Learning. It’s Complicated.

I read and follow many educational writers, bloggers and theorists in an attempt to understand how learning works, and, by implication or association, what makes for good teaching and an effective education system. However, not everything about education is to be learned in educational texts. A good example of this is to be found in reading ‘River of Consciousness‘, a collection of essays and the last publication of the English-born neurologist and polymath Oliver Sacks. Here, in the course of a few relatively short pieces, the author of such works as ‘Awakenings‘ and ‘The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat‘ takes on evolution, botany, chemistry, medicine, neuroscience and the arts, as he searches for an understanding of the conscious mind and what it is that makes us human. In doing so, he touches on subjects which I see ‘debated’ on eduTwitter on a daily basis. On the importance of Play, for example, especially in young children, he has this to say:

‘All children indulge in play, at once repetitive and imitative and, equally, exploratory and innovative.They are drawn both to the familiar and the unusual – grounding and anchoring themselves in what is known and secure, and exploring what is new and has never been experienced. Children have an elemental hunger for knowledge and understanding, for mental food and stimulation. They do not need to be told or “motivated’ to explore or play, for play, like all creative or proto-creative activities, is deeply pleasurable in itself.’

Which begs the question, if children have an ‘elemental hunger for knowledge’, why do so many children stop engaging with school? I suspect the answer may have something to do with who determines the knowledge which is on the menu, and the extent to which the consumers have a choice. A very important element of play of course is the storytelling element, and Sacks has an observation on that which touches on one of our favourite themes here at The Literacy Adviser:

‘Both the innovative and the imitative impulses come together in pretend play, often using toys or dolls or miniature replicas of real-world objects to act out new scenarios or rehearse and replay old ones. Children are drawn to narrative, not only soliciting and enjoying stories from others, but creating them themselves. Storytelling and mythmaking are primary human activities, a fundamental way of making sense of our world.’

Put very simply, storytelling should be at the heart of any education programme, at all ages and in all subject or topic contexts. And speaking of educational contexts, here is what Sacks has to contribute on the nature of schooling, and the perennial debates about ‘skills v knowledge’ or ‘progression v tradition’ or ‘freedom v structure’:

‘Intelligence, imagination, talent, and creativity will get nowhere without a basis of knowledge and skills, and for this education must be sufficiently structured and focused. But an education too rigid, too formulaic, too lacking in narrative, may kill the once-active, inquisitive mind of a child. Education has to achieve a balance between structure and freedom, and each child’s needs may be extremely variable. Some young minds expand and blossom with good teaching. Other children (including some of the most creative) may be resistant to formal teaching ; they are essentially autodidacts, voracious to learn and explore on their own. Most children will go through many stages in this process, needing more or less structure, more or less freedom at different periods.’

So there you have it. It’s complicated! Schools and education systems have to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of all learners, which incidentally are not fixed, even within an individual. You begin to see why there is no such thing as a perfect system or a perfect school, and why as long as we have formal schooling, everything within it is a compromise of ideas and ideals.

Next time I will be sharing what Sacks has to say about the nature of memory and conscious thought.

 

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Resources Galore!

The annual Scottish Learning Festival takes place next week (21st and 22nd September) at the SECC in Glasgow, and for any teachers  fortunate enough to be able to attend I would recommend a visit to the Into Film stand G25 in the Exhibition Hall, where they will be showcasing their new ‘Scotland on Film‘ teaching resource. With links to Curriculum for Excellence, the resource is  designed to help educators and young people  explore Scotland through film, focusing specifically on the two central themes of Language and Identity.

‘Scotland on Film’ is an engaging, curriculum-linked teaching resource for educators working with 7-18 year-olds, comprising downloadable teachers’ notes and a PowerPoint presentation with embedded film clips. As well as supporting teachers in engaging with film as a core learning tool, the resource is designed to celebrate Scotland and the rich contribution it has made to film. The activities focus specifically on two central themes: Language and Identity. From classic cinema through to modern day representations of Scotland on film, the resource touches on history, myth, and culture.  It also uses film with accompanying Scots language texts, encouraging students to explore the language in historical and modern contexts. The sections on identity cover many aspects of what it can mean to be Scottish, from personal identity to rural and city living.

“Film is an important text within the English curriculum and we seek to utilise it at every opportunity. It also serves to provide a supporting context for other avenues of study; such as novels, functional writing and stimulus for creative writing.”  Michael Daly, John Paul Academy, Glasgow

Created in partnership with Education Scotland, The Scottish Book Trust, LGBT Youth (Scotland) and Arpeggio Pictures, ‘Scotland on Film’ encourages and supports teachers to use film as a core way of teaching the curriculum. Films featured include Fantastic Mr Fox (PG), Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (PG), Sunset Song (15) and short film Take Your Partners, while activities range from discussing what films made in Scotland tell us about Scotland, through exploring ‘book-to-film’ adaptations, to poetry writing and simple filmmaking.

“It has been fantastic working together with Into Film on this new resource. An essential element of my work for Education Scotland promoting Scots Language is the development of new materials that not only show the vast vocabulary and interesting linguistic history of the language, but also to create modern and vibrant ways for Scots to be explored within the learning settings of today.”   Bruce Eunson, Education Scotland

As part of its UK-wide programme to place film at the heart of young people’s learning, Into Film, an organisation supported by the BFI through lottery funding, will also be showcasing the benefits of its school film clubs, which provide  free access to thousands of films and related resources.  Visitors to the stand will have the opportunity to set up a club on the spot with help from Into Film staff, pose queries about existing clubs, sign up for the charity’s free ‘Teaching Literacy Through Film’ online course (created in partnership with the BFI), and get a sneak preview of its newest curriculum-linked resources.

Those who are unable to attend the Festival in person can listen to the keynote presentations live online at the following times. Check the SLF website for more details.

Wednesday 21 September, 10.30 – 12 noon, Opening keynote address, John Swinney MSP, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills.

Wednesday 21 September, 12.30 – 13.30, Fixing the past or inventing the future, Dr Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon.

Wednesday 21 September, 14.00 – 15.00, Leading with evidence for educational improvement, Dr Carol Campbell, Associate Professor, Ontario Institute of Education, University of Toronto.

Thursday 22 September, 14.30 – 15.30, Taking on the impossible, Mark Beaumont, TV presenter and broadcaster, record-breaking round the world cyclist and ultra-endurance adventurer.

The keynotes will also be available to watch online retrospectively.

Curriculum for Integrity

This blogpost is re-published with kind permission from its author, Matthew Boyle. The original can be found on his own blog, Each and Every Dog. Well worth a visit for anyone with an interest in learning and teaching.

 I had the great pleasure of attending a “thinking and creating” day organised by the Common Weal, “think and do tank” and chaired by the very engaging and upbeat Katie Gallogly-Swan. They described the day as a “policy lab” with the explicit aim of connecting academics and experts in education with “interested citizens” to “ask some of the big questions” and to help shape policy for Scotland going forward.

The day began with us considering the questions that mattered most to us and which we felt were fundamental to improving education. The central chosen question, underpinning it all was “what is the purpose of education for the nation?” The other popular questions were:

• How can the final qualifications system be made to better serve the needs of all?
• How can equality for all be more clearly baked-in to everything that we do?
• What should be done to help the system realise its ambition to implement the Curriculum for Excellence?

I am sure everyone took their own strong conclusions and learning from the very rich and open plenary that knitted up the day’s discussion, but I left further reinforced in my view that what is needed is a “strategy for integrity” to ensure that the “Curriculum for Excellence (CfE)” means more in practice than at present! The day coalesced around an early proposition by Bill Boyd (Literacy Adviser), that CfE was already an excellent and well-consulted plan for an egalitarian, effective and individualised education experience; Bill simultaneously conceded that our implementation has left much to be desired, with the model being hindered by traditional forces such as SQA examinations which seem to pay little heed to the aspirations of the new curriculum, or inspection which seemed to hold back innovation.

The new curriculum is based to a significant degree on “The Treasure Within (UNESCO)” with its four pillars of learning:

Learning to know: to provide the cognitive tools required to better comprehend the world and its complexities, and to provide an appropriate and adequate foundation for future learning.

Learning to do: to provide the skills that would enable individuals to effectively participate in the global economy and society.

Learning to be: to provide self analytical and social skills to enable individuals to develop to their fullest potential psycho-socially, affectively as well as physically, for a all-round ‘complete person.

Learning to live together: to expose individuals to the values implicit within human rights, democratic principles, intercultural understanding and respect and peace at all levels of society and human relationships to enable individuals and societies to live in peace and harmony.

This has been translated and modernised by our own curriculum which clearly targets the following (among other outcomes):

• personalisation and choice, although you could argue that that is only a limited version where the factory model of schooling allows.
• Interdisciplinary learning (IDL), although ten years on, strong examples of this “real application of learning” are in only the minority of schools.
• Breadth and depth of learning, which are quite untestable and a bit “mom’s apple pie” in scope and ambition anyway, so what they have led to is no change.
• An exam system to declutter the curriculum and to reflect the more joined-up learning that young people are now undertaking, which teachers are preparing learners for by cutting up old, pre CfE papers, since much of what is in the new exams is similar to the old!

I largely agree with Bill that CfE contains good things, largely agreed on by teachers and society, some of it clearly too woolly and contradictory, but that we are simply not delivering it in the way it’s authors and contributors intended. Perhaps now, as a possible conclusion from the policy lab, it is time for us to refocus on delivery, not rewrites, and attempt to deliver a Curriculum with Integrity! If we believe the examination tail has too long wagged the learning dog, then we must redesign the exams to reflect that belief. If we believe IDL is a major delivery mode of our curriculum then we must break down some of the subject silos at all levels and deliver integrated project-based learning. If we believe individualisation matters, then we must have personal choices available throughout regardless of the inconvenience to our current models.

A delivery strategy to do what we say we value might just be the saving of a good curriculum that we are failing to deliver; CfI instead of CfE anyone?

Another Finnish Lesson

This post is appearing simultaneously on Common Space. Common Space is part of the Common Weal, an exciting component of the developing, democratic new media in Scotland.

Recently I wrote a comment piece for Common Space in which I suggested that, while the Scottish Government was right to try to address the issue of the ‘attainment gap’ in our schools, it was going about it in the wrong way, and that in Curriculum for Excellence we already had a blueprint for change, if only we had the courage to pursue it in reality.

The ‘new’ Scottish curriculum – which was written over a decade ago – is based on a number of key aims, set out in the report of the Review Group, including ‘for the first time ever, a single curriculum from 3-18’ and ‘young people achieving the broad outcomes that we look for from school education, both through subject teaching and more cross-subject activity’.

In reality, this ‘cross-subject activity’ is what always happened in primary schools, where one teacher at each stage is responsible for delivering the whole curriculum and where CfE, unsurprisingly,  appears to have had most impact. In the secondary sector however, the fragmented nature of the timetable has remained largely unchanged, making the goal of a single curriculum 3-18 seem as far away as ever.

Compare our approach to that of Finland, one of the more progressive and successful education systems in the world today. Not content with bucking the global trend towards exam-based, target-driven success criteria, the introduction of their National Curriculum Framework in 2016 will require all basic schools for 7-16 year-olds to have at least one extended period of multi-disciplinary, ‘phenomenon’ or topic-based teaching in their curriculum, the length of this period to be determined by the schools themselves (education in Finland is already far more decentralised than it is in Scotland).

Helsinki, the nation’s capital and largest local school system has decided to require two such yearly periods that must include all subjects and all students in every school town. This doesn’t signal an end to specialist subject teaching, but a move towards what you might call ‘big picture’ understanding, with topics including ‘The European Union’, ‘Community and Climate Change’ and ‘100 Years of Finland’s Independence’.

A holistic approach, involving the integration of knowledge and skills, is not new in Finland, but for the first time it will be a requirement of all school providers up to at least the age of 16. This will be a challenge to those middle-school teachers who have traditionally focused more on their own subject teaching and less on collaboration with their colleagues.

Pasi Sahlberg, leading Finnish educator and Visiting Professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, thinks the rest of the world may look at the proposals and wonder why Finland is pursuing these aims, at a time when the country is slipping slightly in the international league tables, and the answer is as bold as it is revealing;-

“The answer is that educators in Finland think, quite correctly, that schools should teach what young people need in their lives rather than try to bring national test scores back to where they were. What Finnish youth need more than before are more integrated knowledge and skills about real world issues, many argue. An integrated approach, based on lessons from some schools with longer experience of that, enhances teacher collaboration in schools and makes learning more meaningful to students.” (full article)

By describing the curriculum in terms of broad outcomes and experiences, Scotland is already thinking more progressively than other countries with long-established traditions of decent public schooling. The challenge now is whether, like the Finns, we will have the courage of our convictions in pursuing that more integrated curriculum, or whether we will continue to talk a good game while just coming up short when we actually take to the pitch.

Still Searching for Scotland

R.F. MacKenzie 1910-1987

In this year of the referendum on Scottish Independence (September 18th) it was appropriate that my ruminations on the future of education, and specifically the ‘Curriculum for Excellence‘ as it has been labelled, should find me making greater acquaintance with one of the country’s most progressive educationalists of the 20th Century, R.F. MacKenzie, a figure whose name I had heard but about whom I knew very little. Appropriate in more ways than one, in that not only was Mackenzie regarded by many as ‘ahead of his time’, but he firmly believed that it was through the state education system that the British establishment maintained its position of power and privilege, and that only by breaking this mould would ordinary Scots be released from their educational and creative straitjacket.

“The doctrine of power depends on a belief that the majority need an intelligent  élite to guide them. The élite spread the axiom that the majority of earth-dwellers are unintelligent and, to justify the assertion, flood the educational system with incomprehensibility. The majority of children, obviously failing to comprehend, are adduced as proof of the majority’s limited intelligence. The lesson is ‘Leave it to the élite’.”

R.F. MacKenzie, A Search For Scotland

R.F. MacKenzie was born in 1910 in rural Aberdeenshire, the son of a country stationmaster, and spent much of his childhood travelling between the rich agricultural soil of his immediate environment and the rugged North Sea coastline, with its tales of fishing, survival and adventure. It was travelling further afield which was to enable him to look more forensically in later life at the country he loved dearly: as a young man he taught in Switzerland and Nazi Germany, served as aircrew in the Royal Air Force, travelled widely in Europe by bicycle and lived for a while among the Calvinist Boers in South Africa, before returning to Scotland and taking up a career in teaching. The insights he gained from these experiences, as well as the lessons learned from fellow-Scot and radical teacher A.S. Neill of Summerhill School fame, were to inform his career and his philosophy of education, which would generally  be described as liberal and progressive. Like Neill before him, MacKenzie believed that a person’s education should begin in his or her natural environment and stem from a natural desire to answer the great questions in life – Who am I? How did I come to be here (on the earth as well as in this particular place)? Why is this place the way it is? How can, and should, I shape it while I am here? – and that children needed stimulation, not discipline, in order to learn.

The Ideal Classroom?

Learning outdoors is a key feature of the Mackenzie doctrine, having played such a part in his own early education. It is one which he was able to put into practice early in his teaching career, and in his first Headteacher post at Braehead Secondary School in Fife, a ‘Junior’ Secondary for pupils who failed what was then known as the ’11+’ or ”Qualifying’ examination at the end of their Primary schooling. It was with such pupils, whom he believed had been failed by the system, that MacKenzie had most success, often taking them, literally, back to nature in the form of walks and expeditions in the Scottish countryside. In A Search for Scotland, his last book, published two years after his death in 1987, he describes such an adventure:-

“On a June crossing of the high plateau of Scotland from Braemar to Rothiemurchus, from the Dee to the Spey, in which thirty teenagers took part, we discovered a little of the enquiry and discovery that appeals to them, the experience that gives them enjoyment. We left the Linn O’Dee at nine in the morning and stopped four miles later, near Derry Lodge, for breakfast. Some had sandwiches. One gourmet fried bacon and eggs; we thought he would go far. We followed the less-frequented track of the Lairig-an-Laoidh up the Derry Burn past ancient Caledonian pines, quiet, flat-topped like the mediaeval bonnets that Aberdeen professors wear for graduation ceremonies. The gouging out of two neighbouring corries has left between them the tight-rope of an arête but we had twenty miles of tough walking ahead of us and there wasn’t much time to look at it. A.S. Neill, kindest of critics, said that we were compulsive teachers, too keen to offload geology on our pupils. I imagine he was right because when we stopped for mid-morning break to eat a sandwich and gulp lemonade, the pupils were much keener on dropping rocks in the burn to throw up a cascade of water and soak their unsuspecting companions than on listening to a cascade of geological information…….

The compulsive educationalist tries to gather some crumbs of validation for his own over-serious classroom preoccupations. The sixteen-year-old, staggering in his self-imposed task of carrying a half-hundredweight boulder, legs apart, is learning about density, the feel of granite, the musculature of the human skeleton, the endlessly entertaining phenomena of this miracle substance, water. It comes back to the full meaning of the word ‘know’. What is ‘knowing’? We repacked our rucksacks after the midday siesta, laced up our boots and resumed our journey.”

It was a philosophy which was ultimately to lead to his downfall, dismissed from his post as Headteacher at the ill-fated Summerhill Academy in Aberdeen in 1974. His own account of these events is recorded in The Unbowed Head, but according to Walter Humes of Stirling University it was a failure resulting less from deficiencies in the man or his philosophy than from a combination of external factors, including the inherently conservative nature of the Scottish educational establishment and the difficulties of scaling up an approach which had worked in a previous school with around fifty – albeit challenging – pupils.

Many would argue that there is an inherent contradiction in a man who is himself so well-read and able to quote extensively from the Classics, the Bible and Shakespeare, doggedly pursuing a child-centred, ‘discovery learning’ approach to schooling.  Surely a proper education must be about the acquisition of knowledge? My guess is that Mackenzie himself would not have argued against the idea that knowledge was the key to learning, but would have had very sound views on what it is that stimulates the desire and motivation in individuals to acquire it. It could be said in fact that much of what MacKenzie was trying to do was to put into practice the principles of the current Curriculum for Excellence, and that the barriers which stood in his way then remain firmly in place now. Whatever your view, I challenge you to deny that the following extract, written 25 years ago, does not still have some resonance today.

 “The richest of the resources that Scotland is wasting is her young. We would be immeasurably richer for their cooperation, and their reintegration into the community. Many years of dealing with these edgy youngsters of industrial Scotland have convinced me of their intellectual ability and potential goodwill as well as their spiny independence. I suspect that our prolonged schooling of them is to hold them down, to protect us adults from their explosive initiatives. Keeping them into their late teens memorising swathes of barely comprehensible information takes the steam out of them. Maybe schools aren’t the best way of bringing up the young. All the politicians in the last election thought that excellence in education is better examination results.”

R.F. MacKenzie, A Search For Scotland

For a more comprehensive analysis of the life and works of R.F. MacKenzie I would recommend that you read Walter Humes’ excellent paper ‘R.F. Mackenzie’s Manifesto for the Educational Revolution‘ in Scottish Educational Review No. 43 (2011)

See also rfmackenzie.info 

Listen to a discussion on R.F. MacKenzie and A Search for Scotland on the Inside Learning podcast

With thanks to my good friend on Twitter Robert Macmillan (@robfmac) for pointing me in the direction of A Search for Scotland. One day soon I hope to meet him in the real world.

‘The Ideal Classroom?’ image from The Shieling Project at A Thousand Huts

It Should Have Been Messier

Here we are, a decade on from the launch of one of the most radical and visionary curriculum frameworks anywhere in the developed world, and sadly the focus of the mainstream media and the educational establishment in Scotland seems to be back on familiar ground – the lack of readiness of secondary teachers to ‘deliver’ the new National Qualifications to school leavers (STV News). It is an all-too-familiar scenario, and the language of ‘delivery’ tells you all you need to know about our continuing collective failure to turn the system around. I thought this recent tweet from one of the country’s top educational commentators summed it up rather neatly:

Sometimes in Scotland it feels like we launch boats and then refuse to sail in them. Need to make more of Curriculum for Excellence….

— David Cameron (@realdcameron) February 6, 2014

The Scottish Government claims to be fully committed to the vision of Curriculum for Excellence, yet sometimes I wonder if our politicians and their representatives in Education Scotland send out confusing signals  about what was designed to be a ‘seamless’ educational experience for young people between the ages of three and eighteen. Terms like ‘senior phase’ are used to justify the fact that, by the middle years of secondary school, and earlier in some instances, the development of the four capacities appears still to  give way  to relentless exam preparation. If the development of the four capacities in our young people really IS what we believe the purpose of formal education should be about – and the general agreement on that over the past twenty years or so seems to be holding firm – then we need to have the courage of our convictions and look at what is preventing that from happening. Shouldn’t we be spending more time and energy, for example, looking at how we measure that development? Technology has provided us with tools which make it easier for learners to record and demonstrate their own personal development – why aren’t we making more use of them and transferring that responsibility to the learner more effectively? 

“Our approach to the curriculum sees it as a single framework for development and learning from 3 t0 18. The framework needs to allow different routes for progression from one stage of learning to the next, and promote learning across a wide range of contexts and experiences. It should equip young people with high levels of literacy, numeracy and thinking skills and support the development of their health and wellbeing. It should enable every child to develop his or her full potential through a broad range of challenging, well-planned experiences which help them develop qualities of citizenship, enterprise and creativity…As many schools recognise, the curriculum is more than curriculum areas and subjects: it is the totality of experiences which are planned for young people through their education – a canvas upon which their learning experiences are formed.”

A Curriculum for Excellence, Progress and Proposals, Looking at the Curriculum Differently. March 2006

Discussing this issue on last week’s Inside Learning podcast, I repeated my long-held belief that the brakes were put on the new curriculum almost from the start, when it became clear that secondary schools would be expected to implement significant changes within their existing structures, when in fact it is the very structures themselves which should have been up for discussion, a point taken up by Professor Mark Priestley of Stirling University in two recent blogposts on the same topic.

“I wish to dwell briefly here on issues of provision. Addressing questions of fitness-for-purpose should also be about looking at systems and procedures, thus identifying barriers and drivers which impact upon the development of the curriculum. A prominent example of where this has not tended to happen concerns the secondary school timetable. Logic would suggest that a serious attempt to implement the principles of CfE would include a serious look at the structure of the school day. One might expect longer school periods for example, to accommodate CfE pedagogy. One might expect a serious look at the ways in which knowledge is organised in schools.  Disciplines and subjects are not the same thing, and schools should be looking at alternative ways to organise disciplinary (and everyday) knowledge, especially in the pre-qualification Broad General Education phase, where fragmentation is a problem (typically S1 pupils might see 15 teachers in a week). As Elliot Eisner (2005) reminds us, ‘There is no occupation …  in which the workers must change jobs every fifty minutes, move to another location, and work under the direction of another supervisor. Yet this is precisely what we ask of adolescents, hoping, at the same time, to provide them with a coherent educational program‘. Serious attention to such matters might include the systematic development of inter-disciplinary approaches, including hybrid subjects (integrated science, social studies, etc.).”

Mark Priestley, Professor of Education, Stirling University

While I agree wholeheartedly with Mark Priestley’s observations, I don’t think ‘the systematic development of inter-disciplinary approaches’ goes far enough; many schools claim to be doing this already, and the evidence of impact is so far hard to find. For me, the problem is caused by having a ‘Broad General Education’ for three years of secondary schooling before reverting in the senior phase to the exam-driven scenario we are all too familiar with. Shouldn’t the whole of schooling be a ‘BROAD, GENERAL, EDUCATION’? As I said earlier, I think the crucial decisions were made with the publication of the Progress and Proposals document in 2006, which made it clear that the structures in secondary schools would remain largely unchanged. This was what launched the next phase of development, when outcomes and experiences were written by ‘subject-based’ groups of specialists. A much more productive next phase, in my view, would have been to tease out the ‘attributes’ and ‘capabilities’ of the four capacities (featured below) into a larger curriculum framework.

It could have been different, and it is never too late. If we are to make real progress in Scotland and re-establish our reputation for a world-class education system, we need to grasp the nettle, admit that our natural conservatism has not brought about the systemic changes we were looking for, and go back to the drawing board. This would be less an admission of failure than a further declaration that we do indeed have the courage of our convictions.

Whether you are working at school, departmental, local authority or national level, and wondering how you might re-boot the curriculum, looking again in some detail at the four capacities would not be a bad place to start.

The four ‘capacities’ of the Scottish curriculum.

Footnote: The day after I published this blogpost, I was alerted to the publication of ‘A Common Weal Education‘ from the Jimmy Reid Foundation. I had no idea that it was being written, but an added bonus is that it was written by Brian Boyd, Emeritus Professor at Strathclyde University and one of the most positive influences on Scottish Education over the past two decades. If you have any interest in the future of education in Scotland – or anywhere else for that matter – I could not recommend this report highly enough.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

Regular readers of the blog will know of my admiration for Inanimate Alice, the digital novel which has captured the imagination of teachers and young readers around the world, and many of you have already introduced your own students to the story, as well as making full use of the literacy resources which accompany the four episodes currently on the website. (You can catch up with my previous posts on Alice here, here and here). After reading about Alice and her travels, young people love to write their own version of the next episode, setting it in their own locations and introducing new characters, but their most frequently asked question is, When are we going to see Episode 5? Recently I caught up with producer Ian Harper of The Bradfield Company at his Vancouver Island base and asked him that very question, as well as what readers might expect as our eponymous heroine develops into young adulthood.

TLA. It has been a long time since Episode 4 appeared online. When can fans expect to see Episode 5 and can you give us any clues as to what it might look like?

Ian Harper. Yes it has been a while since Episode 4 appeared. Way too long in fact. We haven’t been entirely idle in the meantime and have been concentrating our efforts on establishing relationships with partnerships that will grow the title for the long term. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the relationship we have established with Education Services Australia, the government organisation that has been responsible for the development of the curriculum across the country. We are delighted that Inanimate Alice was the first digital text chosen to be adopted into that national curriculum. That feels like a landmark moment. Education Services Australia has invested in both the development of new content and in the title’s discoverability across all of the nations education platforms and websites. Quite a commitment. It has certainly put Australia firmly on Alice’s map. This year we are developing interactive journals and translating the first four episodes of the series into Japanese and Indonesian for ESA’s Language Learning Space. We must be doing something right!

I digress. These developments, though, have encouraged our creative team to proceed with the development of that long-awaited Episode 5. It is in production now with a planned completion date of the end of May 2014. We are seeking promotion of the episode in similar way to the launch of Episode 3 in the Guardian newspaper. Readers of the series will see familiar scenes in Episode 5 as this episode is set in the same town, the same school as Episode 4. However, Alice is two years older and trying out her storytelling skills using the Unity game engine for the very first time. So those readers may well be surprised to see 3D effects within a 2D linear storyline. This episode provides the transition to the full-on 3D explorable environment we are anticipating for Episode 6 when Alice is “off to college.”

I’m hopeful that long-standing friends of Alice will be pleasantly surprised by developments. There has been much more going on behind the scenes than can be gained from viewing the website. For example, the new Australian project will form part of Season 5: Gap Year where Alice takes up travelling once again, this time without her parents or the Aunt who accompanies her around Europe as part of Season 4. With Japan and Indonesia on the itinerary it is shaping up to be quite a year. Tasters, at least, of each of these Seasons will appear during the year and we will open up windows on Japanese and Indonesian culture in the same way that we have done with Alice’s Australian adventures. Expect to hit the ‘Japan’ button and find yourself in Hiroshima. ‘Indonesia’ will lead to Jakarta and the gateway to a country that doesn’t know how many islands it comprises.

Work in Progress. A screenshot from Inanimate Alice episode 5. The bird silhouettes, like the cat and the nightclub in the following two shots, are animated and move gently, creating a sense of depth.

TLA. You have said often that IA was written as entertainment rather than education. Have you been surprised by the uptake from teachers around the world, and how do you account for its tremendous popularity in classrooms?

Ian Harper. For sure, teachers have taken us by surprise on many occasions and continue to do so, after all this time. The first surprise came quite early on when we noticed, from the website statistics, that most of the site users were teachers and, importantly, they represented almost all of those returning to the site time after time. It was then we decided to switch tactics and actively support teachers in their endeavours.

As the numbers grew, we were able to detect trends in usage and saw that in addition to literacy objectives teachers were using it right across the curriculum with high-spots naturally in literacy and ICT education. What was at first a surprise and continues to be a joy is the uptake in the language learning community. Around the world, British Council teachers of English are among the title’s strongest supporters. We see usage at international schools particularly across the Pacific Rim. The translations, too, have served to widen uptake with Spanish being by far the most popular at this time. This interest is from the Spanish speaking Americas as much as Spain itself. There are multiple factors at play when it comes to its popularity, the strongest of which must surely come under the heading of engagement. Students are immediately gripped by the dramatic storyline and teachers can rely on having the attention of everyone in the classroom. This is a primary consideration whether students are high performers or reluctant learners. It has turned into a bit of a mantra but one of the beauties of the title is that is suitable for deep-reading and re-reading, The story bears revisiting and viewers are often delighted when they experience something fresh on each occasion.

TLA. How many episodes are planned in total, and how fully developed are they?

Ian Harper. We have long held on to the vision that there will be ten episodes in all, spanning Alice’s life from an 8 year old through to her mid-twenties, when we see that she has achieved her ambition to work as a computer game designer. One of the first tasks undertaken, by the writers Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, was to develop a story bible that not only described the arc of the narrative but also delved into the multimedia guidance we needed to understand her circumstances at each juncture. This document keeps us generally on track in managing her ever-improving skills as a digital creative, yet affords the flexibility for us to learn both from feedback gained and the improving technologies that help us better present the story. Beyond Episode 6 which has an established format, we have not developed the later episodes in any detail. The shift to 3D graphics and the provision of interactive journals that will run alongside and in-between episodes allow great opportunities to discuss challenges and intended outcomes with partners.

TLA. Are you prepared to give away the ending of the story?

Ian Harper. The straightforward answer to this question is NO! However, I can tell you that the complexity and interactivity increases exponentially with each episode and that by the end of the series the last episode will have the look and feel of a AAA computer game title. That ambition brings great challenges and we hope to surprise and delight ‘Friends of Alice’ many times along the way. It is no secret that the Inanimate Alice series was developed from a theatrical movie screenplay. The ambition holds that folks, having met Alice through all 10 episodes, 3 hours of screen-time, but never having seen her face, will want to visit the Tokyo Games Show and meet her together with Brad for the first time.

TLA. One of the features which makes IA unique is that, in your own words, it was ‘born digital’. Do you think that the era of the paper book is over?

Ian Harper. By no means. The printed word remains just as fascinating, just as gripping as it always did. People still love to get their hands on a book. I’m sure that that desire will remain, but the sorts of books that consumers will buy in paper form will certainly change. The revolution we are now experiencing centres on content, words with audio-visual accompaniment, appearing in multiple forms, often concurrently. Formerly, readers would have the single option of getting their hands on a paper book. Now they can read and experience on myriad devices. They can browse now or download for later reading. They have the choice of ‘read only’ or selecting an enhanced version that offers the prospect of venturing outside of the linear narrative. This enhanced narrative experience is in its formative stages and its an exciting time to see this unfold.

From our perspective, one of the great advantages of having the title ‘born digital’ is the prospect of simply being able to take the title in any direction. It’s just as easy to anticipate smartphone delivery as it is to imagine what Inanimate Alice looks like in print formats. Ease of translation and switching between translations suggests far greater reach than the mere option of “do you want the paperback or PDF on an e-reader?” and thinking beyond “how much is it?” What fascinates me is the challenge of delivering stories and translations for example in print to students in Australia, while offering a mobile version of the stories directly to kids in Japan, China and Indonesia. This kind of reach was the sole domain of the world’s largest publishers until digital came along.

If you haven’t already joined Alice’s growing band of supporters you can do so in a number of ways. Here are a few of them.

Follow Alice on Twitter

Like Alice on Facebook 

Follow Kenny Pieper and his English class as they engage with Alice here

Find out more about Alice on Wikipedia

Read the latest Alice news at Scoop.it!

Collect Alice images and pin them at Pinterest

See how other teachers are using the Alice stories on Edmodo

Download and re-mix the the digital assets from ‘Alice in Australia’

 

A Novel Approach To Reading

Contains more than recipes. Art, geography, history, photography, folklore and classical culture are all covered.

Since acquiring an eReader last year, my reading habits seem to be developing into a new pattern, whereby I tend to download and read novels from the screen, but continue to buy non-fiction titles, graphic novels and – an increasing obsession – cookery books, in paper format. I suppose the most obvious reason is the tactile quality of many of these latter texts – I’m thinking of titles like Shaun Tan’s The Arrivals or Chris Ware’s Building Stories which is literally a book in three dimensions – but there is often, too, something about the physical weight or heft of a book in your hand which, in the case of many cookery books for example, suggests bounty or treasure – you feel as if you are getting something for your money. These are the texts for which the word ‘book’ now seems a bit inadequate, for often they are indeed artefacts or works of art.

However, sticking with novels for the moment, once you have become a fiction addict you are always on the lookout for that next fix, and I recently enjoyed a great novel called Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk by Ben Fountain. As it happens I was on Twitter when I spotted this tweet from Jamie Byng of Canongate, who published the book, and was intrigued enough to favourite it for later reference. A quick look at the reviews on Amazon confirmed that it was  ‘my kind of book’, so I downloaded a sample to my Kindle and was reading it within minutes. How the magic of technology has improved and enhanced our reading habits in recent years, particularly that facility to read a sample before we decide whether we want to read the whole text or not.

“@Jeff_Daniels: Reading a scorchingly good novel. BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK. Great to see that Ben’s band of evangelists grows & grows

— Jamie Byng (@baddabyng) June 25, 2013

None of that would have happened though, I guess, if I wasn’t already a reader. How I  became a regular reader is a long story – much longer than any novel – which started way back in primary school, when the Friday afternoon ‘treat’ of silent reading wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but suited me just fine, thank you very much. The generous class library, which comprised most of Enid Blyton’s prodigious output, Just William in every imaginable situation, a smattering of Jennings and Derbyshire and W.E. John’s handlebar-moustached hero Captain Biggles, held a seductive enough range of material with which to escape the classroom for a couple of otherwise dreary hours. For a boy growing up in a semi-rural working-class West of Scotland community, the main attraction of the stories was the excitement of exploring other worlds, a virtual travel agency if you like, which is exactly what reading does.

Just William

It is through reading, and especially through fiction, that we are able to journey, for a while, alongside people who are not like us.

You can perhaps understand then why my heart sinks every time I hear teachers discussing which novel (often  singular) they will be ‘teaching’ students this year. I don’t blame them (I was that teacher once), but the exam-driven system which has brought them to this state of affairs. I too spent many hours in the classroom – this time as a teacher – pulling apart some  great novels to look at how you might squeeze them into the straitjacket of a particular essay question. It was a system designed for a minority of students who would study literature at university, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Imagine an education system where young people read an increasing number of books year on year, and keep on doing so long after they leave school, rather than, in many cases, abandoning the practice as soon as they are no longer ‘made to read’. Imagine if the culmination of your efforts as a teacher, and the measure of your success was not exam results but the number of lifelong readers you had helped to create. Imagine, if in their final year, the task you set the class was not to write a ‘critical essay’, which in all likelihood most of them will never have to do again, but to complete a group investigation something like the one below. Imagine the opportunities that would present, the reading that could be done, the fun you could have together, and the gift you could pass on to future generations.

Final Year Reading Task

What is the origin of the novel as a storytelling form, and why does it remain popular today?

What novels would you say every young person should read?

What features would you say are common to all the novels you (as a group) have read?

What distinguishes a successful novel from an unsuccessful novel, and is ‘successful’ the same as good?

Why should we read novels written in previous centuries?

Further Reading:

The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller

Study: Reading Novels Makes Us Better Thinkers

Related Posts:

Sticking to the Plot

Lighting a Spark for Reading

Of Mice, Flies and Farms: Death by Examination

The Power of Fiction and the Storytelling Animal

Reading by Numbers

No Trivial Pursuit

When Martin Robinson set off in mental pursuit of the kind of education he wanted for his young daughter, he was using a benchmark effective teachers should always have at the forefront of their thoughts – would this be what I would want for my own child? As a successful AHT and Advanced Skills Teacher in London, the former drama teacher’s own formal education had been an uneasy affair, leading to frustration and an early departure from a school system which could not always accommodate his naturally rebellious and challenging nature, an experience which would ultimately shape his own approach to teaching what he describes as ‘that most subversive of subjects’.

Given the subject-matter, Trivium 21C: Preparing Young People for the Future with Lessons from the Past could so easily have turned into a dry treatise on the history of education in the western world, but in fact it could hardly be further removed. Through a combination of wit, humour, diligence and erudition, Robinson travels back to the Greco-Roman concept of the ‘trivium’ – grammar, dialectic and rhetoric – traces its history through the ages by way of the major philosophers, and examines in detail his own supposition that the same principles could apply equally well today, in the context of the technologically-enhanced classroom of the internet age. In order to do so, he reckons that he must first address the question, ‘What is the purpose of education?’ His answer is a complex one, reaching far beyond the accumulation of grades, paper qualifications and the currently popular utilitarian concept of readiness for work, yet he is able to summarise it in deceptively simple terms.

“For my daughter, independence – an ability to understand and find solutions – would seem to be a good thing, and I would like her to love learning for its own sake. We are lucky to live in a culture that recognises the rights of women to be educated as free citizens. I would like her to be educated to spend her time in worthwhile activities, including a pursuit of the pure forms of higher culture. However, I would also like her to have experience and skills in the so-called inferior arts, such as an engagement with a craft in which the authentic experience of doing is as important as thinking…….

The three ways of the trivium – knowing, questioning and communicating – had come together as the basis of a great education. This is what I want for my daughter. I want her to know about things and how to do things. I want her to be able to question, both to find out more and to realise that some things aren’t known, can’t be known, or aren’t fully understood. I want her to communicate about things she has discovered, surmised, or created in the way of an open hand to the world . Finally, I want all this to have a purpose, which can be summed up by the phrase ‘a good life’ (because I certainly don’t want her to have a bad one). When I look at the three arts of the trivium, I wonder why it was beyond the wit of my school to give me this grounding, and why it shouldn’t be the grounding for a great education now. Surely there is nothing that could stop the trivium from being the foundation of schooling for my daughter in the 21st century?”

More astute readers will have noticed that the three original elements of the trivium – grammar, dialectic and rhetoric – have become ‘knowing’, ‘questioning’ and ‘communicating’ respectively, though the writer himself arrives at these modern definitions only after a thorough examination of each of the concepts. Adopting the modern-day trivium, he reasons, would enable us to put an end to the sterile ‘debate’ which has so-called traditionalists and progressives arguing over the ‘skills’ versus ‘knowledge’ curriculum, as if the two were mutually exclusive, and instead recognise that all three elements, including the much-neglected art of rhetoric, are of equal importance when providing an all-round education. As a teacher of drama, and a highly successful one at that, Robinson is deeply persuasive about the importance of rhetoric, which he variously describes as communicating, producing, sharing, expressing, arguing, teaching or performing. There can be no critical analysis without knowledge, while knowledge, understanding and creativity are of little value without the demonstration of it to others, an idea which chimes with Seth Godin‘s notion that what matters is the production of art (see previous post).

“The art of dialectic therefore covers a very wide range of important activities in teaching and learning. In the context of whatever they are studying, students are taught the specific grammar that gives them structure and knowledge. This is taught in a way that also opens up the possibility of criticism, which in turn opens up the possibility for dialectic. Therefore, students should become well versed in being able to analyse and challenge, whether it be through logic, scientific method, or debate and discussion. Controversies should be welcomed and addressed. In classrooms, we should see the skills of deduction, induction, abduction, analysis, criticism, debate, argument, challenge, and dialogue. Added to this is the opportunity offered through logos: students should have quality time to develop their own enthusiasms and whether, like Sherlock Holmes, they like to play the violin, or whatever they decide to pursue, ways need to be found to ensure activities like these are recognised as being more than mere hobbies at the fringes of the curriculum.”

I think Martin Robinson has produced a manifesto for education – or more precisely for schooling – which is of huge significance and well worthy of consideration, regardless of one’s own education, politics, class, culture or belief system (he himself is an atheist). At times he paints quite a gloomy picture of the way schools are in Britain at the moment – ‘The current education and assessment system does not like doubt; it has its targets and assessment objectives. Teachers teach children what to think, what to write, and how to write it down for endless tests, which are intended to prove that they know what to think. Doubt is treated as an imposter; despite the language of opening minds, many are in fact being closed down.’ – yet he is optimistic that things can be turned around without adopting a new paradigm – ‘We do not need a new model; our system already has the capability to improve our existing educational landscape. This is truly radical: it is from the root and also progressive.’

Mmmm. Despite the reminder that radical means ‘fundamental’ as well as ‘progressive’, I don’t know that I necessarily share his optimism, and I wonder whether the educational system we have is truly capable of producing young people (and I mean all of them, not just a few) who are truly independent thinkers, capable of joining up the often disparate experiences they encounter while following a secondary school timetable. If you have ever had the opportunity to shadow such a student over the course of a school day or a indeed a school week, where he or she will encounter anything up to fifteen discrete subjects, you will realise what a tall order that is. The ways in which a young person makes sense of his or her schooling, and the question of responsibility for ensuring a smooth and progressive journey, could be the subject of many more books and blogposts. Martin Robinson’s daughter is fortunate to have such a father, teacher and mentor  to call her own. Would that every child could say the same.

“Schools should ensure that opportunities to perform and communicate are at the heart of what they do. Performance means making theatre, speech making, poetry readings, dance, sports events, community spectacles, art, and so on. Some schools run their own theatres, concerts, radio and TV stations, film companies, multimedia platforms, publishing houses, school newspapers, web pages, Twitter communities, blogs, computer programmes, art galleries, and workshops, with the philosopher kids (the term Robinson has coined for young people in the lifelong pursuit of knowledge and wisdom) developing their communicative skills through performance. This should be about creating content, not capital. In order to do this, schools should use their partnerships with local communities, businesses and individuals, as well as their heritage, history and cultural institutions.”

This review has also been posted on the Amazon website.

Big Apple For The Teacher

Just as Scotland’s teachers are digging deep into their final reserves of energy and ingenuity this week in the run-up to the long summer holiday, their efforts received a boost from the other side of the Atlantic in an article in the New York Times, which praises the different approach the country has taken to curriculum design from those in the rest of the UK – as well as the US – an approach which places less emphasis on standardised testing, has lighter-touch inspections, gives greater autonomy to teachers in their classrooms,  and has focused on a re-alignment of the balance between knowledge and skills. The key to this progress (I hesitate to use the word ‘success’ prematurely) has been a general consensus among the general public, the government and the professional teaching associations  – rarely referred to as ‘unions’ these days – as to the kind of educational system we want in a modern-day Scotland.

“In the same week that Britain’s (sic) education minister, Michael Gove, announced yet another measure to make the national exams taken by high school students in England more rigorous, their counterparts in Scotland were taking a curriculum in which national exams for 16-year-olds had been abolished……….

In 2005, Scotland introduced the Curriculum for Excellence. While education in England became increasingly prescriptive — with public debate on precisely what students were expected to know and whether, for example, there ought to be a greater focus on kings and queens, or the history of the British empire — the Scottish decided to pay more attention to how subjects were taught.”

Scottish Schools Focus On More Than Just Tests, New York Times, June 23, 2013

It is worth reminding ourselves how we came to this parting of the ways. In 2002 the then Scottish Executive undertook the most extensive consultation ever of the people of Scotland on the state of school education, through the National Debate on Education. Through that debate, most stakeholders – pupils, parents, teachers, employers and others – said that they valued and wanted to keep many aspects of the current curriculum, especially those principles which had a long tradition in this country stretching back to the introduction of public schools, and including:

• the flexibility which already existed in the Scottish system – no one argued for a more prescriptive ‘national’ system
• the combination of breadth and depth offered by the curriculum
• the quality of teaching
• the comprehensive principle (privately-funded schools account for around 5% of schools in Scotland)

Some also made compelling arguments for changes which would ensure all our young people achieved successful outcomes and were equipped to contribute effectively to the Scottish economy and society, now and in the future, changes which would:

• reduce over-crowding in the curriculum and make learning more enjoyable (the implication being that it wasn’t enjoyable enough!)
• better connect the various stages of the curriculum from 3 to 18
• achieve a better balance between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ subjects and include a wider range of experiences
• make sure that assessment and certification support learning (rather than lead learning as had been the case prior to the introduction of CfE)
• allow more choice to meet the needs of individual young people

A key element of the changes has been the replacement of 5-14 national tests with The Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN), a national sample-based survey which monitors performance in literacy and numeracy in alternate years at P4, P7 and S2, and involves only a handful of randomly chosen young people from each school. Information from the survey is also used to inform improvements in learning, teaching and assessment within the classroom; it has been aligned with Curriculum for Excellence and includes written, online and practical assessments.

There is still much work to be done, especially I believe in respect of the last two objectives on that list of changes which people wanted to see, but as another academic year draws to a close, it is reassuring to know that what we are attempting to do here is attracting some admiring glances from other, bigger nations, who have perhaps found themselves seduced into thinking that more and better tests were the answer to better learning, only to discover that the two are only loosely connected.