ABSTRACT
And by that I don’t mean just teaching things the same way but louder. Or slower. Or more often. What this new model calls for is ‘multiple-chance education’ (Gardner
1993) where students can access the information in a variety of ways that will allow them the opportunity to play to their strengths and, also, work on their weaknesses. Such variety of approach – and the watchword here genuinely is ‘variety’; after all, it’s hard to hit every student all of the time – cuts across not just how you offer opportunities for learning in your classroom but the nature of the classroom and even the school day as we shall see in chapter 22. What’s more, as part of being a ‘learning school’, it is important that
you teach children how to learn. This will sound self-evident to many of the teachers reading this book, but it wasn’t always the case. The whole idea of ‘Learn to Learn’ seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, at least on a widespread scale. (In the past, on the rare occasions where there was some form of teaching children how to learn work going on in the odd isolated school, it was usually carried out by an odd and isolated teacher.) That the idea of actually teaching children how to do the thing we expect them to do every day of their school careers is self-evident is, even now, not always the case and I still do get asked in schools whether I think it is a good idea. It is a question that even now I am unsure how to respond to since ‘Well duh!’ never seems that professional. In 2001, a four-year research project looking at the nature of ‘learning
to learn’ in schools in the UK was launched by a team that linked King’s College in London, the Institute of Learning, the University of Reading, the Open University and 40 primary and secondary schools across five education authorities around the country.2 The project was under the auspices of a better-eight-hundred-years-late-than-never Cambridge University. Part of their findings was that learning to learn was not a single discrete
skill but rather ‘a family of learning practices that enable learning to happen’. They then plumped for the accurate but less catchy LHTL over L2L adding, ‘the HOW word seems important’. This is something echoed by think-tank Demos3 in their 2004 report entitled About Learning and commissioned by the then minister for schools standards, David Milliband. Exactly what the members of this ‘family’ are, the report doesn’t make clear, but Demos quotes from the Royal Society of Arts’ Opening Minds project where there is a detailed range of ‘competencies’ including:
Understanding how to learn, taking account of one’s preferred learning styles, and understanding the need to, and how to, manage one’s own learning throughout life
Learning, systematically, to think
Exploring and reaching an understanding of one’s own creative talents, and how to make best use of them
Learning to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding oneself.
