6 February 2024

In this episode, UK cognitive scientist Professor Guy Claxton explores the crucial connection between learner agency and effective learners and how educators can support this in their classroom. We sat down with Professor Claxton fresh from a live online workshop he facilitated with almost 600 students across South Australia.

Show Notes

Professor Guy Claxton

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach; a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I am joined by a very special guest. An international man of great ability and expertise, Professor Guy Claxton.

He is a cognitive scientist. He's written more than 30 books on psychology and education. He's a man with a double first in natural sciences from Cambridge University and a doctorate in experimental psychology from Oxford. That's a lot of stuff there.

Professor Claxton, thanks for joining us.

Guy Claxton: Not at all. It's my pleasure.

Dale Atkinson: Now what I'd like to speak to you today about, and you've just joined us from a conference with a large group of our students, and I'd like to talk to you about student agency.

Tell us a little bit about what that session today with those, four, five, six hundred students looked like.

Guy Claxton: First of all, can I say it was a first for me. First time I've done a live workshop with that number of kids scattered across a large geographical area. It was the first also in the sense that I've never been involved in a similar event anywhere else on the planet.

I would like to start by just tipping my hat to Martin Westwell and his team for engaging in such a thorough and honest investigation of what it is that communities, and professionals, and families and students themselves, what they want from their education. I don't know of any other jurisdiction that has gone to these lengths to do customer research- customer facing research.

Doing that kind of research has been a kind of commonplace in the business world for, I don't know, 30 or 40 years, but education doesn't seem in most places, certainly not in my country, and then back in England, it doesn't seem to have caught up with the importance of finding out what the customers actually want and getting some feedback. I suspect there are a lot of reasons, but one of them might be there is a kind of continuing insularity or arrogance on the part of educational professionals, that they're the only people who know whose business it is to know what young people need to know, and that anybody who questions- who isn't trained in the profession, you know, doesn't know what they're talking about. So students who don't turn up or vote with their feet, there's something wrong with them, or there's something wrong with their families.

And the idea that cumulatively, certainly in my country, the vast number of kids that haven't come back to school after COVID is just brushed away as if it were, you know, we need more draconian measures to punish parents if their kids don't come to school. Rather than entertaining the possibility that it may just be that their time out of school hasn't sharpened their sense of the relevance and the empowerment of what goes on in school. And they've, you know, hundreds of thousands of such kids are continual truants in my country, and I suspect the stats are not very different in Australia.

This consultation and the seriousness with which the department are taking it, I think, is really laudable. And the focus of it is obviously meet and drink to me.

My work is two-pronged in a way. I am, as you said, Dale, a cognitive scientist or a learning scientist is my specialism. So part of me is an egghead and my work has revolved around learning to learn, the learnability of learning itself and also really quite rapidly changing fundamental conceptions of what it is to be intelligent and moving away from that. The idea that we're condemned by our genetics to have some kind of fixed sized pot of general-purpose nous that sets a ceiling on what we can achieve and that follows us around for the rest of our lives.

And the other side of my work is very practical with schools. Actually going into classrooms, talking lots of workshopping with teachers and gradually developing an extensive micro-toolkit of little things that teachers can do in schools as they are. We're not going to get wholesale improvement unless we can show existing teachers the steppingstones that are not too threatening to get them from here to there.

So a large part of my job here and my work with the students this afternoon is to try and introduce them in a kind of entry-level sort of way into some of the science, but also a little bit into some of the practical ramifications. And I think we were at least partly successful. They seem to be quite interested in the practical relevance of some of the things that I was talking about.

Dale Atkinson: And what changes when we start to engage students on this level, the level that you were engaging with them today?

Guy Claxton: The fundamental change is around the notion of learning and around the learnability of learning. And around the interestingness of, if you unpack that, if you start to see learning as a craft, then beginning to understand what the skills and capabilities or life skills, or there's a whole big vocabulary that is used to refer to something a bit deeper and a bit broader than merely a skill which sounds like a rather technical thing.

So habits of mind, character strengths, positive learning dispositions. So getting clearer about what are the underpinnings of someone who is confident, autonomous, and capable when faced, this is my definition broadly, when faced with situations that are novel, challenging, complex, or uncertain. That's my definition of learning.

It's like being good with uncertainty. Or as Jean Piaget once defined intelligence as: knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. We've built an education system around giving kids things that they do know what to do.

I always have this image by the time they leave they have a large backpack of well-rehearsed performances of understanding that is supposed to equip them for life in the big wide world and I honestly doubt that that's the best send-off we can give them.

Whereas, if we dig deeper into the process of learning and if we talk about learning as if it were itself something that was learnable, there are skills and strategies, obviously, but there are these more deeper, more character like things. And I think for me, that's the difference of nuance between in the new framework that's emerging from the Department for Education.

I think for me, learner effectiveness or the effective learner points in the direction of the skilful or the strategic. And the idea of learner agency points at something deeper; a confidence or an attitude or a stance. All other things being equal and openness to that which is strange or challenging. Not being automatically frightened or bigoted or dismissive of people, things or ideas that are not immediately yours or not immediately familiar.

And goodness knows, society needs that kind of mindset, doesn't it? Tolerance for diversity.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, I think that's certainly echoed, I think, in the way that educators have been engaging with their students.

Guy Claxton: Yeah, so if I could just add one-one more thought.

A lot of my work is how to make that not just hot air and aspirational. You know, the road to educational hell has been well-paved time and again by fine words and wish lists. Whereas my work has been: 'so how can we tweak what's going on in a maths classroom so that it is building, not just the ability, but the desire, the appetite to figure it out for yourself?'

So you don't have students kind of sitting there looking pathetic with their hands half up, saying with their most mournful face on, saying verbally and unverbally, "I don't get it, Miss, please come and rescue me”.

And I think we've been too quick often in the past to, it's like kind of responding to a stroke patient who says, "Nurse- I, my legs won't work anymore. Please wheel me around in my wheelchair". Whereas, a good physiotherapist will say, "Come on, George, up you get. You did 12 steps yesterday, do 15 today". And that kind of tough love, you might say, is absolutely in George's best interest. And likewise, for children to discover the capacity and the appetite. I think both those things are important.

So I often say that you know you're making progress in a classroom when you set the students a puzzle, it might be in an English lesson. A common activity, certainly in my country, is to take a poem- a well-known poem, cut it up into individual couplets or stanzas, give them back muddled up to students and take away the title of the poem and give it back to students to would say work in twos or threes to see if you can reorder these elements into what seems to make the most sense to you. And out of which, you can make a reasonable guess as to what the title of the poem is.

And you know you're doing well when you say, "I'll give you ten minutes to do that", and after seven minutes, you say, "Would you like to know the answer?" And they all say, "No, Sir. No, don't!" Like: 'Don't rob us of the possibility that we might be able to figure it out for ourselves'. Because there's pride and pleasure. It's not fun, but there's a pleasure, isn't there? In that efficacy.

So it's like, little things like that. How do we change our very understandable impulse to rescue children and comfort them when they're finding something difficult and tweak that so that now they are gradually discovering and strengthening their capacity to do it for themselves; so that the mood in the room now becomes one of the teacher is the last resort to rescue them like if all else fails rather than the first resort?

Dale Atkinson: I mean this is quite a glib summary perhaps, but that transition from teaching the student the thing to teaching the student how to learn about the thing is quite a profound shift, isn't it?

Guy Claxton: 'Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish'. It has some similarities to that. Fish goes off much faster than learning does. But yeah, absolutely.

The idea that children's performance in schools, like how and why they do well or they do badly in their learning, is not easily predicted by some naive combination of fixed ability and effort.

That's the traditional, what we call in my discipline, folk psychology. And it's inaccurate and it's unhelpful. It would be like talking to, you know, the third squad of a football club and saying to them, effectively, you know, 'you're in the third squad and that's where you belong, mate. Because you lack ability'.

You wouldn't be a very good coach if you spoke to your athletes in that way. You'll motivate, you'll say, 'if you try really hard, if you practice, ta da da, maybe next season you'll make it into the second squad'. And maybe they do and maybe they don't, but they'll have learned more through the aspiration, rather than feeling pigeonholed.

And we've unfortunately and without really meaning to that notion of ability, fixed ability plus effort, has and in some places still does permeate. It's like a bit of mental malware. That if you're a bright student or a successful student the way you tell that is by the fact that that student gets everything right first time, preferably without breaking sweat, and always. Now that's a very stupid idea to feed into students' minds because it means if they're slow or they make mistakes, that immediately gets interpreted as stupid. Nobody likes to feel stupid, so you're kind of getting them to veer off, you know, the legitimate experiences of being a learner now become aversive to you.

Once you point that out, it's common sense. But in some classrooms, still, it's a rather uncommon common sense. People might sort of poo-poo it as just a bit of sort of Namby-pamby psychology, but to my mind, it's absolutely practical.

And I think it went- those ideas went down rather well with the students. For a lot of them, it made them stop and think about, for example, the nature of mistakes. Some mistakes are sloppy; some of them are unacceptably costly if you really mess up some expensive material; and some mistakes are smart. Like, they were a good idea, they didn't work perfectly, but you've learned from them and the next time you're going to do better.

So even that, for a group of five-year-olds, detoxifies the notion of mistake and opens up the concept of drafting, learning through critique and through reflection. Good old-fashioned trial and error.

Dale Atkinson: One of the things you spoke to the students about was the learning pit. Can you sort of explain that concept to the listeners?

Guy Claxton: The learning pit is a very nice, simple, graphic visualization which basically just points out two things:

Any learning worth its salt is uncomfortable by definition, unless it's kind of really trivial learning. What it means is you're at and beyond your current limit of comprehension or competence. You're somewhere out there. You don't know, you can't reliably predict the effect of your actions. You can't always get the result that you wanted.

Getting kids clearer, getting-getting them to understand more clearly the realities of learning, I think. And to know that frustration and confusion are not things to be scared of. They're inevitable emotional accompaniments.

The science shows very clearly, deep down in us in the way we're designed biologically, our bodies, and our brains and our minds learning is an emotional business, you know. We were designed as learning animals to discover things that matter to us. And our brain is designed to switch on and to make itself rubbery and plastic when we're confronted with something that matters to us, that seems threatening or an unexpected resource. And yet, schools have often kind of operated as if curiosity, or that sense of significance or mattering, was a sort of expendable issue. Like, we don't need to pay attention to it or even that it was a distraction.

So the learning pit, first of all, encourages children to understand that it's not that bad to be in the pit. And everybody did. David Bowie did, Paul McCartney did- he spent a lot of his time in the learning pit. So did Beethoven, so did Einstein, etc, etc, etc.

And the second side of the pit, it just graphically shows, but if you develop on your strategies, and if you develop your learning strengths and your learning attitudes, you have ways of getting yourself out of the learning pit. They're like crampons in the side of the pit. And that you can go on discovering those more and more.

I was in a school this morning, Prospect North Primary School, where the children there- year five and six children were showing me their customized version of the learning pit which was very meaningful. I, like, I checked with them, 'Is this just another bit of teacher business that we have to do?'

They- 'No', they said, 'it's really useful to have those words, to have that insight'.

The time in the pit is not necessarily just painful and useless. And that if you try and build a rope bridge across the top of the pit and avoid the discomfort, then you end up just as incompetent as you were on the original side of the bridge. I mean, I think a lot in metaphors. And I think in education, it's useful to communicate a lot in metaphors.

So I think the learning pit is a very useful image, a way of imaging that gets kids, particularly younger kids, directly into an understanding of the reality of learning rather than this alternative idea that anybody who's really bright doesn't have to bother with mistakes or effort. You can just do it.

Dale Atkinson: There's a huge degree of resilience and self-confidence that's required for a student to tackle learning in that particular way. How is it that educators can activate those capabilities within learners?

Guy Claxton: Well, that's a big part of my work and I think it's a big part of what underlies the responses to the consultation.

I was just looking at some of them. Children and parents alike saying they often use the word 'skills', where I would use the word 'dispositions'. But again and again, they use words like: 'be more resilient', 'more confident', 'more curious', 'more creative', 'more entrepreneurial', 'more imaginative', 'more collaborative'. They often couch their wish list for education in those terms.

So the job of the teacher now becomes moving them at an acceptable rate. You become like a mind coach, where you're not- you don't see your job just as filling minds of a fixed sized ability, but of actually expanding that ability. And you do it gradually in the way you blow up a balloon. So it's like you see intelligence not as a fixed sized bucket, but as a balloon that is capable of being inflated or becoming larger and more flexible as you go along.

So little things like resilience. There's lots of little strategies that are very common, they're not particular to me. But what I do is try and collect these things and show the synergy behind them.

Little things like, try '3 Before Me'. Which is when a child is struggling, you'll go to say, "I will help you, but just tell me the three things you've tried to help yourself first. And if you haven't come up with three things, then would you just, Anna, would you just see if you could hang in for another couple of minutes? Then if you're really, really, really stuck, I'll come and give you a hint. Would you do that for me?"

It's a tiny tweak in the classroom, but it's a tweak that is inviting, that is telling Anna she might be able to rescue herself. That doing so it is a desirable thing and that if she has another couple of minutes, she might just be able to do it rather than falling into that helplessness and there's lots of lots of variations on that. So it's just finding those little stepping stones that help teachers get from here there.

How you build concentration, for example, we know that the ability to concentrate despite distractions is a strengthenable muscle. It's what mindfulness training is all about. There are all kinds of little ways in which you can raise children's awareness of their own potential capacity to control their attention. To not get ripped away from what they were doing by a fire engine that goes by. And to learn to recognize that. And it's a bit like CBT, a form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

It's like having the awareness in the moment to say, 'Ah, this is a potential distraction. I don't need to go there'. And sometimes it's so juicy you can't resist it still. But sometimes that opens up a moment of choice where you can say, 'Aha, I'm now going to go back to what I was doing'. So these little things that are highly accessible, but I think often psychologically quite sophisticated, are things that I want to kind of make available broadly to teachers.

We're not going to get into the world of dispositions by a quantum jump. We're going to get there by evolution by lots of teachers hearing about these things and going quietly to themselves: 'Oh, I could do that. I could do that with my kids. I'm going to try it tomorrow'. And gradually, the great liner of education begins to turn around or at least that's my belief.

Dale Atkinson: Well, I think that's very encouraging and, uh, in the show notes we'll have more information on where teachers can go to access some of the advice and expertise that, uh, Professor Claxton has made available.

If you had one piece of advice to the teachers that are listening today, what would that advice be?

Guy Claxton: Give it a go. That was one of the things- one of the lists of five most important things that parents said they wanted for the children. The willingness to give it a go. And I would just wish all teachers not to be stuck, not to be defensive, not to be immediately critical.

Not to say: 'Oh, but it'll jeopardize the results', particularly secondary and senior secondary teachers. But to say: 'It's only a little thing, it's a little tweak. It might make a difference; I don't know yet. But I'm going to give it a go and I'm going to make it work for three weeks and then I'm going to see if it's made a difference to the mood in the classroom'.

Chances are it will, and if it does, then you might be ready to make the next little tweak and on you go. So do something a little bit different tomorrow.

Dale Atkinson: I think the piece of advice that we're providing to teachers there is exactly the skills and capabilities we're trying to instil in the students that we're educating.

Guy Claxton: Exactly right.

Dale Atkinson: Professor Guy Claxton, thank you very much for your time.

Guy Claxton: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

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