The Children Know How To Improve Your Lessons, If You’re Prepared To Really Listen
It might take practice to get over the ego trip and take on board what kids give you an answer you’re not expecting, but doing so can make your school better
- by Rosie Palmer
Imagine this scenario. You have a child in your class who, no matter what you do, will not be enthused about school. No teacher has yet managed to light a fire in him. He is compliant and well behaved, but gives up easily and is not switched on to learning. He is one of your ‘invisible middle’.
You have a brainwave. Instead of trying to guess what is going on for him, you ask. You talk to him about his experience of school and his self-perception as a learner. You think about the conditions for effective learning and decide to focus your questioning on social and emotional wellbeing, metacognitive skills and self-regulation. You listen openly and don’t rush to fill in silences.
The boy reluctantly starts to talk. He describes learning as something done to him; his language is passive. You discuss his answers with a colleague and together interpret that his responses show a lack of enjoyment and agency in learning. You resist the urge to rush into action, and instead talk to him again to check your understanding. You slowly fill in a richer picture of someone who experiences debilitating fear when he gets stuck. You start to explore your hunches with a colleague as to why that might be so and what you, as his teacher, are contributing to the situation. You wonder about how your language and focus on success in tests could be discouraging admitting mistakes.
Following some internet research and a chat to colleagues in other schools, you find a powerful visual, ‘the learning pit’, and build it into your lessons over some weeks, along with a reflective journal for the children to record their feelings about learning. You start to notice changes in the boy, and want to check that your instincts are right.
When you talk to him about his learning again, his language indicates a greater sense of agency and a new ease in being stuck. He says “I understand how my brain works and I can challenge it”. His test marks have improved and other teachers comment on the visible change in him. You feel buoyed, empowered and you᾿re itching to have similar conversations with each child in your class. And so it goes on…
Kids know best
This is what happened at Hampton Vale Primary School in Peterborough after the staff started to use the Spirals of Enquiry approach to transform their practice. Spirals is a collaborative enquiry-based practice for school improvement and innovation, founded on the premise that – given the right conditions – people are naturally curious problem solvers, and that there is no end point to learning (nor to learning about learning), which spirals on and on. From these foundations, it encourages educators to repeatedly ask, “What is going on for the learner?” and “How do we know?”, and from these insights take evidence-informed action.
What makes Spirals distinctive is that it encourages teachers to discover what᾿s going on for the learner not through test scores and written work (although that can play an important part), but by asking carefully crafted questions of learners to find out their unique perspectives on how and what they are learning. Using these conversations between teacher and student as the catalyst for transformation is powerful because it uncovers the real, often unexpected, barriers to learning. It also fosters a human connection that motivates and sustains change in teacher practice.
In an educational policy climate that favours a mechanistic input / output model of learning according to predetermined ability (not to mention heavy tinkering when the mechanism goes awry) it is no surprise that Spirals was developed in a system quite different from our own: British Columbia.
Global success
It began 15 years ago when Drs Linda Kaser and Judy Halber were working with teachers within the Aboriginal Enhancement Schools Network to improve educational quality and equity for Aboriginal students, who had historically underachieved across the province. They distilled and refined a six-stage framework out of the processes that teachers were using to structure their improvement and innovation work. Gradually, through a combination of regular teacher meetings, informal networks and a lot of hard graft, Spirals grew; currently, it is being used by around 70 per cent (1650) of primary schools in British Columbia, one of the highest-performing jurisdictions in the world. Its success has been infectious.
Indeed, interest is growing globally in how to support sustained teacher professional learning with greater impact, as it is widely acknowledged that this is the key to system-level improvement. After seeing the results in British Columbia, schools and districts within New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Scotland and now England have begun experimenting with Spirals of Enquiry in their own contexts.
In England, the work is supported by the Whole Education Network which, working with Drs Kaser and Halbert, has developed a programme of support for schools to embed Spirals into their culture and practice. With a shared focus on narrowing achievement gaps, 60 primaries and secondaries are now using the approach and already seeing a difference in their children’s outcomes – both academic and beyond – and also on teacher wellbeing.
Early evaluation of the work in England has confirmed that Spirals embeds factors we already know to be important for successful professional learning: a focus on learner outcomes; purposeful collaboration and networking; leadership support; sustained time commitment; recognition of different school contexts; the importance of external support. What is distinctive and presents a potential paradigm shift is how it starts, and sticks with, the student’s experience of learning as the guide and anchor for new practice development and professional learning. Interventions are then fitted to the children and their learning needs, not the other way around.
If you are interested in joining the next cohort of Primary Schools using Spirals of Enquiry please get in touch with Rosie Palmer on rosie@wholeeducation.org. Discounted places are available to members of the Whole Education Network, which is a non-profit organisation.
BECOME A BETTER TEACHER
Spiral of Enquiry has six key phases. Here᾿s how they work
1. Scanning – what’s going on for our learners? How do we know? 2. Focusing – what shall we prioritise as our focus for now? 3. Developing a hunch – what is creating this situation? 4. New professional learning – how and where can we learn more about what to do? 5. Taking action – what will we do differently? 6. Checking – have we made enough of a difference?
