They'd just play Xbox wouldn't they?

On a previous post, I wrote about the apparent lack of student engagement. 

From my own experience in the Early Years, I have always felt that by allowing the children to choose their context, you enable everyone's (adult's and child's) time and energy to be spent actually learning - rather than fighting each other. 

As such, to me, a child-led project based approach has always seemed the best way to achieve higher levels of student engagement throughout school. However, one of the things that I believe holds this approach back is that we have a real trust issue with our children. 

This was demonstrated during an interview that Joe Harrison of Slow Education, and Andy Raymer from the fantastic Matthew Moss High school (MMHS) did on BBC Breakfast. 

At MMHS, they have developed 'My World', a project based learning section to their curriculum. They believe in the children being in the centre of the process, choosing what and how they learn. 

It's a belief that's seen great results with definite improvements in the children's dispositions towards learning. But like the journalist in the video below, for the most part society doesn't trust our children to want to learn. 

The answer to the "Won't they just play on Xbox?" question being a montage of the students' ideas of what they would choose to learn, is perfect and should reassure any doubters.

Slow School Vox Pop NOVEMBER 16th from Nikki O'Rourke on Vimeo.

And on a whole other level of what children can achieve on their own, there's the brilliant and charming, Sugata Mitra. His TED talk is amazing and underlines, in red many times, how much we underestimate children. I'm beginning to think that school actually just holds children back...

Lack of pupil interest

We often hear that children are disengaged at school. They're bored and don't see the point of what they are learning. Or the only point they see is to pass the test. I remember asking my teachers whether what we were learning would be in the exam, as if it wasn't why would I need/want to know it?

There has been lots written about student engagement and I'm sure I have only scraped the surface. One blog I found, Wright's room, Shelley references research that says that between 50-70% of children are not engaged at school, which surely translates as at least that many not reaching their full potential?

I find It interesting talking to people about this. Some feel it is the children's problem, the 'it wasn't like that in my day" crowd. But I have a feeling it was. On David Price's blog, he discusses how engagement is confused with compliance, and my hunch is that in years gone by we maybe just had more compliance. But quiet "well behaved" disengaged children are surely still under achieving. My first headteacher used to say it was funny how teachers were judged by how long they could get children to sit quietly on the carpet for, as this had little to do with their learning. The 'well-behaved' class may just be a class of children who have perfected the 'art of sleeping with their eyes open.' 

In the Early Years, we work hard to follow the children's interests, creating interesting and challenging new experiences within this context, valuing their own ideas and supporting their explorations and investigations. It has always seemed crazy to me that as the children get older and more able to understand what they need to learn we reduce their freedom in how they do it. 

Again on Shelley Wright's blog she defines engagement as "a genuine disposition for self-directed, deep learning, fostered from an early age and continues life long." During my time as an Early Years teacher I was involved in the Effective Early Learning study, which looked at child involvement and adult engagement as ways of assessing the quality of a setting. Through having the time to actually watch the children I was privileged enough to see these very young children independently exhibiting those dispositions. Surely it is our job to continue to nurture these rather than squash them.

 A further study mentioned by Shelley seems to indicate some level of squashing, as Covington & Dray (2001) found that the longer a child is in school the less academically competent they feel. This reminds me of John Holt, he felt that children are amazing self motivated learners from infancy and that when they get to school, the very place where that should enhance this, they discover 'learning' is something they are not good at, don't enjoy or want to do anymore. Here is a link to School is bad for children an article he wrote in 1969

I have worked with some amazing and creative teachers who worked very hard to make the learning more engaging for their class. So much energy went on making the learning entertaining because fundamentally the children weren't interested in what they were being taught. I really believe we can tackle this problem by allowing the children to lead their learning, choose their context, and I think this is a matter of trust. Sadly we just don't trust children to make good choices but I think we are wrong...

Gever Tulley

Another inspirational person I discoverd through TED.
I had heard the fuss in the media about the book '50 dangerous things (you should let your kids do) but had/have never read it, but it had obviously sunk in enough for to me to remember Gever Tulley's name. So when I saw he had a couple of TED talks I watched them. This was the first one.



I love this approach. Although I was never brave enough to have power tools in my early years class rooms (I doubt my school would have been too keen either), the kids did use real tools. I remember being very anxious the first time I had hammers and saws out, but the children were brilliant. It was one of those activities that guaranteed focus and enthusiasm.  And since becoming a mum and making friends with people much more able than me my little boy has had lots of fun..

.

I think children getting to experience these activities and watch skilled people use these tools for real purposes is so valuable. I wish I had more opportunities like that when I was young. 

I became a bit of a Gever fan, he seemed to be on a similar journey to me in regards to questioning todays schooling. Another of his TED talks was Reimagining Education. This talk goes through the modern school system as well as looking into other options including "unschooling." I had always been quite prejudiced about the idea of home schooling but after reading some of John Holt's books and talking to friends had I become interested in, and sympathetic to the approaches. There were a couple of quotes from this speech than have stuck with me and inspire me to keep thinking.

"Nothing is better than public school"

"It's time to do less, and by doing less allow children to do more."

Gever Tulley has then gone on to open a school, Brightworks in San Fransisco.
This is the description of the school from their website;

Brightworks is a school that reimagines K-12 education. By taking the best practices from both early childhood education and hands-on, project-based experiential learning, we strive to meet students’ needs in a flexible, mixed-age environment that breaks the traditional walls between school and the community outside the classroom. We offer a broad-spectrum learning environment designed to encourage creative capacity, tenacity, and citizenship.

Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? 

My under informed knee-jerk reaction to changing ratios

Ok so this is slightly off topic for what I meant this blog to do. But the governments announcement about how they intend to improve early years has got all my friends (the actual people I know on facebook as well as the clever people I stalk on twitter) very upset and I completely agree!
So my very basic take is this, yes it's great that early years staff should need to hold better qualifications and that we should respect the people we put in charge of raising our babies when we are not there, and yes to enable those parents who want/need to go back to work this needs to be affordable. This has always struck me as a bit of a catch 22, and I'm pretty sure changing the ratios is not the way to go about this.
We entrust the staff at nurseries with the lives of our tiniest members of society, asking them to nurture them, care for them and educate them in our absence. To me this feels like it should be expensive. I can't think of much else more valuable than that!
The new ratios would see the ratios being changed to 1:4 for the under 1s and 1:6 for 2 year olds. This seems crazy! OK again the staff will be expected to be better qualified but I'm not sure that actually helps too much. I am a teacher qualified to masters level but this has not helped me sprout more arms, more eyes or be able to slow time.
Zoe Williams wrote an entertaining article in the guardian today, where she looked after 6 toddlers. Chaos ruled, and she makes light hearted comments about how you would need to keep them in smaller areas and how taking them out would be even more of a challenge.
It worries me that in a time when there is already concern that we protect our children too much and are too risk averse that these changes will encourage this even more. Will nurseries not have to really think carefully about every activity they make available (even more than now) to make sure that they are all really completely safe for unsupervised play? Will we not wrap our kids in even more cotton wool and further limit their experiences?
Now I am completely naive about this so forgive me if I am utterly wrong but how will changing ratios lower costs? Yes I get that it theoretically should, more children per adult (although these adults will be being paid more), but nurseries are businesses are they really going to lower costs or just take on more children and increase profit? I also worry that it will lead to larger variation in quality, something the EYFS is meant to have addressed. As if some nurseries take on the new ratios and lower costs, while others keep existing ratios but charge a premium for it are we not creating a 2 tier nursery system depending on what you can afford? I know these variations already exist but we are further widening the divide.
I haven't read in depth the proposals so may well being swept up in media hype. I believe we should look to models of early years provision that are successful, such as Denmark, but I'm pretty sure there is more to their success than their ratios....
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