice, learning to learn and assessment for learning to underpin the delivery of a learning opportunity. For instance, training and encouraging students to develop their own assessment criteria for a given task, or to determine how feedback will be most usefully given, goes a long way to ensuring that the student has ownership, and therefore the likelihood of really learning knowledge or skills through a particular activity. Far from abdicating responsibility as expert, the teacher’s role is refocused on teaching the student how to learn. This is, for many, a redefinition of the role of teacher in the classroom.

Beyond the classroom, deep learning requires whole school leadership. That leadership needs to value learning above all other pressing demands and will set that learning in the context of the support and experiences students need to enjoy if they are to flourish as autonomous, confident learners. The personalised learning gateways of advice and guidance, mentoring, curriculum provision and new technologies were present in many of our schools but lacked the cohesive focus of individual learning. Increasingly, schools committed to personalising learning are recognising that we have to ‘join up’ our thinking. So often, leadership of traditional ‘pastoral’ or ‘curriculum’ responsibilities has created competing fiefdoms within school, benign but rich in lost opportunity because top-down leadership determined its separate agenda. By placing the needs and experience of the student at the heart of all school leadership, leadership becomes ‘bottom up’: determined by student need, and the old pastoral/curriculum dichotomy within schools diminishes. Student-focused leadership creates the conditions for deep learning.

But there are real challenges for school leaders committed to personalising learning. At the heart of the matter for schools and educators is the often paradoxical interplay of short-term accountability and real learning. Schools in the UK are accountable for outcomes at the end of key stages, as defined by narrow assessment criteria. Successful learning is more or less defined by the outcome of summative assessments. There is no measure that tracks students a decade later, to ask what was actually learned, what was really useful: was learning a ‘deep’? The challenge for school leaders is to effect system and cultural change to allow personalised learning to flourish. We owe it to our students to make this happen. However, the reality for us all is that personalised learning cannot be delivered at the expense of our contextualised value-added results. The leadership challenge, as ever, is to manage the external measures of our effectiveness without compromising the conditions that lead to our ultimate holy grail: deep learning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Carin Taylor is Principal of Soham Village College, in Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK.

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