The Rough Guide What are 21st century skills (1)? The 21st

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The Rough Guide
OUCEA Annual Lecture
What kind of learning do we want?
21st century learning, the standards agenda and expert
learners
12 May 2015
Gordon Stobart
Emeritus Professor of Education, Institute of Education, University College London
Honorary Research Fellow, OUCEA
g.stobart@ioe.ac.uk
• The 21st Century learning agenda – a policy wish list?
• What kind of learning does the standards/
accountability/ selection agenda encourage?
• Expert learning as a proxy for effective learning –
what’s involved?
• Implications for classroom teaching and learning
What are 21st century skills (1)?
• A global policy rhetoric – the globilisation agenda,
business rather than education led?
• A wish list with some common features but
arbitrary numbers
Are students prepared for future challenges? Can they
analyse, reason and communicate effectively? Do they have
the capacity to continue learning throughout life?
PISA homepage www.pisa.oecd.org
As never before, the next generation will need to be
innovative, creative, and skilled at managing knowledge as a
resource.
The 21st century learner agenda
Singapore’s Desired Outcomes of Education (DOE)
a confident person
a self-directed learner
an active contributor
a concerned citizen
Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence
Successful learners
Confident individuals
Responsible citizens
Effective contributors
(Alberta Province, Canada, Inspiring Education, 2010, p.3)
The 21st century learner agenda
Ways of Thinking
1. Creativity and innovation
2. Critical thinking, problem solving, decision making
3. Learning to learn, metacognition
Ways of Working
4. Communication
5. Collaboration (teamwork)
Tools for Working
6. Information literacy
7. ICT literacy
Living in the World
8. Citizenship – local and global
9. Life and career
10. Personal and social responsibility – including cultural awareness
and competence
P. Griffin et al. (eds.), Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills,
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21st Century learning – John Dewey (and Socrates)
got there early
Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing
intelligence for independent effectiveness – the
emancipation of the mind to do its own work’ (1903).
We state emphatically that, upon its intellectual side
education consists in the formation of wide-awake,
careful, thorough habits of thinking. Of course
intellectual learning includes the amassing and retention
of information. But information is an undigested burden
unless it is understood. It is knowledge only as material is
comprehended. And understanding, comprehension,
means that the various parts of the information are
grasped in their relations to one another – a result that is
attained only when acquisition is accompanied by
constant reflection upon the meaning of what is studied.
John Dewey (1933) How we think
So how different do our classrooms look?
Teachers talk 70-80% of time;
ask 200-300 questions a day, 60% recall facts, 20%
procedural;
<5% group discussion or meaningful ideas;
70% of answers less than 5 secs (3 words)
(Source J. Hattie 2012 )
Students still in rows?
Work still individual?
Teachers still at the front?
The standards/accountability/selection agenda
• Need to improve standards in schools in order to
compete internationally (the power of PISA)
• Accountability systems to provide pressure and
incentives
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performance pay (USA, UK,)
school targets
state targets (Australia)
national targets
• Test results as key measures of improvement
– teaching to the test
– playing the system
• The pressures of high stakes selection (Singapore;
Bethell)
Sustainable assessment
David Boud’s ‘double duty of assessment’
Assessment activities:
Have to focus on the immediate task and on implications
for equipping students for lifelong learning in an
unknown future ...they have to attend to both the
process and the substantive domain.
Frederiksen and Collins have called for systemically valid
assessment:
that induces in the education system curricular and
instructional changes that foster the development of the
cognitive skills that the test is designed to measure.
Defining learning
‘A significant change in capability or understanding’
This excludes: the acquisition of further information
when it does not contribute to such changes.
(Michael Eraut)
‘Any process that...leads to permanent capacity change’
this involves content, incentive and interaction
(Knut Illeris)
‘It’s like learning to ride a bike’
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Expert Learning
Expert learning is the mastery of skills and knowledge
at a level that distinguishes the expert from others.
Experts, especially in relation to novices, are likely to
excel in:
1. Choosing the appropriate strategy to use;
2. Generating the best solution, often faster and more
accurately than others;
3. Using superior detection and recognition, for example seeing
patterns and 'deep structures' of a problem;
4. Applying extensive qualitative analyses to a problem;
5. Accurately monitoring their own performance;
6. Retrieving relevant information more effectively.
Expert learning as a model
It involves
1. Opportunities – time, place, people (Bill Gates, Steve
Redgrave)
2. High expectations and clear goals
3. Strong motivation, resilience and risk-taking (Marie
Curie)
4. Powerful mental frameworks
5. Extensive deliberate practice – 10,000 hours
6. Skilled diagnostics and feedback
This is an apprenticeship model
naive – novice – apprentice – proficient apprentice
(journeyman) – expert – master
(Chi, 2006)
Ability needs opportunities – it is developed not fixed
Child prodigies do not have unusual genes: they have unusual
upbringings.
(Matthew Syed)
• Re-thinking ability – the Anglo-Saxon legacy:
– ‘This general intellectual factor appears to be inherited , or at
least inborn. Neither knowledge or practice, neither interest nor
industry, will avail to increase it’
(Cyril Burt, 1937)
– ‘ We must react against this brutal pessimism’
(Alfred Binet, French developer of first intelligence test)
– ‘Ability acts as an unrecognized version of ‘intelligence and ‘IQ’. If
we were to substitute ‘IQ’ for ‘ability’ many alarm bells would ring
that currently remain silent ‘ (Gillborn & Youdell)
– ‘Ability labelling exerts an active, powerful force within school
and classroom processes, helping to create the very disparities of
achievement it purports to explain.’ (Hart et al.)
- Canadian ice hockey professionals & summer born
Mental models
Expert learning as a model
It involves
1. Opportunities – time, place, people (Bill Gates,
Steve Redgrave)
2. High expectations and clear goals
3. Strong motivation, resilience and risk-taking (Marie
Curie)
4. Powerful mental frameworks
5. Extensive deliberate practice – 10,000 hours
6. Skilled diagnostics and feedback
Working memory
Write 18725 as code
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Mental models
Recognising patterns
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The three major messages for teachers
from John Hattie’s Visible Learning
Transparent
goals
• the more transparent the teacher makes the
learning goals, then the more likely the
student is to engage in the work needed to
meet the goal.
Success
criteria
• the more the student is aware of the criteria
of success, then the more the student can
see the specific actions that are needed to
attain these criteria
Rapid
formative
feedback
• the more there is feedback about progress
from prior to desired outcomes the more
positive attributes to learning are developed
https://tmsydney.wikispaces.com/.
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The importance of being clear about what and why
we are learning – and making deep demands
The need to ‘make sense’ and ‘make meaning’
– It’s not that I haven’t learned much. It’s just that I
don’t understand what I’m doing’ (15 yr old)
– Sir treats us like we’re babies, puts us down, makes us
copy stuff off the board, puts up all the answers like
we don’t know anything. And we’re not going to learn
from that, ‘cause we’ve got to think for ourselves.
(low achieving student)
– We knew how to do it. But we didn’t know why we
were doing it and we didn’t know how we got around
to doing it.....I can get the answer, I just don’t
understand why .
(maths student)
Mental frameworks - schema
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you
arrange the items into different groups. Of course one
pile may be sufficient depending on how much there
is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack
of facilities, that is the next step; otherwise you are
pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things.
That is, it is better to do too few things rather than too
many. In the short run this may not seem too
important but complications can easily arise. A
mistake can be expensive as well.
(F. Bartlett, 1932)
(source: Jo Boaler)
Expertise involves
Expert learning as a model
It involves
1. Opportunities – time, place, people (Bill Gates,
Steve Redgrave)
2. High expectations and clear goals
3. Strong motivation, resilience and risk-taking (Marie
Curie)
4. Powerful mental frameworks
5. Extensive deliberate practice – 10,000 hours
6. Skilled diagnostics and feedback
5. Extensive deliberate practice – 10,000 hours
The iceberg illusion (Ericsson) and being ‘a natural’
The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage. As
long as you are determined to cover everything, you
actually ensure that most kids are not going to
understand. You've got to take enough time to get kids
deeply involved in something so they can think about it
in lots of different ways and apply it—not just at school
but at home and on the street and so on.
(Howard Gardner)
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Deliberate
practice
Which zone – what kind of maths problem is this?
Panic zone
Learning zone
A woman is on a diet. She buys 3 turkey slices
which weigh 1/3 of a pound (0.45 of a kilo) but
her diet only lets her eat 1/4 of a pound.
How much of the 3 slices she bought can she
eat if she stays on her diet?
Comfort
zone
Source: Colvin, 2009
Some solutions
Expert learning as a model
1. 3 slices = 1/3 ; x slices = 1/4
cross –multiply so that 1/3 x = ¾, so x = 9/4
2. If 3 slices is a third of a pound then 9 slices is a
pound. I can eat ¼ of a pound so ¼ of 9 slices is 9/4
slices (Grade 5)
3.
It involves
1. Opportunities – time, place, people (Bill Gates,
Steve Redgrave)
2. High expectations and clear goals
3. Strong motivation, resilience and risk-taking (Marie
Curie)
4. Powerful mental frameworks
5. Extensive deliberate practice – 10,000 hours
6. Skilled diagnostics and feedback
(Source: Jo Boaler)
Finding out where learners are
‘The most important single factor influencing learning
is what the learner already knows..[find it].. and
teach accordingly,’
(David Ausubel)
Medical diagnosis:
‘Talking to the patient more often than not provides
the essential clues to making a diagnosis....what we
learn from this simple interview frequently plays an
important role in the patient’s health even after the
diagnosis is made’
(Lisa Sanders)
The importance of talk
‘In England more than in many other countries, an
educational culture has evolved in which writing is
viewed as the only ‘real’ school work’. (Robin Alexander)
Yet:
1. Language and thought are intimately related, with
cognitive development depending on language.
2. There is a ‘relative scarcity of talk which really
challenges children to think for themselves...[a] low
level of cognitive demand in many classroom
questions’
Einstein’s mother ‘what questions did you ask in school
today?’
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How well do we listen?
Are there parallels with medicine?
Doctors will ask us what brought us there – ‘the odds are
overwhelming that the patient won’t have much of an
opportunity to tell that story’. Why? Because a ‘facts
only’ attitude will mean doctors are likely to interrupt
with interrogation questions. Even when being taped,
research revealed that doctors interrupted their patients
75 percent of the time. In one study, doctors listened for
an average of 16 seconds before breaking in, some
interrupting the patient after only three seconds.
‘Once the story was interrupted, patients were unlikely
to resume it. In these recorded encounters fewer than 2
percent of the patients completed their story once the
doctor broke in’.
(Lisa Sanders)
How well do we listen? (2) continued
Gunter Kress comments:
Here lies my unease. Of course I think James and
Emily should learn to spell frogspawn the “correct”
way. But on their road to that goal I worry that we
overlook and lose their energy, precision and
eagerness to encounter the unknown and make
sense of it. I worry that our present educational
paths may be stifling, not fostering, their exuberance
and creativity
How well do we listen? (2)
Two seven year olds have been studying the reproductive cycle of
frogs.
James writes: ‘When frogs are born there called frogs born and
there in little rond bits of jelly so they con’t do nofing’.
Emily writes ‘Tadpole and frog. I already new that frog’s have
Baby’s. I have learnt that tadpole come out of frog’s sporn’.
Gunter Kress points out that these comments reveal a lot about the
children. First of all they are ‘meticulous phoneticians recording
the sounds of north London’ who, when faced with an unfamiliar
word, took different routes. James took the route of meaning:
‘frogs born’ that’s how frogs come into life. Emily’s route is via
grammar, like ‘mum’s bag’, a sporn must be something frogs
have.
Investigating wrong answers
‘How much is 7-4?’ Becky (age 6): ‘2’
‘How did you get that answer?’
‘I knew that 7 take away 4 is 2 because I knew 4 + 2,
is 7. And if 4 plus 2 is 7, then 7 take away 2 must be
4’.
‘The second ingredient in the cognitive stew was
more interesting than the faulty memory. She
introduced the idea that if 4+2=7 then it must be
true that 7-4 =2... A classic syllogism’
(H.Ginsburg, 1997)
‘is specific and clear’....
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Expert learning and the double duty of
assessment
Assessment activities:
Have to focus on the immediate task and on
implications for equipping students for lifelong
learning in an unknown future ...they have to attend
to both the process and the substantive domain.
(David Boud)
Intelligence (and expert learning) is ‘knowing what to
do when you don’t know what to do’ (Piaget)
John Wooden’s approach to feedback
One of the distinctive features of his approach was that
most feedback came as players practised; he didn’t go
in for long harangues or ‘chalk talks’ but rather ‘short,
punctuated, and numerous’ comments to players as
they played.
The researchers coded these over many practices and
found that three-quarters of the 2000+ utterances
were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when
to intensify the activity.
Less than seven percent were compliments, the same
proportion as for expressions of displeasure.
His most frequent form of feedback was to model the
right way to do something, show the incorrect way,
and then model the correct way again, all in a matter
of a few seconds.
Gordon Stobart
Emeritus Professor of Education, Institute of Education, University College London
Honorary Research Fellow, OUCEA
g.stobart@ioe.ac.uk
Book - The Expert Learner: Challenging the Myth of Ability, published by McGraw Hill, Jan 2014
http://www.mheducation.co.uk/9780335247301-emea-the-expert-learner
http://oucea.education.ox.ac.uk/
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