What makes a good school?

Ouch! Dr Perryman told us what she didn't like but the only way she could characterise a good school was whether it made the children happy. But was she doing any more than airing her prejudices?

I mean there are good schools and there are some very, very bad schools. Surely if you are researching into 'what makes a good school?' you need to try your best to find factors which are common to the good schools and not to the bad schools so that you can advise bad schools on how to get better. And to simply blame the entire variation of schools on socio-economic circumstances is manifestly not true. Otherwise a bad school could never ever improve and we know that they do. And we know that schools with identical SECs can be better or worse.

I was very disappointed in these videos. The attack on Ofsted was predictable but it involved suggesting that Ofsted do not use value added data, only raw scores, when their inspection handbook requires inspectors to take account of the starting point of students. It also brought out the much-repeated and never-evidenced notion that Ofsted teams 'may' have an agenda.

I've been on Ofsted inspections. Yes, the data about the school is important. It is, after all, a measure of the school. But the two days of observation is always used to challenge the data.

The myth of ability or practice practice practice

I was impressed by Professor Stobart's debunking of ability. I loved the analogy made with language acquisition: clearly there is a genetic predisposition to learn but the environment plays a crucial role, which is why my Mandarin is worse than that of many five year old kids.

And I too had been impressed by Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers which suggest that 10,000 hours of practice is what is needed to make you an expert. 

But I thought that idea had been exploded by the research of Professor Macnamara and her team who did a meta study of 88 papers and concluded that practice only explained a small percentage of success in various fields: 26% in games, 21% for music, 18% for sport, and just 4% for education.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140728094258.htm

Is this because practice is only really important in activities that are largely physical or is it because we just don't know how to teach in education and if we did practice would account for a larger percentage.

Perhaps the myth of ability is the reason for this tiny 4%.

The other thing that occurred to me is that Prof Stobart's ideas might chime with those of Carol Dweck. Dweck suggests that learners learn better/ faster if they have a 'growth' mindset, ie they believe that if they work harder they will become more able, rather than believing that their ability is fixed no matter what they do. Perhaps it isn't the practice that is important, perhaps it is having the right self-beliefs.

Finally, I wonder if the type of practice is important. Stobart said it had to be 'deliberate' practice, ie practice that focuses on the weaknesses rather than just doing more and more of the same thing. This is why you might need a coach (or a tutor). But I also want to apply my rip, mix and burn model of learning to it. Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke bandied ideas about gravitational fields in the coffee houses and discussion groups they both attended. Hooke probably suggested the inverse square relationship to Newton in one of their meetings. But after this collaborative learning, Newton went away and buried himself in Maths for two years and came up with his theory of gravity. Hooke's mind flitted from topic to topic like a butterfly. So becoming an expert learner may have something to do with focus.

But the expert learner I used on the discussion forum, whom I called J, was a bit of a Jack of All Trades: he was pool champion for the region, played cricket for the Town and worked in his parents' shop as well as doing A-levels with me. How could he excel in everything if he needed to put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. And he's not the only one I've known.

Summary of the first week

I came away from the Google Hangout thinking that we had been addressing a crucial issue about schooling: at any time in any class there are some pupils who are able to learn by themselves and there are some pupils who need the teacher to chivvy them along. We need to be able to release those pupils who want to fly whilst at the same time teaching those who need the structure and support of a taught class. Of course, before we can do that we need to identify which pupils are in which state (and this might change according to subject, topic, time of day ...)

I came away from the discussion forums thinking that learning is really a little more complicated than most of my colleagues seemed to suggest. I believe that there are (at least) three phases of learning:

• Ripping which corresponds to Thornburg's campfire in which a teacher transmits information to a mostly passive learner. This need not be oral; the 'teacher' could be a book that the learner is reading. 
• Mixing which corresponds to Thornburg's watering hole in which a learner compares the newly transmitted learning with other ideas. These might be the learner's previous understandings which now need to be modified or even unlearned. This might take place through dialogue with other learners in a collaborative process. This seems to be similar to constructivist learning.
• Burning which corresponds to Thornburg's cave. In this process the learner consolidates and memories the new understanding. This is often done through homework, for example when the learner is writing a n essay (or a reflective blog!) on their learning. Most learners probably need solitary and peace and quiet for this phase of learning.

I think these two reflections are somehow different sides of the same coin. The teacher's skill is to make sure, for each learner, that they are learning efficiently in each phase of learning. During ripping, how should learning be transmitted: lecture, powerpoint, book etc? During mixing, how can a group conversation be structured so that all learners are benefiting? How is consolidation best achieved during burning: should the learner be writing an essay or composing a poem or building a wall?

After the Hangout

This was my first experience of a Google Hangout and, like all such, it had pros and cons.

The technology let Amira down so we didn't get much from Lebanon.

But the other four participants were from England (me), Mongolia, Australia and Norway. Five countries and four continents in five people is about as diverse as you can get!

The discussion quickly centred on the understanding that some kids were better suited to independent or enquiry-based learning while other kids needed a teacher to drive them on. I suggested (I was being deliberately provocative) that we therefore needed two schooling systems: one for the high flyers and one for the er low flyers. This went down like a lead balloon (too many flying metaphors here but you know what I mean). So I suggested we designed a classroom that had a break out room which the high-flyers could go into to learn on their own while the teacher drilled the others. This too was not acceptable.

There were two reasons. One was around the difficulty of identifying high-flyers (and they might be different for different subjects). This could be overcome with a completely personalised pedagogy such as in New York's School of One.

The second objection was that schools do have a social function and we didn't want even high flyers to end up as geeks with no social skills. Not sure how to overcome that objection. Would the experience of mixing with other kids at playtime or in the canteen be enough?

Old and cynical

Reading through the posts of so many of my classmates on the Coursera What Future for Education? MOOC, I feel a little old and cynical. So many of my new colleagues have the fervour of revolutionaries. Old classrooms are bad, modern technologies are good. Transmissive pedagogy is bad, Vygotsky and collaborative constructivism is the way children learn.

And I reflect that if the old ways are so awful why have they lasted so long? Because there is no doubt that people today are better educated than they were one hundred years ago.

And they will say that the old ways may have been satisfactory (not good, never good) but that they are manifestly inadequate for the new world where people no longer need knowledge and where learning is available online. But the majority of e-learning opportunities are entirely transmissive. And I worry about whether they are ditching the baby with the bathwater.

OK, so this MOOC has the transmissive video lectures, the collaborative discussion forums and the reflective learning journals: all three elements of education. But so does my old traditional classroom. And there are benefits to the classroom.

When I stand in front of a group of students and lecture them I am continually processing instant feedback. They tell me with their body language (and sometimes their disruptive behaviour) when they are bored or when they are struggling with the concepts and I choose an alternative mode of transmission. Sometimes you can sense little 'eureka moments' pinging all around the class and you tweak what you are saying to make it more challenging, to explore higher and higher concepts. At other times you scaffold. But you can't do that with a pre-recorded video lecture. (Though the advantage of the video lecture is that you can replay it as many times as you wish, as if repetition of the same material necessarily leads to enlightenment.)

And when I encourage students in my classroom to discuss, I carefully structure their discussions and I continually eavesdrop and interject. Most discussion boards contain a series of statements without dialogue (unless the students on the course are severely limited in number). If you have thousands on a MOOC it is impossible for the teacher to respond to all but the tiniest fraction of them.

So that just leaves us with reflection. I don't do that very well in my classroom: it is too noisy and if they were all working in complete silence I would be scared of someone coming in and criticising this. Perhaps the really traditional classrooms where kids sat and worked through problems from the book in silence were better! In my class. homework is where reflection goes on and many students don't do that. So perhaps it is this aspect of learning that needs modern methods most.