Zest for Learning

Developing curious learners who relish real-world challenges

Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781785834844
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Zest for Learning: Developing curious learners who relish real-world challenges, Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer explore the ways in which teachers can help their pupils to find their passions, develop independence and challenge themselves to become more expansive learners.

Young people need more than subject knowledge in order to thrive they need capabilities. The Pedagogy for a Changing World series details which capabilities matter and how schools can develop them.

A key capability is zest: the curiosity and desire to experience new things. Zest for Learning offers a powerful new synthesis of thinking about what it takes for young people to flourish both in education and in the wider world, especially at a time when preparing them for life beyond school often calls for brave leadership.

This could be encouraged through, for example, greater engagement with sports and the arts, by collaborating with external bodies such as the Scouts and Guides or the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme or by working with libraries, museums, faith groups and environmental associations.

In this book Bill and Ellen offer a framework for zest: a practical guide for teachers, underpinned by theory. They draw on a number of areas of knowledge and practice that each have something to contribute to the concept of zest for learning, bringing together ideas in concrete and actionable ways.

Zest for Learning connects the co-curriculum with the formal curriculum, building both theoretical and practical confidence in the kinds of pedagogies which work well. Bill and Ellen have infused the book with a wide range of ideas for getting pupils to love learning so much that they will be able to learn whatever they want to throughout their lives.

The authors also go further by presenting case studies that illustrate the successful integration of the co-curriculum with the formal curriculum at various educational institutions, and by providing an A to Z of practical ideas and activities for developing zest in young learners.

Suitable for all teachers and leaders, in both primary and secondary settings.

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Chapter 1

Zest for Learning

What it is and why it matters

zest, n. figurative. Enthusiasm for and enjoyment of something, esp. as displayed in speech or action; gusto, relish. Frequently with for.

Oxford English Dictionary

We wrote this book for teachers because it seems to us that there is an absence of zest and an abundance of both blandness and examined predictability in too many schools at the moment. For many young people, their learning stops just when it is getting really challenging and engaging. The bell goes and out they file. Where their learning interests might ideally take them is beyond the scope of a particular subject or syllabus. And in these form-filling, litigious times it is ever more tricky to organise educational forays out into the real world.

We like the word ‘zest’ because it suggests the kind of engaged curiosity we see as being at the heart of all good learning. We have looked hard at the evidence to understand more about zest. Research suggests that it is a valuable capability, central to human flourishing and eminently learnable.

This book draws together a far-reaching literature exploring zest and zest-like attributes, offering schools and organisations working with schools a model of how it could be at the heart of children’s educational experiences. We hope it will give encouragement to head teachers, teachers, proactive parents and all those in the many voluntary, charitable and business organisations who work with young people to be expansive in their thinking. Zest for Learning is a call to action for us to broaden our horizons of what school can be and to take heart from the ideas which others are already using.

We believe there are two essential outcomes of education: flourishing and real-world challenge-readiness. By flourishing we mean thriving and growing with an underlying sense of direction and purpose. By being ready for the world’s tests we 12mean prepared both morally and practically for the challenges of living in complex times. We need to understand where we’ve come from, how we’ve arrived at this place in time, and where we want to be as a society. It is not just about being able to come up with a creative solution to an engineering or biomedical problem. Beyond problem-solving is problem-setting: asking which problems are worth looking at, and seeking knowledge, understanding and wisdom that allows ethical decisions to be made based on more than just blind progress. Both flourishing and meeting real-world challenges are about embracing learning with both hands.

So what do we mean when we say a person has ‘zest for learning’? Using the definition of zest on page 11, such a person might take a certain enthusiastic enjoyment in their learning; they are hungry to learn and find it a stimulating end in its own right. They enjoy the way learning opens up a richer understanding of other aspects of their life, seeing the interconnectedness of things. They are deeply satisfied when something that was formerly fuzzy and grey becomes clear to them, like the pieces of a jigsaw fitting together. They are keen to develop themselves, to experience new things, to try some and to master others. They try not to be discouraged by setbacks. To some degree, they are discontented with the status quo, with their own understanding of things, if not with the world at large. Zestful learners use hand, head and heart in much of their lives.

We know that human beings are born with an instinct to learn, boosted by the feedback they receive from every encounter with the objects and people around them. It’s more than a proclivity; small babies are learners. In this book we will be wondering how best we can help young people to maintain a child-like fascination with the world as they grow older, wiser and more experienced in the ways of the world. The amount of zest for learning we each possess will, of course, be down to both nature and nurture. Positive learning experiences will impact people in different ways. There is much in the psychology literature to unpick here.

You could be forgiven for wondering whether this book’s focus represents more fanciful territory than either creative thinking or tenacity, which we dealt with in our two earlier books. Are we really going to argue that all children, whatever their background, can benefit from zest? Or that schools can cultivate it? The answer is yes! In Zest for Learning we argue that zest is a public good, that learners with zest are more likely to be keen learners in and beyond the classroom, and that teachers deep down want to help foster zest in any way they can.13

Bodies of knowledge

Perhaps because zest is used as shorthand for something everyone is assumed to understand, definitions of zest are conspicuous by their absence in the bodies of literature that use the word. In this book we offer a framework for zest: a practical guide for teachers, underpinned by theory. We draw on a number of areas of knowledge and practice that each have something to contribute to the concept of zest for learning, clarifying the concept of zest and bringing together ideas in concrete and actionable ways. As we do this we will constantly be asking: what might this tell us about developing zest for learning in and from schools?

More than fifty years ago, John Holt (1967, p. 175) came close to putting into words the essence of zest for learning:

Since we cannot know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless trying to teach it in advance. Instead we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

The concept of zest for learning sits broadly within two large fields of knowledge: psychology and education. We are interested in the specific contribution each makes to our understanding of zest for learning, represented by the area where the two intersect:

Our understanding of zest for learning comes from two broad areas of knowledge and research

14These two fields are, of course, broad, encompassing many different and unrelated areas of research and knowledge. Because there is very little that speaks explicitly to a concept like zest for learning, this book carves out new territory, uncovering what the two fields have to say about human flourishing. The figure below shows some of the relevant topics within each body of knowledge. There will, of course, be cross-fertilisation of ideas as some topics have links to more than one knowledge area.

Two bodies of knowledge and their most relevant topics

Two bodies of knowledge and their most relevant topics

In this chapter we unpack each of the areas of literature in terms of their relation to zest for learning. We look first to the field of psychology and its multidisciplinary and loosely collected studies called the ‘learning sciences’. This is where we find ideas like habits of mind, grit, optimism and their cultivation.

• We explore the psychological study of traits. If, as we have suggested, it is possible to cultivate zest, we need to understand what aspect of it – if any – is related to the relatively fixed notion of personality traits.
• Theories of intelligence is a broad area in which we look at embodied cognition and the study of learning to learn.15
• Positive psychology offers us the concept of ‘flow’, which is also relevant to learning to learn. Character strengths are also explored in this field.
• We explore the psychology of motivation where the concept of flow is, again, important. Mastery goals and a sense of purpose are also important ideas from this area.

The field of education also has a number of contributions to make, particularly in terms of ideas regarding the ultimate purpose of education as they concern meaning, situating oneself within the world and the development of virtues and values.

• We explore ideas relating to finding purpose, including lifelong learning and character.
• In terms of pedagogy, the learning sciences have important concepts for zest, including metacognition, real-world learning and habits for learning.

Developing a model of zest for learning

In this book we have created a model that describes the habits for learning, or dispositions, that together make up a person with – specifically – zest for learning. This moves beyond what it is to be a good or powerful learner into understanding what makes a skilful, effective, motivated, ethical, life-wide and lifelong learner. We try to look beyond the confines of whatever curriculum is currently in play, and ask a bigger question about what might be important to learn. In trying to narrow down what these dispositions or habits might be, we have scanned much of the literature, especially focusing on psychology and education.

You will notice that within the discussion of each area are a number of concepts which bring something significant to bear on the idea of zest for learning. These can be distilled down into six themes that relate to habits for learning:

1. Valuing relationships.
2. Maintaining perspective.16
3. Exploring the world.
4. Embracing novel experiences.
5. Finding meaning.
6. Deepening understanding.

We signpost these themes along the way. Chapter 2 explores the framework and Chapter 3 asks how we might cultivate these valued habits in school. Having a framework through which to consider these habits is important for teachers because what they do in the classroom really matters. Talking of curiosity, a close cousin of zest for learning, Susan Engel (2015, p. 127) makes it clear how what teachers do makes all the difference:

from an early age, some children are more curious than others. But there is also great fluctuation from one setting to another. A child who is usually timid about opening things or asking questions can be beckoned into inquiry. Children who are ordinarily inquisitive can be hushed into a kind of intellectual listlessness. The characteristics that fuel curiosity are not mysterious. Adults who use words and facial expressions to encourage children to explore; access to unexpected, opaque, and complex materials and topics; a chance to inquire with others; and plenty of suspense … these turn out to be the potent ingredients.

Psychology for flourishing

In linking together areas of literature that speak to the broad concept of zest for learning, there is much that falls under the label of psychology. Within this broad field we might look at psychological traits, theories of intelligence, positive psychology and the psychology of motivation. Each of these has something to contribute. There are relationships between these fields which mean that sometimes we talk about a particular concept where it sits best.17

Psychological traits

Psychological approaches to zest (in a broad sense, not constrained to zest for learning) ex...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Chapter 1: Zest for Learning
• Chapter 2: A Framework for Zest for Learning
• Chapter 3: Cultivating Zest
• Chapter 4: Promising Practices
• Chapter 5: Brave Leadership
• Chapter 6: An A–Z of Ideas for Developing Zest
• Appendix: Signature Learning Experiences
• References
• Copyright