The Teacher's Toolkit E-Book

Paul Ginnis

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2001

Beschreibung

The Teacher's Toolkit provides an overview of recent thinking innovations in teaching and presents over fifty learning techniques for all subjects and age groups, with dozens of practical ideas for managing group work, tackling behavioural issues and promoting personal responsibility. It also presents tools for checking your teaching skills - from lesson planning to performance management.

Leseprobe

The Teacher’s Toolkit

Raise Classroom Achievement with Strategies for Every Learner

Paul Ginnis

Illustrations by Les Evans

“We should be as concerned with how we teach as we traditionally have been concerned with what we teach.”

John Bruer, Schools for Thought

Dedicated to those closest to me

Sharon, Helen, Steven, Clare

Table of Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Section 1 Design Tools

Why?

There Are Similarities Between Learners

There Are Also Differences Between Learners

There Are Other Agendas Too

The Recipe

Section 2Tools for Teaching and Learning

Introduction

Ambassadors

Assembly

Back to Back

Beat the Teacher

Bingo

Bodily Functions

Broken Pieces

Calling Cards

Centre of the Universe

Circus Time

Conversion

Corporate Identity

Delegation

Dicey Business

Discussion Carousel

Distillation

Dominoes

Double Take

Dreadlines

Forum Theatre

Go Large

Guess Who

Hide ’n’ Seek

Hierarchies

Hot-Seating

Information Hunt

Mantle of the Expert

Marketplace

Masterminds

Memory Board

Multisensory Memories

On Tour

One-to-One

Pairs to Fours

Pass the Buck

Question Generator

Question Time

Quick on the Draw

Ranking

Scrambled Groups

Silent Sentences

Spotlight

Stepping Stones

Still Image

Thumbometer

Value Continuum

Verbal Football

Verbal Tennis

Wheel of Fortune

Where There’s a Will …

Section 3Tools for Managing Group Work, Behaviour and Personal Responsibility

Introduction

Murder Hunt

Framed

Observer Servers

Learning Listening

Sabotage

Games

Maintenance

Assertiveness

Groups Galore

Step On It

Help! How Do We Hold A Group Discussion?

Help! How Do We Make Decisions?

Proportional Representation

Triple Check

Think About It

Settled Starts

Tricks of the Trade

Section 4Operating Tools

Introduction

Overtime

Extended Horizons

Upwardly Mobile

Menu

Sole Search

Blank Cheque

Section 5Audit Tools

Introduction

Check Your Lesson Plans

Check Your Students’ Learning Styles

Check Your Impact On Students’ Self-Esteem

Check Your Delivery Of Independent Learning Skills

Check Your Language

Check Your Professional Development

Check Your Management Of Change

Appendix A: Starting Points for Research

Appendix B: Learning Styles Analyses

References

Select Bibliography

Index

Copyright

Acknowledgments

My deepest appreciation goes to my family and friends without whose love and supportthis book would not have been written. They waited patiently while The Teacher’s Toolkit took time and energy that should have been given to them:

My wife Sharon, beautiful and intelligent, my companion and co-worker who has given so much to see this project through.

My three multi-talented children, Helen, Steven and Clare to whom I wish all the happiness in the world.

My mother Jean, stepfather Cliff, sisters Trish and Debs, brothers-in-law Andy, John and John, nieces Nicola and Amy, nephew Dan, mother-in-law Monica and sister-in-law Mary.

My inspiration, Donna Brandes.

My dear friends, Peter Batty and Steve Munby.

I am thankful to all those who have shared their wisdom, skills and friendship with meover the years. From you I have learned many lessons, most of which are now between thecovers of this book:

Lindsey and Ted Hammond and the boys

Roland and Janet Meighan, Philip and Annabel Toogood and all in the Education Now network

Clive Carroll, John Peatfield and all the academic and administrative staff at the Education Development Unit of St Martin’s College

Jane Ryan Caine and John Caine

Peter Duncan, Dai Power and everyone in the Dynamix team

Ian and Jane Pickles and family

Ted Harvey

Mike and Pam Cousins

Roy Kent and Janet Briggs

Tony Salmon

John McAleavey

Of the 450 schools with which I’ve worked, some have particularly helped me to developand trial new practice. Thanks for providing the challenge and the opportunity:

The Harwich School, Essex

Villiers High School, Southall

The Ferrers School, Northamptonshire

Thistley Hough High School, Stoke-on-Trent

Radcliffe School, Oldham

Stamford High School, Ashton-under-Lyne

All Saints Catholic High School, Huddersfield

Likewise, my long-term relationship with several Education Authorities has given me thechance to try out and refine key ideas. Thanks for taking me on:

Birmingham, Pembrokeshire, Sandwell, Solihull, Stoke-on-Trent, Salford, Swansea, Jersey and Middlesbrough

Thanks to all the colleagues involved and a particular thanks to the Pembrokeshire ProjectLeaders Group for putting such energy into the work, for sustaining genuine change andfor giving me valuable feedback and encouragement.

Thanks to one or two teachers who have given permission for me to publish examples oftheir work:

Alan Cadman

Jim Bradshaw

Roger Hamer

Paul Stewart

A big thanks to Jane Ryan Caine for carefully scrutinising Section 2 and providing many helpful suggestions.

Foreword

Over the past ten years there has been a cautious but profound revolution taking place in schools and in broader debates about education. At the centre of this change are the fundamental questions about the nature of learning and, linked to this, the role of the teacher and the organisation of classrooms and schools. Paul Ginnis has been at the heart of this debate and this book represents an important synthesis of his contribution to our shared understanding of the impact of learning on children’s education.

The change is perhaps best represented by the shift in the language we use about what happens in classrooms. The emphasis has switched from ‘teaching’, through ‘teaching and learning’ to the situation where learning is seen as the key activity. The impact of this change should not be underestimated; it alters the fundamental premises about the status of children, the nature of pedagogy and the whole architecture of learning. The curriculum becomes a vehicle to support learning rather than an end in itself.

What Paul has done in this book is to provide a powerful conceptual framework to justify the strategies he describes. Perhaps one of the most significant changes has been the emergence of the ‘science of learning’: the discovery of a neurological foundation for the work of learners and teachers. This is as profound a change as any in medical or electronic science in the past 50 years. When linked with new insights into cognitive psychology and the social aspects of learning, it becomes clear that the status quo in the classroom is not an option.

Some of the activities that Paul describes will be recognised by many teachers; others will be seized on as innovative and exciting – others may be rejected as too radical. However, every single activity described is firmly rooted in a coherent and systematic strategy based on a real understanding of the difficult balance between the science of learning and the art of teaching for learning.

The Teacher’s Toolkit is an important and welcome resource because of the emphasis that it places on how we learn and teach rather than what we learn and teach. The book also focuses on raising achievement but balances the concern for performance with the development of understanding of learning how to learn and this, perhaps, is the greatest legacy of formal schooling. This book provides numerous opportunities for individual teachers to develop their own classroom practice; it will serve as a powerful stimulus for professional learning; but, and most importantly, it has the potential to make learning exciting and fun for teachers and students alike.

John West-BurnhamProfessor of Educational LeadershipUniversity of Hull

Introduction

I have packed into The Teacher’s Toolkit almost everything I know about teaching and learning.

For years, as a profession, we have been trying to raise levels of student achievement. Given that the challenge is still on to pursue excellence day by day, often in testing circumstances, this seems like a good time to gather my favourite practices together and share them.

Teachers want practical ideas. There are loads of them in this book, but that’s not all. My experience has been that the quality of teaching and learning improves most readily when practice and theory inform each other. It is helpful for us to know why things work, or don’t; it is helpful to have principles to guide the design of lessons; it is helpful to know how students learn so we don’t always operate unthinkingly from expediency or unquestioningly from political directive.

On the wall of Pontin’s Conference Centre in Blackpool, of all places, there’s a plaque:

Insanity – doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different result!

Making the same point, Frank Zappa, the great American rock musician, once said:

Without deviation, progress is not possible.

We have to do things differently if we want achievement to improve further. But what? Fortunately, we no longer have to depend on guesswork, trial and error, ideology or flights of philosophical fancy. We can now rely on some fairly secure truths about the learning process. It seems that there are natural laws of learning, some givens, some universal principles that provide a firm foundation for effective practice. These provide us with compass directions to follow, indicating the best, though not necessarily the easiest, ways forward.

Where have they come from? In recent years a huge amount of scientific information about the brain has become available thanks to new neuroscanning technologies. This has been popularised in accelerated learning and through the wealth of print and Internet material on brain-based approaches (see Appendix A and Bibliography for details). What is impressive, and reassuring, is the extent to which this “new” stuff affirms and refines earlier practices based on the principles of humanistic psychology, holism, cooperation and democracy. Many older educationalists who held only quasi-scientific notions about teaching and learning – Dewey, Holt and Rogers, for example, whom we shall meet later – have been proved largely right. This current convergence of thinking from a variety of old and new sources – neuroscientific, psychological, sociological and moral – suggests that the main thrust of national policy needs to be rethought. It seems to be barking up the wrong tree.

Be that as it may, the principles that underpin The Teacher’s Toolkit are sufficiently down-to-earth for individual teachers such as yourself to adjust your practice no matter what the big wide world outside your classroom is up to. The practical techniques inspired by current thinking are sufficiently self-contained to be conducted within the confines of your own four walls. In some cases the strategies of yesteryear belonging to the older, recently reaffirmed thinking, can be dusted down and reused with confidence.

Classroom techniques created in the days of active learning, student-centred learning, drama across the curriculum, flexible learning and supported self-study, and belonging to initiatives such as the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative, Active Tutorial Work, even Raising of the School-Leaving Age (well before my time!), are found to be compatible with the latest findings of the neuroscientists. These ideas always were effective, and now we know why. They just got buried under the pile of prescription that is the national curriculum. So, where is this particular collection from?

Over the 22 years that I have worked in schools – as a teacher, head of department, advisory teacher, staff development tutor and freelance trainer – I have learned my craft from many remarkable people. Without doubt the deepest and most pervasive influence has been Dr Donna Brandes, the internationally renowned student-centred educator. Donna brought into my young professional life, at a time when I am ashamed to say that students called me “Hitler”, a coherent person-centred philosophy and skill set. The ideas stretched me to the limit but resonated strongly with the deep values of my theological training and so created the kind of congruence in my teaching that I had been seeking. Over the years that we worked and wrote together she taught me how to trust students, how to be myself in the classroom, how to pursue the goals of self-esteem and personal responsibility above all and let everything else fall into place. A master practitioner herself, she showed me the power of optimism, unconditional regard and self-belief. Donna’s insights continue to influence my work, fundamentally, day by day.

The second greatest influence on my thinking has been my good friend Professor Roland Meighan. Roland taught me to see the big picture, to understand what is happening socioeconomically and politically within and beyond schools. He showed me the true nature of democracy and cooperation, the value of nonconventional and free-spirited thinking and the place of pioneering action. He continues to model the winning combination of hard-hitting analysis, humane values, sharp wit and genuine warmth.

Then there is my wife Sharon. She taught me how to use drama, how to trust intuition, how to think laterally and how to be daring in the classroom. She showed me what it’s like to have a learning style and intelligence profile that doesn’t fit the system, what it’s like to be on the outside and what happens to self-esteem and life chances when teachers do not have the will or the skill to meet individual learning needs. Her creativity and spontaneity I aspire to.

The fourth, but by no means least, significant influence is my close friend and colleague Peter Batty, the ultimate reflective practitioner and man of integrity. Peter has taught me to slow down, to make room for learning, not just teaching. He has shown me how to trust the process, how to value reflection and review, how to let principles be the guide to practice, and how to live a little.

So, you will no doubt get to know these characters as you read between the lines of the pages that follow. Beyond them are countless teachers, headteachers, advisers and trainers who have taught me, often unknowingly, crucial lessons. Therefore, many of the ideas in The Teacher’s Toolkit are not mine. Credit is hard to apportion, though, as many strategies have their origins somewhere in the mists of time, so forgive me if you read something that you thought you’d invented! The ones that are mine have been fashioned from experiences in thousands of classrooms in hundreds of secondary schools of all types around the country. In fact, every practical suggestion has been thoroughly road-tested, often with difficult classes and always in a variety of subjects and with different age groups. In the hands of skilful teachers, they have almost always had positive effects on motivation, discipline and the quality of learning. Ideas that didn’t work have been ditched.

By the way, don’t use the ideas slavishly; the intention is to stimulate your own creativity. Don’t underestimate the power of enthusiasm; it lifts lessons to a higher plane, and your enthusiasm will always be greatest for ideas that you invent yourself. I hope you enjoy using The Teacher’s Toolkit as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Now, at last, I can get back to listening to my jukebox and going to some home games at the Britannia Stadium.

Paul GinnisBirmingham

Section 1

Design Tools

Why?

In his bestselling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People1 Stephen Covey suggests that a habit is formed whenever a person knows what to do, knows how to do it and has a good reason for doing it – in other words knows why. Understanding why helps to create motivation. Covey says “A habit is the overlapping of what to do, or knowledge, how to do or skill, and why to do – want to or attitude. Where they overlap you’ll see a habit.”2

Those who work in the field of professional development, or whose job it is to manage change, know the truth of this. Simply exhorting people to alter their ways doesn’t work. Telling them what they should do differently, without giving them the necessary skills, leads to feelings of frustration and failure. Nor does it work in the long term to give people new techniques without a convincing rationale. Innovation is then short-lived. On the whole, new practice is not sustained unless people have:

a motivation to keep doing it, which comes from conviction an understanding of the principles that underpin the practice so that the new methodology can be continually refreshed and reinvented.

Much of this book is about how. This, I hope, makes it attractive to teachers and trainers who are understandably eager for new practical ideas. The risk, though, is that it provides no more than a “box of chocolates”. Once the chocolates have been enjoyed, the box is likely to be thrown away and a fresh one demanded. The more taxing but ultimately more productive intention of The Teacher’s Toolkit is for readers to internalise the recipe so they can make their own confectionery when this particular selection runs out.

So this first section is about why – the rationale. Why push the boat out and do things differently? Why not just carry on as normal? My basic premise is that learning in schools is likely to be at its best when teachers follow the natural laws of the learning process. This idea is presented strongly by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum in the introduction to their excellent Teaching For Effective Learning:

Some would argue that teaching is a different job depending on where you teach and whom you teach. Obviously there are differences but [we] believe that the basic principles of learning apply no matter where you teach and no matter what the needs or the age of the learners you teach.3

The title of Mike Hughes’s book, Closing the Learning Gap,4 says it all. In the past, teaching tended to be hit-and-miss because as a profession we were less certain about learning. Even now the way many teachers teach is out of step with the way most learners learn. The task of the modern, aware teacher and school manager is to bring teaching methods increasingly in line with the learning process. Herein lies the real solution to the apparent problems of underattainment (measured narrowly) and underachievement (more broadly).

The difference between attainment and achievement is more than semantic. In EffectiveLearning in Schools Christopher Bowring-Carr and John West-Burnham stress

that learning must have a consequence for the learner. By “consequence” we mean that by learning x, the learner will see the world in a slightly different way, will alter his or her behaviour or attitude in some way. If the “learning” that has taken place is merely capable of being reproduced at some later date in answer to the demands of some form of assessment which replicates the original problem, and the context for that problem, then what is being learnt is “shallow learning” only.5

Deep learning involves the development of an increasingly sophisticated personal reality with matching competencies and disciplines. The Teacher’s Toolkit attempts to provide some of the means of arriving at “deep learning” (achievement), even within a culture concerned largely with “shallow learning” (attainment).

There are many excellent books currently available providing surveys of modern learning theory. Alistair Smith’s Accelerated Learning in the Classroom,6Accelerated Learning in Practice7 and his myth-busting The Brain’s Behind It,8 along with Colin Rose’s and Malcolm J. Nicholl’s Accelerated Learning for the 21st Century9 and Robin Fogarty’s Brain Compatible Classrooms,10 are ideal starting points. The Learning Revolution11 by Gordon Dryden and Jeanette Vos is a recognised classic, and the many books by Eric Jensen, especially The LearningBrain,12Teaching with the Brain inMind,13 and Brain-Based Learning,14 provide crisp, readable and, above all, applied insights into recent research.

Behind all this is biology. For the last couple of decades neuroscientists have been telling us with increasing confidence about the workings of the brain. This is a direct consequence of advances in scanning technology, particularly fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and PET (Positron Emission Tomography), which allow us to see the brain in action to a very precise degree. For those who are not very familiar with all the bits of the central nervous system, visit Eric Chudler’s fresh and frequently updated website Neuroscience for Kids at http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.xhtml

For more advanced technical stuff about the structure of the brain, go to www.vh.org/Providers/Textbooks/BrainAnatomy/BrainAnatomy.xhtml

Alternatively, familiarise yourself with Susan Greenfield’s work. Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and a popular TV presenter, she describes the inner secrets of the grey matter in very readable texts such as The Private Life of the Brain,15Brain Story16 and The Human Brain, aGuided Tour.17 If you’re ready for a detailed and fairly technical account of shifts in brain research from the 1940s to the present day, read John McCrone’s Going Inside: A Tour Round aSingle Moment of Consciousness. Towards the end of the text he sums up: “This book has tried to track what would be a fundamental change in the science of the mind: a shift from reductionism to dynamism.”18

Nowadays the brain is thought of as dynamic, not as some sort of computer crunching its way through billions of inputs per second. It is considered to be a flexible, self-adjusting, unique, ever-changing organism that continually grows and reconfigures in response to each stimulus. Early in the 1990s researchers such as the neurobiologist Karl Friston of London and the psychologist Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard were instrumental in formulating this new paradigm. They realised that the brain operates rather like the surface of a pond. New inputs provoke a widespread disturbance in some existing state. The brain’s circuits are drawn tight in a state of tension and when a pebble is thrown in (a sensory input) there are immediate ripples of activity. New pebbles create patterns that interact with the lingering patterns of previous inputs. Then everything echoes off the sides. Nothing is being calculated. The response of the pond to the input is organic, or more accurately dynamic.

Elissa Newport, psycholinguist at the University of Rochester in New York, uses another image: the brain can now be seen as working more like a beehive, its swarm of interconnected neurons sending signals back and forth at lightning speed. Sir Charles Sherrington, who has been described as “the grandfather of neurophysiology”, says of the brain, “It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance”. However you choose to describe it, the brain is characterised by activity, plasticity, responsiveness, interplay, speed, adaptability, continual reshaping and inexhaustible resources – a far cry from the computer-like comparisons of the not-too-distant past.

Aware of the vitality and fluidity of the brain, all made nakedly apparent by imaging, McCrone suggests that a complete understanding of consciousness can be achieved only if insights from a number of disciplines are combined:

Scanning technology has already had the beneficial effect of forcing the beginnings of a marriage between psychology and neurology … But if the human mind is a social as well as a biological phenomenon, then yet further marriages are required with the “soft” sciences of sociology and anthropology, and their many sub-disciplines.19

Therefore, in our rush to embrace the main messages from brain science, it is vital that we do not bypass more established cultural and socioeconomic insights as if they were now old hat. Roland Meighan’s A Sociology of Educating,20 for instance, is as important as it ever was. The classic perspectives of Ivan Illich and Paulo Friere, along with the popular works of John Holt, most crucially How Children Fail,21 and Postman and Weingartner in Teaching As a SubversiveActivity,22 may be middle-aged and unfashionable, yet they combine to present a powerful agenda for personal, social and ultimately political empowerment that is entirely relevant to our modern needs. In assessing Illich in The Trailblazers, for example, Professor Edith King of Denver concludes:

As the educational issues that Ivan Illich espoused now seem familiar at the close of the 20th century, teachers and parents can find strength … from his writings in their advocacy of the democratic school and alternative educational futures.23

What next?

Revolutionary insights into the brain are only part of a more general overhaul of thinking that has gathered momentum in the last fifteen years. An increasing number of commentators are now weaving global social, economic, commercial and technological “megatrends” together with modern insights into the brain to present us with new visions of the future. Dryden and Vos’s “16 major trends that will shape tomorrow’s world”24 provides as good an overview as any, while Charles Handy, the internationally renowned business and social commentator, established some time ago that change is now discontinuous. He said, “the success stories of yesterday have little relevance to the problems of tomorrow … The world at every level has to be reinvented to some extent. Certainty is out, experiment is in.”25 Guy Claxton’s reflective Wise Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning26 makes the persuasive case for major shifts in our thinking about learning, schooling, training and parenting. He argues that the ultimate life skill for the 21st century is the ability to face difficult and unprecedented challenges calmly and resourcefully.

Worldwide, information and communications technology is being increasingly understood and utilised by ordinary people. This brings two major, positive benefits to learning. First, teachers are gradually being released from having to be the main transmitters of information, ideas and skills, enabling them instead to concentrate on the facilitation of learning, on being learning coaches. Second, students are being empowered to learn independently. They can access most of the information they need, and often whole courses, on CDs or online. Learning, even of regular examination subjects, can take place in the school’s learning centre, at home or in the local cyber café, meaning that students can control when and where they learn, and often how. The visual and interactive nature of most hi-tech resources makes them appealing to learners who struggle with academic routines. Information and communications technology (ICT) is free of time, space and tradition. All students need to do is learn how to learn.

In fact, Doug Brown, chairman of the British Computer Society’s School of the Future Project, commenting on his final report back in 1998, said:

The current school model, with its rigid classroom, has been useful only because there was no alternative. The millennium school will be vastly different … the concept of a nine-to-four school day will become obsolete … In order to use ICT successfully, schools must change their culture – how students learn and how teachers teach.27

In the United States, Don Glines, director of the California-based Educational Futures Project, has argued for years that “there is only one overriding issue facing educators today: the transformation to communication age learning systems.”28 In Britain, John Abbott and Terry Ryan’s superb The Unfinished Revolution: Learning, Human Behaviour, Community and Political Paradox presents a complete raft of compelling reasons for declaring that “the current structures of formal education are fundamentally flawed” and that “societies now stand at an evolutionary crossroads where the way ahead must be to capitalise on fresh understandings and remedy … upside down and inside out education.”29 The 21st Century Learning Initiative (www.21learn.org) sums up the situation in its published vision:

New understandings about the brain; about how people learn; about the potential of information and communications technologies; about radical changes in patterns of work as well as deep fears about social divisions in society, necessitate a profound rethinking of the structures of education.

This UK network and others like it, such as Education Now (www.gn.apc.org/educationnow) give penetrating insights into the shortcomings of the current education system and offer constructive, radical alternatives.

Such thoughts raise big questions – two in particular. In this day and age, what should be the purpose of education? And how should it be organised? Over recent decades a view has crept to dominance in Britain that education exists primarily to serve the economy. This premise currently drives almost all current policy. Early in the reign of New Labour, Tony Blair declared in The Learning Age: A Renaissance For a New Britain30 that “Education is the best economic policy we have.” At the start of his second term of office the Prime Minister sounded the same note: “The world’s fourth largest economy cannot advance without a world-class education system.”31 The economy has become the politician’s first and foremost, and unquestioned, reason for pursuing quality in education, but where does such functionalism lead?

Even educationalists in the “learning-to-learn” camp often argue their case on economic grounds – they say that people are often required to learn on the job and will inevitably have to retrain at least once in their working lives, so they need the skills to do it. It’s true, companies increasingly expect employees to learn, and employees increasingly expect companies to provide for their learning. Many multinationals now have their own in-house universities and even a relatively small outfit such as Bulmer’s Cider in Hereford has a learning centre open 24 hours a day. The British government’s University for Industry, Learning Direct advice service and Lifelong Learning Partnerships, along with the Learning and Skills Councils, are designed to facilitate continuous work-based or work-related education.

Clearly, education and the economy are in a mutually dependent relationship: each needs the other, and this will remain so. Individual livelihoods and the continuance of national life depend on it. But there are two issues to debate. First, the prominence of the economy in the nation’s thinking about education: currently it dominates and dictates. National education and training targets are set explicitly to improve competitiveness; the national numeracy and literacy strategies and the current attention given to thinking and learning skills are intended to serve the same purpose. The second debate concerns the nation’s understanding of what the economy now needs from education. According to Abbott and Ryan,

Today’s social and economic needs argue for a new model of learning that entails: 

mastery of basic skills;the ability to work with others;being able to deal with constant distractions;working at different levels across different disciplines;using mainly verbal skills, and;problem-solving and decision-making.32

By contrast, most political thinking about education is driven by an out-of-date understanding of business needs. Current education policy is way behind the times, serving the old factory age, not the new information age. Attendance, punctuality, compliance, acceptance of the “manager’s” decisions, an understanding of one’s place in the pecking order, a sufficient general knowledge and the ability to use a few basic skills make up the current curriculum (as they did a hundred years ago), whereas businesses are currently crying out for flexibility, responsiveness, creative problem-solving, teamwork, self-management and sophisticated communication skills. The reason for the yawning gap is clear. The modern business agenda chimes with the modern learning agenda, and there’s a deep-seated stubbornness about accepting modern educational ideas, even those grounded in the most credible neuroscientific research. Why? Because they resemble the progressive child-centred practices that have been so successfully rubbished in the popular mind. In a private conversation with Professor Howard Gardner, a recent British Secretary of State for Education irrationally said, “I simply don’t believe in your multiple intelligence theory.” End of story.

Compounding the problem is the simplistic idea that educational outcomes can be fundamentally altered by changing the curriculum and its content. This of course is nonsense. Since the UK’s Education Reform Act of 1988 there has been nothing but curriculum change, and yet the outcomes that matter – attitudes and skills – remain more or less the same. The kind of changes required for modern economic success, for a healing of social ills and for personal fulfilment are rooted in the way learning is conducted, not in what is learned. In other words changes to teaching and learning methodology and to education structures are required. No wonder John Bruer, a cognitive scientist, said that “we should be as concerned with how we teach as we traditionally have been concerned with what we teach”.33

Take creativity, for example. All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education,34 the report of the National Advisory Committee for Creative and Cultural Education, headed by Professor Ken Robinson of Warwick, points out that employers are “saying that a degree is not enough, and that many graduates do not have the qualities they are looking for: the ability to communicate, work in teams, adapt to change, to innovate and be creative”. Robinson concluded that:

this is not surprising … the traditional academic curriculum is not designed to promote creativity. Complaining that the system does not produce creative people is like complaining that a car doesn’t fly … It was never intended to. The stark message, internationally as well as nationally, is that the answer to the future is not simply to increase the amount of education, but to educate people differently.35

He provides a clear way forward: “Creative learning is made possible by creative teaching. This is not an easy process and calls for sophisticated skills in teachers.”36 Robinson argues that substantial changes to the curriculum, to assessment and to teacher training will be needed to support this.

Presently teachers tell us that creativity is crushed in Key Stage 2 as they focus on preparation for SATs, and we see the natural learning processes of childhood – free play and random exploration, for example – abandoned by zealous teachers and parents in their desperate attempts to give children an “advantageous” start. Secondary schools are using increasingly bizarre bribes (such as offering McDonald’s meals and mountain bikes as prizes) to get students to attend. The national teacher shortage suggests that adolescents are not the only ones who don’t want to go to school any more. How long will this position be tenable in a country that still harbours deep divisions (the North of England race riots of summer 2001) and signs of serious disaffection (the turnout in the 2001 General Election was a shocking 59%) and in which we now know enough about learning to address these issues successfully? The snag is that politicians get stuck. Once they’ve declared their course they can’t backtrack. They fall prey to a great British habit: if something doesn’t work, do it harder and more often (homework clubs, holiday schools, evening revision classes). Politicians are simply not allowed by the media and the public to learn from mistakes and adapt to fresh evidence – what a role model for a “learning society”!

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. Estelle Morris, on becoming the UK Education Secretary in 2001, declared, “We want to give schools more freedom. We want to put the fun and creativity back and we want them to be innovators for our next round of reforms.”37 We’ll keep our fingers crossed and see what happens. I wonder if she has in mind what Tom Bentley, Director of the independent think tank Demos, said: “A sustained transformation of the education system needs a guiding purpose. I have suggested that this goal should be creativity, at the individual, organisational and societal level.”38

Those who break with the economy-driven view of education and propose fundamentally different purposes are few and far between, but include Bowring-Carr and West-Burnham: “We see the development of the mind as the overriding purpose of education.”39 Professor Clive Harber of the University of Birmingham on the other hand speaks strongly of education for democracy that is “as much about the way in which people think and behave, how they hold their political opinions, as it is about what they actually think”. He quotes Carl Rogers, the inventor of client-centred counselling and student-centred learning: “People who can’t think are ripe for dictatorship.”40 This begs us to ask whether the British government’s simultaneous interest in thinking skills and citizenship is joined-up policy, or a fluke!

If we are to break from the shackles of “shallow learning”, navigate these uncertain times and fashion a morally sound and fruitful future for all, then purposes such as “the development of the mind” and the “preservation of democracy”, or others such as “the creation of an inclusive and egalitarian society” or “the fulfilment of the whole person” will have to become driving rather than half-hearted concerns. As I hope you will come to recognise, these intentions underlie the practical strategies presented in Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Then there is the question of how education should be organised. It all depends on the dominant purpose, of course. If education were supposed to secure acceptance of the social order andworking habits of old, then we’d probably want the kind of schools we have now. Writing a few years ago, Anita Higham OBE, formerly principal of Banbury School, puts this point strongly: “My thesis is that we are in the death-throes of secondary schools as we know them because we are attempting to educate adolescents of the late 20th Century within the style and structure of the late 19th Century school and its teachers’ contractual conditions.”41 In Britain we have never quite shaken off the idea that schools are primary agents of socialisation; we’ve stuck with them because they do this job rather well. Sadly, as Bill Lucas and Toby Greany put it: “Schools as we know them are fast becoming an anachronism … their very traditions and structures mean that they are educating young people for a world which no longer exists.”42

If instead, the prime purpose of education were to meet learners’ individual needs, we would follow the lead of Valerie Bayliss, director of the RSA project Redefining the Curriculum: “Implicit in these [modern] ideas is a greater emphasis on the individual. A competence-led curriculum, together with the liberating capacity of technology, has the potential to open up much more individualised learning.”43

If the prime purpose were to help peoplelearn how to learn, we’d be asking serious questions along with Sir Christopher Ball, patron of the Campaign for Learning:

Is it going to be possible to adjust traditional school education to satisfy pupils – or should we think about replacing it with something altogether different? The true learning society we all seek will require a new breed of teachers – more like guides than instructors, more part-time than full-time, more philosophers than pedagogues.44

If the purpose were to promote democracy, we’d have democratic schools, as in Denmark, for example.45

It is significant that calls for fundamental change are no longer being made by radicals alone, but increasingly by mainstream, and in many cases Establishment, figures.

Part of the reason for sticking with what we’ve got is that there are no large-scale models to copy. In America there are many individual examples of reconstructed “schools”. Ted Sizer’s Coalition for Essential Schools with its 1,000 institutional members (www.essentialschools.org), for example; schools redesigned along the lines of multiple intelligence; the chain of schools modelled on Daniel Greenberg’s Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts (www.sudval.org); the One Room Schoolhouse in Alameda, San Francisco – these are just some of the welcomed “experiments”. The alternative education movement in the States is buoyant, as is clear from Creating Learning Communities,46 a stimulating collection of examples of grassroots innovation, summaries of underpinning ideas and insights into key thinkers in which American contributions outnumber the rest by nine to one. Visit the website: www.creatinglearningcommunities.org

In the UK, by contrast, alternative schools have been systematically crushed over the years, or have committed suicide by poor management and chronic public relations. The attempt in 2000 to close Summerhill School in Suffolk (with its many faults) was staved off only at the eleventh hour. A few marginalised innovations survive outside the system: Sands School in Devon; a number of small schools affiliated to the Human Scale Education movement (www.hse.org.uk); one or two virtual cyberschools that have sprung up recently and struggled; English Experience in Kent, a school set up to pioneer brain-friendly teaching; and that’s about it. For a full account of the rise and fall of progressive schools in Britain see John Shotton’s No Master High Or Low: Libertarian Education and Schooling 1890–1990.47 No wonder that an increasing number of parents are turning to home education and organising educational cooperatives such as the Brambles Centre in Sheffield, the Otherwise Club in London, the Learning Studio in Bishop’s Castle and Planet Learning Zone, Warrington.

There are those in Britain who talk about reconstruction – the Tomorrow Project recently submitted its recommendations for education in the year 2020 to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) (www.tomorrowproject.net); there are those who fantasise about it – see John Adcock’s In Place of Schools48 and his more recent and more detailed TeachingTomorrow: Personal Tuition as an Alternative to School;49 and there are many who argue cogently for it – see particularly Phil Street’s, Bob Fryer’s, Tony Hinkley’s and Guy Claxton’s contributions to the impressive collection of essays, Schools in the Learning Age,50 and Professor Roland Meighan’s The Next Learning System.51 But there’s no one with the clarity of vision who is also in a position to generate sufficient political will to make anything happen. Yet. The real problem is that our preoccupation with the economy has constrained our thinking. The language (“delivery”, “hard outcomes”, “driving up standards”, for example), the procedures (measuring, target setting, inspecting, comparing, bidding, performance-related pay) and the values (materialism, competition, capitalism) have created a “national normality”. Few people inside the system now seem able, or willing, to think outside the box.

Therefore, there is huge resistance to contrary ideas. Radical proposals from the brain scientists, the sociologists and the philosophers – people who know about learning – are generally batted off. At the same time, the government’s own initiatives haven’t amounted to much. Potentially exciting possibilities have been suffocated by the blanket domination of targets and league tables. On the whole, Education Action Zones in Britain haven’t risen to the original challenge to explore real alternatives – they have at best tinkered with existing provision. Learning centres within the Excellence in Cities initiative stand a better chance of breaking new ground. Transforming Teaching and Learning in the Foundation Subjects, part of the Key Stage 3 Strategy, will only nibble at the edges unless it is led with vision and courage. The Specialist School Programme just gives more money, which certainly buys welcome facilities, but at the price of imposing a specialism on students who happen to live in a given area.

The ultimate answer is of course to base policy on what we know about learning. Professor Robert Sylwester of Oregon sums up the position with a voice that rings true over the years and across the miles:

The brain is a biological system, not a machine. Currently we are putting children with biologically shaped brains into machine-oriented schools. The two just don’t mix. We bog the school down with a curriculum that is not biologically feasible.52

Return to the Forbidden Planet?

So this is the political and professional arena into which the theoretical and practical ideas in The Teacher’s Toolkit are pitched. But the majority of ideas presented in this book are not that new after all. For example, some of the currently fashionable “neuroscientific” applications to education actually have their origin in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP promotes a set of principles, attitudes and techniques that enable people to change or eliminate behaviour patterns by focusing on the dynamic relationship between mind and language. Apart from the obvious visual, auditory and kinaesthetic modalities model and its detection through predicates and eye patterns, other examples of the transference of NLP into education include the notion of “states”, “anchoring” and the idea of “chunking” (short-term memory can cope with between only five and nine bits of information at a time). For those who want to check out NLP, which is among the primary sources of accelerated learning, one of the most complete introductions is The User’s Manual For The Brain by Bodenhamer and Hall.53

NLP itself has a direct historical connection with humanistic psychology and the human-potential movement. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, developers of NLP, actually began by deconstructing and modelling the language used by two therapists: Fritz Perls of Gestalt fame and Virginia Satir, the leading family therapist. So it’s no surprise that many of the “brain-friendly” ideas, simply confirm older notions. Much of humanistic psychology, with its optimistic view of human capacity, its mission to overcome barriers to personal growth and its holistic agenda, has been affirmed by neuroscientists and neurolinguists. As a young teacher in 1985, I had the privilege of writing A Guide to Student-Centred Learning54 and in 1990 The Student-Centred School55 with Dr Donna Brandes, the internationally acclaimed and exceedingly gifted educator and therapist. Inspired by Carl Rogers’s client-centred work, many of the books’ central themes, such as the need for emotional safety, the fundamental significance of self-esteem and the power of personal responsibility, are now commonplace within the emergent new orthodoxy. The importance of mental and physical activity, clarified by our modern understanding of the neocortex and the role of kinaesthetics in learning, is in direct line with “active learning” of old. Developmental group work, flexible learning and supported self-study all find reflections in the mirror of modern-day teaching and learning.

John Abbott, the determined and erudite commentator on educational futures, writing with Terry Ryan at the dawn of the new millennium, makes a similar point that would have John Dewey, the father of experiential learning, rejoicing in his grave:

The mass of evidence that is now emerging about learning and brain development is spawning a movement towards educational practice which confirms the earlier intuitive understanding about learning through direct involvement with the activity.56

In other words, the only way to learn how to do something is by doing it!

So the basis of good practice may have shifted from psychology and philosophy to biology, and many new insights have been added, but in some key respects ideas that disappeared underground with the rise of the reductionist thinking that has dominated political visions of education since the mid-1980s have now been given fresh impetus and value. This is encouraging for many established teachers who might otherwise feel resistant to “yet another set of new-fangled ideas”.

Head in the clouds, feet on the ground

So far, I have attempted to paint a picture of the background to the practical ideas in this book. It is at once an exciting and depressing sight. And it’s easy to get carried away with the discussion, but let’s keep things in perspective. The Teacher’s Toolkit has its feet firmly on the ground, it is rooted in the here and now and suggests only strategies that can be tried today, tomorrow or next week in regular classrooms in ordinary schools. However, it is not just a novel collection of expediences. It is more than a random and aimless set of “tips for teachers”. Its core purposes are in line with the best of modern thinking and these now need to be clarified. They say that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step – but that step has to be in the right direction! Fortunately, modern researchers and commentators have given us compass bearings and a map.

So let’s now look at a modern agenda for learning in more detail. This will give us the specifications for the design of effective learning strategies, even within the limitations of the present system. From the wealth of insight available I have selected certain key ideas on the basis that they translate directly into the construction of concrete classroom activities. The first two groups of points, dealing initially with similarities and then with differences between learners, draw largely on the brain sciences. But beware: this is nowhere near the full game of “brain-compatible learning”, just a few edited highlights. Find out more via the Bibliography and Appendix A.

There Are Similarities Between Learners

Emerging from the latest neuroscientific research are several truths about the way that all brains seem to function. Four of the similarities are presented in this section, the ones that have particularly informed the preparation of The Teacher’s Toolkit’s practical ideas. In the next section we look at key differences between learners. Before any of it will make sense, though, we need to familiarise ourselves with the brain’s processing method: the biology of learning.

The biology of learning

Susan Greenfield, Professor of Pharmacology at Oxford and one of the UK’s best-known neuroscientists, likens the brain to the Amazonian Basin.57 She says that the number of neurons in the human brain is about equivalent to the number of trees and plants in the 2.7-million-square-mile rainforest. The number of dendrites (the fibrous extensions from the neuron cell body that act as “receptors”) is more or less equivalent to the number of leaves on those plants and trees. In the jungle that is the brain, all these are busily and continuously connecting with each other. Other images come to mind. The number of neurons in the brain is about the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way or three times the number of people on Planet Earth. One cubic millimetre of brain tissue has more than a million neurons, which means that all the world’s telecommunications systems could fit into an area of the human brain about the size of a pea.

The good news is that you have the same number of brain cells as Albert Einstein! Everyone does, unless their brain is diseased or damaged. The even better news is that every student in your school has the same number of brain cells as you! There is, therefore, a biological basis for optimism. One hundred billion neurons per person, up to twenty thousand dendrites per neuron, all multiplied together means that the number of potential connections between brain cells in any brain is 10 to the 100 trillionth power, actually far greater than the number of particles in the known universe, according to Paul Churchland, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California.58 In fact, if you were to count the actual connections in an adult neocortex alone, that is in the thin outer covering of the brain, at a rate of one per second, it would take you 32,000,000 years!

Neurons are responsible for processing information. Each neuron has one axon, a thin fibre that can be up to a couple of metres in length (and operate your big toe, for example), but is more often a centimetre or so long. The axon is the transmitter, passing information on in the form of electrochemical stimulation. Its job is to connect with the dendrites of other neurons, thousands of them, which means it has to subdivide itself to create lots of terminals. Each neuron is in effect a tiny battery powered by the difference in concentration between sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. An electrical charge, the action potential, is generated in the cell body of the neuron, which travels down the axon at a rate of between 1 and 100 metres per second.

Dendrites, meanwhile, are the branch-like extensions from the neuron cell body that act as receptors. The information flow between neurons is only ever one way: from the cell body, down the axon and then via synaptic connections to the dendrites of other neurons, which carry the signal to their own cell bodies. The axon terminal never touches the dendrite. There is always a tiny gap, the synaptic cleft. The electrical pulse travelling down the axon reaches the terminal and activates neurotransmitters (chemical cocktails stored in vesicles in the tip of the axon) that carry the message across the synapse and stimulate (or inhibit) the electrical charge in the receiving dendrite.

A single neuron can simultaneously receive signals from thousands of other neurons. The sum total of all the signals arriving from all the dendrites to the cell body determine whether or not the neuron will itself fire a charge. Because its axon can branch repeatedly, a firing neuron can send the signal on to thousands of other neurons.

So, this is learning: new mental or motor experiences provide stimuli that are converted to nervous impulses that travel to sorting stations such as the thalamus (in the midbrain area). From here signals are sent to specific areas of the brain. Repeated stimulation of a group of neurons causes them to develop more dendrites and therefore more connections, and so a whole forest-like network of neurons is established that creates a grasp, an understanding, a mastery. In time these neurons “learn” to depress “wrong” connections and to respond positively to weaker signals – in other words to do the same mental or motor process with less “effort”. In other words, cells change their receptivity to messages based on previous stimulation.

The teacher’s job is to support students in translating their brains’ remarkable biological potential into actual performance. It is of course a “mission impossible”, since only a fraction of the brain’s total power can ever be used within a lifetime. It is estimated that we use less than 1 per cent of 1 per cent of our brain’s projected processing capacity which is around 1027 bits of data per second according to psychiatrist and sleep expert Allan Hobson of Harvard.59 When scientists cut into Einstein’s brain after his death they discovered that he had no more brain cells than anyone else, just more connections between them, and, even so, there was loads of capacity left.

In pursuit of excellence in learning, then, it seems that the skilled educator faces three tasks:

First, to encourage new neural connections through challenges that create high levels of stimulation. Second, to consolidate existing connections. The more a neural pathway is used, the more efficient it becomes. Axons become insulated with a white fatty substance called myelin, which speeds up the electrical-chemical-electrical signalling process, and neurons respond with less effort to the original prompt. On the other hand, unused connections are eventually lost, they are pruned away. The educator’s third task is to ask learners to reconfigure existing webs of neural connections by taking on board data that will straighten out a misunderstanding, refine a concept, complete an understanding or hone a skill.

This last one sometimes feels like quite an effort. Eric Jensen sums up the job: “The key to getting smarter is growing more synaptic connections between brain cells and not losing existing connections. It’s the connections that allow us to solve problems and figure things out.”60

In order to achieve best results, it’s obviously important to work with the brain’s natural processes, to teach in a way that is compatible with the student’s natural learning methods. Some of these points, a selection of the similarities and differences between learners, will be discussed shortly. But, generally, learning should get off to a great start because it appears that everyone is born with several predispositions, including

a desire to work cooperatively with othersthe inclination and ability to learn languagethe will and skill to make patternsa natural propensity to learn mathematics, according to Brian Butterworth, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at University College, London.

Butterworth argues that “… our genes contain a set of instructions for building a mathematical brain, and this is why, without benefit of teaching, human beings are born to count”.61

However, it’s not all plain sailing. Some of the factors that affect the translation of potential into performance are outside of the teacher’s control, so let’s get the depressing bits out of the way first.

One obvious example is lifestyle during pregnancy. A developing foetus is very sensitive to stress and nutrition. The mother’s emotional state, diet and intake of substances have an effect on the development of the brain, which is creating neurons at a rate of up to 15 million per hour between the fourth and seventh month of gestation.

A second example is nutrition. Mothers’ breast milk appears to contain certain nutrients that stimulate the production of neurotransmitters, which are essential to the efficient firing of synapses. Also, fast foods and most cheaply-produced packaged foods simply don’t contain enough of the items that the brain needs for optimum performance: proteins, unsaturated fats, complex carbohydrates, sugars and trace elements such as boron, selenium, vanadium and potassium. Conversely, the negative effects of many soft drinks and most food additives is well known.

A third area is early-years stimulation. In middle-class homes, for example, twice as many words per day on average are spoken by parents to toddlers, compared with working-class homes. Such enrichment in early years is crucial to the construction of the brain’s basic architecture. So is the amount of early-years laughter, touch, freedom, visual stimulation, tactile manipulation, music, motor stimulation, environmental variety and cooperative play. The infant brain is utterly plastic and begins to customise itself from the moment a child is born. It configures itself to its environment and experiences. Over 50 trillion neural connections are already in place at birth, and millions more are added moment by moment, but unused connections begin to be cut away by the billion. Take emotional and social development. The evidence suggests that emotional intelligence develops early, perhaps even in the first year, and that the school years are only the last resort for nurturing emotional literacy.

Professor Philip Gammage, de Lissa Chair of Early Childhood, South Australia, is clear:

At birth there are far more potential connections than the child can use, and by the age of three or so pruning has already started and systems of connection that are seldom or never used are being slowly eliminated. We are born, for instance, capable of learning phonemic combinations not common in our native language, but will lose that capability relatively soon … By about five (or earlier) many predictive and causal social, as well as physical/locational attributions, have become quite settled. In a real way, the brain is then almost “cooked”.62

It’s a real case of “use it or lose it”. Even the first two years of life can decide between dramatically different possible futures. This is why Ernest Boyer, the late President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, offered a sobering thought: “To blame schools for the rising tide of mediocrity is to confuse symptom with disease. Schools can rise no higher than the expectations of the communities that surround them.”63

A fourth example is sleep. Lots of children simply don’t go to bed early enough or, during puberty, they wake up too early! Modern thinking suggests that during deep sleep the brain sorts and files the day’s inputs. Consequently, learning is consolidated and memories are laid down.

Finally, we come to genetics. Currently, the extent to which intelligence is inherited is hotly debated. There are researchers who fiercely argue that it is, among them Professor Sandra Scarr, famous for her identical-twin studies, and also Professor Robert Plomin, who claims to have virtually isolated the elusive gene for “general intelligence”. One area is fairly clear: Tonegawa and Kandel have identified a specific gene that activates the critical memory function of neurons and this may explain why some people have a better memory than others. Overall, it’s now thought that 30–60 per cent of the brain’s wiring is due to heredity and 40–70 per cent is the result of the environment, depending on what type of behaviour is being considered.

Now let’s flip the coin over and see what’s on the optimistic side. The good news is more powerful than the bad. Within the teacher’s control are expectations. We have known since Rosenthal’s and Jacobsen’s Pygmalion in the Classroom,64 published in 1968, that teachers’ internalised views of students’ capabilities have a direct impact on students’ actual performance. In the studies students were grouped randomly, but the teachers were told they differed in ability. Guess what. The results of the group that were mistakenly believed to be high flyers rose and the results of the “low achievers” went down. Rosenthal identified six ways in which the teachers communicated high expectations:

1. the teacher expressed confidence in her ability to help the student

2. the teacher expressed confidence in the students’ ability