Module I 

Introduction

 

"Some philosophers have given their moral approval to the deplorable verdict that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, one which cannot be augmented.  We must protest and act against this brutal pessimism... it has no foundation whatsoever ... [learners] should be given lessons of will, of attention, of discipline; ... in a word they must learn how to learn."  Alfred Binet (1909)  OR

 

 

Helping our students "learn to learn" is probably the greatest gift we can give them. But learning to learn is not just strategies and techniques. That notion has been discredited. To help our students "get smarter" we can be effective learners ourselves and models of a growth orientation. And we can update our understanding about what getting smarter means and how it happens. 

 

1. Learning to Learn

 

Q1: Is there an introductory overview article that I should can read about the subject?

A1: Yes. It's by Guy Claxton, the Co-Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning and Professor of Learning Sciences at the Univresity of Winchester, UK.  Guy is the originator of the Building Learning Power program now widely used in schools across the world.

               

In cognitive science, a revolution has taken place in the way we think of ‘intelligence’. For a while, people believed a number of rather odd things about intelligence. They believed that it was a dollop of general-purpose mental resource that God or your genes gave you when you were born; that it didn’t change much over the course of life; that it followed you around from place to place and didn’t vary with the situation; that its main effect was to set a ceiling on what you could achieve; that when you struggled or failed, that was evidence that you had got to the limit of your ‘ability’; and that you could reliably measure the size of someone’s reservoir of intelligence by asking them to solve abstract puzzles that had no personal meaning or relevance in a strange room under intense pressure. 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 intelligence varies enormously across time and place, and IQ bears no relation to being real-life smart. And it is pernicious because it leads people to feel 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 Steve Redgrave, nor as fast and tough as Paula Radcliffe, but that does not mean that it is therefore a waste of time my going to the gym. And when I do go, the whole point is to get hot and sweaty and 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. It was Jean Piaget who first defined intelligence as ‘knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.’ And you can get better at that. Lauren Resnick, the doyenne of educational psychologists in the States, now defines intelligence simply as ‘the sum total of your habits of mind.’ And habits grow, change, and can be broken.
 

This work is also showing that growing more intelligent is not just a matter of learning a few techniques, or even mastering some new skills like ‘critical thinking’. It is as much to do with attitudes, beliefs, emotional tolerances and values. And these change more slowly. You can’t change someone’s interest in learning, or their stickability, overnight. But schools and classrooms have systematic, cumulative influence, as surely as rivers wear away their banks. For example, when teachers change their way of talking with their students about learning, those students’ attitudes can change, in turn, within a term (and by the way, their results go up).

 

Guy Claxton. "Learning is Learnable (and We Ought To Teach It)." In the National Commission for Education report Ten Years On, edited by Sir John Cassell, 2004. <OPEN AND READ THIS ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRETY> 

 

2.  Changing and Learning

 

          Q2: How can we help students see themselves as people who learn, change, and grow?    

          A2: By engaging them in significant learning experiences aimed at reshaping their habits of wanting, thinking, feeling, and doing through                  exposure to quality resources.

 

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.

https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/7572433?page=review

 

3. The Aim of Learning Power

 

Q5: What is the purpose of Learning Power?  (i.e., The power to learn)        

A5: To help students get smarter. To help them become more intelligent. 

 

View Guy Claxton’s YouTube video “The Idea of Learning Power” (7 min 45 sec)  LINK

I think I'll attach a file with this text of the video for those who would like that format, but not include it on the page. 

 

The idea of building learning power is that it is possible in a real sense to help young people to get smarter. To help them become more intelligent. And the real reason for doing that is to give them the confidence that they will be able to face tricky stuff of all kinds — problems, challenges — out there in the big wide world, both now and in the future. The science behind BLP gives us the confidence that this is a real possibility. There are all kinds of experiments and studies that have been carried out in the last few years which show that — contrary to some popular opinion —  it really is possible to help people get smarter. It’s possible to help young people become more intelligent. And we’re beginning to understand what that means in some degree of detail. 

 

Intelligence is not some general purpose pot of fixed size ability that the genes or the good Lord gave you and you carry around with you for the rest of your life. That’s a misconception. 

 

The ability to learn is itself very learnable. And it consists of things like curiosity, the ability to ask good questions, persisting in the face of difficulty, being resourceful, being able to have a range of different strategies to call upon, being a good team worker, being a good collaborator, being able to be thoughtful, being able to stand back from what you’re doing particularly when its difficult and think: How’s it going? How might I do this differently? It’s partly a matter of being able to balance being imaginative with being able to think clearly and rigorously and in a disciplined kind of way. 

 

What we’ve discovered through the science is that it’s possible in real lessons to help them strengthen each of these ingredients or capacities that make up real world intelligence. 

 

What we’ve discovered is that the way to build the capacities of the powerful confident real life learner is not so much adding on little bits of pieces to lessons but just adjusting in a way that many teachers find quite comfortable. Just changing the way we talk to students can make a big difference. Instead of always talking about work in the classroom, if you focus attention in the chat that goes on in a classroom more on the learning: What’s the learning?  That shifts the focus so that young people become more interested... 

 

(Guy Claxton “The Idea of Learning Power.” YouTube 19 Aug 2013).

 

4. The Learning Power Perspective

 

      Q3: How does Learning Power address the problem of learning, changing, and growing?                      

      A3: By defining the goal in terms of the whole human being. Effective and lasting change requires that all the separate selves be brought into                      alignment: what you want, what you feel, what you think, and what you’ll actually do. Notice the bolded sentence in the reading below.

 

[The My Learning Journey image goes here].

 

This is borderline TOO LONG to be shown on the page.  I think I'll try to capture the text under the image and link it to the page.

Using the metaphor of ‘learning as a journey’ there are four ‘stations’ which require

attention from learners and teachers. The first is the learning self, with its particular

identity, nested sets of relationships, stories and aspirations. The second comprises

the personal qualities, values, attitudes and dispositions for learning—perhaps

twenty-first-century virtues. The third is publicly required and personally valued skills

and competencies such as managing situations, being an active citizen or managing

ambiguity (see, for example, Haste, 2001). The fourth is the acquisition of publicly

assessed and valued knowledge and know-how. Learning and teaching require

mentored, selective attention to be given to these stations in a spiral sequence rather

than a linear one, since they are mutually reinforcing.

 

Learning power

It is the second ‘station’ in this metaphor which has to do with the personal power to

learn, or its popular designation ‘learning power’. This refers to seven core

dimensions of the capacity to learn how to learn, which emerged from a factor

analytic study with nearly two thousand learners (Deakin Crick et al., 2004). It is

described as ‘a form of consciousness characterized by particular dispositions, values

and attitudes, with a lateral and a temporal connectivity’. Significantly, the

dimensions of learning power described in this study include affect, cognition,

desire and action and thus cannot be reduced to only one of these components; hence

the reference to dispositions, values and attitudes. Together these can be supported

through the development of self-awareness and intentionality; hence the term

‘consciousness’. Temporal connectivity refers to a ‘way of being’ in the world that

orientates a person towards changing and learning over time and in different contexts,

and lateral connectivity refers to the ideas embedded in a sociocultural view of

learning in which the learner is a ‘person in relation’ to other people and to cultural

tools and artefacts, in which learning is frequently mediated through the interactions

of learning relationships (Rogoff & Wertsch, 1984; Lave & Wenger, 1991). These

may often be within a community of learners: a group of people committed to sharing

learning in a purposeful and collaborative manner.

 

In relation to the ‘learning journey’, learning power reflects backwards to the

learning self, since it is deeply personal, and forwards as mediated scaffolding,

towards the development of competencies and the acquisition of knowledge and

know-how. The purpose of making judgements about, or assessments of, someone’s

learning power is to facilitate the movement between personal identity, choice and

motivation and the processes and outcomes of learning. It is in this sense ‘dynamic’

since it is both retrospective (diagnostic and reflective) and prospective (formative

and motivational).

 

Ruth Deakin Crick. “Learning How to Learn: the Dynamic Assessment of Learning Power.” The Curriculum Journal 18:2 2007 135-153. 

 

 

  6. Intelligence-in-Practice: Habits of Mind

 

Q6: What do we know about how people get smarter? And how does that work in a classroom setting?

A6: 

      ANSWER ONE: Intelligence is the habit of persistently trying to understand things and make them function better. Intelligence is working to figure things out, varying strategies until a workable solution is found. Intelligence is knowing what one does (and doesn't) know, seeking information and organizing that information so that it makes sense and can be remembered. In short, one's intelligence is the sum of one's habits of mind. 

 

For more than 20 years, psychologists and other students of the human mind have been experimenting with ways of teaching the cognitive skills associated with intelligence. These include techniques as varied as generating analogies, making logical deductions, creating and using memory aids, and monitoring one's own state of knowledge (metacognition). Early experiments on teaching specific, isolated components of intelligence yielded a common pattern of results: Most of the training was successful in producing immediate gains in performance, but people typically ceased using the cognitive techniques they had been taught as soon as the specific conditions of training were removed. In other words, they became capable of performing whatever skill was taught, but they acquired no general habit of using it or capacity to judge for themselves when it was useful.

 

As a result of these findings, cognitive researchers began to shift their attention to educational strategies that immerse students in demanding, long-term intellectual environments. Now, positive results are coming in. In experimental programs and in practical school reforms, we are seeing that students who, over an extended period of time are treated as if they are intelligent, actually become so. If they are taught demanding content, and are expected to explain and find connections as well as memorize and repeat, they learn more and learn more quickly. They think of themselves as learners. They are able to bounce back in the face of short-term failures.

 

This experience is giving rise to a new conceptualization of intelligence-in-practice: Intelligence is the habit of persistently trying to understand things and make them function better. Intelligence is working to figure things out, varying strategies until a workable solution is found. Intelligence is knowing what one does (and doesn't) know, seeking information and organizing that information so that it makes sense and can be remembered. In short, one's intelligence is the sum of one's habits of mind.

 

Lauren B. Resnick. “Making America Smarter.” Education Week 18.40 (1999): 38-40 Education Full Text (H.W.Wilson) Web 19 Aug.2013. <OPEN AND READ THIS ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRETY>

 

          ANSWER TWO: Intelligence is built up over time especially in talking with others. We build knowledge together in the way we conduct           discussions. In the way we use language. What works are conversations that build the mind. (Thinking routines also facilitate           conversations that help build the mind).

 

     A distinguished scholar in the learning sciences, Lauren Resnick, is offering a free online Coursera course through the University of Pittsburg      starting Sept 9, 2013.  The course is called “Accountable Talk: Conversation That Works.” The tagline calls it an introduction to the theory and      practice of well-structured talk that builds the mind. Watch the following brief video .  The text is provided as well. 

 

I invite you to join a revolution. 

A revolution about how people know things and how they become smarter. 

We used to think that people were born either smart or stupid and there wasn’t much we could do about that.

Now we know that intelligence is built up over time especially by talk with other people.

We used to think that intelligence was a private thing going on entirely in one person’s head. Now we know that that’s not true either.

We know now that people are constantly building knowledge. They build it together and in so doing they become smarter together.

Even when we think we’re learning alone — say by studying a book — we’re actually having a conversation. What do I already know that is like this? Do I disagree with this author? Why?

As we work to answer questions such as these we become smarter. We develop intelligence. More knowledge plus more ways of accessing that knowledge. 

We know that people become intelligent through conversation. 

This [Coursera] course is about the new understanding of intelligence…

 

Lauren Resnick

https://www.coursera.org/course/accountabletalk

 

7. The Meaning of Learning  Can we save this for Module 3?  For those who are reading carefully, they'll find a reference to ELLI in the Claxton article bibliography.  I fear that including this raises the cognitive load.  We will ask people to take the ELLI as part of their Module 3 work.  Let's talk about reasons to include/not include it here. 

 

     Q7: Many students have a mistaken view of what it means to learn.  Is there an instrument and a set of concepts

            that helps us communicate what learning is?

     A7: Yes. It’s called The Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory. It is both an formative assessment instrument and set of concepts for communicating              a practical understanding of what learning is.

 

The University of Bristol has developed ELLI, the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (Deakin Crick, Broadfoot and Claxton, 2004). ELLI is an instrument used to improve the effectiveness of learning measuring the ‘learning power’ of individual students (see section 4.3 above). Building on previous instruments from Ball (2001), extensive interdisciplinary literature review in the field and inputs from policy and practice, an initial instrument was developed with 112 field trial items and through a lengthy testing of this instrument it was refined to 65 items and produced the 7 learning power scales. YIKES, this sentence is poorly written. In short the seven factors included in the inventory can be described as follows:

• Growth orientation (changing and learning) establishes the extent to which learners regard the process of learning is itself learnable;

• Critical curiosity demonstrates learner’s desire to find out new things; 

• Meaning-making affirms the extent to which learners are on the lookout for links between what they are learning and what they already know; 

• Dependence and fragility finds out how easily learners are disheartened when they get stuck or make mistakes;

• Creativity establishes the learners’ ability to look at things in different ways; 

• Relationship/interdependence (learning relationships) establishes the learners’ ability to manage the balance between sociable and individual approaches to learning; 

• Strategic awareness finds out learners’ awareness of their own learning processes. 

(Deakin Crick, Broadfoot & Claxton, 2006). 27

 

One of the interesting aspects of this instrument is that it is “a tool that can be used diagnostically by teachers and others to articulate with their students what it is to learn.”(Deakin Crick, Broadfoot and Claxton, 2004, p. 267). After the first studies the instrument has been used by a number of schools. “Since 2003 over nine thousand learners between the ages of 7 and 21 have used the Learning Power Profiles in formal learning contexts, usually schools” (Deakin Crick, 2007, p. 144). Learning Power Profiles are the feedback given to those who do the test. It is a spider diagram showing the learning profile of a person based on the seven factors included in the test.

 

Bryony Hoskins and Ulf Fredriksson. Learning to Learn: What it is and Can it be Measured? Luxemberg: European Communities, 2008. 27

 

8. Dimensions of Learning 

 

          Q8: What is the structure of a Dimension of Learning?

          A8: Within each dimension there are aspects of affect, desire, cognition, and action.

 

               Study this dimensions graphic and help us improve it.