Cleverlands Page 24
Principle 1: Get Children Ready for Formal Learning
Children come to school at different stages of readiness. In England, children from more advantaged homes already have a head start with their vocabulary, compared to children from homes with fewer books and less conversation.219 In Finland and China, five-year-olds already have a better mathematical understanding on average than five-year-olds in England (despite the fact that the former have not yet started school).220
Common sense might tell us that the best way to help disadvantaged students catch up with their peers, and the best way to help English children catch up with the Finnish and the Chinese, would be to start teaching them to read and to count as early as possible. That might be why there are higher academic expectations of six-year-olds in England than six-year-olds in Finland,221 and more academically oriented mathematics education for preschoolers in England than in Korea222 or Japan.223 America seems to be getting in on the early-academic action too; according to recent research,224 kindergarten and preschool are becoming more academic and teacher directed, and a quarter of the teachers surveyed reported that there was no time for free play in their kindergarten classrooms.
In this instance, though, ‘common sense’ is at odds with early-years experts, economic and psychological research, and the practices of top-performing education systems. Early-years education is extremely important, but focusing heavily on specific academic skills at the expense of broader development and child-initiated activity can have long-term negative effects on motivation, social behaviour, emotional health and self-esteem,225 without having a lasting positive effect on academic outcomes.
While those children who start formal learning early sometimes outperform their later-starting peers in the first few years of school, this difference disappears,226 and occasionally reverses,227 by the time the children get to late primary school. Researchers who conducted a study on the differences in mathematical understanding between five-year-olds in England, Finland and China concluded: ‘The data also suggest that the approach implemented in English early childhood education at the time of data collection (i.e. focusing on specific number skills quite narrowly) was not necessarily the most beneficial approach for young children’s early numeracy skills development in general.’228
Children in Finland, Singapore and Shanghai don’t start formal schooling until the age of seven, and in Canada and Japan it is six. This means that children are not required to demonstrate specific academic outcomes such as reading or adding before this age, nor are early-years teachers expected to push them to get there, ready or not. By the time these outcomes are expected of the children, most have had the time and input they need to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge and understanding necessary to achieve them, allowing the class to progress together.
However, children don’t necessarily develop these skills and attitudes by themselves, so waiting to start any educational provision at all before age six would be a mistake. Developing accessible high-quality early-years programmes is well worth the investment in the long-term.229 The most effective programmes seem to be the ones that build motivation and character alongside cognitive skills;230 where there is a balance between social and cognitive development. And this cognitive development is based on developing children’s pre-academic skills, through playful learning.
To prepare children for reading this means building up their vocabulary and knowledge across domains to enable their comprehension, getting them to understand the correspondence between letters and sounds, and familiarising them with the letters of the alphabet through games and songs. There are also two types of pre-mathematical skills which children need before they start learning formal mathematics: relational skills (i.e. classification, comparison, seriation and one-to-one correspondence), and counting skills (i.e. primary understanding of amounts, counting, counting with an understanding of what the numbers correspond to, and counting on).231 Chinese and Singaporean children are better than English children at both of these,232 and are taught them in preschool through playful teaching activities (by matching, ordering and comparing different colour toy cars, for example233). Japanese teachers also arrange the environment and activities to encourage an interest in quantity and informal mathematics, and Finnish children have exposure to mathematical concepts through play-based activities in preschool too.
Preschool in all of these countries is also used as a time to get children used to being in a social environment, and to develop other important skills that come about through play – self-regulation, planning and language development. The latter is particularly important for the children of immigrant parents, who benefit the most from preschool, but are less likely to attend than their native peers.234
Lest ‘get children ready for formal learning’ be too vague, let me attempt to sum up what I am suggesting so far in a single recommendation:
Enhance children’s social and pre-academic skills through rich environments and playful learning before age six, rather than requiring specific academic outcomes from them.
But this is not all that I mean by ‘get children ready’. Once they are in school, teachers in East Asia spend a significant amount of time teaching the children routines that allow for smooth transitions between activities, such as handing back books or getting into groups. I saw a great example of this in Canada too. Every morning I spent with Marilyn, the children lined up in the playground at the sound of the bell and stumbled into the classroom. I know how hard it is to get a bunch of seven-year-olds to organise themselves having once covered a Year 3 class in England, and asked them to pack up at the end of the day; there were tears. Not so in Marilyn’s class – the children efficiently hung up their coats, unpacked their bags, handed their homework to that day’s homework monitor, and sat down unruffled and ready to start the day’s learning. This prevents the emotional disturbances that can occur during classroom transitions, and saves precious time during the subsequent weeks, months and years which can instead be spent on the objective at hand, whether that is learning about the kings and queens of England or learning to manage themselves in a group.
Take the time early on to teach children the routines.
To get children ready for learning during the day, throughout primary and lower secondary school, four out of the five systems I studied had 10–15 minute breaks between every lesson, during which the children could let off steam. In contrast to the quiet focus I observed during lessons in Japan and China, I had to step over those same children as they wrestled on the floor during their breaks, seemingly unacknowledged by their teachers (if they were there at all). As well as being good for their social development and reducing cognitive overload, it provided opportunities for physical activity too. In Finland children were outside in all weathers, (a number of Finns told me, ‘There is no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing’), and in China and Singapore they also did their morning exercises to prepare for the day.
Give children (and teachers) a 10–15 minute break between each lesson.
Finally, something that seemed effective at getting children ready for learning in Finland and Canada was the presence of multi-disciplinary teams of professionals on site (though not necessarily full-time in small schools) that would meet to discuss all children (in the case of Finland) or those in need of additional support (in Canada). Teachers and policy makers I spoke to in both places recognised that sometimes social or emotional problems were preventing children from making the most of school, but rather than using this as an excuse, they took the steps (and had the resources) to address these issues, making the most of the skills of the professionals on the team.
Resource schools with access to professionals who can address children’s non-academic needs.
Getting these foundations right, with social skills practised, pre-academic skills developed and early issues identified, sets these children up for the rest of their education, and their life.
Principle 2: Design Curricula Co
ncepts for Mastery
(and Context for Motivation)
How can George, aged 10, understand what his teacher is telling him about multiplying fractions, if he didn’t really ‘get’ fractions the last time they were taught? And how can Annie, aged 13, retain her childhood fascination with science when she’s being taught what an atom is for the third time, since half the class hasn’t covered it at primary? Avoiding these kinds of situations is just one of the reasons for having a defined sequence of knowledge and skills children ought to be taught at each grade. In Finland, Japan and Singapore this exists at the national level, and in China and Canada – so much more diverse and distributed – at the level of the province.
Of course, having a national or provincial curriculum is not an unqualified advantage; if it is of poor quality – too full, in an illogical order, overly-prescriptive – it can be harmful to children’s learning and teachers’ sanity. But if it is carefully designed and of high quality – and aligns with examinations and curricular materials – it can ensure that all children under its remit have access to key content that can help them enrich their lives, and at each stage, that they have an understanding of the concepts without which they cannot address the next topic.235 So what does this actually look like? I’ll admit now that I have not personally pored over curricula from five different countries in four different languages, but some of the features drawn out by educational researchers who have looked at what the curricula of top-performing systems have in common concur with my own conversations and observations in classrooms around the world.236
A good national/provincial curriculum should be:
Minimal – Focusing on fewer topics, but in greater depth.
High-level – Clear on what concepts and skills are required, without prescribing context or pedagogy.
Ordered – Organising concepts in a logical order, based on research into how children learn.
This could also form the basis for an excellent school curriculum, in addition to the context-rich schemes of work that would be necessary at this level. But the advantages of having it as a common national or provincial curriculum is that it establishes a curricular entitlement that is not dependent on the individual school;237 it ensures consistency, allowing for children moving schools, and it even contributes to the equity of a system.238
It needn’t mean a lack of autonomy for schools either, for two reasons. The national curriculum is not the same as the curriculum; what a school actually teaches is and ought to be so much broader than that which is prescribed239 – one reason why governments must resist the urge to keep adding more to the national curriculum to align with new initiatives or the demands of pressure groups, and instead leave the inclusion of most additional material to the school (I’ve lost count of the number of times people who don’t work in education have told me that the education system would be so much better if only they would teach ‘insert pet interest here’).
Secondly, even within the remit of a national curriculum, schools will have autonomy over how this is taught, so long as the national curriculum has stuck to the remit of being high-level and providing concepts but not contexts. A school might have to teach changes of state (the idea that materials change from solid to liquid to gas and back again as the particles they are made up of, gain or lose energy), but whether they choose to use the example of ice cream melting on a hot day, or teach it as part of a unit on what happens inside the local steel plant, is up to the teachers and their assessment of the children’s interests.
Adapting provincial curricula content in a way that is motivating for children is something they are particularly good at in Canada – I went to maths lessons involving pumpkins and science lessons in which they grew their own beansprouts in yogurt pots. When a Canadian teacher friend read over my earlier comments on the importance of subject knowledge, she wrote in red pen in the margin, ‘it won’t stick unless you make it meaningful to their lives’ – this is why it’s so important for teachers to know the children they teach as individuals. Finland’s national curriculum is adapted at two levels; at the level of the local authority teachers from different schools collaborate to create a local curriculum that is relevant to the area, and then this is further adapted in individual schools to make it relevant to the children in their care.
What closes this autonomy down is attaching too much importance to an external test; if this is the case, the freedom to interpret the national curriculum becomes irrelevant, as teachers will teach based on exam syllabi, or past papers. While Shanghai, Japan, Singapore and Finland share the principle of designing curricula concepts for mastery (Canada has too many provinces to say), the ability of their teachers to design the context for motivation varies due to the importance of external tests in their country and at their level of schooling. I wouldn’t have had to hear the story about Bird and Frog as many times as I did if questions about Bird and Frog were not in the end of term exam. All children should be entitled to the same important concepts, but for engagement and enjoyment, these ought to be taught in ways that are motivating to the children in question.
Principle 3: Support Children to Take On Challenges,
Rather than Making Concessions
If you are just to remember one principle from this book, let it be this one. It applies to parents, to teachers, to school leaders and to system leaders, and its effects can be seen in homes, classrooms, schools and whole countries.
I’ve talked quite a lot about intelligence during this book, because what we believe about intelligence is fundamental to how we behave when designing and working in educational contexts. Research suggests that intelligence develops over childhood in all but the most severe cases of intellectual disability, and that the speed and ease of development depends partly on genetic factors, and partly on the environment. What with the diminishing number of low-skill jobs due to improvements in technology, this means that it becomes not only possible but desirable to educate almost everyone to higher levels than we have done historically.
Additionally, children’s performance at school is highly correlated with their current level of intelligence, but not defined by it – teaching quality, parental support and student effort make a difference too. So even if the above weren’t true – even if your genetics entirely determined your intelligence – believing that effort could make a difference to your intelligence and subsequently working hard would still improve your school grades. Thankfully there is no need for this noble lie – the facts and the helpful beliefs match up.
At a system level, how do these countries support their children to take on challenges, and support the idea that intelligence is malleable? Of the five top-performing systems I went to, four of them had common standards that nearly all children were expected to reach, right up until the age of 15. The teachers and the parents supported less able students to reach these standards through additional teaching and tutoring, and through having high expectations of those children – ‘I’ll help you get there but you’ve got to put in the effort’ – rather than making concessions, saying ‘Don’t worry, we can’t all be good at maths’, and sending them to a different school, putting them in a different class, or giving them a different curriculum. There are, of course, some exceptions to this in the case of children with more severe special needs, where parents agree that their children might benefit from more specialist provision, but these cases are based on psychological diagnoses, rather than doing badly in school tests.
As I discovered in Finland, the research on school selection suggests that separating students into different schools at an early age leads to greater inequity and inequality in a system; a larger spread of results, with these results being more heavily determined by parental background (and immigration status240). Delaying selection seems to improve the results of lower performers, without disadvantaging high achievers,241 and in the case of Poland, a delay of school selection by just one year was estimated by the World Bank to have led to gains in PISA scores
of over 120 points, which they describe as ‘a dramatic improvement, hardly comparable to effects of any known educational policy’.242
Delay selecting children into different schools based on ability until age 15 or 16.
Of course, a delay in school selection by itself is not necessarily enough. You can have all students in the same school, but still put them into different classes based on ability, teach them less challenging things and have lower expectations of them. They didn’t do this in Finland, Canada, Shanghai or Japan. They had them all together, in mixed-ability classes, attempting the same challenging curriculum, right up until the end of lower secondary school. This works in combination with Principles 1 and 2. Because formal academic requirements only begin once most of the children have the prerequisite skills to meet them, the spread of ability isn’t as wide from the beginning, making it easier to bring everyone along with you in a class. And because there is an emphasis on mastery, fewer topics are covered, meaning that everyone has the opportunity to reach at least a minimum standard in their understanding of each topic, and those who pick it up quickly have the opportunity to explore it in greater depth.
Teach children in mixed-ability classes until 15 or 16.
Even then, unhelpful expectations about children’s potential can slip in and adversely affect children’s opportunities. Sweden, for example, has a comprehensive system and mixed-ability classes, and yet students within these classes choose individualised grade-related study tracks, depending on what grade they are aiming for.243 Those who choose the ‘pass’ track are given work that requires only lower-order thinking. The alternative, practised by Singapore (within classes), Canada, Finland, Shanghai and Japan is to expect all students to work towards the same curriculum, which is pitched at a reasonably high level, but alter the amount of help given. In-class differentiation is in the form of extra attention from the teacher or support by more able peers in class, rather than in the long-term outcome expected.