Improving Learning How to Learn

Classrooms, Schools and Networks

Mary James, Robert McCormick, Paul Black, Patrick Carmichael, Mary-Jane Drummond, Alison Fox, John MacBeath, Bethan Marshall, David Pedder, Richard Procter, Sue Swaffield, Joanna Swann, Dylan Wiliam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134138425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning how to learn is an essential preparation for lifelong learning. Whilst this is widely acknowledged by teachers, they have lacked a rich professional knowledge base from which they can teach their pupils how to learn.

This book makes a major contribution to the creation of such a professional knowledge base for teachers by building on previous work associated with 'formative assessment' or 'assessment for learning' which has a strong evidence base, and is now being promoted nationally and internationally. However, it adds an important new dimension by reporting the conditions within schools, and across networks of schools, that are conducive to the promotion, in classrooms, of learning how to learn as an extension of assessment for learning.

There is a companion book, Learning How to Learn in Classrooms: Tools for schools (also available from Routledge), which provides practical resources for those teachers looking to put into practice the principles covered in this book.

Part I
What is the issue?

Chapter 1*
Promoting learning how to learn through assessment for learning

This book is based on a development and research project that investigated how learning how to learn might be promoted in schools using assessment for learning as a starting point. This chapter sets the scene by exploring the reasons for the growth of interest in learning [how] to learn and describing briefly what the project set out to do. It also clarifies the project’s use of important concepts and attempts to answer some questions, such as: What do we mean by learning? What is assessment for learning? What is learning autonomy? What is learning how to learn, and is it different from learning to learn? What is the contribution of ‘assessment for learning’ to ‘learning how to learn’?

The importance of learning how to learn in the twenty-first century

The idea of ‘learning how to learn’, or, more commonly, ‘learning to learn’, has been around for a long time but it has become especially popular recently because it is felt to be important for lifelong learning in the twenty-first century. The assumption is that in a rapidly developing world in which the creation of knowledge increases exponentially, the crucial resource in ‘knowledge economies’ is the ability of people to respond flexibly and creatively to demands for new knowledge, skills and dispositions in continuously changing social and economic contexts. Some of what has traditionally been learned at school may become redundant or irrelevant by the time that pupils enter the workforce; some knowledge may even need to be ‘unlearned’ as new knowledge supersedes old knowledge. In this context, development of a capability to learn new things, throughout life, becomes essential.

But education for economic growth in increasingly globalised and competitive markets is only part of the story. The benefits and purposes of learning go beyond the enhancement of individual and national economic productivity. This has, of course, been recognised from Plato and Aristotle onwards, although during the 1980s and 1990s both Conservative and New Labour governments in the UK focused on the demands of the economy, reflecting trends elsewhere, especially in the USA. This contributed to the language of markets permeating the world of schools: educational aims and goals became ‘targets’; parents became ‘consumers’; the curriculum was ‘delivered’; and ‘choice’ was a key value. These concepts are still pervasive but there is growing evidence that they are now being moderated by cross-party concerns for social justice and individual and social well-being – at least at the level of political rhetoric.

This policy shift is illustrated by the fact that the UK Government saw the need to establish a Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning (http://www.learningbenefits.net/), which has subsequently identified ‘social productivity’ as a key framework to set alongside ‘economic productivity’. Individual health and well-being; family functioning; community cohesion and flourishing; social cohesion, economic growth and equality, are all identified as contributing to ‘social productivity’. In other words, learning is seen to benefit the individual, the family, the community and the nation. Feinstein (2006, p. 4) argues:

In a globalising world with ever increasing levels of technological development and intensification of economic pressures, it is vital that the education system equips children and adults to withstand the economic, cultural and technological challenges they face. Technical and academic skills are essential for this, but … so are features of personal development such as resilience, self-regulation, a positive sense of self and personal and social identity. The capability of individuals to function as civic agents with notions of personal responsibility, tolerance and respect depends on these wider features of self as well as on the interaction with others in schools, workplaces, communities, neighbourhoods and through the media and other channels.

This has striking resonance with the Every Child Matters agenda in the UK (HM Government, 2003) which highlights the importance of the following five outcomes of the education system:

• Being healthy

• Staying safe

• Enjoying and achieving

• Making a positive contribution

• Achieving economic well-being.

However, as Feinstein also points out (2006, p. 5) there is a tension between meeting these broad-ranging objectives and focusing on the basic skills and qualifications which have been the major thrust of contemporary policy. It is possible to argue that people who are developing well in these broader terms are better equipped to develop core academic skills, and vice versa, but it is equally possible that these outcomes are in conflict.

Learning how to learn can be thought of as a process of learning which enables the learner to know how best to go about learning other things, including school subjects but also other valued forms of knowledge, skills, attitudes and capability. The development of learning how to learn strategies and dispositions fits well with the idea that education for the twenty-first century should be concerned with building intellectual and social capital for the benefit of individuals and society in a changing world. (We discuss ideas about ‘capital’ more fully in Chapter 2.) This might explain why, since the turn of the century, there has been a plethora of initiatives concerned with different aspects of learning to learn. For example, in the UK, the Campaign for Learning established an action research project with schools (see http://www.campaign-for-learning.org.uk/projects/L2L/l2lindex.htm), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded a seminar series on ‘Knowledge and Skills for Learning to Learn’ which produced a book (Moseley et al., 2005), and the think-tank DEMOS published the results of a working group in a booklet About Learning (DEMOS, 2005). In Finland, researchers at the University of Helsinki developed an instrument to assess learning to learn (Hautamäki, et al., 2002); and, in response to the Lisbon Agreement, the European Commission set up a ‘Learning to Learn Expert Group’ to make recommendations on the development of an indicator to compare the learning to learn capabilities of 15-year-olds in European Union countries.

The ESRC TLRP Learning How to Learn (LHTL) Project

This book is the result of the work of researchers, schools and local authorities in England, who, stimulated by similar concerns to those described above, worked together from 2001 to 2005 on a major development and research project funded by the ESRC within the UK-wide Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). Part I of the book provides the background and an introduction to what follows. Part II provides an overview of what we found out, including short case studies from schools that illustrate some of the most interesting developments and issues. Part III summarises the main themes and arguments and draws out implications for practice and policy. A more detailed account of the methods we used to carry out the research can be found in James et al. (2006a), although there is also a summary in the Appendix. The book is conceived as a ‘gateway’ which directs readers to other project publications and resources where more detail can be found on particular aspects of the work.

Background and rationale

While the rhetorical power of learning how to learn (LHTL) was already considerable at the time when we initiated the project, there was little clarity or consensus about what LHTL is, how it can be promoted in classrooms, what challenges it poses for teachers, or how the teacher development that might be necessary can be supported through knowledge creation and sharing within schools and across networks. We wanted to find out more about these issues so we began by articulating a number of assumptions, or premises, derived from our previous research and our reading of existing literature, which we then set out to investigate in our new project.

We identified four such premises. First, we thought that practices likely to promote LHTL would overlap with, and build upon, those associated with assessment for learning (AfL). These include clarifying learning goals and criteria, reflecting on learning, acting on formative feedback and promoting peer- and self-assessment. Members of the research team have considerable experience of research on assessment for learning so we wanted to examine this link, especially the shift from the somewhat teacher-centred approach of AfL to the more pupil-centred approach that learning how to learn implies. We were especially interested in the potential of LHTL to develop autonomous learners.

Second, evidence for the effectiveness of AfL is derived mainly from carefully controlled but small-scale experiments which have involved intensive support to teachers. If these innovations are to be scaled-up and sustained across the system, they will have to grow with much less support. Conditions for the creation and spread of knowledge and practice would be crucial to their successful implementation. We expected that the professional development of teachers and the organisational structures and cultural processes that support and enhance teachers’ own learning would be crucial.

This insight led to our third premise: that LHTL should not be seen as an idea with relevance only to the education of pupils, but it should also be central, if it is as powerful as it is claimed, to the learning of teachers, individually and collectively within networks, and to the organisational learning of schools.

Our fourth premise was recognition that LHTL practices, whether applying to pupil or teacher learning, were still novel and would need to be stimulated in most state-maintained schools notwithstanding the fact that, during the course of our work, the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) introduced AfL into its National Strategy frameworks, supported by materials and money for consultants. The results of these initiatives were still unknown so we judged that we needed to do a minimum level of development work, consistent with what was achievable within the normal resources of schools. We expected that the level of engagement of schools with our project would be influential but, in schools where many initiatives interact, we would need to treat this as just one variable among many. Indeed, we were particularly interested in how schools coped with multiple initiatives and whether, for instance, they treated them separately, combined them in some way, or reconstructed ideas from different initiatives into some coherent whole, based on underlying principles. So, we proposed to investigate the way that project ideas ‘landed’ in schools, what happened to them and why, what we could learn from this about the quality of the ideas, how they were engineered into practice by teachers and scho...

Table of contents

• Improving Learning TLRP
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I What is the issue?
• Part II What does the research tell us?
• Part III What are the overall implications?
• Appendix How the research was carried out
• References
• Index