[MUSIC] Teaching for Learning. Well, that seems a very strange title to give to a course, because isn't all teaching for learning? A chief inspector in England wrote a book, in which, he said this: Teachers teach, and children learn. It's as simple as that. Well, is it? A very different kind of proposition is put forward by Judith Warren Little in the United States, where she said no, it's a much more complex equation than that. And she said, or wrote, we must pursue the connections with aggressive curiosity and healthy skepticism. We must always question if that relationship is quite as simple as that chief inspector would have us believe because, as David Hargreaves, professor at Cambridge a number of years ago, wrote, knowledge is sticky. Now, he didn't mean that when you teach knowledge just sticks to the student. He said if you think of a tube connecting the teacher's speaking with the learner's listening, as knowledge passes down that tube, it has to negotiate quite a difficult path. It has to negotiate past what he calls self-doubt. Well, I'm not very good at this. I'm not very good at Maths. I'm not very good at English. I'm not very good at foreign languages. Self talk, talking yourself down. Well, I'm not as clever, you know, or I'm not, I'm actually quite stupid, or I'm not, I'm not as clever as other people are. Self talk and misconception. How often do children assume things or make judgments? Such as, for example, when a science teacher talks about volume. What does volume mean? Is it that thing on your Hi-Fi? Is it that thing on your radio when you turn up the volume? And if you don't clear up some of those misconceptions, children go on harboring those conceptions, because often, there is a lack of prior knowledge. So unless we know something, how do we learn? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French writer, talked about how can I learn something new when I know nothing about it? Well, that's a strange conundrum, isn't it? But, we need to have some basis on which to build and then knowledge gets stuck, because of peer norms, because of our fellow students, who often tell us, well, it's not terribly cool, really, to learn to be a little more distant, a little more kind of cynical about the whole purpose of school. So it's, we take a lot from our peers, which can often be inhibiting of our learning. Well, six questions. As a teacher, do your students ever doubt their ability or intelligence? Do they talk themselves down? I'm not very good at... Are they influenced by what their friends and their peers do or say? As a teacher, am I aware of the prior knowledge they bring with them into the classroom. Do I understand and check out their misconceptions before going on? Do I use the best medium for communicating with them? Not always talk. Not always demonstration. Not always necessary activity or rehearsal. We need to constantly be thinking about what is the best medium. This may look something like your classroom, perhaps not. But in that classroom, there is a whole world of childhood and a whole world of learning. Three key, simple principles which we call connect, extend, and challenge. What does your teaching connect with in their learning? In what ways does it extend their learning? And in what ways does it challenge their misconceptions of their prior learning, their prior assumptions? How does this new information connect with what they already know, think and can do? How does it build on what they think and what they feel and what they do? And how does it challenge? Here are just a few of the routines that David Perkins uses. We've talked about the connect, extend, challenge. What makes you say that? That's a powerful question, isn't it? What makes you say that? What do you think you know? What puzzles you? Can you puzzle about something as simple as 2 and 2 make 4? What do you wonder about? And then, that important classroom strategy talks about think, pair, share. When asked a question, don't put up your hand and volunteer an answer. Think about it. Pair with somebody else. Share your ideas, and then we'll take a whole range of different ways of people answering the question. All learning, all learning is social, emotional, and intellectual. And bearing that in mind, how do we engage students' thinking and feeling and doing? Graham Greene, when he wrote the book "The Power and the Glory", he said there is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in, the teachable moment. When the timing is right, the ability to learn a particular task will be possible. A teachable moment. If we don't have a teachable moment, learning is not going to occur. This was written by Robert Havighurst in 1952, when he wrote a very seminal book about the nature of human development and learning. So to come back to that question, that statement by Judith Warren Little, which we began with, we must pursue the connections with curiosity and healthy skepticism. Well, think back to that cartoon again of the cats. How do we know, how can a teacher possibly know what's going on in children's heads? Whether they're really concentrating, thinking about what the teacher is trying to get across, or thinking about something else? What they are going to do after school, or what they're going to have to eat, or what they're going to do with their friends when school is all over. We simply don't know, do we? And that's why the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, try spelling that if you like, but you could have a look at his book or an excerpt from his book, called Flow the idea that at times children are experiencing a real high in their learning, at other times they're frustrated, bored, or anxious. And the way we know is because he invented an instrument which he called the Spot Check. And it's a very simple kind of idea that children are given a piece of paper with a number of statements on it. And at a given point, a teacher might stop and say, at this moment, fill out the spot check and on the left-hand side, if you are concentrating at the moment, give it a 1. If you were really thinking about other things, then give it a 3. And as you go down that list, are you alert, drowsy, relaxed, anxious, wishing to be here, wishing to be somewhere else, happy, sad, active, passive, excited, bored, is time passing quickly or time passing slowly? And what we learned from this, when teachers use this instrument, they often discover that their time frame and the student's time frame is not the same. Time may be passing quite quickly for them, but not necessarily for their students. Now, it may be not terribly practical to use something like this with a very large class, but you could give it to ten students, a sample of the class. You might be able to give it to everyone in the class. And to get them to do it at, maybe, one or two given moments in a class, and the teacher does it at the same time. And then, having that kind of comparison can be very challenging and very helpful in thinking, well, how do we do things differently in the future, and opening that up to discussion with the students themselves. Where is it? When is it that you are actually most engaged, most excited, and most of the time, finding that time is passing quickly? And when we know those things, we can actually make our teaching better, and make our learning more effective. The Spot Check has a lot of possible uses, but think about whether or how you might use this with a whole class or with a sample of students in a class. Because it can yield quite a lot of useful information, but not only that you might use it together with other teachers in the school. Perhaps teachers teaching different subjects or different classes, and also thinking about how you might use it with other members on this course. When you're in a forum and teachers are using the same instrument it could be the basis for a very stimulating conversation. [MUSIC]
