The Learning Power Approach

Teaching learners to teach themselves (The Learning Power series)

Guy Claxton

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781785832451
• eBook ISBN: 9781785833106
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In The Learning Power Approach: Teaching learners to teach themselves Guy Claxton sets out the design principles of a pedagogical formula that aims to strengthen students' learning muscles and develop their independence, initiative, determination, and love of learning. Foreword by Carol S. Dweck. Learning is learnable! Educators can explicitly teach not just content, knowledge, and skills, but also the positive habits of mind that will better prepare students to flourish both in school and in later life. And as 'traditionalists' fight for rigour and knowledge, and 'progressives' defend the increasing focus on character and well-being, Guy Claxton's Learning Power Approach (LPA) brings resolution to this phoney and unnecessary war by offering teachers a win-win pedagogical formula that delivers good academic results while simultaneously turbocharging students' independence, initiative, and love of learning. In this groundbreaking book Guy distils fifteen years' experience with his influential Building Learning Power method to provide a set of design principles for strengthening students' learning muscles, and together with a wealth of practical strategies and the supporting evidence that underpins them details the small tweaks to daily practice that will help teachers attend more closely to the ways in which they can shape their students' learning dispositions and attitudes. Complemented by engaging and informative classroom examples of the LPA in action and drawing from research into the fields of mindset, metacognition, grit, and collaborative learning The Learning Power Approach describes in detail the suite of beliefs, values, attitudes, and habits of mind that go in to making up learning power, and offers a thorough explanation of what its intentions and guiding principles are. Furthermore, in order to help those who are just setting out on their LPA journey, Guy presents teachers with an attractive menu of customisable strategies and activities to choose from as they begin to embed the LPA principles into their own classroom culture, and also includes at the end of each chapter a Wondering section that serves to prompt reflection, conversation, and action among teachers. Suitable for teachers and leaders in all educational settings, The Learning Power Approach carefully lays the groundwork for a series of books to follow that are specifically tailored to primary teaching, secondary teaching, and school leadership.

Chapter 1

The Origins of the Learning Power Approach

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mahatma Gandhi

It wasn’t until I was working on my doctorate in cognitive psychology that I began to unlearn to be taught. DPhil supervision in the Oxford University Department of Experimental Psychology was, in the early 1970s, a very loose affair. I had three supervisors over the course of the four years it took me to complete my thesis, all of whom practised a form of benign neglect. It was entirely down to me to make an appointment to see them, and, when I did, the response was usually some form of “very interesting – what do you plan to do next?” What guidance I got came mostly from protracted coffee-break conversations with other graduate students, and especially from conversations with the three young bloods with whom I shared an office, Stephen, Nigel, and Roger.

We read and argued. We thought up and carried out many experiments that never saw the light of day. And in the process, we were rehabilitating our learning faculties. We were learning to be curious, and to develop and discipline that curiosity through critical thinking and wide reading. We were developing longer-term interests and stretching our willingness to persist in the face of difficulty and confusion. We were learning to collaborate and discuss, to disagree robustly while remaining friends, and to reflect critically and fruitfully. We were learning to be creative and imaginative, dreaming up possible theories to explain whatever we were interested in. We taught ourselves to design and critique experiments and to pick holes in our own and everyone else’s arguments. We made dozens of mistakes and learned to learn from them. Above all, we were learning to trust our own minds: to believe that that we wondered was worth wondering, what we thought was worth thinking. We were learning to develop and rely on our own (collective and individual) resources. We were regaining the confidence – which we had all had as small children – to dive in, have a go, follow our noses, and engage in trial and error (lots of error), but honing those attitudes into sharp, sophisticated research skills. We were learning to be powerful learners. (And we all went on to become productive and successful academics.)

It was a challenging, uncomfortable, and exciting time. We had to break free of all the habits and expectations that our previous education had embedded in our minds. We had to give up expecting a teacher to design learning for us, rescue us when the going got tough, tell us the “right” answers, or train us in how to write an A-grade essay. In the absence of that benign, authoritative, guiding teacherly presence, we had to learn how to become our own teachers. And so I will always be grateful to my supervisors for their neglect.

When I left Oxford I imagined a career as a psychology academic, but, to pay the bills, I took a temporary job teaching psychology at the University of London Institute of Education. I quickly discovered that the real-world challenges of helping people learn to become schoolteachers were more satisfying, and indeed more intellectually interesting, than designing finicky little laboratory experiments – so I have never left the world of education. And those earlier experiences of education – of learning, and then eventually unlearning, to be taught – have shaped my work ever since.

It quickly dawned on me that everyone – not just academics – needs those powers of confidence, curiosity, and imagination that I had been strengthening at Oxford. No artist, no engineer, no plumber, no care worker is going to be followed throughout their lives by a kindly teacher marking their work and showing them how to close the gap between their current performance and a more advanced form of expertise (like passing an exam). If I had become a chef instead of a prof, I think I would still have needed those abilities.

Admittedly, in some workplaces there are line managers, annual appraisals, and learning and development departments offering some advice and training. But if we are going to take advantage of those offerings to grow our expertise, we will need a mindset that has the confidence and enthusiasm to learn on our own. Even more, if we are to craft “trajectories of excellence” through life – as a parent, a lawyer, an athlete, or a gardener – we will have to design and manage those learning journeys for ourselves. We will need to notice what it is we need to get better at, and to think about how best to acquire the knowledge and skill we currently lack.

When you look at traditional education, we don’t seem to be doing very well at turning out those independent thinkers and learners. Of course, some people turn out to be powerful learners despite their schooling, but many more do not. Their minds are shaped for the worse by their time in classrooms. No one, to my knowledge, has ever gone into teaching saying, “My passionate commitment is to do everything in my power to turn out young people who are apathetic, passive, extrinsically motivated, dependent, dogmatic, timid, fragile, and credulous.” However, I have seen far too many schools that have unwittingly developed exactly these dysfunctional attitudes – in high as well as low achievers. Under pressure to raise grades, they have felt obliged to teach in a way that creates such closed and anxious minds. They may bemoan the lack of creativity, initiative, or entrepreneurship in today’s young people, yet respond by trying to paste some special activities over the top of routine teaching methods that are the real culprits. Not surprisingly, such sticking plasters are largely ineffective.

Such schools are neither run nor staffed by bad people. As I say, no one in their right mind sets out to create these attitudes. Yet these attitudes are the very antitheses of the mindsets that today’s young people are going to need.

Apathetic means you are lacking in curiosity and wonder.	Instead of apathetic, you will need to be curious.
Passive means you are uninterested in learning unless required to engage in it by someone else.	Instead of passive, you will need to be proactive.
Extrinsically motivated means you are interested only in getting marks, grades, and praise for what you have learned; not in the glow of satisfaction from having mastered something tricky or produced something you are personally proud of.	Instead of extrinsically motivated, you will need to be intrinsically motivated.
Dependent means you are unable to engage in learning unless constantly instructed, reassured, and corrected by a teacher.	Instead of dependent, you will need to be independent-minded.
Dogmatic means you are addicted to right answers and unable to think about complicated or uncertain things that aren’t black and white.	Instead of dogmatic, you will need to be thoughtful and open-minded.
Timid means being so frightened of making mistakes that you are unadventurous and conservative in your approach to learning, willing only to tackle things you already believe you can be successful at.	Instead of timid, you will need to be adventurous.
Fragile means you are likely to get upset or go to pieces if you get confused or don’t get good grades.	Instead of fragile, you will need to be robust and resilient.
Credulous means you accept uncritically whatever authoritative-sounding statements come your way.	Instead of credulous, you will need to be critical and sceptical of what you hear and read.

Until recently, there was a prevalent view that chasing grades and building mental capacities were somehow at odds with each other. Without really thinking about it, some educators thought they had to choose. Am I going to go for the grades, in which case I have to adopt a rather didactic, teacher-directed style, or am I going to try to build those elusive “21st century skills”, in which case the grades might suffer? This either/or thinking is an example of what we will call limiting assumptions – beliefs that we may not even recognise as beliefs, but that limit our horizons and aspirations: our sense of what is possible. And what is possible, according to the research, is to teach in a way that hits both targets: higher grades and positive, empowering attitudes towards learning itself. The Learning Power Approach is about turning this possibility into a day-to-day reality – in every school in the world.

And what is possible, according to the research, is to teach in a way that hits both targets: higher grades and positive, empowering attitudes towards learning itself.

Gradually the idea of “learning power” was born, and I developed it through a number of books: Live and Learn in 1984, Teaching to Learn in 1990, and Wise Up: The Challenge of Lifelong Learning in 1999, in which I brought together all the research that underpins the idea of learning power. A friend of mine, Graham Powell, who was working as a professional development adviser to teachers at the time, read Wise Up and suggested I boil it down into a practical book for teachers, so in 2002 Building Learning Power was published by a small British education provider, TLO Limited (TLO stood for The Learning Organisation). For the next 12 years, I worked closely with TLO to develop practical training and resources for teachers that would help them put the ideas into practice in their classrooms.

Though I am no longer closely associated with TLO, and my own thoughts have moved on, I think Building Learning Power (BLP) remains an excellent example of what I am calling here the Learning Power Approach (LPA). There are now thousands of schools around the world that have put BLP into action. Many hundreds of these are scattered around the United Kingdom, but there are also chains of English-speaking schools in South Africa and Argentina; a network of schools in Ireland; a cluster of rural primary schools in the forests of Silesia in Poland; early childhood education centres across New Zealand; groups of independent schools in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia; and international schools in Amsterdam, Budapest, Dubai, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, Suzhou in China, and Santiago in Chile. (The work of some of these is described in a book that Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer, and I published a few years ago called Expansive Education.1) My colleagues and I are now developing Learning Power International to coordinate and strengthen the spread of the LPA around the globe.

As we researched more, we naturally discovered earlier pioneers who had been thinking along the same lines, as well as a variety of other groups around the world, especially in the United States, who had been developing very similar – or apparently similar – approaches. I divide those approaches into four categories: nuclear family, godparents, friends and neighbours, and near misses.

Nuclear Family

The nuclear family – those approaches that exemplify the LPA most clearly – include several of the approaches that have come out of Harvard University’s Project Zero, especially those originated by David Perkins and his colleagues. There is the Intellectual Character/Visible Thinking initiative, now led by Ron Ritchhart, and the work on Studio Thinking, focusing on learning habits of mind through arts education, led by Lois Hetland and colleagues. Also influenced by Perkins and his co-director of Project Zero, Howard Gardner, there is what is now known as EL Education, originally Expeditionary Learning, led by Ron Berger, which focuses on the development of a craftsman-like approach to learning in all learners. There is the pioneering Habits of Mind approach, originated by Art Costa and his long-time collaborator Bena Kallick. There is Chris Watkins’s elegant work on the powerful effect of getting students to tell their own stories of learning, and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The Learning Power Approach
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Foreword by Carol S. Dweck
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Origins of the Learning Power Approach
• Chapter 2: What Is Learning?
• Chapter 3: What Exactly Is the Aim of the Learning Power Approach?
• Chapter 4: How Do I Get Started?
• Chapter 5: Why Does Learning Power Matter?
• Chapter 6: What Is Learning Power Made of?
• Chapter 7: Learning Power in Action
• Chapter 8: Design Principles of the LPA Classroom
• Chapter 9: What Is the Evidence for the Learning Power Approach?
• Chapter 10: Distinctions and Misconceptions
• Chapter 11: Joining the Culture Club
• Bibliography
• Resources
• Publishers’ Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright