1 Pupil consultation as a key to improving teaching and learning
Teachers and pupils today might be forgiven for wondering whether, rather than entering a place of learning every working day, they are, in fact, stepping into a football stadium. Surrounded by an eager crowd of politicians, parents and employers, they are keenly aware that what happens inside the classroom is being watched, scrutinised, evaluated and publicly debated. âTargetsâ and âgoals', âperformanceâ and âleague tablesâ are the banners waved enthusiastically by education policy makers and the media and, just like football teams, teachers and pupils find their performances vilified when public expectations do not seem to have been met. It is easy to see how this model has infiltrated education: through government schemes that aim to recognise and reward the successful, through systems of inspection and measurement designed to pressure relentlessly for âhigher scoresâ and through the establishment of a competitive structure where some schools find themselves singled out as âfailingâ. The public have been captivated by the language and style of this winner-takes-all culture but, while notions of âcompetitionâ, âimprovementâ and ârewardâ are in themselves worthwhile and appropriate within certain contexts, it must be recognised that learning is far more important, complex and demanding than any game and, as a society, we cannot afford to relegate any young person to failure.
While it is clear that much remains to be done to ensure that our educational system matches up to the demands of the twenty-first century, this political drive for higher standards and greater accountability has not necessarily supported schools effectively in meeting the challenges and, as national statistics continue to confirm, too many young people leave school without the qualifications and skills they need for successful and fulfilling adult lives.
Consulting pupils: a new direction for school improvement?
If the constant barrage of change and reform in education, directed by successive governments, has not succeeded in resolving many of the pervasive problems in education, then where else can we look to find solutions? The answer is, perhaps, an obvious but often overlooked one: to find new directions for improving schools we must take as our starting point the classroom itself and explore teaching and learning through the eyes of those most closely involved â teachers and young learners. Their guidance can be used to direct our attention to the issues that need to be given priority in planning improvement. Only in this way will teachers be enabled to develop new strategies based on a deeper knowledge and firmer understanding of the complex processes of teaching and learning.
Where the objective of the investigation is to improve teaching and learning, then it is only the testimony of pupils and teachers themselves that can provide essential, first-hand evidence. Of course, other âexpert witnessesâ from a range of fields may also make important contributions to the consultation but, unlike teachers and pupils, these experts cannot offer perspectives based on direct experience. When we invite teachers and pupils to give us their accounts of teaching and learning, we are interested in more than âfactualâ testimony in the legal sense because we also want to discover more about their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, their experiences in classrooms and schools. Whilst these perceptions might not constitute admissible evidence in a court of law, in the context of an investigation aimed at improving teaching and learning, such evidence is a vital resource. It allows us to identify the things that teachers and young learners consider important and that make a difference to pupils' opportunities for successful learning.
Until fairly recently, pupils were rarely invited to bring their perspectives on teaching and learning into the development frame. Evidence has been drawn from observational studies, ethnographies, experiments and action research interventions but the researchers' perspectives have defined the boundaries of what counts as evidence. Too often, although with some very notable exceptions (for example, Martyn Hammersley, Linda Measor and Peter Woodsâ pioneering research on pupils' experiences of schooling), research has concentrated on looking in from the outside and has not focused on participants' conceptions of teaching and learning; yet it is these conceptions that form the ârealitiesâ of pupils' and teachers' working lives and understanding these realities is essential to our objective of making teaching and learning more effective.
However, although we are proposing that pupils' perspectives are worthy of attention, we do not suggest that undue weight should be given to them. We would agree with Nixon and his colleagues who have pointed out that âThe pupil testimony is not privileged as more âtrueâ than the accounts of teachers and advisers, but it provides a crucial element still too often overlookedâ (1996: 270). We also share the concern expressed by American researcher Sonia Nieto, who cautions that taking account of the pupil perspective âis not meant to suggest that their ideas should be the final and conclusive word in how schools need to changeâ; and that to place too great an emphasis on their contribution is âto accept a romantic view of students that is just as partial and condescending as excluding them completely from the discussionsâ (Nieto, 1994: 398). We are not proposing that pupils should dictate how schools are run but our research leads us to believe that practitioners and schools can benefit from tuning into pupils' perspectives.
Investigating pupils' perceptions and attitudes is not a new idea in education research but some earlier researchers adopted the view that pupils are sources of data whose behaviour and responses should simply be studied, measured and recorded. As Roche points out, there are signs that this is changing:
Increasingly a new kind of work with and writing on children is being done. There is much literature which explores how children and young people see the world, their values and priorities and the ways in which they feel themselves marginalised...
(Roche, 1999: 477)
Until recently there have been relatively few attempts to involve pupils as active participants in classroom-based research investigations and school improvement initiatives. However, as Gross argues, the benefits in adopting this type of collaborative approach are plain: âOngoing collaboration with students helps determine direction and develop emphases for specific changes toward an improved teachingâlearning situationâ (1997: 80). In the following section we consider the âgridlineâ of questions that will enable us to gain a clearer picture of pupils' perspectives on teaching and learning in school.
A question of learning
Asking questions is, of course, a familiar part of classroom life and teachers use the technique of asking questions in a variety of ways during lessons. They may, for example, ask a question to check whether pupils have understood instructions or to prompt pupils' thinking about problems and possible solutions. Pupils are also likely to ask teachers questions, perhaps to gain more information about what they are supposed to do or to request help in understanding something they have not yet grasped. But there are some important questions that, somewhat surprisingly, are rarely heard in the classroom and these are questions concerning the learning process itself. Consider for a moment the following questions:
- How do you learn best?
- What helps you to learn?
- What gets in the way of your learning?
- Why do you find it more difficult to learn certain things?
- Do you learn better through particular styles of teaching?
- What encourages you to work harder at your learning?
- How do you know if you have succeeded in learning something?
Some of these questions are quite difficult to answer and need to be explored through discussion where different perspectives are brought into play. Although the issues and topics under investigation are likely to vary according to the focus of the enquiry or the school's particular interests or concerns, pupil consultation is principally about gathering information to help illuminate such questions.
For some years we have been working on investigations that explore what pupils have to say about teaching and learning and the conditions of learning in their schools. Our research has also looked at how schools have developed different kinds of strategies based on pupil consultation. These initiatives have highlighted some of the potential benefits that these processes can offer to teachers and schools. But what do we mean when we refer to these two terms, âpupil consultationâ and âpupil participationâ?
What do we mean by âpupil consultationâ?
Consultation is defined as âthe action of taking counsel together; deliberation or conferenceâ and this notion of âtaking counselâ suggests that the parties involved in the consultation process have been invited to contribute because they have relevant and important views and information to share. Pupil consultation, therefore, rests on the principle that pupils can bring something worthwhile to discussions about schooling. The term can be applied to any research or development strategy or research approach that invites pupils to talk about their experiences as learners in school. Pupil consultation is nested within the broader principle of pupil participation.
What do we mean by âpupil participationâ?
The principle of pupil participation requires that pupils should be given an active and direct involvement in school matters, at some level. Although all pupils âparticipateâ in the basic sense that they attend a school, receive teaching instruction and have their name on a register, the term âpupil participationâ suggests inclusion, or membership, of a community, in which pupils are valued and respected contributors. The principles of democracy and citizenship are also linked with the notion of pupil participation, as Gerison Lansdown suggests:
Participation can be defined as the process of sharing in decisions which affect one's life and the life of the community in which one lives . . . In the field of education in this country there is a great deal of discussion about the need to teach children responsibility, citizenship and respect for others, but these skills and attitudes are not ones which can be acquired merely through the taught curriculum. The understanding, competence and commitment to democratic participation can only be achieved through practice and experience.
(1995: 17)
Researching pupils' perspectives
When we are looking for answers to the problems affecting our society we often fail to recognise that how things are is often less important than how people think â or perceive â things are. In other words, people's conceptions of the world around them are profoundly significant, both to themselves and to others, because it is these perceived ârealitiesâ that give shape and meaning to people's lives and actions. Indeed, as Thomas and Thomas proposed, âIf men define situations as real, they are real in their consequencesâ (1928: 572). Recognition of this key point has profound implications for our endeavours to improve what happens in schools for, unless we look at the experiences of teaching and learning through the eyes of young learners, we, like Cervantesâ Don Quixote, may be in some danger of tilting at windmills. We may be wasting our time and energy wrangling with issues that may, from an outside perspective, appear to be real, âsolidâ concerns but which are, in fact, illusions. As Michael Apple suggests: â. . . to understand schools one must go beyond what educational practitioners and theorists think is going on . . .â ([1979] 1990: 141, our emphasis). The issues currently attracting policy makers' and media attention â such as truancy, male underachievement and classroom discipline â may look rather different when viewed through the lens of pupil perspectives. There has, for example, been much debate about why boys are underachieving but our pupil data suggest that factors influencing pupil achievement are more complex than this simple question may at first suggest. Although more boys than girls appear to be affected, the problem of underachievement may not be wholly ascribed to the condition of âbeing maleâ as some commentators have argued. We may gain a deeper understanding of these problems and underlying factors if we address a broader set of questions with all young learners:
- How can lessons be made more engaging?
- Do pupils feel that what they are learning is relevant and important?
- Are schools providing conditions for learning that enable all learners to succeed?
Our research with primary and secondary schools across the UK has demonstrated that pupils of all ages can show a remarkable capacity to discuss their learning in a considered and insightful way, although they may not always be able to articulate their ideas in the formal language of education. We have also observed that, in some cases, the opportunity to participate in a learning-focused dialogue may help to improve pupils' attitudes towards teachers and schools. There is also evidence to suggest that it may also have a beneficial effect on pupils' performance (for example, see Watkins, 2001). But why should this process of dialogue â of thinking and talking about learning â affect pupils' progress? Feedback from teachers on pupil consultation strategies offers a partial answer to this question. Teachers have reported that listening to what pupils say has helped them to understand how pupils learn most effectively and led to them reconsider, and make changes to, aspects of their own teaching practice:
Encouraging pupils to explicitly engage in [such] a self-questioning exercise helps them to begin to think about and take control of their own learning. It can also provide the teacher with the valuable information needed for differentiating work and developing effective support activities for individual learners who may have special needs.
(Doran and Cameron, 1995: 17)
As some of the school profiles presented in this book suggest, where teachers have made improvements to their practice, based on information drawn from pupil consultation, they have reported positive outcomes in terms of pupils' attitudes and behaviour and, in some cases, also of their performance.
However, another, rather different, answer lies in the potential impact on young learners themselves, as observed by Mike Jelly and colleagues, who consulted pupils as part of their research with special needs schools. These researchers found clear evidence that consulting young learners about their learning enhanced self-esteem and confidence, promoted stronger engagement and motivation to learn and encouraged pupils to become more active members of the school community ( Jelly et al., 2000). As pupil consultation becomes used more widely, and the impact of these initiatives is monitored and evaluated, there is increasing evidence of a range of positive outcomes for pupils, for teachers and for schools.
Improving learning
Giving young learners opportunities to think and talk about aspects of teaching and learning can have a direct impact on pupils' meta-cognitive development and on their understanding of how they learn (see, for example, Pramling, 1990, Quicke, 1994). Learning-focused dialogue is particularly useful both as a strategy for identifyin...
