Are we Helping Early Years Children Too Much?
Guy Claxton and Becky Carlzon explain how the Learning Power Approach can be used to nurture independence, resourcefulness and resilience in Year R and beyond…
It is the beginning of the new Reception year at Sefton Park in Bristol, and teacher Becky has co-designed a lesson that will help children learn how to count accurately, and to appreciate the meaning – the ‘value’ – of the digits.
She wants the children to understand the purpose to counting and see that being able to count things is useful in play and everyday life.
But she is doing more than teach them the beginnings of maths; she is also starting them on a journey to understanding how to become more independent in their own learning, and not to shy away from sorting out challenges and problems for themselves.
To start with, Becky and her partner teacher have planned a lesson on ‘the Threeness of Three’.
To set the scene, as the children come in, they are playing a song by American folk-singer Jack Johnson called ‘Three is a magic number’.
The children sit in a circle around an array of models, pictures and paintings that the teachers had put together before the lesson to illustrate the idea of ‘three’.
There are Mobilo trucks with three sets of wheels, and paintings with three bunnies, three trees, three birds and so on.
The children are told that they are going to be learning something to do with number, and asked if they can work out what the theme of the lesson might be.
Some guess it might be about 3D shapes because there are some towers in the display. Others guess it could be 2D shapes because there are triangles and circles in some of the drawings.
Eventually one child notices what it is that links all of the objects and pictures together, and guesses they are going to be learning about the number three.
Independent learning
The children are told that they are going to use all of the Reception area, including outside, to show the grown-ups what they already know about the number three, as well as what they can find out.
They are encouraged to form pairs and talk about how they might go about it.
Becky also talks to them about how they might get distracted, and asks them what things they might do to help themselves to stay focused. She also encourages them to push themselves, and to think about how they might make the challenge “trickier for themselves”.
One child comes up with the ideas of trying to write the number three by themselves. Another gets excited by the idea of “doing lots of different sets of three”. A third suggests something really tricky: “trying to write some number sentences with three in them”.
While the pairs go off to explore and stretch themselves, Becky and her teaching assistant wander round encouraging them and giving them the occasional ‘nudge’, for example, by pushing the children who have been making different sets of three to count up how many sets they have made.
Finally, at the end of the lesson, the whole class share all the many ways they have made ‘three’ and review what they have achieved and discovered.
One pair of children have made a picture with lots of sets of ladybirds, and the whole class together counted all of the ladybirds (there were 27!). Becky points out how some of the children have been behaving like “real mathematicians” because mathematicians often count in “sets of”.
An emphasis on exploration
Some might say this is “just good teaching”, but there are things going on here that illustrate a very particular philosophy of education.
The children are not just learning things but are simultaneously learning how to design, plan, troubleshoot and review learning for themselves. That is the essence of what we call the Learning Power Approach (LPA).
The LPA reflects a worry that some ‘good teaching’ helps the children learn – but it helps them too much, so that children become too reliant on teachers and TAs to guide and rescue them.
Instead of becoming more and more independent and resourceful in their learning, they develop a greater need to be supported and reassured.
The LPA sees this as a really negative outcome of education, because when the children are grown up, they will need to be as full of initiative and resilience as they can be, in order to cope with all the complex demands of real life.
So teaching in a way that prepares them to be confident explorers and problem-solvers can’t begin too early. In fact, the earlier the better. Notice some of the characteristically LPA things that are going on in Becky’s classroom:
- the use of the song as a background clue to get them thinking;
- working in pairs to develop their ability to talk about learning and be supportive co-explorers for each other;
- an activity that gets them thinking about what the topic of the lesson might be and starts them thinking about what they already know and what they might try out;
- a scaffolded conversation about the likelihood of becoming distracted (especially outdoors), and involving the children in thinking about how they might ‘armour’ themselves against this possibility; and
- the use of language by the adults, which stimulates the children’s thinking and encourages them to use their initiative.
You’ll have spotted that Becky and her TA are doing very little direct teaching or correcting.
Their interventions are aimed at ensuring that all the children are grappling productively with the challenge and not left to flounder miserably, and also at encouraging them to be adventurous and to stretch their own capacity.
Their comments stay close to the things that the children are discovering and trying out for themselves, and gently nudge them in the direction of deeper questions and further explorations.
And the review at the end of the lesson both affirms what they have learned and gets them to appreciate their own ingenuity and resourcefulness.
The emphasis is constantly on exploring rather than ‘learning the right answer’. Accurate knowledge emerges at the same time as the children are strengthening their ability to discover and evaluate things for themselves.
The idea that children have to be sat down and taught a whole load of ‘facts’ before they can begin to think about them is nonsense. In a LPA classroom, knowledge and learning power develop happily and productively side by side.
And in such a classroom, where children are confidently thinking and exploring alongside each other, the majority of so-called ‘behaviour issues’ simply don’t arise.
Children who are engrossed in the process of challenging discovery are much less likely to become bored and fractious than those who are anxiously trying to give back the ‘right answers’ that their teachers seem to be fishing for.
Guy Claxton is Visiting Professor of Education at King’s College London. His Building Learning Power ideas have influenced teachers throughout the UK and around the world. Becky Carlzon is a primary school teacher – she blogs at learningpowerkids.com.
Guy’s new book, The Learning Power Approach: Teaching Learners to Teach Themselves (Crown House Publishing, £18.99), is available to preorder now. He and Becky are jointly writing a follow up, Powering Up Children: The Learning Power Approach to Primary Teaching, which will be published later this year.
Develop high-achieving, independent mindsets within your school
Join best-selling author Professor Guy Claxton at February’s ground-breaking Learning Power Approach Conference (6 February, London) as he showcases the new framework for the 21st century, providing you with tools to take you to real and meaningful learning. Book your place today.
