Gifted and Talented kids – victims of teacher ideology?

The emerging nature of the education debate, notably being driven by the Conservative party among others, was revealed today in the Telegraph’s front-page, which shouted that teachers were failing to promote the brightest kids because they ‘fear promoting elitism’.

The Conservatives have been arguing for some time that schools are riddled with evidence of what they term ‘progressive ideology’.  Cross-curricular themes and classrooms where children sit more often in groups rather than rows are two things they point to. The general thrust has been enthusiastically taken up by some, notably the Campaign for Real Education, also quoted in the Telegraph article.

So, in the quoted responses to an ACL report on the now defunct National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth it is unsurprising to see the initial lack of uptake by schools spun as yet more evidence of institutions stocked with education professionals committed to ideologies which run counter to children’s success.

There are two problems with this reponse. The first is that that DCSF are able to point to greater uptake in recent years, particularly since the new Gifted and Talented scheme was put in place, now run by CfBT. 95% of secondary schools are, it is said, now engaged.

If this is truly a problem of entrenched ideology in schools’ staff, it hasn’t taken long to shift…

However, aren’t there other, perhaps more likely, effects at play? For example, our sytem of school based accountability and targets based on the achievement of 5 A-C GCSEs could easily be said  to skew the picture. If I were running a school, with those targets and league tables in mind where would I put my effort? Would I put Gifted and Talented Students at the top of the list, or those students on course for getting D’s at GCSE who could perhaps be tipped over into the government’s definition of success…

This may be part of the explanation for the findings of a recent DCSF-commissioned piece of research that showed that amongst high-performing education systems, schools-based accountability is relatively rare.  Most seem instead to favour monitoring approaches which enables comparison of performance between regions and internationally, while the performance of schools is understood based on their region and the  profile of their intake. Notably those taking this approach include Sweden, much trumpeted by the Conservatives for its promotion of choice and school freedom.

Rather than looking for a debate about ideology, wouldn’t students be better served by a focus on what evidence means for policy and implementaton?

The difficulties of blogging on education

There is a big drive right now towards improving the RSA’s presence in the blogosphere – RSA Projects teams are being encouraged – and supported – to blog on their various areas of expertise. Arts and Ecology have an excellent and busy blog, Design and Society, Design and Behaviour, Prisons and the Social Brain are new and a fascinating insight into the diversity of the projects (and people!) here at the RSA.

We the Education Team have been blogging for some time now, with varying degrees of success and frequency. However, I’ve been finding it difficult and our blog account is full of my abandoned, half written blogs. Why?

It’s partly because I find it difficult to stick to writing short posts on a single idea and always tend to get distracted and go off on tangents. Like this one.

But it’s also because education feels like a particularly contested field – both ideologically and personally – where the stakes are high. All that makes it difficult to write about without being controversial.

We’re told that this is OK – that we are blogging as individuals and that the blog is the place for our opinions, thoughts and provocations, rather than meticulously thought out pieces of writing. We have organisational go ahead to say what we think without worrying too much.

However, we also have a responsibility to the reputation of the projects that we run, the partners we work with, and – most importantly – to the schools we work with, their learners and their teachers, whose lives and careers are subject to plenty of scrutiny and critique as it is.

So, can we embrace the open, collaborative, opinion driven climate of the blogosphere without courting damaging controversy? If not then our account is going to remain full of half written pieces that I found the inspiration to draft, but not the courage to post.

But we will try, and all we ask is that those who read these posts take them in a generous, thoughtful spirit and then comment to tell us why we’re wrong

- Louise Thomas

Screen time is up, and book time is down. Should we worry?

The Guardian and BBC are both reporting on the growth of ’screen culture’ for young people.

In particular, it is pointed out that the numbers of kids reading for pleasure is down from 84% – 74% in the two years from 2006-2008, while socialising on the internet and playing videogames are apparently big winners.

I must say, it first occured to me to wonder how much of this trend can be attributed to the end of the Harry Potter series. I also wonder if the growth of communications use is actually just about multi-tasking facilitated by access to phones or webtools that let kids have easier access to Facebook etc. That is to say, doing the same things kids were always doing but it is easier to text or have an instant message client running at the same time.

Anyway, what really worries me about our analysis of these numbers is that they are never accompanied by any analysis of the quality or propriety of what is being consumed.

Reading is down, and videogames are up. We assume disaster, because we believe reading is inherently good and videogames and the net are at best a waste of time and at worst morally damaging.

But surely the time has come to acknowledge that reading is crucial and irreplaceable by any other media, reading total rubbish is not. Playing certain videogames probably will be a waste of time, while others will stretch the mind and the imagination.

So, coverage of the amount of time spent on reading for pleasure or playing games or watching TV is important. However, without a more evaluative analysis of what is being actually consumed on the different media, it is always more likely to promote a panic which may or may not be justified…

The numbers that really matter…?

This week, the education headlines will no doubt be dominated by the political row over the headline figure of 470 ‘failing schools’. Is it good progress, poor progress,  or not what we should be measuring in the first place…  

I have decided to be contrary and blog about other numbers that matter. The road less travelled by and all that.

So, turn away from 30 (per cent A-C GCSE’s) and consider 150. Or Dunbar’s number as some know it.

Dunbar’s number refers to the work of Robin Dunbar, an anthoropologist who argued that the brain had evolved to cope with social networks of about 150 people.

My colleague at the RSA, Matt Grist, is author of the excellent Social Brain blog. His most recent post, Social brains, social networks, big ideas and social change, points to fascinating work being done to combine recent insights such as this from evolutionary psychology with policy and practical application.

The theory goes that you find this number popping up all over the place as the limit to the size of social networks people can cope with. Historical and contemporary examples are dispersed through life like a mundane version of the Valenzetti Equation - the numbers of friends and acquaintances you possess, Christmas card lists, church communities. I might add Facebook friends lists.

If our brains are limited in the social complexity they have evolved to cope with, the idea is that when we try and break these limits we might see problems.  People can’t take in the complexity of the social arrangements, and therefore Alliances become hard to form, social norms are harder to reinforce and so on.

To draw a practical implication of my own, it reminded me immediately of Human Scale Schools.

Dunbar’s number is disputed – is it 150 or nearer 300 as others suggest?  Does is it shift depending on your use of modern technologies like bebo or instant messaging? But the weight of opinion tends towards the view that humans have evolved to deal with a certain size of social network. 

Either way, it is interesting to note that Human Scale Schools tend to contain 300 students or less, and possess a emphasis on the relationships within the school.

Equally, perhaps it should reduce our surprise when schools which experiment with large classes of up to 90 students, as some Opening Minds schools do, find it can work very well.

I’m sure I’m not the first to make the link, but it illustrates the far reaching consequences that such new knowledge could (should?) have on the way we organise schooling in future.

The fragile balance of risk and reward in the classroom

Last week saw Ofsted criticising boring teaching. A common response was that if you want more engaging lessons, you need to allow teachers to take more risks. More creative lessons might be great, but, they argue, a greater number of lessons will fall flat, and we need to be ok with that.

Engaging students with more interesting lessons is one reason to take risks, but there are others…

In the context of major challenges like climate change and a contracting economy, the RSA has been emphasising the importance of action by each of us. These aren’t problems that will be solved just by government, big business, but rather require most people to change their behaviour. Change is less about them and more about us.

When thinking about schools, I would argue, in short, that our concern should be not only that young people are knowledgeable, but that they are able to act.

That’s why when I met a university admissions tutor for a maths department the other day, I asked him what he thought about using projects or practical problems as a vehicle for learning content in a subject like maths. As it is one of the subjects least often integrated into project work in Opening Minds’ schools, I was expecting a fairly firm rejection of the idea.

His response was far more subtle. It was, he said, potentially worth pursuing, but in pursuit of a better outcome, we could lose what’s worthwhile in what we already do. It was, in short, fragile.

In the ensuing discussion, he gave the excellent example of an exercise he had run with students where, rather than ask an individual a straight maths question, he presented a group of students with a problem and asked them to present a reasonable solution.

In this case the problem was ‘ predict how many people could you fit on a football pitch’?

This problem has several possible solutions. One is to take the area of the pitch, assume everyone is shaped like a rectangle of a regular size, and go from there. Another is to refine that approach for a more accurate answer by assuming the space people take up is not rectangular, but hexagonal. Then tessalate the hexagons. You can refine further by assuming different sized hexagons based on, say, the average area taken up by adults and children. You can further refine it by acknowledging that the area taken up is better represented by a circle, and attempting to tessalate those.

To get the most useful answer, the group must realise rectangles aren’t very accurate, that to work with circles involves using maths that hasn’t been invented yet (according to my source). The best solution in practice is therefore going down the hexagon route.

He argued that many students were arriving at university who knew the formulas, but not when or how to use them to solve a problem. Classroom teaching and individual coaching got them so far, but no further.

So, using a practical problem in this way could be better. Students can delve more deeply into the maths and grapple with the formulas, while at the same time having to imagine a solution, manage group discussion and decision processes and so on.

But there is a price…the FA say football pitches can be different sizes. What happens if the students just argue about what size the pitch is? In other words, if the facilitation of the group processes is poor it can lead to dealing with content in a very shallow way.

We might decide change is needed for a number of reasons: engaging students, helping students learn how to use knowledge, and or how to work with others are just a few. However, if we move on from ‘delivering content’ as many schools have begun to, we must realise the risks involved and consider how far we should go, how we can improve the chances of success, and do we have the people that can get results in this way?

In short, we need to remember it’s fragile.

A prescription for fun

It has recently been reported that Ofsted are to ‘crack down’ on ‘boring’ teaching as part of an effort to refocus inspectors’ attention on teaching and learning.

It is a relief to hear acknowledgment that poor behaviour in the classroom does not necessarily stem from feral children or a broken society, but might rather be the result of young people rejecting a system that appears irrelevant to their needs and interests.

Oli de Botton and Phil Beadle both make a similar point, that Ofsted are right to point out the importance of engagement as an issue, but that Ofsted doing what Ofsted usually do isn’t going to solve it. Creating more boxes to tick, and having more inspector scrutiny is not the answer. It might be more appropriate to treat teachers as, and support them to be, the creative professionals that we need if the needs of every learner are to be met.

So, bravo for realising that what is important in schools in engaged, happy students who enjoy learning. The evidence from Opening Minds indicates that, rather than simply cracking the whip on teachers, we can use the curriculum to create more space for teachers to inspire and motivate young people. Based on Opening Minds, teachers and students benefit from models of learning which show young people why the content of lessons is relevant, how it is inter-related between subjects, and, most crucially, how they can use knowledge to act and to achieve things.

Critics of such a view of ‘knowledge for a purpose’ in schooling will warn that too much freedom can lead to an avoidance of difficult and particularly abstract knowledge. It is a lack of challenge because of shallow teaching focussed on coaching for a test that is to blame. We should heed part of this warning. While I don’t believe it should mark a retreat to traditional forms of teaching and learning, young people should be consistently challenged by the content they are grappling with.

Some of the teachers unions have responded by claiming that not every lesson can be exciting and that such claims make teachers ‘fair game’ for everyone, including students. Perhaps it would be better to welcome an emphasis on teaching and learning rather than testing, and present the alternative to just more inspection – to demonstrate the steps we need to make to ensure engaging lessons are a widespread reality.

More flying mud (now with added pigs!)

A quick follow up to yesterday’s post.  Opening Minds was cited in a further two articles, one positive, one not so much negative as apoplectic.

The Guardian’s Jenni Russell gives us a breath of fresh air, by bemoaning the Today programme’s tendency to avoid looking at what is interesting about the Rose Review, and continue to look ‘through the tired old lens of progressive versus traditional teaching’. It was really gratifying that to make her case she could turn to an example of practice in an Opening Minds primary school to illustrate what is really at stake – ‘[unleashing pupils'] enthusiasm and…desire to learn’.

And then we saw this fiery response in the Yorkshire Post which cites a separate example of such practice. In doing so, it manages to attack an apparently successful school using an integrated curriculum at Key Stage 3 based on Opening Minds. According to the article, this school gets good results at GCSE, and yet it is asserted that pigs will fly before kids get a good education from such a school…

Growing numbers of schools are innovating with their curriculum, and the government are responding too. While the service students get from schools is changing, the service the public get from the media is all too often stuck in the past.

The Rose Review (beware flying mud)

In my experience, the longer an argument goes on the messier and more confusing it will get.  Arguments about education seem messier than most.  We warm to our themes and suddenly mud is flying all over the place.

Traditional subject based curricula versus relevance and skills, as it’s often (mis)presented, is a  long running debate, but there has been a recent spate of comment worth noting.

Today, we have Sir Jim Rose’s review of the primary curriculum getting a lot of play, notably his advocacy of a curriculum content organised around six themes. Melanie Philips doesn’t like it much. Lessons in well-being, happiness and health represent ‘the way a society tears up its own future’.

In Friday’s TES was a comment piece which built on an article about the decline in membership of subject associations by fretting  that ‘recent developments in education have emphasised skills and social concerns at the expense of knowledge and understanding’ (Time Education Supplement, 5th December 2008). *

I’m tempted to point out that this didn’t seem to be what the subject associations themselves were particularly concerned about. As Mick Waters has often said, ‘excellent subject teaching will always make links within and between subjects’. Planning an Opening Minds curriculum with its topics and themes requires real subject expertise.

Critics of the Rose Review who present ’skills vs knowledge’ as a zero-sum game need to say why they feel justified in doing so? Where is the evidence that this has to be the case? It isn’t offered by the Tim Birkhead’s article quoted in the TES, however strong his arguments about the importance teachers’ subject knowledge and good quality assessment might be.

Not only do those who argue that Rose is sacrificing knowledge and truth on the altar of skills or of social/political ends need to demonstrate their case, they need to do so in the face of a compelling argument for relevance in the curriculum.

Our world faces huge challenges. Young people will need knowledge, but growing up into a complex world with an uncertain, unformed future, knowledge is not enough. The acid test of a good education will be not just what people know, but how they are able to act, individually and collectively. How are they able to take that unformed future, and understand and realise the common good?

All those arguments about the world changing…and then it really did

Yesterday I attended an excellent round-table event held by the education folks at Oxfam GB.

 

All too often I get a pang of guilt when attending these kinds of events, thinking about what I could be doing back at the office that would be more beneficial to the RSA. That certainly didn’t apply in this case.

 

The substance of the meeting began with a short, sharp discussion about the policy climate, and the possible ramifications of the recent meltdown in the markets for public services and schools.

 

It was grim but fascinating stuff.

 

It seems clear that the pain for public services is going to be felt for a long time. And limited cash brings with it tough choices. The centre-ground consensus of investment in public services we’ve experienced in recent years is under threat (for example, we have seen the Conservatives withdrawing from their commitment to match Labour’s public spending plans).

 

What follows are my thoughts from the meeting.

 

Those of us who have sought to challenge the status quo and who have pushed for an ‘alternative’ education system, however that may be defined, have been riding the back of a (unsustainably) strong economy. As have everyone, of course.

 

In this resource rich environment, two things were allowed to happen:

1. in opposition to the status quo, a fragmented discourse flourished about what change was required, even amongst progressives who basically agree with each other
2. the basic assumptions of the education system went unchallenged – there was enough in the system for schools to do interesting work based on alternative value systems

 

This has lead to lots of interesting innovation starting in schools but with little coherence or scale, and consequently little sense of critical mass around change. Frankly, we can’t go on this way.

 

We need an agreement to invest what we have in an education for young people that will deliver more value for our communities, and which will ultimately develop the citizens of the future. I think this means three responses:

1. We need a far more coherent and accessible discourse about change in education
2. That discourse must argue for a new settlement between those with a stake in education – that is to say, those with an alternative vision must demonstrate to young people, government, employers, parents and civil society why they should invest in an alternative vision for schools
3. We need to convince practitioners, parents and students that practical change is possible today even with constrained resources. To do that we need to celebrate the practices that are a reality now in ordinary schools up and down the country, and that point the way forward

 

I hope the Charter for Education in the 21^st Century is a start in the right direction, and that the good work of organisations like Oxfam will bear fruit.

 

- Ian McGimpsey

We’re in the news!

Well aren’t we just the bells belles of the ball? It’s been really nice to see that the press attention surrounding the opening of the RSA Academy at the beginning of November has been followed up with interest in Opening Minds more broadly – there were two articles in the TES last week, one news item and one feature, and even a passing reference in the Independent.

The media coverage of Opening Minds has placed us squarely in the debate about skills vs. knowledge which is a conversation that we’re really pleased to be having (see previous posts by Ian here and here and here).

More work is being done at our end – but we welcome contributions and thoughts to move the debate forward!

Louise Thomas