|
|
Enquiring Minds: the story so far
An interview with Ben Williamson, Learning Researcher, Futurelab
By Kim Thomas |
In the past few years we've heard plenty about 'personalised learning' from the Government and others, but there are still a lot of people who aren't completely sure what it means or whether it will work in practice. Rising to the challenge, Futurelab last year launched Enquiring Minds - a three-year project that attempts to put personalisation into practice by helping children become more involved in decisions about what and how they learn. Since September 2005, Futurelab researchers have been working with teachers at two Bristol schools, Gordano and Ashton Park, to discuss what it means to involve children in their own learning, and to devise strategies for making it happen.
In the first year of the project, Futurelab ran 16 one-day workshops with teachers from the schools. "We didn't want to impose something on the schools; we wanted to develop something with the schools," says Ben Williamson, a learning researcher at Futurelab. "The aim of the workshops was to introduce the teachers to the overall rationale. We worked with them to develop some experiments so that each of them was experimenting within their own subject areas." Some of the English teachers, for example, tried out group work with their pupils, while one maths teacher tried a completely different approach from his usual one: "Rather than going into a classroom and telling kids what problem they're going to be working on, and working them through the formula, he just set them a very broad problem, and told them, 'There are some clues I can give you but I want you to work out what the formula is or what the rule is. Have a go at working it out in reverse.' His observation was that the kids really enjoyed being given a bit more responsibility."
The children taking part are from Year 8 (Ashton Park) and Year 7 pupils (Gordano): "At Gordano, they thought this would be a really good way to help introduce these Year 7s into secondary school, and give them something that other kids in previous years hadn't had - the opportunity to choose their own direction and topic of study."
As well as the workshops for teachers, Futurelab ran two one-day sessions with pupils from both schools. The content of the days was designed by teachers, and involved giving pupils a broad issue to discuss, such as children's health or the local park: "The idea was to explore children's ideas, their experiences of these things and begin to generate some questions and problems to investigate."
The project has just entered its second year. So what's happening now? At the beginning of the autumn term, says Ben, the schools have allocated two tutor groups to the project. Each group will spend a double period a week on Enquiring Minds. The teachers taking part come from a cross-section of subjects, including maths, science, English, modern languages and food technology. The idea is to move away from the heavily prescriptive National Curriculum and towards subjects, and ways of learning, that the children themselves are interested in: "The National Curriculum is heavy with content that kids have to learn, fixed bodies of knowledge that they have to memorise and regurgitate in exam conditions. What we're looking at, and what the teaching profession is looking for, is more transferable skills. If we can allow children to identify problems themselves and to have some skills at their disposal that they know can be employed in a range of areas, that's going to help them both in other subjects and beyond, in further education or in employment."
The aim is not, he points out, to allow children complete freedom about what they learn: "Kids have certain expectations about school and what classrooms are like. They might not necessarily like it but giving them freedom can also lose them. They need high levels of support. We're certainly not getting rid of teachers - we're talking about needing really flexible teachers who can support children in multiple different ways. That naive assumption that if you let kids come up with their own ideas they'll love it is misguided. We have to find ways of really supporting them to identify things that interest them and that surprise them as well."
Technology is playing an important part in Enquiring Minds. A lot of current educational software is very poor, says Ben, and is often nothing much more than an electronic textbook with a little bit of interactivity added. As a result of funding from Microsoft, the schools have been equipped with video cameras and digital cameras so that the children have access to technology in every Enquiring Minds session. The idea is to explore the ways in which technology can connect children's experience outside school with the learning they do inside it. Some of this is being done through social software, such as blogs and wikis: "Some children are using blogs as forms of learning diaries. It's a space for children to record what they've done, to save examples of their work and create a diary or portfolio of their development through the project."
The wikis are being used as a way of enabling children to work together on projects, such as helping each other with homework, developing a jointly-written and jointly-edited script for a school performance or writing collaborative book reviews: "It has proved exciting for the teachers because it's something social - it extends what you can do in the classroom rather than just being a pretty front-end."
The hope is that Enquiring Minds will have a reach beyond the two schools currently involved in the project. By the end of the second year, says Ben, the aim is to have produced a handbook, in collaboration with the teachers involved, that will provide help and advice to other schools interested in setting up their own schemes. The researchers are also talking to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) about the project, and hope to supply its network of innovation both with good practice case studies and examples of the things that can get in the way of school transformation.
Ben expects the year ahead to be a bumpy ride: some children, he says, thrive in a more structured environment and will find the new flexibility quite challenging. Others will really love it. "The big point is that we're at the beginning of a long trial of something quite experimental so we don't expect it all to go swimmingly straight away. What the teachers are doing is taking a risk with their own practice," he says. A year from now, we'll know if it's paid off. Watch this space.
Links
www.enquiringminds.org.uk
October 2006
|
|
