Changing and Learning I

Learnable Intelligence

 

http://www.garyduke.org/oo/4/

 

Our QEP: Learning to Learn: Developing Learning Power - Changing and Learning I

 

▼ Overview and Context: What is the point of all this?

▼ script 1 (Intended as a narrated powerpoint. Could begin as audio only.

Changing and Learning is one of seven dimensions that scholars have identified as being characteristic of people for whom learning has become a lifelong habit. In the literature they define it this way:

A sense of oneself as someone who learns and

changes over time; the opposite is being ‘stuck and static.’

And the extended “official” version reads as follows:

 

Changing and Learning, or ‘growth orientation.’ Effective learners

know that learning itself is learnable. They believe that, through effort, their

minds can get bigger and stronger, just as their bodies can and they have

energy to learn. They see learning as a lifelong process, and gain pleasure and

self-esteem from expanding their ability to learn. Having to try is experienced

positively: it’s when you are trying that your ‘learning muscles’ are being

exercised. A growth orientation includes a sense of getting better at learning

over time, and of growing and changing and adapting as a learner in the whole

of life. There is a sense of history and hope. The contrast pole of growth

orientation is fixity, or being stuck and static. Less effective learners tend to

believe that ‘learning power’ is fixed, and therefore experience difficulty

negatively, as revealing their limitations. They are less likely to see challenging

situations as opportunities to become a better learner.

A favorite book for young architectural students in the 60s was one by Koberg and Bagnall. It was graced with a very long title: The Universal Traveller: a Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Problem Solving, and the Process of Reaching Goals. Although it was targeted at schools of architecture it’s really for anyone who wants to create and build something something useful.

 

Koberg and Bagnall recommend that when problems arise we not do the natural thing which is to ask “What can we do about it?” Rather we should ask “What is the real (or true) problem in this situation?”

Answering that question is certainly something that we should do together. But there are some things that point us in the right direction.

When we ask instructors to describe their students, the word that we most often hear is passive. Sherry Turkle, of course, has written about this and her 20 minute presentation at the TED conference entitled “Connected But Alone” speaks directly and somewhat sadly to the inability of many of today’s students even to have a real conversation.

 

It is not insignificant that one of the books we hope you’ll look at closely -- Making Thinking Visible -- has as its subtitle “How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Autonomy for All Learners.”

 

The author, Ron Ritchhart,  believes that our profession needs ideals, not just measurable outcomes. He asks in an earlier book Intellectual Character “What else should we be teaching for if not for intelligence?”

This brings us to the subject of this first of four modules. Richland has a goal (the QEP SLO). And we’ve started thinking about what the real problem is. We certainly have “resources.” But do we have any ideas about how to fix what’s wrong? We think we may and that’s what this “journey through the land of learning” is about.

The social scientist Kurt Lewin once said that the most practical thing one can have is a good theory. As you work your way through these materials you'll be introduced to the ideas of some smart people. And their theories about how we can help our students become smarter.

 

We asked earlier about the real source of the problem with students today. The easy answer for us is that students are just not smart enough for what we’re asking them to do. That they don’t have the necessary gray matter. That their abilities just aren’t up to the task. 

 

So listen for the way in which Bill Lucas, and Guy Claxton, and David Perkins and Carol Dweck all direct our attention to other factors which research has shown have a huge impact.

 

Ability is an important part of the equation but there is so much that we can do with other factors.

Desire, courage, strategy, persistence. These factors are clearly not just about ability . But they make a big difference. . There is much to be done here. The handout entitled “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Learners” which you may have seen is another way of directing our attention away from the simple IQ equation (Either you have it or you don’t).

As you make your way through this material, we hope you’ll be open to the possibility that there’s much more here than simply learning a few new teaching techniques. Think of it as an invitation to be open to new possibilities and to look where you may not have looked before.

Let the journey begin.

• Changing and Learning is one of seven dimensions that scholars have identified as being characteristic of people for whom learning has become a lifelong habit. In the literature they define it this way:

A sense of oneself as someone who learns and

changes over time; the opposite is being ‘stuck and static.’

And the extended “official” version reads as follows:

 

Changing and Learning, or ‘growth orientation.’ Effective learners

know that learning itself is learnable. They believe that, through effort, their

minds can get bigger and stronger, just as their bodies can and they have

energy to learn. They see learning as a lifelong process, and gain pleasure and

self-esteem from expanding their ability to learn. Having to try is experienced

positively: it’s when you are trying that your ‘learning muscles’ are being

exercised. A growth orientation includes a sense of getting better at learning

over time, and of growing and changing and adapting as a learner in the whole

of life. There is a sense of history and hope. The contrast pole of growth

orientation is fixity, or being stuck and static. Less effective learners tend to

believe that ‘learning power’ is fixed, and therefore experience difficulty

negatively, as revealing their limitations. They are less likely to see challenging

situations as opportunities to become a better learner.

A favorite book for young architectural students in the 60s was one by Koberg and Bagnall. It was graced with a very long title: The Universal Traveller: a Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Problem Solving, and the Process of Reaching Goals. Although it was targeted at schools of architecture it’s really for anyone who wants to create and build something something useful.

 

Koberg and Bagnall recommend that when problems arise we not do the natural thing which is to ask “What can we do about it?” Rather we should ask “What is the real (or true) problem in this situation?”

Answering that question is certainly something that we should do together. But there are some things that point us in the right direction.

When we ask instructors to describe their students, the word that we most often hear is passive. Sherry Turkle, of course, has written about this and her 20 minute presentation at the TED conference entitled “Connected But Alone” speaks directly and somewhat sadly to the inability of many of today’s students even to have a real conversation.

 

It is not insignificant that one of the books we hope you’ll look at closely -- Making Thinking Visible -- has as its subtitle “How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Autonomy for All Learners.”

 

The author, Ron Ritchhart,  believes that our profession needs ideals, not just measurable outcomes. He asks in an earlier book Intellectual Character “What else should we be teaching for if not for intelligence?”

This brings us to the subject of this first of four modules. Richland has a goal (the QEP SLO). And we’ve started thinking about what the real problem is. We certainly have “resources.” But do we have any ideas about how to fix what’s wrong? We think we may and that’s what this “journey through the land of learning” is about.

The social scientist Kurt Lewin once said that the most practical thing one can have is a good theory. As you work your way through these materials you'll be introduced to the ideas of some smart people. And their theories about how we can help our students become smarter.

 

We asked earlier about the real source of the problem with students today. The easy answer for us is that students are just not smart enough for what we’re asking them to do. That they don’t have the necessary gray matter. That their abilities just aren’t up to the task. 

 

So listen for the way in which Bill Lucas, and Guy Claxton, and David Perkins and Carol Dweck all direct our attention to other factors which research has shown have a huge impact.

 

Ability is an important part of the equation but there is so much that we can do with other factors.

Desire, courage, strategy, persistence. These factors are clearly not just about ability . But they make a big difference. . There is much to be done here. The handout entitled “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Learners” which you may have seen is another way of directing our attention away from the simple IQ equation (Either you have it or you don’t).

As you make your way through this material, we hope you’ll be open to the possibility that there’s much more here than simply learning a few new teaching techniques. Think of it as an invitation to be open to new possibilities and to look where you may not have looked before.

Let the journey begin.

▼ We could also consider here the original article from Guy Claxton which was used in the Topic Development Report

• NEW UNDERSTANDING ABOUT LEARNING

Learning to learn: a key goal in a 21st century curriculum

Professor Guy Claxton Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol

‘The thing that I’m scared of is, say I got laid off, I’ve got nothing, nothing to help me get another job...I’ve got no other skill.’

Todd, aged 18, bricklayer

‘I guess I could call myself smart. I can usually get good grades. Sometimes I worry, though, that I’m just a tape recorder...I worry that once I’m out of school and people don’t keep handing me information with questions, I’ll be lost.’

Emily, aged 15, GCSE student

Professor Guy Claxton

There are

two good reasons for reconfiguring 21st century education: economic and personal. The well-rehearsed economic argument says

much as the more conspicuous failures of the education system such as Todd. Emily sees herself as ready for a life of tests, but not the tests of life. Todd does not even believe that he has it in him to master a new skill.

They differ greatly in how literate and numerate they are, but Emily and Todd are both, in their different ways, illearnerate. They do not think of themselves as effective real-life learners. They think that school has not only failed to give them what they need, it has actually compounded the problem. Many young people live in a Matrix world in which there is often no consensual reality, no agreement about what to do for the best, and in which nobody taught them what to do when they didn’t know what to do. Their culture of ‘cool’ is, in part, a reaction to their sense of inadequacy and insecurity in the face of real difficulty. Young people want more real-life gumption, more initiative, more stickability, just as prospective employers and anxious governments do. More fundamental even than the concern with literacy and numeracy is the need to protect and develop young people’s learnacy.i

Government reforms have tinkered with existing provisions and structures in dozens of ways: the timetable, the curriculum, the assessment methods and so on. Such tinkering has been going on for a long time, but it does not seem to have healed the hole in the heart of education that young people experience so keenly. However recent developments in the human sciences are beginning to fire people’s imaginations. One of these is that it is actually possible to help young people become better learners – not just in the sense of getting better qualifications, but in real-life terms. Ideas from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and cultural psychology, for example, are converging on a rich set of ideas about what ‘learning to learn’ involves, and how it can be taught.

In cognitive science a revolution has taken place in the way we think of ‘intelligence’. For a while people believed that intelligence was a fixed-sized dollop of general-purpose mental resource provided by God or your genes when you were born, that set a ceiling on what you could achieve. We now know that this model is scientifically indefensible, factually incorrect and educationally pernicious. It is indefensible because, twins studies notwithstanding, you cannot separate nature and nurture in that way. It is incorrect because everyone’s intelligence varies enormously across time and place, and IQ scores bear no relation to being real-life smart. It is pernicious because it leads people to feel stupid and ashamed (rather than challenged) when they find things difficult, and therefore it undermines their ambition and determination.

In fact there is enormous room for everyone to get smarter by developing their learnacy. Even if there were some hypothetical limit on my ability, in practice I am nowhere near it. True, I am never going to be as fit and strong as Matthew Pinsent, nor as fast and tough as Kelly Holmes, but that does not mean that it is a waste of time my going to the gym. And when I do go, the whole point is to find it hard. Pushing myself need not mean ‘I’m hopelessly unfit – and that’s that’; it shows me that I’m in the process of getting fitter. Jean Piaget first defined intelligence as ‘knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do’. Lauren Resnick now defines intelligence simply as ‘the sum total of your habits of mind’. And habits grow

and change.ii

This work is also showing that growing more intelligent is not just a matter of learning a few techniques or mastering some new skills. It is more to do with attitudes, beliefs, emotional tolerances and values. These change, but more slowly than ‘skills’, and schools and classrooms have systematic, cumulative influence upon them. When teachers

that knowledge is changing so fast that we cannot give young people what they will need to know, because we do not know what it will be. Instead we should be helping them to develop supple and nimble minds, so that they will be able to learn whatever they need to. If we can achieve that, we will have a world-class workforce comprising people who are innovative and resourceful. The personal argument reaches the same conclusion. Many young people are floundering in the face of the complexities and uncertainties of contemporary life: the relatively successful children like Emily, as

encourage their students to talk more about the process of learning, their attitudes change and their achievements improve within a term.iii

From neuroscience comes the realisation that we are all born with brains that are ready, willing and able to sieve useful patterns out of experience and turn them into practical expertise, and to do so without any external supervision.iv Some of the most powerful of these discovered tools amplify the process of learning itself. The brain learns to become more sophisticated at, for example, investigating, memorising, researching, deducing and imagining, and in doing so bootstraps the natural learning ability with which it was genetically endowed. We are born powerful learners and have the capacity to become more so.

Our most powerful source of ideas about how to be a better learner, of course, is other people – and this where sociocultural studies in the tradition of Lev Vygotsky prove their worth. They show that we transmit our own learning habits and values to young people not so much through what we teach explicitly, as through the ways we act and talk around them. Children are inveterate eavesdroppers and spectators, and they osmose habits of mind from their elders, and from each other, without even thinking about it. In fact it even looks as if the brain is designed to prime itself to copy what it sees other humans doing. Much more than we might think, our minds are constituted out of the habits and values that permeate our social milieu.v

Children learn what to notice, what to ignore, what to laugh at, what to be afraid of and what’s worth investigating. And they also pick up on how to respond to uncertainty – what to do (and how to feel) when they don’t know what to do. From this point of view, the way a teacher reacts when a well-planned lesson inexplicably goes wrong is at least as relevant to students’ development as the lesson content. If teachers never let their students see them being learners, but only as know-ers (at worst, anxious and dogmatic knowers) they are depriving the students of vital vicarious experience. Helping young people become better

learners may mean daring to give up the belief that a teacher’s top responsibility is to be omniscient.

Does the intention to build young people’s learning power mean that we no longer care about the content of the curriculum? Obviously not – despite the almost wilfully facile polarisation of some commentatorsvi learners must have interesting things to learn about, and it is impossible to teach anything without encouraging the development of some learning habits (passive compliance, say) at the expense of others (critical questioning). Content and process are the warp and weft of the curriculum. It’s only a matter of how explicit and thoughtful we are about whether we are weaving the weft that young people will actually need when they leave school. We simply have to take care that, while we are helping our students to learn how to calculate compound interest, or write a poem, or think about the reasons for famine, we are also helping them to develop into more confident, curious and capable learners. We can help them develop the confidence to ask questions, to think carefully, and to know when and how to make productive use of their intuition and imagination. We can start building resilience by making difficulty more interesting and confusion less shameful, and we can encourage reflection by modelling what reflective learning looks like. And so on.vii

If different bits of equipment in the gym exercise complementary facets of ‘fitness’ – the treadmill for stamina, dumb-bells for strength, stretches for flexibility – how do the different components of the school curriculum contribute to the development of all-round learning power? Which mental muscle groups are specifically exercised by maths, or history or music? Can favourite topics defend their place if looked at in this light? Does adding fractions stretch children’s minds in a way that titrating acids and bases can’t? How can we help students not just to learn algebra or the periodic table, but learn to learn like a mathematician, a scientist or a playwright?viii

When we look at the curriculum as a whole, both across subjects and across years, does it provide the cumulative,

comprehensive mental exercise regime that will serve both Emily and Todd in years to come? That’s the question. It’s not a matter of liberal waffle; it’s a matter of clear-eyed attention to what it takes to flourish in the midst of the complex personal uncertainties of the mid-21st century – and of remembering that, if we really go back to basics, and do not make the mistake of getting sidetracked by the surrogate concern with tests and qualifications, that is what education is actually about.

Notes

This paper is based on my chapter ‘Learning is learnable (and we ought to teach it)’ in Sir John Cassels (ed), Learning to succeed: the next decade, University of Brighton, 2003.

i Speaking up, speaking out! The 2020 vision programme research report, The Industrial Society, London, 1997.

ii Perkins, D, Smart schools: better thinking and learning for every child, Free Press, New York, 1995.

iii Watkins, C, Learning about learning enhances performance, Research Bulletin No. 13, National School Improvement Network (info@nsin.org), 2001.

iv One has to tread carefully here, for a great deal of nonsense is being talked about the implications of brain science for education. It is not true that playing your baby Mozart will make her smarter, nor that your child’s brain will dry up if is not continually drip-fed water from a fancy bottle, though some people will try to tell you otherwise. For a critique, see Bruer, J, Chapter 26, ‘Education and the brain: a bridge too far’, Educational Researcher, 1997, pages 1–13.

v See for example Bruner, J, The culture of education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996; Gordon Wells and Guy Claxton (eds), Learning for life in the 21st century: sociocultural perspectives on the future of education, Blackwells, Oxford, 2002.

vi Woodhead, C, ‘Cranks, claptrap and cowardice’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 March 2001.

vii The practicalities of teaching for learning are addressed in my Building learning power: helping young people become better learners, TLO Ltd: Bristol, 2002 www.buildinglearningpower.co.uk.

viii See for example Claxton, G, Chapter 24,

‘Mathematics and the mind gym: how subject teaching develops a learning mentality’, For the Learning of Mathematics, 2004, pages 27–32.

This document can also be viewed or downloaded in PDF format from the website www.qca.org.uk—.

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate debate. Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of QCA.

 

▼ Question: What is teaching for?

A few years ago, I attended a conference entitled "Teaching for Intelligence." The conference had been an annual event for several years, bringing together leading educators interested in promoting and realizing a vision of education designed to bring out the best in all students' thinking. This particular year, the school superintendent from the host city addressed the conference. Unfortunately, as he spoke, it became clear that he was unfamiliar with his audience and hadn't given his opening comments much advance thought. He casually remarked that "Teaching for Intelligence" seemed like a rather vague title for a conference. "After all," he remarked, "what else would we be teaching for?" His remaining comments were unremarkable, but this question, and the rhetorical way it was framed, has stuck with me. What else would we be teaching for if not intelligence? It is a question I find worthy of considerable attention. Is teaching for intelligence, that is, teaching with the goal of making students smarter, such a cornerstone of our educational systems that we can take it for granted? Is it a goal that parents, students, teachers, and the rest of the community readily recognize and embrace? Is making students smarter a mission that directs our work in schools in a substantive way? Or is there more fuzziness around our goals for education? Do we, as educators and citizens concerned with education, even know what we are teaching for? What other competing goals are capturing our attention? 

 

Ron Ritchhart. Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It  

• A few years ago, I attended a conference entitled "Teaching for Intelligence." The conference had been an annual event for several years, bringing together leading educators interested in promoting and realizing a vision of education designed to bring out the best in all students' thinking. This particular year, the school superintendent from the host city addressed the conference. Unfortunately, as he spoke, it became clear that he was unfamiliar with his audience and hadn't given his opening comments much advance thought. He casually remarked that "Teaching for Intelligence" seemed like a rather vague title for a conference. "After all," he remarked, "what else would we be teaching for?" His remaining comments were unremarkable, but this question, and the rhetorical way it was framed, has stuck with me. What else would we be teaching for if not intelligence? It is a question I find worthy of considerable attention. Is teaching for intelligence, that is, teaching with the goal of making students smarter, such a cornerstone of our educational systems that we can take it for granted? Is it a goal that parents, students, teachers, and the rest of the community readily recognize and embrace? Is making students smarter a mission that directs our work in schools in a substantive way? Or is there more fuzziness around our goals for education? Do we, as educators and citizens concerned with education, even know what we are teaching for? What other competing goals are capturing our attention? 

 

Ron Ritchhart. Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It  

▼ Question: What idea lies at the heart of building learning power?

• The idea that we can help our students get smarter

• View this YouTube video by Guy Claxton (especially the first two minutes)

www.youtube.com—watch

▼ Question: How do we define learning power?

• As a form of intelligence. 

• Learning power refers to the collection of psychological traits and skills that enable a person to engage effectively with a variety of learning challenges. The concept emerged during the 1980s and 90s, for example in the writings of the cognitive scientistGuy Claxton, as a way of describing the form of intelligence possessed by someone who, to quote Jean Piaget's phrase,"…knows what to do when they don't know what to do." The forms of learning envisaged are typically broader than those encountered in formal educational settings, for example those that are of most use in learning sports or musical instruments, or in mastering complex social situations. Though Learning Power is conceived as a form of intelligence, it differs from some more familiar notions of intelligence in a number of important ways.

• First, it is seen as eminently practical, and not revealed particularly through solving abstract problems against the clock.

• Second, it is not primarily intellectual, but involves characteristics more usually associated with personality, such as emotional resilience in the face of difficulty or frustration.

• Third, Learning Power is conceived of as a composite of interwoven capacities, rather than as a distinct 'monolithic' mental entity.

• Fourth, the elements of Learning power are usually described as dispositions(David Perkins), Habits of Mind (Art Costa) or 'capacities' (Guy Claxton) rather than skills. Skills are abilities that may need prompting - they do not necessarily come to mind when they are needed - whereas Learning power refers to a persistent orientation towards learning. Those with high levels of Learning Power can be said to be generally open to learning opportunities, and typically find engaging with challenges where they are uncertain of success pleasurable rather than aversive.

• Finally, all the elements of learning power are seen as capable of development. Whereas conventional measures of IQ are taken to reflect intellectual endowments that are relatively constant over time and context, Learning Power emphasizes the role of experience in expanding, or sometimes contracting, the dispositions towards learning. This emphasis reflects the concern of those who use the concept with education: specifically with education seen as a preparation for lifelong learning.

Different authors have produced lists of the ingredients of Learning Power that differ somewhat, but largely overlap. Those of US authors such as Costa, Perkins and Ritchhart tend to be more focused on the kinds of intellectual learning typical of high schools and universities, while that of Claxton and his associates in the UK (Ruth Deakin-Crick, Bill Lucas) attempt to cover learning in informal as well as formal settings.                                          "Learning Power." Wikipedia. Web. 2 August 2013.

▼ Question: What does the research on learnable intelligence tell us?

• THE MAIN MESSAGES

• Despite significant levels of research over many years, there is no consensus about what is meant by intelligence and how, or whether, it can be measured. 

• The concept of intelligence has become closely tied with how we regard ourselves and other people. It is more often associated with perceptions of human worth, values, politics and ideology, than what can be proven scientifically. 

• Human intelligence is one of the most important yet controversial topics in the field of human sciences. The associated literature is huge; much of it is highly partisan and often far from accurate. Academics cannot agree what constitutes intelligence and whether it can (or should) be measured. 

• Stressing the importance of intelligence, defining it narrowly and suggesting that it is mainly genetic can damage people’s confidence and self-belief.

• Science is unlikely to resolve whether intelligence is a result of nature or nurture.

• We need a new view of intelligence in our schools, universities and businesses - a view of intelligence that is less exclusive, more democratic and which has a wider application to the real world. 

• In the meantime, education professionals need to consider attitudes to intelligence and how this impacts on learning. Schools need to develop policies and practices that play down the importance of in-born intelligence and play up the importance of learnable intelligence. www.journeytoexcellence.org.uk—rslearnableintelligence.asp

▼ Question: What is the new view of what it means to get smarter?

• Key Ideas for Developing Intellectual Character

 

RETHINKING SMART                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                • Conventional View of Smart. The dominance of testing, grades, and IQ instruments has distorted our view of what it means to be smart. These measures value knowledge and speed disproportionately and view intelligence as something that rests inside the individual.

 

• New View of Smart. Intelligent action in the world is what counts most. Ability is only a part of performance. Of equal importance are the spotting of occasions for the use of those abilities and the inclination to put those abilities into play. We recognize smartness in the patterns of one's exhibited behavior over time.

 

• Intellectual Character. An overarching term to describe a set of dispositions that not only shape but also motivate intellectual behavior. Character implies a consistent deployment of abilities so that patterns of behavior are established over time. Character builds on beliefs, attitudes, temperaments, and tendencies but is also developable and must be nurtured by the environment.

 

• Dispositions. Acquired patterns of behavior that are under one's control and will as opposed to being automatically activated. Dispositions are overarching sets of behaviors, not just single specific behaviors. They are dynamic and idiosyncratic in their contextualized deployment rather than prescribed actions to be rigidly carried out. More than desire and will, dispositions must be coupled with the requisite ability. Dispositions motivate, activate, and direct our abilities.

 

Ron Ritchhart. Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It  

 

▼ Question: How do the myths about intelligence direct our attention to new possibilities for teaching?

• Challenging some myths about intelligence.                                                                                             It seems to us that the education system is the victim of a number of enduring myths with regard to intelligence and that these are at best unhelpful and at worst downright harmful. Here are some of the beliefs that we will be seeking to challenge in the book. Each one of these broadly speaking relates to the chapter number next to it. Of course such connections are more complex than this so the linear link is not always quite so clear-cut.         

 

Claxton, Guy; Lucas, Bill (2011-03-28). New Kinds Of Smart: Teaching Young People To Be Intelligent For Today's World (Expanding Educational Horizons) (Kindle Locations 271-275). McGraw Hill International. Kindle Edition.                                                                                                                                                                                   

• Eight Myths about Intelligence.                                                                                                                        1 MYTH: Intelligence is essentially a one-dimensional commodity largely to be found in the kinds of thinking required by IQ tests.                                                                                                        2 MYTH: Intelligence is relatively fixed: educators make use of it, but do not really alter it.           3 MYTH: Mind and body are separate and truly intelligent activity is located in the mind.             4 MYTH: Intelligence is rational and conscious.                                                                                     5 MYTH: Intelligence is a personal ‘possession’, and using tools which have the effect of making you smarter is a kind of cheating.                                                                                                6 MYTH: Intelligence is an individual not a social concept.                                                                  7 MYTH: The concept of intelligence is universally valid, and not closely tied to the details and demands of one’s particular ‘habitat’.                                                                                                       8 MYTH: Intelligence is an intellectual function, separate from emotional and moral functions.              If teachers believe some or all of these ideas, then the possibilities of their job are rather constrained. If you are persuaded by the arguments in this book, however, then the job of the educator, whether in school, at home, or in the wider community, becomes a very different one. A range of different possibilities open up. While you (assuming you are an educator of some kind) will still need to locate your learning and teaching activity within real contexts – you cannot develop intelligence or ‘grow’ better learners in the abstract – you may well come to see your teaching differently. For as well as teaching the ‘content’ or ‘subject’ you may now be on the look-out for specific learning strategies designed to boost the learner’s mind power. As with the myths listed above, each of the suggestions below for the development of the teacher’s role is deliberately tied to the chapter number next to it. The list, therefore, offers some headline messages from each chapter on what the role of today’s teachers might be. If these headlines seem a little cryptic right now, the chapters that follow will spell them out in practical detail. We have put the key concepts in italics. “As well as teaching the ‘content’ or ‘subject’ you may now be on the lookout for specific learning strategies designed to boost the learner’s mind power.”           ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

• Eight aspects of the teacher’s role in developing more intelligent learners.                                                       1 Cultivating the dispositions which are most likely to create learners who are active throughout their lives.                                                                                                                                                                                     2 Developing and sustaining growth mindsets in young people (and modelling these as adult learners).                                                                                                                                                         3 Creating opportunities for young people to become more ‘manipulate’ as well as articulate.                      4 Helping students to develop states of mind conducive to different kinds of learning, specifically using their intuitive as well as rational selves.                                                                                                                     5 Encouraging learners to understand which tools tend to help in certain situations and how to know when to use these.                                                                                                                                                          6 Providing students with effective strategies for learning and working collaboratively.                                   7 Teaching students how to be more strategic about their learning, how to reflect on what happens and how to transfer their learning from one domain to another.                                                                                    8 Setting all educational work in a broader ethical context in which the ultimate intelligence is the survival of Homo sapiens in a fast-changing world.

 

Claxton, Guy; Lucas, Bill (2011-03-28). New Kinds Of Smart: Teaching Young People To Be Intelligent For Today's World (Expanding Educational Horizons) (Kindle Locations 276-306). McGraw Hill International. Kindle Edition. 

▼ Question: What role does the process of educating students play in helping students get smarter?

• For a beginning sense of direction, let us suppose that educating has to do with shaping human dispositions (beliefs, behaviors, actions) through the use of meaningful materials chosen according to a criteria of excellence. Beliefs and behaviors of human beings can be shaped in a large variety of ways -- indoctrination, conditioning, socialization, and so forth. These ways can be educative or miseducative. A street-corner sense of education is to "get smart." In everyday living there are hundreds of ways of getting smart, of developing savvy, of knowing what is coming down. Human beings do get smart from formal education as well, but this seems to be a well-kept secret. Formal education is not only a deliberate intervention in the lives of people, but an intervention with a highly selected and refined set of materials. These materials must be tailored for their meaningfulness and they must embody a criteria of excellence. Furthermore, we believe that repeated events of deliberate intervention gradually shape habits such that persons are liberated and freed both from the intervention and the materials. As durable and reliable as educational activities are, they are also short-lived and ephemeral; no single characterization will capture completely the whole scene. So recognizing that we are not trying to define the ineffable, let us begin with a statement to serve as a working sense of direction.

• Educating, as an eventful process, changes the meaning of human experience by intervention in the lives of people with meaningful materials to develop thinking, feeling, and acting as habitual dispositions in order to make sense of human experience.

• D. Bob Gowin. Educating. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

▼ Question: At which part of the learning journey does Learning Power aim?

• Dispositions, Attitudes, Behaviors, but also  -- As Bob Gowin pointed out -- Beliefs.

•

▼ Question: And what are the primary "learning" dispositions  employed?

•

▼ CONSIDERATION BIN

▼ Question: What makes teaching hard? or What's your theory of difficulty?

•

• One of the most important questions we can ask as educators is, “What makes this hard?” When we have a good answer to this question, we are anticipating the hard parts that go with a particular topic or activity. Maybe with the right approach, we can prevent those hard parts from doing their worst damage. Any experienced teacher or parent or coach or minister or mentor always has some kind of response to the what-makes-this-hard question. Also, the six kinds of troublesome knowledge from earlier provide a very broad list of candidate answers. The eight complexity factors from Feltovich, Spiro, and Coulson offer more specific answers for challenging conceptual learning. Difficulties like presentism for history or perspective taking in moral judgment or the everyday sense of physics that people have (as in “objects in motion remain in motion in the classroom, but come to rest on the playground”) are responses to the what-makes-this-hard question for common topics. All of these, general or specific, formal or informal, from researchers or teachers, are theories of difficulty. Such theories often are not very academic, nor do they need to be to do good work. They warn teachers and learners about the potholes on the learning road and thereby tell us where we need a special spring in our educational feet. However, theories of difficulty are not always as specific or well directed as they need to be. Let me tell you about some of my experiences here. For many years, I’ve taught a course to students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education called “Cognition and the Art of Instruction.” The course asks participants to develop individual design projects for learning agendas of their choosing. The design projects vary widely in their learning targets and settings, from such standard in-school topics as fractions arithmetic to out-of-school themes such as pig farming and understanding knee-joint replacement. I routinely ask the students to spell out simple theories of difficulty for the topics they choose. What will make this hard for learners? And therefore, what are you going to do about it in your learning design? The answers do not have to be very elaborate to be helpful. A student designing a decision-making program for people in management positions might note difficulties like this: In the midst of time pressure, there is a chronic problem of neglecting long-term consequences. Or: In the hierarchical management climate, a respectful and genuinely helpful pattern of consultation can go by the wayside. A student designing an intervention to foster ecological responsibility might note difficulties such as: It’s one thing to understand some of the problems conceptually and even write essays about them, but another thing to discern practical actions you can take in your community beyond the really simple ones such as recycling. And it’s still another thing to get around to those practical actions! Through such characterizations as these, students provide themselves with better defined design targets.

 

Perkins, David (2010-02-04). Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education (pp. 100-102). Wiley. Kindle Edition. 

▼ Question: How do we describe the problem of teaching these students?

•

▼ What does the science say? (Mindset Works)

• www.mindsetworks.com—whatismindset.aspx

• So as an instructor, what do I do now? (Bill Lucas list)

• What are the three types of intelligence and which provides the greatest potential for learning and changing in our students?

• A question that can be answered with Crick