Centre stage papers – Day 1: The challenge

Learning partners for powerful learning

 

 

Abstract

This paper begins with the idea that the images of humankind we see around us shape the meaning we give to living and learning. The school curriculum and the school environment provide opportunities to put before students images that challenge those that emanate from the media. The views of students about disengagement and boredom in school are considered and some relevant research findings outlined. Finally, the suggestion is made that children and adolescents could be taught the skills needed to become learning partners to coach each other in the thinking behaviours for powerful learning within school and throughout life.

Introduction

In the middle of the swinging and confusing 1960s, the philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote that human beings cannot live without images of themselves. He believed that it is through the conflict of images around us that we come to know ourselves. He contrasted his times with earlier centuries. Then figures from myths, legends and poetry and the figures of sages, prophets and saints guided humankind. In the context of the threats of annihilation from the Cold War and the population bomb, and in the midst the massive social change in many nations across the world between the genders and among the races, he asked: ‘Are there still guiding images that appear to us in the stars of the stage and screen, in sport champions, politicians, writers, and scientists, or are there no authentic images any more?’

As we stand in the queue at the local supermarket and glimpse the latest on what Paris and Britney are up to, or wonder about Robbie’s addiction to prescription drugs, we might also ask ourselves, ‘Are there no authentic images any more to guide us all, but particularly the young, in our striving to learn and live well?’

Well, of course there are. But they probably won’t jump out at you from the daily newspaper or the television screen. They have to be sought out. A powerful curriculum can provide a set of images of members of our species learning and living well, breaking through discouragement and disappointments, and learning from mistakes. The curriculum needs to be designed as a counterweight to the media’s dross of the celebrity images and its endless footage of senseless violence that inundates us.

Images and the ways of being, thinking and living they depict are contagious. Neuroscience has verified what teachers have often observed in the classroom and school yard - our brains are hard-wired for imitation and the consequences of who and what behaviours we imitate makes the world of  difference to the quality of our learning and living.

Our stimulus material for philosophical inquiry, the literature we read with our students, in all that we study in science, humanities and the arts, we can find images of human beings who love and live courageously, who question and wonder, and do honourable work.

But I am not suggesting a curriculum that only looks at virtuous humanity. It is vital that, as they mature, students learn about totalitarianism, racism, religious persecution, slavery, genocide, revolutions and war. The experiences of the evil that we do to each other and what is learned from that would richly furnish the conflict of images in which students may grow to understand our human nature.

As well, children and adolescents need to be explicitly taught the thinking behaviours of learning and living well that will push against the inertia of boredom and disengagement, and their extremist cousin, depression.

The starting line is where our students’ minds are at. We can learn much from what our students think and say, if we listen.

Listening to the students’ voices

Towards the end of 2005, I conducted 10 focus groups of students in years five to eight in six primary and two secondary schools. A total of 81 students participated, representing all middle years’ classes in a cluster of schools in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs.

I was curious to find out what the concept of quality teaching and learning meant to them and I wanted to investigate the extent to which they perceived their basic needs for safety and security, belonging, power, freedom and fun were being met in their lives at school. I did not ask them about being bored at school, but they told me, anyway.

For one year 8 student, boring work was ‘Just writing, writing. No changes, just continue’. Others in this focus group agreed, nominating three subjects in which this was the case: humanities, science and maths – ‘You think of it and then you write it, and you write. Sometimes it gives me a headache’. A member of a year 7 group, which overall was far from bored or disengaged, thought that when a teacher’s explanation would make you think hard, it was not boring but if ‘… you already know about it, it’ll get really boring. You’ll go like “Oh gee, why don’t I just go on with it”.’ Another student was adamant in his rejection of tasks that he finds boring: ‘So if it’s really boring, I just won’t do it’.

Four primary school focus groups identified circumstances when boredom set in. At one school, repetition was identified as crushing interest: ‘Like work, when it repeats the same question … it’s just wasting time’. At another school, it was the meetings of student leaders where they discussed how they could improve the school. They complained about the lack of action or activity in relation to these meetings: ‘Not really anything happens’.The leadership role of some senior students came up at a third school. They were involved in peer mediation, which was spoken of dismissively: ‘Little, tiny problems that they could resolve themselves. Sometimes little kids are having problems in the toilets and we go up to them and say, “What’s wrong?” and we take them to the teachers. There’s no point in having peer mediation. It’s boring’.

At a fourth primary school, comments that asserted that working on computers can be boring showed just how discriminating about ICT middle years’ students can be:

‘We had to do a brochure … but that wasn’t very fun, it was sort of boring. It was on a computer program and we had to rewrite it ourselves. It’s more fun when you get to be creative, get to do it yourself, not on a computer program’.

So when do the students in my focus groups feel engaged and interested? When the work they are doing is:

• ‘Worth doing … Something that will help you in your future’ (the example given was maths.)
• ‘Challenging and makes you think … you learn something new.’
• ‘Something interesting, like studying ancient civilizations.’
• ‘Something that we can relate to or that’s like fun, that we can enjoy what we’re doing.’

When I asked a year 7 group: ‘What does quality work look like’, an eloquent rush of ideas ensued, suggesting a state of educational being that was very distant from boredom and disengagement:

• ‘It looks good and interesting.’
• ‘Hard and difficult sometimes.’
• ‘Not all quality work has to be like beautiful and full of pages of anything it could also be short but like challenging as well.’
• ‘A project or something, it should be original, it shouldn’t be someone else’s idea, because then it makes it more quality for you.’
• ‘Something that’s easy to understand and at the same time challenging.’
• ‘Sounds very interesting and makes you want to do it.’
• ‘It sounds confident and terrific and so on, all perfect to look at or a speech.’
• ‘It’s appealing to the eye, nothing boring and like nothing photocopied out of a book.’
• ‘You can give different choices for our future for the sorts of work we like to do.’
• ‘Motivates or pushes you to understand it.’
• ‘It should have colours.’

What does the research tell us?

It tells us that thinking behaviours, such as autonomy, spontaneity, flow, creativity and optimism/resilience, matter in learning and life. 

These concepts feature prominently in a recently completed thesis by Dr Gaye Williams a lecturer and researcher at Deakin University, in Melbourne, Australia. Dr Williams won the Australian Association for Research in Education Award for Doctoral Research in Education in 2006.

In a recent article in the Age, ‘Look on the bright side and it will all add up’, education reporter, Chee Chee Leung, introduced the findings of Dr Williams’ thesis:

‘A Melbourne researcher has found that optimism is a key ingredient for success in school mathematics. Students who perform well with unfamiliar maths problems have the drive to persist with difficult tasks, even when previous attempts have failed’.

Williams explained:

‘These students saw the setbacks as temporary and specific … When they couldn’t solve a problem, they didn’t just stop and say, “I’m stupid”. They persisted.’

She suggested the value of giving students time to struggle with problems, rather than the teacher telling them how to solve them, has multiple benefits:

‘You’ve got to build resilient children … By doing this, teachers not only increase student ability to solve unfamiliar problems, they also build adolescent wellbeing, which can help reduce the risk of depression’. 

For Williams, the teacher’s role is to provide a learning environment in which students experience what she terms High Quality Learning Situations (HQLS). These learning experiences combine two critical aspects that displace boredom and disengagement – complex thinking and high positive effect; her term for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’ * (www.austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm). These are the seven characteristics of being in the flow:

• completely involved, focused, concentrating - either due to innate curiosity or as a result of training
• sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality
• greater inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going
• knowing the activity is ‘do-able’ - that the skills are adequate, and you are neither anxious nor bored
• sense of serenity - no worries about self, feeling growing beyond the boundaries of ego - afterwards, feeling of transcending ego, in ways not thought possible
• timelessness - thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing.
• intrinsic motivation - whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

Williams provides us with some rich answers to the issue of boredom and disengagement. In fact, she is quite explicit that the journey that led to the findings in her thesis began with these very concerns:

‘When I commenced teaching, I found many students did not understand mathematics and disliked, or were bored, with the subject. I wanted to find ways to make mathematics accessible to more students and to capture the enjoyment I knew could be associated with mathematics learning’.

When she began her research life, she discovered that her search had intuitively led her to teach in a way that research had identified as conducive to optimising students’ mathematical learning. The elements she had incorporated that were endorsed by international research findings were:

• the use of a problem-solving approach
• the inclusion of group work
• student-student interactions at the whole class level
• an expectation of justification and an eliciting of complex thinking
• student engagement in the process
• the development of a mathematical disposition
• ‘autonomous’ student learning
• ‘spontaneous’ student learning.

A temporary impairment to the teacher-researcher’s mathematical thinking capacity, resulting from an illness, had unexpectedly, beneficial consequences for teaching and learning in her classroom. Because Williams could not maintain her former position as predominant mathematical authority in her class, she had to encourage her students to participate much more actively in a collaborative process. The positive impact on student learning was so strong that when her mathematical knowledge was restored, she continued the practice that ‘whenever students were undertaking unfamiliar challenging problems, whether I knew solutions or not, I purposely worked and explicitly talked as though I did not’.

The empirically grounded model that arose from her study is called ‘Space to Think’, in which there are six types of student thinking behaviours:

• enacted optimistic exploration
• spontaneously identified complexity
• manoeuvred cognitive autonomy
• autonomously accessed mathematics related to their explorations
• spontaneously pursued their exploration
• formulated questions to structure future explorations.

An important implication of the ‘Space to Think’ model for all learning areas is to urge teachers to maintain a dual focus on the individual creation of new knowledge, and the knowledge that is created in communities of inquiry.

Peer coaching for primary and secondary students

Training teachers in peer coaching is currently a priority in many primary and secondary schools. When it becomes embedded in practice and a part of the culture of the school, the next step in building an authentic learning community could be to teach peer coaching skills to students. The notion that teachers will coach their students to improve their thinking is well known, but when reading a conversation between two eight year olds about the development of their Learning Power (LP), an article by Guy Claxton titled ‘Fit for Life’, I realised that these kids were coaching each other.

All the models, approaches and strategies that come to mind that might be worth experimenting with in a peer coaching training program for children and adolescents are already widely known and taught by many teachers:

• explicit teaching of selected Thinking Behaviours, Habits of Mind or Learning Dispositions
• the skills for learning in a ‘community of inquiry’ and independently exploring attitudes to learning and what is valued
• active listening (www.gordontraining.com/)
• using whole brain, auditory, visual and kinaesthetic, multiple and emotional intelligence profiling to increase self and peer understanding of learners  
• communication in the ‘adult-adult’ ego state
• William Glasser’s choice theory (www.wglasser.com)
• giving and receiving feedback
• assessment for learning - both self and peer assessment.

As well as challenging students with focused teaching and learning tasks just beyond their current learning comfort zone, the teacher would be the lead coach modelling the coaching skills, as well as providing training with lots of guided practice.

When equipped with these coaching skills and demonstrating that they are willing and able to use them, we might anticipate hearing students reflecting together on their learning experiences, questioning each other and discussing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of their learning strategies. They may suggest that they try a new approach. They could explore their different styles of learning. Helping each other set goals that are at the same time realistic and challenging could be something the learning partners tackle together. They could model and imitate productive learning. The dialogue may lead to each student discovering ways of learning and thinking that they may not have become aware of without this interaction.

I wonder how much behaviour among students in the early years already resembles coaching. Would learning be more powerful if, from the early years of schooling, the student-student relationship was overtly re-conceptualised around the concept of peer coaching or learning partners? Could it survive the hormonal change in the middle years of schooling and the competitiveness of the final years?

Reference

Jaspers, Karl, (1969) Philosophy is for everyman: a short course in philosophical thinking. London: Hutchinson.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Ray Daniels is a former school principal who is currently Cluster Educator for the Clayton-Springvale-Westall Cluster of schools.  He is based at Springvale Secondary College, in Springvale, Victoria, Australia. He is also an international education consultant for Learning Partners: Powerful Peer Coaching for Primary and Secondary Teachers (www.raydaniels.com.au).

 

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