Teaching Creative Thinking E-Book

Bill Lucas

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In Teaching Creative Thinking: Developing Learners Who Generate Ideas and Can Think Critically,Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer define and demystify the essence of creative thinking, and offer action-oriented and research-informed suggestions as to how it can best be developed in learners. Where once it was enough to know and do things, young people now need more than subject knowledge in order to thrive: they need capabilities. Teaching Creative Thinking is the first title in the three-part Pedagogy for a Changing World series, founded upon Lucas and Spencer's philosophy of dispositional teaching a pedagogical approach which aims to cultivate in learners certain dispositions that evidence suggests are going to be valuable to them both at school and in later life. A key capability is creative thinking, and, in 2021, one of the guardians of global comparative standards, PISA, is recognising its importance by making creative thinking the 'innovative assessment domain' to supplement their testing of 15-year-olds' core capabilities in English, maths and science. Creative thinkers are inquisitive, collaborative, imaginative, persistent and disciplined and schools which foster these habits of mind in learners need to be creative in engaging children and young people by embedding creativity into their everyday educational experiences. In this extensive enquiry into the nature and nurture of creative thinking,the authors explore the effectiveness of various pedagogical approaches including problem-based learning, growth mindset, playful experimentation and the classroom as a learning community and provide a wealth of tried-and-tested classroom strategies that will boost learners' critical and creative thinking skills. The book is structured in an easy-to-access format, combining a comprehensive listing of practical ideas to stimulate lesson planning with expert guidance on integrating them into your practice, followed by plenty of inventive suggestions as to how learners' progress can be assessed and tracked along the way by both the pupil and the teacher. The authors then go further to offer exemplars of success by presenting case studies of schools' innovations in adopting these approaches, and dedicate a chapter to dispelling any pressing doubts that teachers may have by exposing the potential pitfalls and offering advice on how to avoid them. Venturing beyond the classroom setting, Teaching Creative Thinkingalso delves into the ways in which a school can work towards the provision of co-curricular experiences such as partnering with a range of external community groups and better engage its leadership team and pupils' parents with the idea of creative thinking in order to support learners with opportunities to grow. The authors offer many examples which will inspire schools to do just this, and collate these ideas into building a framework for learning that equips young people in schools today with the twenty-first century skills and capabilities that will enable them to thrive in the workforce of tomorrow. Replete with research-led insight and ready-to-use strategies, Teaching Creative Thinkingis a powerful call to action and a practical handbook for all teachers and leaders, in both primary and secondary settings, who want to embed a capabilities approach in their schools.

Leseprobe

Praise for Teaching Creative Thinking

This book can teach us all how to think more effectively.

Arthur L. Costa, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Co-Director, International Institute for Habits of Mind

This commendable new book charts a course for developing employees who are both inquisitive and collaborative in the classroom and beyond.

John Cridland, Chairman, Transport for the North, former Director General, CBI

A hugely welcome book, full of practical examples of pedagogy to cultivate knowledge, skills and capabilities, all the while recognising the power of professional learning communities within and between schools.

Dame Alison Peacock, Chief Executive, Chartered College of Teaching

The work Bill Lucas and his team are doing in examining the place of capabilities in the curriculum – and, perhaps more importantly, how to assess capabilities – is of critical importance.

Dr David Howes, CEO, Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority

An intelligent, strongly evidenced and globally connected approach to developing creative thinkers in schools today.

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA

There is a risk in today’s data-driven educational environment that knowledge and skill are emphasised at the expense of creative thinking. Teaching Creative Thinking shows us that this need not be the case; creativity can be embedded in all schools.

Walter Boyle, Head Master, Holyport College

This book resonates strongly with the profession because it puts forward a powerful argument for scaffolding curriculum content through capabilities.

Christine Cawsey, Principal, Rooty Hill High School, Sydney

If you still need convincing why your school or school system should prioritise critical thinking, look no further than Teaching Creative Thinking.

Louise Stoll, Professor of Professional Learning, UCL Institute of Education

This powerful book gives a clear explanation of how and why creativity breathes life into the curriculum. Step away from the spreadsheets and read it!

Carolyn Roberts, Head Teacher, Thomas Tallis School

A must-read for educators and other professionals who are passionate about encouraging children and young people’s critical and creative thinking.

Dr Leslie Gutman, Senior Lecturer and Programme Director, UCL Centre for Behaviour Change

Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer’s Teaching Creative Thinking is a must-read for anyone teaching in Scotland.

George Roberts, Head Teacher, Danestone Primary School and Heathryburn Primary School

Here is a book that creates the thrust for better learning in schools. It should be read by parents, teachers, learners, employers and policy-makers.

Mick Waters, Professor of Education, Wolverhampton University

At last, an approach to developing creativity in schools which eschews the false dualism of knowledge and skills in favour of a holistic approach to cultivating young people’s capabilities.

Alex Crossman, Head Teacher, The Charter School East Dulwich

Lucas and Spencer provide the right mix of pedagogical and school practices, and real-life examples. Their framework will inspire a variety of readers, including teachers, school leaders and policy-makers.

Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Senior Analyst, OECD

This is a practical handbook, a resource to support far-reaching and high-impact developments, whose purpose is to raise standards and prepare young people for further learning and for life as high-functioning contributors to the workforce and to wider society.

Bill Watkin, Chief Executive, Sixth Form Colleges Association

Hats off to Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer for Teaching Creative Thinking – a compelling case for capability-based education.

Keith Budge, Headmaster, Bedales Schools

Creativity in the classroom will not happen by accident, and this book gives valuable insights into how schools can promote it.

James Townsend, Director, The Church of England Foundation for Educational Leadership

Wholehearted thanks to Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer for this hugely important book on the future of teaching.

Rhys Morgan, Director of Education, Royal Academy of Engineering

Today’s employers tell us they need character, resilience, problem-solving and creativity in potential employees. Let’s just get on with cultivating and valuing creative thinking as this book seeks to do.

Kirstie Donnelly, Managing Director, City & Guilds

Teaching Creative Thinking is a timely book, both expert and readable, which makes an authoritative case for the relevance of creative thinking to schools today.

Jonnie Noakes, Director, Tony Little Centre for Innovation and Research in Learning, Eton College

Being able to think creatively opens the door to opportunity and this book brings a welcome global breadth to this vital topic.

Tony Little, Chief Academic Officer, GEMS Education

First published by

Crown House Publishing Limited

Crown Buildings, Bancyfelin, Carmarthen, Wales, SA33 5ND, UK

www.crownhouse.co.uk

and

Crown House Publishing Company LLC

PO Box 2223, Williston, VT 05495, USA

www.crownhousepublishing.com

© Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer, 2017

The right of Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2017.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. Enquiries should be addressed to Crown House Publishing.

Crown House Publishing has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Extract pp. 154–155: adapted from ‘What’s worth knowing’ from Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up by Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica © 2015, Ken Robinson. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

p. 104 Stuck poster © TLO

IFC, p. 121 and p. 179 © Rooty Hill High School

IBC, p. 127 and p. 164 © Thomas Tallis School

p. 177 © VCAA

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Mindmaps are a trademark of the Buzan organisation.

A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

Print ISBN 978-178583236-9

Mobi ISBN 978-178583266-6

ePub ISBN 978-178583267-3

ePDF ISBN 978-178583268-0

LCCN 2017948774

Printed and bound in the UK by

TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

Acknowledgements

Our huge thanks to:

Former and current colleagues at the Centre for Real-World Learning, Guy Claxton and Janet Hanson.

All those at the OECD who are exploring ways of teaching and assessing critical and creative thinking and with whom we have been in dialogue, especially Michael Stevenson and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin and all of the teachers and educational leaders involved.

Our friends at the Mitchell Institute in Melbourne who have the cultivation of capabilities at their heart, especially Michelle Anderson, Stacey Fox, Sarah Glover, Peter Noonan, Megan O’Connell and Kate Torii.

All those at Victoria’s education department and Curriculum and Assessment Authority, especially Lynn Davey, Sharon Foster, David Howes and all the schools with whom we have been prototyping approaches.

All the pioneering school leaders who have contributed case studies, including: Sarah Bergson, head teacher, Redlands Primary School; Ann Carter, head teacher, Duloe CE VA Junior and Infants School; Christine Cawsey, principal, Rooty Hill High School; Dianne Hennessy, former high school principal; Conny Mattimore, deputy principal, Rooty Hill High School; John Devlin, executive head teacher, Our Lady of Victories Primary School; Jill Howells, assistant principal, Brunswick East Primary School; Jon Nicholls, director of arts and creativity, Thomas Tallis School; and Carolyn Roberts, head teacher, Thomas Tallis School.

And Michael Fullan for great conversations along the way.

The authors and publisher would also like to thank:

The Victorian Curriulum and Assessment Authority for permission to use a screenshot of their online assessment materials.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for permission to use the image OECD 2030 framework for education from Global Competency for an Inclusive World, page 2.

Michael Fullan and colleagues for permission to use NPDL material.

TLO for permission to use the Building Learning Power stuck poster text.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Series Introduction: Capabilities and Pedagogy

Changing roles for schools

The purposes of education

Which capabilities matter most?

The idea of signature pedagogies

A four-step process to cultivating capabilities in young people

Learning to change

About the series

Chapter 1: Creative Thinking

A short history of creative thinking

Creative thinking in more detail

Why creative thinking matters today

Chapter 2: Cultivating Creative Thinkers

Teaching for capability

Five signature pedagogies

The ecology of creative thinking

Two core approaches

Putting it all together in a school

Focusing on the parts

Chapter 3: Getting Going

Inquisitive

Persistent

Collaborative

Disciplined

Imaginative

Chapter 4: Going Deeper

Leadership for creative thinking

Professional development for creative thinking

Personal development and real-world learning

Exploring signature pedagogies for cultivating creative thinking

Engaging parents with the idea of creative thinking

Co-curricular experiences for creative thinking

Chapter 5: Promising Practices

Rooty Hill High School, Sydney – leadership, visible thinking routines, professional learning and technology

Thomas Tallis School, London – leadership, whole-school integration and pedagogy

Redlands Primary School, Reading – growth mindsets, enquiry-based learning and the University of Redlands degree courses

Brunswick East Primary School, Melbourne – multi-age learning communities, thinking routines and Philosophy for Children

Our Lady of Victories Primary, Keighley – skills-led curriculum, sense of adventure and themed ‘wonder weeks’

Duloe Church of England School, Liskeard – creative cross-curricular connections and teachers supported to take risks

OECD, France – PISA domains, understanding pedagogy and assessing progression in critical and creative thinking skills

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, Australia – support for schools to develop signature pedagogies and innovative approaches to assessment of capabilities

New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning, Canada – research based, clarity of progression within its defined capabilities and a commitment to pedagogies for building capabilities

Four Dimensional Education, USA – research based, clarity of progression within its defined competencies and an alliance of education leaders

Creative Schools

Educating Ruby and Building Learning Power, UK

Chapter 6: Signs of Success

Pupils tracking progress

Teachers tracking progress

Real-world assessment options

Online assessment options

Chapter 7: Creative Challenges

Appendix 1: An A–Z of Teaching and Learning Methods for Developing Creative Thinkers

Appendix 2: Thomas Tallis School’s Tallis Habits Pedagogy Wheel

References

Series Introduction

Capabilities and pedagogy

Ensuring that all people have a solid foundation of knowledge and skills must therefore be the central aim of the post-2015 education agenda. This is not primarily about providing more people with more years of schooling; in fact, that’s only the first step. It is most critically about making sure that individuals acquire a solid foundation of knowledge in key disciplines, that they develop creative, critical thinking and collaborative skills, and that they build character attributes, such as mindfulness, curiosity, courage and resilience.

Andreas Schleicher and Qian Tang,Universal Basic Skills: What Countries Stand to Gain (2015, p. 9)

Changing roles for schools

Across the world there is a great shift taking place. Where once it was enough to know and do things, our uncertain world calls for some additional learning. We call them ‘capabilities’. Others call them ‘dispositions’, ‘habits of mind’, ‘attributes’ or ‘competencies’, words we find very helpful. Some refer to them as ‘non-cognitive skills’, ‘soft skills’ or ‘traits’, none of which we like given, respectively, their negative connotations, tendency to belittle what is involved and association with genetic inheritance.

Our choice of capabilities is pragmatic. A country in the northern hemisphere like Scotland is actively using the term, as is Australia at the opposite end of the earth. If we had to choose a phrase to sum up our philosophy it would be ‘dispositional teaching’ – that is to say, the attempt specifically to cultivate in learners certain dispositions which evidence suggests are going to be valuable to them both at school and in later life.

We know that the shift is underway for four reasons:

1. One of the ‘guardians’ of global comparative standards, PISA, is moving this way. In 2012, as well as tests for 15-year-olds in English, maths and science, they introduced an ‘innovative assessment domain’ called ‘creative problem-solving’. This became ‘collaborative problem-solving’ in 2015 and will become ‘global competence’ in 2018. 2021’s assessment domain is ‘creative thinking’.1

2. Researchers the world over are beginning to agree on the kinds of capabilities which do, and will, serve children well at school and in the real world. We’ll explore this increasingly consensual list later on, but for now we want to share just some of the key thinkers to reassure you that you are in good company: Ron Berger, Guy Claxton, Art Costa, Anna Craft, Angela Duckworth, Carol Dweck, K. Anders Ericsson, Chris Fadel, Michael Fullan, Howard Gardner, Leslie Gutman, Andy Hargreaves, John Hattie, James Heckman, Lois Hetland, Bena Kallick, Tim Kautz, Geoff Masters, David Perkins, Lauren Resnick, Ron Ritchhart, Sir Ken Robinson, Andreas Schleicher, Ingrid Schoon, Martin Seligman, Robert Sternberg, Louise Stoll, Matthew Taylor, Paul Tough, Bernie Trilling, Chris Watkins, Dylan Wiliam and David Yeager. We’d include our own work in this field too.

3. Organisations and well-evidenced frameworks are beginning to find common cause with the idea of capabilities. The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project, Building Learning Power, the Expeditionary Learning Network, the Global Cities Education Network, Habits of Mind, New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning, Partnership for 21st Century Learning and the Skills4Success Framework are just a few examples. We’d include our own Expansive Education Network in this too.

4. Inspirational leaders across the world are very gradually showing us that you can powerfully embed capabilities into the formal, informal and hidden curriculum of schools, if you have a mind to do so. Here are five examples: Col·legi Montserrat in Spain, Hellerup School in Denmark, School 21 and Thomas Tallis School in England and Rooty Hill High School in Australia. You’ll doubtless have your own favourites to add in. We admire these schools and their courageous teachers. Throughout the series, we hope that their stories and our grounded practical advice will serve to ensure that hundreds of thousands of schools across the world see the value of systematically cultivating capabilities, as well as deep disciplinary knowledge and useful academic or practical skills.

Increasingly, ‘character’ is the word used to describe the cluster of capabilities which are useful in life, with a further clarification of the term ‘performance character’ suggesting those attributes which are associated with excellence in situations where performance is called upon – an academic test, examination, sports match or any extra-curricular activity in which concentrated demonstration of a skill is called for.

All this means that as well as ensuring, as Andreas Schleicher and Qian Tang put it in the quotation which begins this chapter, all young people develop a solid foundation of knowledge and skills while at school, they also need to acquire a set of important capabilities.

The purposes of education

Parents, educators and policy-makers alike have many hopes for the education of children and young people. But with so many ideas about what schooling might achieve, it is hard to reach any kind of consensus. Nevertheless, in late 2015, the UK parliament initiated an inquiry into the ‘purpose of education’. On the one hand, it is a telling admission if a government has to ask such a fundamental question. On the other, it could be construed as a sign of strength, as a recognition that times are changing.

At the Centre for Real-World Learning, we worked with a number of national bodies to see if common agreement could be reached. The list below is what we came up with, and it is indicative of the sorts of things we might all wish for our children’s education to achieve (Lucas and Spencer, 2016). The first half a dozen are particularly relevant to this series of books, but the remainder also give a sense of our values. We want educational goals which:

1. Work for all young people.

2. Prepare students for a lifetime of learning at the same time as seeing childhood and school as valuable in their own right.

3. See capabilities and character as equally important as success in individual subjects.

4. Make vocational and academic routes equally valued.

5. Cultivate happier children.

6. Engage effectively with parents.

7. Engage well with business.

8. Use the best possible teaching and learning methods.

9. Understand how testing is best used to improve outcomes.

10. Empower and value teachers’ creativity and professionalism.

11. Proactively encourage both rigorous school self-improvement and appropriate external accountability.

Which capabilities matter most?

Let’s look in more detail at the third item on our wish list: seeing capabilities and character as equally important as success in individual subjects. In the last decade, we have begun to understand with greater clarity those capabilities which are particularly useful. Here are two lists, the first from an economic perspective (Heckman and Kautz, 2013) and the second through the eyes of educational researchers (Gutman and Schoon, 2013). Both sets of researchers are attempting to describe those capabilities or, in some cases, transferable skills which will improve outcomes for individual learners and so for wider society.

Heckman and Kautz:

Gutman and Schoon:

Perseverance

Self-perception

Self-control

Motivation

Trust

Perseverance

Attentiveness

Self-control

Self-esteem and self-efficacy

Metacognitive strategies

Resilience to adversity

Social competencies

Openness to experience

Resilience and coping

Empathy

Creativity

Humility

Tolerance of diverse opinions

Engaging productively in society

The striking thing about these lists, to us, is how similar they are. While we may want to interrogate the terms more closely, the general direction is clear. The demand side, from employers, is similar in its emphasis to that of the educational researchers. The Confederation of British Industry launched a campaign setting out the kinds of capabilities it wanted young people to acquire at school. Their list included: grit, resilience, curiosity, enthusiasm and zest, gratitude, confidence and ambition, creativity, humility, respect and good manners, and sensitivity to global concerns (CBI, 2012).

The idea of signature pedagogies

If we are reaching consensus as to the kinds of capabilities increasingly being seen as valuable, what about the kinds of teaching and learning methods that might cultivate them? Is there a similar level of agreement? In truth, there is probably less so, mainly because, regardless of subject matter, there are some deeply engrained pre-perceptions. Teaching authoritatively from the front, for example, is something that those who see themselves as ‘traditionalists’ might advocate, but that most people would agree is only one kind of good teaching. By contrast, those who see themselves as more ‘progressive’ would argue that good teachers should be much less visible and their pupils engaged in self-organised group activities, another potentially good kind of more facilitative teaching.

We’d like to urge you not to adopt either of these binary positions, but instead to ask yourself some different questions:

If I wanted to teach a pupil how to become more creative and better able to solve problems, what methods would I choose?

If I wanted my students to become more resilient, what methods would I choose?

If I wanted my pupils to be full of zest for learning, what methods would I choose?

Before you answer, we need to introduce you to an important concept – the idea of signature pedagogies. First suggested by Lee Shulman in the context of preparing learners for different vocational routes, these are ‘the types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions’ (Shulman, 2005, p. 52). Shulman talks of the three dimensions of a signature pedagogy:

1. Its surface structure: ‘concrete, operational acts of teaching and learning, of showing and demonstrating, of questioning and answering, of interacting and withholding, of approaching and withdrawing’ (ibid., pp. 54–55).

2. Its deep structure: ‘a set of assumptions of how best to impart a certain body of knowledge and know-how’ (ibid., p. 55).

3. Its implicit structure: ‘a moral dimension that comprises a set of beliefs about professional attitudes, values, and dispositions’ (ibid., p. 55).

It’s not much of a leap to think not about the fundamentals of a particular profession but instead of a particular capability. Suppose it were perseverance: how would you model and demonstrate it? What know-how does someone who is a good perseverer show, and how can you impart the clues of persevering to pupils? What are the underpinning self-belief and can-do dispositions that reinforce perseverance? Quite soon you are getting under the skin of a target capability. You begin to realise that some methods – having tactics for getting unstuck, asking for help, self-talk to keep going when others have given up – might be what you need to focus on.

Signature pedagogies are the teaching and learning methods which are most likely to lead to the desired capability and, throughout the series, we will be exploring these. In our earlier book, Expansive Education: Teaching Learners for the Real World (Lucas et al., 2013a), we introduced a ten-dimensional framework to help teachers think more carefully about the kinds of teaching and learning methods they might select. To do this, we encouraged them to reflect more about the kinds of outcomes they desired. Each line of our dimensions then serves as a prompt to think about learning methods suited to the desired outcome or outcomes and matched to a specific context.

A ten-dimensional framework of pedagogical choices

Source: Lucas et al. (2013a, p. 136)

In some cases (e.g. our attitude to talent and the visibility of processes), we have powerful research evidence from Carol Dweck (2006) and John Hattie (2009) which means that we are always likely to choose methods which put us at the left of the continuum whatever we are teaching. But in others (e.g. means of knowing, approach to tasks and role of the teacher), decisions are likely to depend on the nature of the task, the timing within a lesson and the desired outcome. Take ‘means of knowing’ as an example and it becomes clear that in most situations teachers will want learners to be confident in both theory and practice. The question is really one of timing. Do you tell children that there is something called Ohm’s law before you encourage them to play around with different ways of assembling electrical circuits, or do you let them discover the properties of voltage and current more experimentally before explaining that they are not the first to have noticed some important relationships between the two? The teacher decides.

The more a teacher moves from an ‘instruction’ approach to teaching, to what Chris Watkins (2005, p. 13) calls a ‘co-construction’ or more facilitative approach, the more decisions about the use of time, space and tasks look different and the more the role of the teacher changes. ‘Good’ teaching is an effective blend of the methods which are most likely to achieve desired outcomes. Typically these are a blend of capabilities, skills and knowledge.

A four-step process to cultivating capabilities in young people

From work with teachers across the world, and from the kinds of initiatives listed earlier in this introduction, there is a considerable amount known about how best to develop the kinds of capabilities at the core of performance character. Essentially it is a four-step process:

Step 1: Understand the capabilities

As well as being subject matter and skill experts, teachers have a vital third role: cultivating capabilities. Just as decisions have to be made about whether the timetable has scope to fit in both French and Spanish, so schools will want to decide which capabilities are most critical to them and on which they are going to focus. In some cases these will be value judgements and in others it will require a careful study of the research. Each book in the Pedagogy for a Changing World series takes a core capability and tries to get underneath its skin.

Step 2: Establish the classroom climate

Across the world much effort is expended in determining curriculum content. Governments rightly have a role in determining the kind of education their nation’s children will receive, ensuring their chosen blend of competitive advantage, prosperity, social cohesion and well-being. As part of the process of qualifying to be a teacher, individuals demonstrate knowledge and understanding of one or more disciplinary areas. But at least as important as subject matter knowledge is pedagogical knowledge and skill (Coe et al., 2014). Teachers make thousands of decisions every day about the process of helping learners to learn. These kinds of pedagogical decisions are what we are concerned with in steps 2 and 3.

A four-step process of cultivating capabilities

Source: Centre for Real-World Learning

Creating the classroom climate, or culture, is about designing an environment that consistently communicates the right messages to learners, parents and teaching and support staff, both explicitly and implicitly. Each of these stakeholders will witness the extent to which capabilities are valued, or not, whether verbally or through what they see and experience. A classroom whose climate is conducive to the valuing and learning of capabilities will be distinctly to the left of our ten-dimensional model.

The way knowledge is acquired can be done in a way that closes off questioning or that helps learners to understand how we come to know certain facts. In science, for example, are learners taught theories as ‘fact’, or do they understand the limits of scientific theory and what makes a theory scientific? Do they understand the role of perspective or motive? Who wrote history? What was the worldview of our scientists? How do we know that? Why is it important? How can that thought process be used elsewhere?

Displays of work reflect what is valued. Where capabilities are valued, this might be shown in a visual demonstration of the process learners have been through of drafting and improving for excellence. Important as excellence in a final product is, we need to show and teach the process of getting there. A sense of crafting for improving is shown through displays of risk-taking and creativity that have led to failed attempts accompanied by thoughtful evaluations.

A whole host of capabilities – resourcefulness, curiosity, collaboration and critical thinking, for example – can be strengthened by access to appropriate resources as learners decide they are needed, as well as through the process of having to work out what tools might be required to complete a task.

Effective pedagogy will always involve the teacher modelling the capabilities they value. This includes a willingness to take risks, to collaborate with colleagues, to question their own understanding and their own readiness to learn.

Parents have an important role in supporting the messages teachers convey to learners about learning. They can either reinforce the capabilities at home or contradict them. In this respect, the education and involvement of parents is key.

Classroom systems of reward, recognition and sanction will need to align with any desired capabilities. Learners need to receive their teacher’s commendation for the critical thinking behind a good essay.

Step 3: Manage the learning

Given that capabilities are not generally taught in a vacuum (although it is possible that a teacher might wish to focus on them aside from the lesson content – for example, in a school assembly), a fundamental management issue is the way that teachers ensure that learners value knowledge and skills at the same time as understanding the importance of developing their capabilities as learners in every lesson they experience.

Whether within the formal curriculum or outside it, it is important to name the capability explicitly: ‘Today we’re going to learn how to pass accurately, and I’d like all of you to see how many times you can practise this – get your teammate to make it trickier each time so you are stretched to get better.’ In this example we are learning to throw a ball and we are learning about the importance of pushing ourselves.