The Learning Pit

One of the frameworks I regularly share with teachers is that of the Learning Pit, a model that explains how and why challenge is necessary for learning. Having first heard Dr John Edwards in 2001 using a "pit" to explain how organisational growth more often than not involves getting worse before getting better, I thought that the metaphor was an ideal way to explain to my students why I was consistently making things more difficult for them. Since then I have developed the idea into the following four-stage lesson plan:

STAGE 1: IDENTIFY THE KEY CONCEPT

The learning pit always begins with an important concept, since it is through conceptual analysis that students gain an understanding of their world. Example concepts include: art, bullying, culture, democracy, existence, growth, indentity, justice, knowledge, language, music, number, originality, poetry, questions, reality tv, science, tourism, and so on.

STAGE 2: CHALLENGE

In July 2008, Professor John Hattie began an address on behalf of his Visible Learning Laboratory in Auckland with: "The major message from my work with 240m students, 800+ meta-analyses, 50,000+ studies is... Challenge Challenge Challenge Challenge Challenge". Stage two of the learning pit is concerned with just that: challenging students to think more deeply, purposefully, critically and creatively.

STAGE 3: CONSTRUCT

This is the point at which students co-construct an undersanding of the key concepts through continued dialogue and study with each other. According to many notable educational theorists such as Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget and John Dewey, there is no such thing as knowledge "out there" independent of the knower, but only knowledge we construct for ourselves as we learn. Stage three recognises this by creating the conditions necessary for meaningful dialogue.

STAGE 4: REFLECT

If you reflect on anything you have learned, you soon realise that it is the product of repeated exposure and thought. Thus, stage four is concerned with students revisiting and reflecting upon their learning journey.

Notes

• The Learning Pit will be published in my new book, Challenging Learning, this autumn. To reserve your copy, please click here
• For an article covering the background, lesson ideas and outcomes of the Learning Pit, click here
• The photo attached to this posting comes from Lacey McCarthy,whose Year 2 students at Douglas Park School in Masterton, New Zealand have been using the Learning Pit to deepen their learning.

Teaching the ASK model

Two of the schools I'm working with, one in Doncaster (UK) and the other in Cambewarra (Australia), are trying a new approach to their curriculum that places an emphasis on Attitudes and Skills, as well as Knowledge (ASK). In a previous blog, (see Teaching Attitudes on 18 March 2009) I shared the Attitudes work of Sandringham Primary School. Now, here's an insight into the Skills work that Cambewarra Primary School are doing.

Selecting five key thinking skills, Processing information, Reasoning, Inquiry, Creativity and Evaluation, Trent Burns and his colleagues are ensuring that at least one of these skills is at the heart of each lesson. For example, when studying the environmental impact of technologies, the children would be asked to "paraphrase" the contributions of another, and then to add a "reason" to that opinion or argument.

Of course, since the children would have to use their thinking skills in order to answer a question or complete a task, some might say the deliberate focus on a particular type of thinking is unnecessary. And yet to improve any skill, expert practice concerns itself with breaking the skill down into parts. For example, in addition to swimming from one side of the pool to the other, a swimmer wishing to improve his/her skills would be well advised to at times focus almost exclusively on head position, then perhaps on the timing of his/her arm strokes and maybe another time on the frequency of kicks. And so it is with thinking - breaking the whole skill down into parts so that the whole might be improved bit by bit.

Furthermore, Trent's students enjoy the added dimension that a focus on thinking skills brings to their lessons, referring frequently to the PRICE model either by identifying the skill they believe they are using to solve a task, or setting out to improve a particular skill by finding opportunities to practise it.

Look out for an update on their progress after my visit there in June.

Learning Detectives

Here's a really nice idea from Louise Brown, the deputy head and reception teacher at Amble First School in Northumberland.

At the start of each day Louise chooses two children to take the role of Learning Detectives. They then each put on some headwear (crown for the girls, a viking hat for the boys) to denote they are the Learning Detectives for that day. Their task is to record their classmates engaging in whatever the focus might be for that day/week.

At the beginning of the academic year, Louise tends to focus the children's attention on social language and social skills (for example, listening to each other, working together, agreeing and disagreeing). She then moves them on to thinking about the skills of learning (for example, asking questions, giving reasons, making links and decisions).

At the end of the lesson or day, Louise asks the 2 Learning Detectives to feed back to the other children when and where they witnessed the particular skill in action. This feedback comes in the form of written notes, digital pictures or diagrams that are drawn on the interactive whiteboard. All are used as part of the plenary session during which Louise encourages them to reflect on their thinking and learning throughout the day.

The idea has now spread across the school, with Learning Detectives appointed to spot good behaviour, friendly actions and sociable children (and adults!) in the playground and around the school.

Primary Twitching

I heard a great suggestion from the owner of Alnmouth Grocers, Alan Tilmouth, recently: twitching for children (taking children out regularly to spot birds!) As he says, "Bird-watching should be compulsory in every primary syllabus. It is a great activity for kids; it improves listening, observation, memory, counting, colour recognition and gets them outdoors more."

Alan is of course biased. Not only is he a father of 3 young children, but he is the co-author of Birds in Northumbria and Editor of a regional weblog Bird North East. That said, he makes a good point! This, I'm guessing, would also be an activity of which, Reuven Feuerstein, recognised as one of the leading psychologists of his generation, would approve highly of.

Feuerstein's programme of intervention, Instrumental Enrichment, upon which so many of the world's curricula for children are based, theorises that the skills of thinking and learning are best developed by children when an adult encourages them to focus upon events, patterns, characteristics or notions that the child wouldn't otherwise notice. So when a young child is building a tower with Lego bricks, we might draw their attention to the colours of the blocks, or prompt them to create different patterns with the tower. Or when teaching a child to swim, we'd encourage them to notice their head position and not just to focus on their arm movements. This mediation is at the core of teaching and learning, and indeed helps to distinguish between outstanding and average practice. And so it would be with bird watching: focussing children's attention on birds' colours, size, flight patterns and so on.

So why not give it a try? The RSPB site gives a lot of ideas and resources. Or, if you're in Northumberland or the North East, I'm sure Alan would be only too happy to advise or support you. There's also a retired police officer turned twitcher, Per Eidsten in Tonsberg, Norway, who I know would be the perfect guide for a spot of twitching!

Maps from Memory

Another favourite strategy from the Thinking Through team is Maps from Memory.

To start with, these were literally maps but the approach has been used very successfully to encourage students to recreate diagrams (eg, the structure of the ear), Mind Maps, processes (eg the Water Cycle), and pieces of music (either listening to music and then re-creating it, or reading sheet music and reproducing it in written or auditory form).

Nice applications for this approach can be found in Thinking Through Primary Teaching, More Thinking Through Geography and the soon-to-be-published, Thinking Through Music by Martin Renton.

Fortune Lines

In the mid-1990's I was part of the Thinking Through Humanities project - a group of teachers from Northumberland working alongside David Leat and colleagues at the University of Newcastle. Among the strategies that we explored and developed were Fortune Lines, so I was particularly pleased to come across this strategy being used with 5/6 year olds recently.

Fortune Lines aim to map the feelings of one or more of the main characters in a story along a timeline. So whilst reading the Gruffalo, for example, the teacher encourages her children to think about how the mouse is feeling at the beginning of the story when he is minding his own business, then how he might feel as he is threatened by the fox, the owl, the snake (and how he feels when each one of them heeds his warning about the Gruffalo and retreats) and then, at the end when the Gruffalo turns up and scares the living daylights out of the whole forest!

An important aspect of the approach, as with all the so-called Thinking Skills strategies, is to challenge children's first answers thus calusing them to think more. For example, "Would the mouse have been sad the moment he med the fox or only once the fox had threatened to eat him?" or "Are you always sad when you're scared?"

Of course, this approach doesn't apply to young children. Various books in the Thinking Through series give superb examples of using Fortune Lines with 13/14 year olds studying events leading up to an historical event, or mapping the changing fortunes of a community as it moves from a primary industry such as coal mining through factory-based work to tertiary industries such as call centres. For more information, take a look at Thinking Through ... Geography, History, Maths or other subjects.

Thinking Schools Network

A new Partner Finding Site for Thinking School People has been launched (Thinking Schools Network) Available in English and "Scandinavish", the site is beginning to fill with the details of interesting schools, thinkers, innovations and speakers. The site has been set up by Bengt Lennartsson and Bitte Sundin, following their hosting of the 13th International Conference on Thinking in their home town, Norrköping (Sweden) in 2007 and the subsequent Nordic Re-Thinking conference the following year.

The aim of the site is to offer a free facility for people interested in thinking in all it's forms to share resources, ideas and contact information with each other. Members of the site can find schools interested in becoming partner schools, making student-to-student contacts and finding out about future conferences and seminars. Already there are members in many of the Nordic and Baltic countries, as well as the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia. JN