Thirteen Years Well Spent
What was school like for you? This podcast chats to young adults about what, from school they use in life and what they have learnt since. In the cumulative stories of real people, lets find out if school is doing as it claims - prepare young people for life.
Thirteen Years Well Spent
18 Guy Claxton
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The extraordinary Guy Claxton, Professor Emirate, prolific author and one of the most influential thinkers in the education research space of our generation. Guy Claxton, the person whose words sat with me 'would young adults say it was 12 years well spent' and were the impetus for this podcast and project. After having conversations in my head with Guy through reading his books, 'What is the Point of School', ' The Learning Power Approach', 'The Future of Teaching and the Myths that Hold it Back' and 'Bodies of Learning' - today I was able to have a conversation with Guy himself! We reflect on the podcast itself, wonder why this work is not being done routinely by all schools, get deeper with Piaget and Antonio Demasio around the visceral rudder, and much more.
Researchers and thinkers mentioned include:
Louka Parry "The Learning Future Podcast"
David Perkins "Post Primary Education Has Little Impact on Formal Reasoning", "Futurewise" and "Making Learning Whole"
Okay, but to develop a kind of library of those and on some regular basis to actually play those back to the kids in your classroom and say, you know, does this ring any bells with you? You know, who would you I who would you identify with? Because it then gives them a language and a legitimacy to reflect. If they can see, if they can see and hear what it is like for someone to reflect on their education, then that might prompt them to offer more interesting and more thoughtful reflections on their own experience. You're making me think interesting things, Susan. I haven't thought or talked about this for uh for quite a long time.
SPEAKER_04Was your 13 years or so that you spent in school-based education well spent? Today we are talking with Guy Claxton. Guy Claxton is the person who sparked this idea. And I am so grateful to Guy to give us his time and his wisdom and all of his thoughts. Around this podcast, it has been a pleasure to be able to think about a really deep and active response to what that 13 years that you spent in school-based education well spent. I am Susan Taylor. I am a teacher of Japanese, a leader of languages, and this is not about me. It is also not about any of the organizations I am, have been, or might in the future be associated with. And before we get into this episode, I'd like to acknowledge the Ganai, Kernai, and Banerong people as the traditional owners of the unceded lands where I live. I appreciate their knowledge and stories and those of all First Nations people, and thank them. If you would like to share your story, we are planning to have at least a hundred episodes. I'm really keen to hear from anyone in that 18 to 30 age group. We can go over 30 a little bit to tell your story about what it's been like in life post-school, because that is the group of people who can really tell us did we set you up for life and what things could we do that might even be better? So please contact me. 13 Years Well Spent, 13 as a word, not a number, at gmail.com. I'd like to thank my partner Gary for much joy in our life and for the beautiful intro and outro music. And thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting me. Please tell other people about it. I would like this to become a dynamo, an inspiration, and a place where we can motivate ourselves as educators to be the absolute best we can. Let's listen to Guy. Hello, hello.
SPEAKER_01How are you?
SPEAKER_04I'm great. So excited to talk with you.
SPEAKER_01Well, here I am. In the flesh. It's a nice sunny morning here in the deepest Sussex, just south of London.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, beautiful. Well, of course it's dark here already, being six o'clock in uh moving out of winter time. And um where are you?
SPEAKER_01You're in you're in Melbourne, Susan, are you?
SPEAKER_04Yes, I am. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Good. I've been doing a lot of toing and froing on the internet with Melbourne. Do you know a guy called Luca Parry? Have you ever come across him?
SPEAKER_04I haven't, but I'd be very glad to be introduced.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he's uh he's a very uh influential podcaster and teacher. Just did a did a very nice um conversation with him and my co-author yesterday morning. He's a very very much alive wire. He moves around. I first met him, he was in Adelaide, but now he's a Melbourne now.
SPEAKER_04Um I do need to manage my adrenaline and my anxiety, so I'm just letting you know that I'm chilling in that best I can.
SPEAKER_01And I know that's just be with the body.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Yeah, I knew you would understand that because I have read all about those things.
SPEAKER_01Have you read Bodies of Learning yet?
SPEAKER_04Yes, of course.
SPEAKER_01Oh, good. Oh, well done. Well done. I hope it's got lots of annotations in it.
unknownOh.
SPEAKER_04These are my other favorites.
SPEAKER_01And the learning power approach and the future of teaching. Well, you're pretty pretty much up to date with my thinking then. Excellent.
SPEAKER_04I feel like I've been in conversation with you for a c about a year. So I'm really looking forward to an actual conversation with you.
SPEAKER_02Okay, here we go.
SPEAKER_04So to take directly from Guy Claxton's bio, he is a cognitive scientist, education thought leader, and prolific author interested in expanding human intelligence through research, writing, and education. To me, Guy puts into words much of what I have always thought about education and hadn't articulated, and with strong evidence behind it. I am very deeply grateful for the life's work that you have put into this guy. Um I can't believe it's taken me this long to connect with your work. And I have to thank Diane Burke, who is in the independent sector in Victoria, for connecting me with you.
SPEAKER_01Oh, good. Say hi, say hi to Diane for me.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, thank you. Um because it was there to be found for many, many years, and I just hadn't found it. So it's a little frustrating that it took me that long for me. I've read, annotated, and used many of your books. The main ones for me are Bodies of Learning, The Future of Teaching, What's the Point of School, and the Learning Power Approach. I've found those really, really helped me to think about uh teaching and learning, have collegial conversations because I do have opportunities to do that as a leader myself. And make the choices that I make in my teaching because I also get to practice teaching every single week. So I have both of those roles. All of that towards welcome, Guy, and thank you.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, good day to you and to your listeners. It's a pleasure to be talking with you, Susan, and to find out more about your lovely, was that 12 years well spent research and recordings that you're taking. It sounds like a wonderful project, but we'll talk more about that as we go along, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_04That's what it's all about. And I definitely have you to both thank and blame for the idea. Um, I was talking in my previous podcast, which might is not live yet, but by the time listeners listen to this, it should be live. That when you said on the E triple R, and it was a couple of years ago now, it was episode 50 of the Education Research Reading Room with Ollie Lovell, you said that it was 12 years, would it be 12 years well spent? Would young people actually say that? And it really struck me that we spend a lot of time in education thinking and monitoring what's happening during the time that children and young people are in the school grounds, but not past that time. And I really, really wonder if that's a big miss in education. So I really thank you for bringing that to my attention. And then it sort of slowly trickled through into creating a podcast and actually getting stories from people post-education. So thank you. What do you think of that as a concept?
SPEAKER_01Uh I think it's great. I mean, we we societies have very strong, often implicit notions about what young people need, but we don't uh seem to pay much attention to what they want. Uh and sometimes what they say they want is conditioned by their experience of education already. So they don't even know what it is that they might want or could want. So I think kind of thinking about that distinction and whether, you know, what are the presuppositions behind the way we've designed schools, presumably around what we think they need, and need for what is a is a big is a big question. And there often seems to be a big gulf, not for all youngsters, but certainly for a substantial proportion of young people, a big gulf between what is enshrined in school, the messages of school, it's like this is good for you. You will need this. So somehow or other, often without it being really thought through or talked through, the idea that a kind of nodding acquaintance with a bit of Shakespeare and the periodic table and some elementary algebra, that these things will somehow help to equip you for life. That may or may not be true, but the case needs to be made, doesn't it? Uh, and it very often isn't made. So for lots of young people who are not naturally bookish or don't or come from different kinds of families, it can feel school can feel, and there's lots of evidence about this, just like a place they don't belong. A recent survey in the UK found that about half of all teachers said school doesn't work for people like me. That's really wicked. That's a wicked statistic, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, interesting. So the teachers are saying that not just the students.
SPEAKER_01No, this was the students. That was the students, yeah. They were the teachers were canvassed. The sorry, the students were canvassed. And you know, some teachers, either publicly or privately, will have their own doubts about that. Uh what comes to mind is an old uh friend of mine who was an excellent secondary maths teacher, uh, who I worked with quite closely when I was still working in London. Um, and she was a great teacher, but she said to me one exhausted Friday evening, she said, Sometimes I feel like I'm struggling to do badly a job that isn't worth doing at all. And that's devastating. That's devastating, isn't it? Uh and there may be there won't be many teachers who would own up so strongly to that experience. But there's an awful lot of them who have their doubts. I mean, another statistic in the UK, which is also very telling, is that of all the teachers that were trained, that went through teacher training in the last decade, a third of them have already left the profession.
SPEAKER_04We in Australia are having a big trouble with teacher workforce shortages as well. And I believe that's not just Australia.
SPEAKER_01So, yeah, but you know, the powers that be need to be saying to themselves, what is this telling us? You know, is this just are they just, you know, lazy and ungrateful? Or, you know, are the kids just too stupid to understand what's good for them? It's like, but for me, these are kind of, you know, the canary in the mineshaft kind of statistics. It's like they're telling us something, and what they're telling us requires decent thinking on our part about whether we've whether we've got it right. I mean, school is a terri incredibly expensive and protracted and stressful for young people. So for on all for all those three reasons, we've got to be damn sure that we've got it as right as it could possibly be, haven't we? You know, that's what any responsible society would be saying to itself. And yet, and yet I don't hear very much of that kind of deep, honest discussion going on in my country or indeed anywhere else.
SPEAKER_04I think everyone who has anything to say about education has at the in their heart the intention of making it as well as possible. But I've I'm very aware that the fish doesn't know what water is, although it's swimming in water, and that I think can apply to schools. So it's great to get student feedback on those things, but the user test is not until after school. So to get feedback from people after they've spent some time in their lives to say whether their lives have benefited from school. And I'm very aware of David Perkins, who you quoted in the What's the Point of School book, page 80, because I bothered to do that today. Almost no effect of education on how well people think in daily life. So I'm very passionate of getting that information post-school.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I mean, basically, David Perkins is a guru of mine. I've learned a lot from him and with him. I would now count him as a as a friend. But he produced a devastating piece of research many years ago now, in the late 1980s, and published the title of the published paper was Post Primary Education Has Little Impact on Informal Reasoning. In other words, exactly as you just said, Susan, if you look at the the amount of schooling that schooling or you know, or university or even post undergraduate study, the amount of that that you've consumed doesn't help you, for example, think about political questions. It helps within your as you become more senior, within particular disciplines. Like maths has always claimed that it's a training of the mind. But actually, it turns out that it only trains you to deal with maths-like situations. It doesn't transfer much beyond that. So, you know, we need to there are some more straws in the wind, aren't there? Aren't there?
SPEAKER_04You know, there are so many straws in the wind. So the content one has been really interesting. Most of my guests have said that unless that exactly what you have already said, unless they are using a particular content from post-primary school in their workplace or regularly in some way, they don't remember what it was. And then, yes, there's the memory thing. If you relearn it, you might learn it faster. But if you're not using it, why are we doing it? So really having a robust reconsideration of content is something that I find quite fascinating.
SPEAKER_01It's about the content, Susan, but I think it's also about the pedagogy. Let's carry on with the maths for example. There's a very interesting maths researcher. She and I were colleagues a long time ago in London called Jo Bowler. Oh, yes, who's now at Stanford. And she did one of her, I'm not sure if this was her PhD or her post-PD studies, looked at different ways of teaching maths, and then followed up, the most telling of her studies, followed up students to see whether what they'd been taught in their maths classes was of any use to them in their everyday life. And it turns out that if you're taught in what we might call the traditional way, in other words, to master procedures so that you can produce little recipes so that you can produce the right answer to problems, had almost no transfer to young people who, when they were at working in their early 20s, may have to use some mathematics. Like, you know, I remember one of her examples was someone working in a hairdresser's salon and working out, you know, the number of bottles of shampoo that you needed to order and whether, you know, doing that kind of thing, b basic arithmetic multiplication and so on. Uh whereas if your math if your maths had been taught in a much more um problem-solving, much more inquiry-based kind of way. Again, another examples was together, they gave kids quite a long time. She said, you know, supposing you've got 29 fence hurdles, like little short bits of of fencing, right? What's the largest area that you can make out of those to keep your sheep in? And the kids had some days to figure this out. If you're taught that way, then the same kids in the same hair in the same hairdresser when they were 23 years old had quite a different impression. They said, Yeah, you know, it's really great that mask. We use it all the time. In other words, whether the whether that turns out to have real life utility for you functionally in practice depends a lot on the pedagogy.
SPEAKER_04It strikes me that we could put as a learning intention rather than the content specifically, the pedagogy behind it. So why am I learning this? I'm learning this so that I can work out how many of things in the future, but even more than that, so that I can I can figure out volumes of things for different functions in my life and have different ways of doing that. If that was in a learning intention, I think it would be more explicitly into both the teacher's mind and the students.
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely. And Dave Perkins again would agree with you. I don't know if you've read one of his two, his two recent, recent-ish books, which I think are the most seminal on making learning whole and future wise.
SPEAKER_04And he's Future Wise, I've read.
SPEAKER_01He has a whole chapter in making so making broadly future wise is about what content, what knowledge do they all need, which is a profound question that is rarely asked. What how what actually do they need within limited time? What are what are the priorities? And the making learning whole is more about the the pedagogical side of things. Um I forgot what I was gonna say. There's some oh yes, that's uh there's a really good chapter in Making Learning Whole about teaching for transfer. You know, there's a different if you want what's what you're studying in school to be functionally embedded in your brain in such a way that it will come to mind in different but appropriate real life context. You have to teach for that. Yes. Whereas one of the stultifying assumptions, simplistic assumptions behind education was that you could explain something to somebody, and then they ought, somehow ought, to have registered that knowledge in such a way that whenever it might be potentially appropriate in the future, whatever the context, it ought to come to mind. And we now know that that just isn't the way the mind is organized. The mind is very situated, so it's much more without paying attention to fostering that transfer process, which you could easily do at the end of any lesson. You could say three minutes with your learn with your learning buddy, where else do you think you could use what we've done here? You know, you don't have to bust you don't have to bust the gut to do that. So, you know, if you if you if you want it, you can build it in. Otherwise, what Bowler's research, a lot of other people's research, shows to put it brandly, but boldly, what's learnt in school stays in school. If it's learned only with the intention of passing an exam, that locks the learning in to a particular framework, and you're very ready, you know, you won't spend much of time getting ready to pass examinations for the rest of your life. Yeah, so it's a it's a very precise and technical skill, learning for examinations. Well, one of my one of my old friends in the business, another one called Art Costa, says we need to be prepared, we need to be preparing kids not for a life of tests, but for the tests of life.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's a lovely phrase. I really appreciate that. I also appreciate Dave Perkins' um. Life-worthy learning and what would make learning life worthy. I'm curious, you've let us know in the E triple R when you first made that mention of was it 12 years well spent or 13 for the Australian context? You also said that there was a very little information from young adults about how successful school was setting them up for life. Why do you think there's so little information and the school system as a whole does not seem to be seeking that information?
SPEAKER_01Because there's a kind of, I mean, boldly, I mean it's it's a very good question, and I haven't thought through a very good answer, so I'll give you a not very good answer.
SPEAKER_04Excellent, thank you.
SPEAKER_01Because there's a kind of laziness and complacency. This is like there is this astonishing lack of willingness on many fronts, particularly by politicians, but not only, to dig below the surface of these kind of warning signals that we were talking about a little while ago.
unknownYep.
SPEAKER_01People don't do it. So the idea of kind of and also there is this sense that, you know, it's sort of nanny knows best kind of thing. But the kids don't really know what is in their own best interests. So student voice, which is a phrase I don't like because it kind of pigeonholes it, it's like a it becomes a thing in schools, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_03What would you use? What would you use?
SPEAKER_01Well, just having respectful, grown-up, equal-sided conversations with young people about their experience. You don't have to fetishize it by having you know, educators very like having their labels. You know, so fucking bucket holy things, you know, and student voice often turns out to be rather minimal, doesn't it? It's just like you know, you give the student counsel, you know, they can think and talk a bit about bullying and then they can tell us what they've thought. But whether we actually listen to what they're saying and heed what they're saying, but it's perfectly possible to give them a whole lot more credibility and a whole lot more credence. And the more you do that, the more the students grow into deeper and more responsible forms of thinking about uh about their education and what they're doing. My experience is it's it's not very difficult to get them into that into that mood of thinking ordinarily. Like, what do they want? One of my favorite examples was um I was friends with someone who was president for a year of one of our teaching unions over here, and it was her job. She could design uh make use of that year as as as president, whatever she liked. And she and I designed some workshops where we got bunches of primary school kids and bunches of head teachers together for a day. And we we muddled them up in different constellations. So we'd put you know, two kids from school A with the head teacher from school B, which was quite awkward for the head teachers because they weren't in a kind of position of authority for those kids. And we made it clear that the teacher's job was to listen to what the students were saying, and we gave the kids like little balloons on a stick, like an old-fashioned like Shakespearean jester. And they said if the teacher, if the teacher you're talking to acts in any way like they're trying to take over or tell you what the right answer is or anything, you bop them on the head with the balloon. And the kids love doing that. The head teachers were rather taken aback. But one of the things we asked the kids when we put them together is what would you actually like from school? What would you like to know? What would you like to learn? And I was talking to uh, I think this came up when I was talking to Luca Perry yesterday. Um, I'd forgotten what the number one thing was, interestingly. I can't remember what it was. But the second most important thing that they very largely agreed upon, and they were from a wide range of different schools, was the one thing they would like was for schools to teach them self-defense.
SPEAKER_02Oh.
SPEAKER_01Because they wanted to feel safer in the playground and on the streets. And they didn't feel safe. There was a general feeling that there was an anxiety about, as I say, different neighborhoods, but you know, walking to school and bullying, subtle bullying within the school context and so on. So, to their credit, when the head teachers heard this, the head teachers of most of the schools got someone in, uh a karate teacher or something like that, and organized lunchtime lessons for the kids to learn a you know a bit of basic self-defense. Well, that's great. But we could do a whole lot more than that, couldn't we? And a whole lot more listening. And the point you made a while ago about following up after kids have left school, I have come across so far only one school that does that. It's a high achievement, high-achieving, fee-paying school in London. And they, I'm not sure how how much they followed it through. But when I was working with them, which was 10 or 15 years ago, they were they had a questionnaire which they were giving to their alumni five, 10, 15, 20 years after they left the school, basically saying, keep us up to date with your email, because we're going to be set following up. Because we want to know at these different stages of your life, did we do a good job?
SPEAKER_03Wow.
SPEAKER_01Where where did we where do you look back now and feel grateful and think that was very useful, that was appropriate. And what did we miss? What did we, what do you think? I wish they taught me this or cultivated this or developed this kind of mindset. Now that takes a bit of commitment and a bit of time from a school to do that, but why wouldn't you? You know, most businesses have sort of, you know, consumer research departments, don't they?
SPEAKER_04That's exactly my thinking. I really don't understand why we're not. There's, and I would love later if you would be prepared to share the school with me so that I could have some sort of correspondence with them. I have three possible answers to my own question of why there's so little information. One has come up for me is that it's actually really difficult to do. People, once they're in their life, are busy doing their life. They don't necessarily want to be interviewed by me or even like they'll happily have a conversation, but they won't necessarily be recorded in that conversation. The second one is I wonder if schools are really wanting that information. So they're not seeking it because that it hasn't it isn't information that they want to know. Or the third one is perhaps they it's just not occurred to them.
SPEAKER_01Right. Well, I think the second one may be that some some some schools, I don't have strong evidence for this, maybe might be scared of what their students might say. So they don't they don't want to ask them.
SPEAKER_04Um it's a possibility. I don't I wouldn't blame any schools, but uh it just strikes me as a possibility.
SPEAKER_01Um one of the things that we do in the in the learning power approach, kind of things that we offer to schools is to train up some of the some of the kids to be lesson observers. The kids volunteered, this would be like year eight, year nine students, to go through a little training course about what uh how you observe lessons and what you know what is it helpful or not helpful to bring into a post-lesson conversation with the teacher and you know to understand that teachers were fragile and anxious human beings just like they are. Um and the when they start when they started off with this, a lot of the tea it was voluntary for the teachers. So they would be uh sooner or later, as a teacher in this school, this high school, you would be approached by a pair of year eights who would ask very respectfully if they would like you to if if you would like them to come in and observe a lesson. And some teachers were quite, you know, to put it baldy shit, scared of having having the the kids, you know, they were afraid that, you know, all kinds of critical things would be fired at them. But actually, it was very fruitful. And more and more teachers learnt that there was less to be frightened of, and that they actually had very, because the students students were trained to do this well, they actually had very fruitful conversations. And actually a lot of the kids who volunteered for this were low-achieving and in some cases rather disaffected kids. And this really gave them a sense of belonging and a sense of agency in the schools, and it worked very well to kind of strengthen the school's culture for the kids to feel that their feedback, their perceptions mattered. Yes, absolutely. It's not rocket science, is it? Like why do you not at all?
SPEAKER_04I I am taking notes. I I remember doing this some years ago, and it was actually quite successful. I remember I'd forgotten about it as a technique. So come my next lesson, which will be Wednesday next week, I will be chatting to a couple of students to see if they would be interested in that and begin to clue them into the sorts of things that I would be interested in them watching for.
SPEAKER_01Fascinating. Very good. Very good. In my in my frame of reference, we would have a they would be looking for not particularly or exclusively what the teacher was doing, but how their classmates, excuse me, how their classmates were responding as learners to the to the way the lesson was framed. Which of their what we call their learning muscles were the students being invited to use? Collaboration, imagination, perseverance, critical thinking, creative thinking, how much of that was going on? And then the students might just be invited halfway through the lesson. The teacher might say, you know, give us your observations. Tali and Simon. And they would say, Well, this group was doing this, and I think there was quite a lot of good collaboration going on, but it seemed to be not much imaginative thinking was happening. Really useful, right? Absolutely. The feedback was focusing in on how the students were behaving as learners, which was quite a useful thing. The teachers found that was quite useful.
SPEAKER_04And obviously, it needs to be both and in terms of the teachers need to explain that collaboration is one of the important parts of this lesson, not just whatever content is being taken out of that lesson. So that ability to hear somebody else's ideas and build on somebody else's ideas and lots and lots of micro skills within that, but collaboration as a learning intention again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I have a friend who's recently retired as a prof of education at Cambridge, a really great researcher called Neil Mercer, who has developed his life to looking at the quality, how we coach kids to develop ever more high-quality conversations in their groups. Lots of schools say we do group work, but they don't do anything to train it or coach it or talk about it. You know, what what makes for a good conversation? What makes for a good team working? Uh and he's he he's coined the word which I really like. He talks about interthinking. Can we develop more high-quality interthinking between the kids? Because that's a really powerful life skill, isn't it?
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. Very, very interesting. There's been a massive impact for me in listening to the stories of adults talking about their school life, because each time one of these stories comes out, I can almost imagine which of the children in my room might say similar things. And because of that, I don't, you don't have a lot of time as a teacher to really talk with each student. But just by imagining that the background of this particular student is similar to Mick, for example, who wanted to be drafted into the AFL and wasn't really interested in doing anything other than the minimum so that the teacher was off his back, I can see a couple of the children in my room actually with that sort of mindset, that sort of background, and it fills in for me a sense of backstory that the children can say a lot. I'm not dismissing their potential, but an adult framing, an adult articulation really has helped me to see what's happening in the children. What do you think of that effect?
SPEAKER_01I think that's really good. And but what I was thinking while you were talking, Susan, was how useful your if you could, you know, develop a library, maybe even little videos or little sound clips of recent school leavers, but also I hadn't realized you were also talking to people who'd who'd left school some time ago.
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm I'm hitting that 18 to 30.
SPEAKER_01Okay. But to develop a kind of library of those and on some regular basis to actually play those back to the kids in your classroom and say, you know, does this ring any bells with you? You know, who would you I who would you identify with? Because it then gives them a language and a legitimacy to reflect. If they can see, if they can see and hear what it is like for someone to reflect on their education, then that might prompt them to offer more interesting and more thoughtful reflections on their own experience.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, fascinating. All right, that's another job on my list. Another job that's come out of this podcast for me has been many items that the 18 to 30 group are telling me that they wish they had learnt at school and didn't. And it generally comes, because it's the 18 to 30 group, it's not your teenagers anymore. It generally comes into things like tax, how to run a business, how to buy a car, what does credit mean, and a lot of those financial things which they say they've they've did percentages, for example, during maths, but they haven't done the transfer, as we were talking earlier, of how percentages impact the credit situation. So I'm going to create some little mini videos that could be shown during um house group time or you know, really, really small snippets, just as a tryout and see if it's taken, if teachers and the younger students take that sort of thing on. But the other thing that's come out, and this really surprised me. I expected I was going to have content type talking, and it probably reflects who I am in terms of my teacher brain thinking content. But many of the students that I've spoken to have talked about learning skills and being able to apply those learning skills, exactly all the content that you've put into the learning power approach. Um, and other students have talked about their sense of success, so a much more personal sense of what is happiness, what is success, and not pushing that towards an ATAR or a score in their grades, but seeing success as being an interrelational thing and happiness as being more of a genuine connection with others, really, is the main source of that happiness.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the one of the sad things about school is uh we shouldn't really go too far down this route, is the way in which much of what happens in school is driven by a particularly narrow kind of assessment. Isn't it? You know, I say my my my slick phrase is the only thing that counts in school is the markable, not the remarkable.
SPEAKER_04Yes, I love that phrase.
SPEAKER_01Um so you know it's it's and also you have to remember if you're if you're doing real life preparation things in school, if there's a if there's a kind of marked test coming up at the end of it, that will deflect the learning. It's back to what we were saying before about the transfer thing. You know, you have to you have to somehow frame it as a kind of this is a you know, this is a you have to make it as real as possible. You have to simulate as as really that which is a a good word, a challenging concept. How do you simulate within the context of the classroom? Like this is something you've got to get right, you've got to fill in your tax return and get it right, or you've got to calculate your Uber money, or you know, whatever, whatever else it might be. So to use the creation of a kind of imaginative context to to do it from a frame of from an as-if frame of mind would help that the learning then to become tagged to how you re actually might be feeling or thinking or the situation you might find yourself in when this these skills would become appropriate five, ten, fifteen, twenty years further down the track. You're making me think interesting things, Susan. I haven't thought or talked about this for uh for quite a long time.
SPEAKER_04I'm I've been thinking quite a lot about we the markable rather than the remarkable. There is uh in some ways a fairly obvious response in terms of trying to legitimize, I suppose, some of the things like learning power or like understanding happiness and relationships and you know, all the interpersonal skills by making them markable in some way. And obviously that's very difficult to do by itself. But my more recent thought is perhaps it needs to not be markable. So what you've just said, that as soon as you put it into a test, you actually lose the power of the remarkable.
SPEAKER_01It's a real, it's a real dilemma. Yeah. I mean, there is, you know, there is truth in the what's the old saying, if we don't find ways to measure what we value, we simply uh simply end up valuing what we measure. Yes. But it's a kind of dangerous route to go down. You know, it would be awful if kids were coming out of school with an eight-hour score on their resilience, their collaborativeness, and their imagination. You know, like I'd only scored, you know, 67 on relationships, you know, as that was kind of a badge that was kind of tattooed on your head when you came out of school. That would be terrible. But there are other much better much better ways of doing it. I don't know if you've plugged into the work going on at uni uh Melbourne on what they call Melbourne metrics, which are what work under the guise of a wonderful woman who I only met recently called Sandra Milligan Milligan. Okay, I'll look her up. Look her up because it's really it's it's achieved a lot of leverage worldwide. This world. Just Google Melbourne metrics. And she's put a she and her team have put a lot of energy in trying to find ways of and uh this I will use the my preferred word here, not assessing or measuring, but evidencing. Because that gives you a much more open it doesn't close down on it's all got to be about numbers, for example. It can be a mixed bag of may there may be some numbers, but there may also be qualitative portfolio-based things. But w ways of avoiding those pitfalls. Uh yeah, so have a look at Melbourne metrics. It's really good work.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, thank you. I'll have a look at that and keep on thinking because um we don't we don't want a score, and we know that the scores tend to feed into people's identity. The people on my podcast have said that very, very clearly that they've felt their their level that they left high school with or secondary school like a mark on their head. My partner didn't finish secondary school, and he continually says that he's not intelligent, and he is so wrong. He is really, really intelligent and just the most beautiful person. But he continues to have that self-identity of not being smart. And it's a real it's a real problem. Let's talk a little bit more about your current book, Bodies of Learning. I I feel for me personally, I'm still processing some of the information in that book.
SPEAKER_01I noticed that quite dense in places and and and potentially quite challenging, but well done for having a go at it anyway.
SPEAKER_04I noticed that you probably very deliberately used nowhere in the book the term brain breaks. Can you explain why you've moved away from that and how bodies of learning is not a brain break?
SPEAKER_01Well, the there was a fad, wasn't there, for talking about brain brain gym and brain breaks and so on. And the the evidence, as far as I know, was that they didn't, you know, they might have been having people kind of you know jumping up and down and sort of shaking out their physical tension for a while. It's not a bad thing. And at least, you know, the ethos of sit down, be quiet, face front, stop talking, that ethos in school is not very not conducive to broader kinds of learning. It may not even be very conducive to, you know, literal, verbatim, retention-based types of learning. But what the work that Emily Paul and I were doing in that book was to go a bit deeper and say actually what's going on in the science world is involves much more. Sorry, excuse me, I've been talking too much over the last couple of days. I must have a have a quick drink. Got a frog in my throat. That people are beginning to reframe the brain, not as the physical site of the mind, so to speak, not as the chief executive of the body, not the brain is the place where all the intelligent stuff happens, and then it it it receives sensory information and it processes it in very I always think of it as like the brightly lit executive office of the mind, of the brain, and then it comes to decisions and then it sends memos to the muscle department to say move this or don't do that or sit up straighter or pay attention or something like that. But all the intelligent stuff was still located in the brain. And what's shifting, this is relatively recent, is to realize that the brain is just one of the organs of the body, which has a very specific function within the whole constitution of the body. Our basic design function in life is not to sit around thinking things or remembering things or writing little essays, it's to get important things done in the world. That's what we're designed for. To be able to produce action. One of the scientists, the most well-known profs in this area, uh, whose name escapes me for the moment, Daniel Wolpit, his name is, um, says we have a brain for for what one reason and one reason only, that is to generate intelligent action. Right. Right? So we're moving the center of gravity of the way we think about school from the acquisition and retention of knowledge and understanding to the cultivation of competence, which is what kids want really. You know, they want to feel competent because out of competence comes confidence.
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_01You feel more confident in the world when you know that you can handle things, you can do things, you can be effective. I'm not a huge fan of the word agency, because that again sort of fetishizes it is, but you feel that you have the power to do things. You have a kind of realistic optimism about your ability to cope or to manage things. And that's, you know, when we're talking about an education for life, that seems to emerge as the key thing. You know, it's not the key outcome is not to be able to, you know, hold your own in erudite conversations at high table in your university or your fancy middle class dining rooms. You know, that may be useful for a minority of people, but that's you know, that's not what everybody needs and wants. Everybody wants to be able to do things. And you do things with your muscles, and you have to do things that are appropriate to the situation you find yourself in. So the the sensory motor side of our lives is not as Piaget is often misrepresented, childish ways of learning and knowing, out of which we must be grown as quickly as possible into concrete and then into formal operational thinking. This is the huge mistake. That what happens is that we develop a suite of more sophisticated ways of learning and thinking, which grow out of and continually are dependent on and integrated with those earlier but still vital ways of thinking and learning and acting and doing, which we had when we were small. That's a reperceptualization. So you have to start thinking about the whole body. You have to start thinking about how in tune are we with what's going on inside ourselves? How well do we know what's in our own best interest? How attentive can we be when you're meeting a new person or being presented with an idea or a possibility to a kind of little voice that often kind of speaks somewhere down in your chest or your tummy? And it speaks in a very primitive language about, and it might it's either going, ah, or it's going, you know, you know that little voice. And little children have that about people that they meet, friends of their parents, whether this is an ah, this is interesting, this is I will move towards this event or this possibility, or a no, this is, I don't know what it is, but something's not clicking, something's wrong.
SPEAKER_04I actually know exactly what you're talking about because I have the privilege of a grandson who's uh 17 months at the moment, and on a Friday, which is today, I get to look after him for the whole day, and we are interacting quite frequently. So I actually get to see his choices of moving towards and moving away from people.
SPEAKER_01Great, and that's where our values, our sense of what's wholesome or what's important or what's urgent is vitally bound up with the visceral memories that we have of previous, earlier situations. It's what the great scientist, the neurologist Antonio Damasio, who's a huge, been a huge influence in this field, calls the visceral rudder. That kind of helps us steer through life. And there are various forms of brain damage which can disconnect the visceral, the promptings, the messages from the visceral rudder in your chest or in your muscles or in your breathing or in your tummy, that can get disconnected from your decision making or action planning bits of the brain. And when that happens, and there are very interesting clinical uh examples of this, when that happens, you can still be clever, you can still do the cryptic crossword in the morning, but you'd start making crap life decisions. That visceral rudder stops being able to steer you in matters that matter to you, that have significance or urgency, that the the rudder stops functioning. So we have to reframe how we understand emotion, for example, in education. Emotion is action readiness. It's the body saying it's the body saying you should run and hide from this, or you should try and um what's the word, face down this. This is a potential threat, or you need you need to try and see it off, or this is not good for you, so you should your the appropriate response is revulsion or disgust. We have these basic motions for good reason, and we should make sure that the signals from those different areas are as tidy and as rich and as accurate as possible in order to steer us intelligently through life. Well, when was the last time you saw that on a school curriculum?
SPEAKER_04Not at all. And I'm quite interested in another aspect which I didn't find well discussed, which is probably because you need to be quite um uh what's the word, contained when you write a book. Could you help me at all in understanding the young children's instinct, perhaps, to be pushing and poking and play fighting, and particularly the boys, not always the boys, just being a bit rambunctious, so that interplay of bodies.
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely. There's uh do you know the work of a man called Peter Gray? I don't know. He's an expert. I can't remember what his. I think his book is called Something Like Freedom to Play. He is a respectable American academic. Uh and he his work, where I came across it, was picked up by uh a recent book that got a lot of traction in certainly in my country, in the education world, a book called The Anxious Generation, uh by an author called Jonathan Haid.
SPEAKER_04You're amazing.
SPEAKER_01And he he refers to the work, the lifelong work of this Peter Grey, who is an expert on play and the functions of play and the importance of play and the place of relatively unsupervised, not allowing dangerous things, but the light touch, supervision, and the the permission for children to learn to acquire some of the basic, particularly social skills of life, through being allowed to go through that kind of rough and tumble form of playing. It should be available just as much to the girls as to the boys, obviously. It's not it's not it's not just a boy thing, or it shouldn't just be a boy thing. But there is good research now showing, you know, we are you know we do have to be concerned with health and safety. We want it to be a license for rough kids to beat beat people up. But you know, but I wish I'd had more of that when I was at school, but I'd learned to kind of comport myself in a physical, in a physical way that was more not assertive, but more confidently in the world. And I was effectively an only child. I had a big sister who was 10 years older than me. So I didn't I didn't get that at home, that sort of rambunctious thing at home. But it's clear evolutionary, look at the way the like the cubs of big cats play plays, rough, rough play with each other. We still have that instinct, I think. So with the appropriate caveat, it's something that we should not be too frightened of, particularly in early, early years. We should not dare to allow those lessons because they're visceral lessons. You know, you learn them not just as something cognitive, but you learn it in your body. You learn it in your body, you learn it as a way of taking care of yourself or giving appropriate signals to other people. Um even just knowing how to kind of comport yourself in a way that is assertive but not aggressive. Right. Is something something that a lot of people haven't yet learned, but you could learn through that. You know, you don't want to be too aggressive, you don't want to be, you know, to ruin the game for everybody else. There's a nice, I don't know if this expression is around in Australia, but it's an old-fashioned English expression. That came from in the in the old days when kids were playing out on the streets and one kid owns the cricket bat, right? So they always get to be the first one in. And then when they're bold first ball, they're really cross and upset, and they're strongly temptation to to this is the phrase, take their bat home. In other words, to ruin the game for everybody else, because they're the only big person who has a bat. But they quickly learn that you lose friends very quickly if you do that.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_01Right. So you have to learn that it's in your own best interest not to give in to the impulse to take your bat home. Simple, simple things like that are kind of you know basic lifelong learnings, aren't they?
SPEAKER_04That's fascinating. I think you'll be a little bit proud of me. I did try out the walk and talk. I was asking students to do a lot of writing last class, and there was a few students who did nothing, and a few students who made it not so great. So I really spent the week thinking about how else we can get students' ideas into a teacher brain without 30 people all speaking at once, and then I get nothing. And I thought, well, if I let them do a walk and talk, and we went outside and they walked around to the basketball court for the first part because it was raining and the oval was too wet, and then they went onto the oval and they came back and they tell told me their ideas after the walk and talk. I'm not sure I've optimised it yet. I think I gave them too much time, and I think because it's the first time that they've ever done it, they're probably not accustomed to the processes around that and so forth. So rather than going, oh my gosh, this doesn't work and throwing it away by any means, I'm really keen to continue doing something like that, refining it. Even the children were coming to me and saying, we've had enough now, and I really should have taken that cue and brought them back inside, but I gave them a few more minutes. So just those sorts of reflections as a teacher on how to tweak that. But I have to say the students did come up with some very interesting ideas, and we were able to have a discussion. The deal was that if we did a walk and talk, they had to listen to the student who was talking when they came back in again and not try and talk over them or have side conversations because the point was for me as a teacher to get their ideas into my understanding so we could then take it further. So I thought I'd just let you know that I'd had a go at that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you. Well, that sounds great. And I wish there were more people like you who could have that learning-oriented reaction. There are unfortunately, I think there are a lot of people out there who've developed a very strong hostility towards anything that they think is progressive, or basically anything that incorporates the body rather than the just the disembodied intellect. And I have a theory, which is not fully evidenced yet, that a lot of those people who have that, who operate with that quite strong antagonism, and some of them you'll be familiar with in Australia, uh, in the both in the government and in the teaching profession, are disappointed. Once upon a time, they were disappointed progressives. And that's certainly true in England, of some of the most vociferous enemies of any kind of progressive teaching. Uh, and quite if you dig into their histories, they often, you know, when they finished their teacher training, they went into school, often rather idealistically, in school, difficult schools, difficult areas, and tried to do things too fast. A little exactly I was reminded of this when you described your experience. And instead of doing what you did and said, this is harder than I thought, or maybe they weren't ready for this, or maybe it was too much too quickly. Let me have another go, let me refine it. They left to the conclusion that the whole thing was crap.
SPEAKER_04Yes.
SPEAKER_01And it, as exactly as you said, it didn't work. Um, and I think that's what fuel fuels some of this animus, this hostility, that that decision, like that, you know, I tried it and I got burnt. So I'm never going to do it again. So I'm going to become a John Sweller cognitive load type person in my approach to teaching and learning ever on, because discovery, learning, and inquiry learning doesn't work in the title of a famous paper. And it doesn't work if you do it badly. Of course it doesn't, in exactly the same way that didactic teaching doesn't work if you do it badly.
SPEAKER_04And that's exactly why I wanted to share that experience so that other teachers hopefully will listen to the podcast and will hear that experience of the toing and froing and the the need to refine things, which we have always done in other areas of teaching. When when learning groups came in, all teachers went, Oh my gosh, this is too much. But it they worked with it and they worked with it until it worked. And that's really the way that you need to go with that sort of thing. I'm it is seven o'clock, and so instead of launching into the next little thought that I had, I should ask you, can I have five more minutes?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yes. Okay.
SPEAKER_04So I have spent my time in my early 20s as a creative dancer. When I do creative dancing, it is music in the room and there's no specific instruction. You just move into the space and start moving with the music. Like it needs to be in relation to the music. But to learn how to do that, the teachers would give us things that helped our minds imagine how to move to this particular piece of music. So if it was very something soft and light, like a Mozart piece or some of Beethoven's light music, we might be given silk scoves to throw in the air and watch them fall and then choose how to move around that. What I'm trying to say is not so much about creative dance, but because I've learnt that feeling of here's the blank canvas of the room, and all you've got is the music, but I actually have the structures within me to understand how I might interpret that music in the space. I think most people haven't been able to take that space from very, very organized, this is how you do it, to complete blank slate do something, which is a scary place to be. And I'm actually really, really good at providing the structures that get you to being able to be creative without feeling overwhelmed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like sort of stepping stones or something. There's a there's enough enough structure to get you there, but enough openness to allow that creativity. Very interesting. I was I've been slightly surprised that my work on the well, the two books that I've produced around the notion of embodiment have got strong attraction in the world of dance. I've I've worked quite a lot with dancers, and my co-author, Emily, is also originally trained as a dancer.
SPEAKER_03Interesting.
SPEAKER_01Dancers, not surprisingly, have a much greater sense or sensibility of themselves as embodied. And a lot of dance teachers and a lot of dancers uh have said to me that you know it's not not only my work, but work that brings a kind of scientific language and a scientific framing to this is very reassuring to them because it kind of gives a language, it gives a scaffolding to things that they have always felt, but which their sense of the value has always been a little bit vulnerable because they felt that they haven't had a robust or a well-respected language through which to articulate their intuitive knowledge and their intuitive understandings. So I'm uh it doesn't surprise me to hear that you have dance in your background.
SPEAKER_04Thank you so much, Guy, for all of the work that you've done all for the whole of your lifetime, because it really does make a huge, huge difference to so, so many people. And really, really grateful for the time that you've given to me and to whoever. That comes to listen to this. I'm just grateful. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Not at all. It's been a pleasure talking with you. I love talking with kindred spirits and even not entirely kindred spirits, providing there's not too much hostility in the air. And as I get older and my health begins to deteriorate, I don't do as much traveling as I used to do. So opportunities to reach people through the kind of work that you're doing are always a great gift to me. So thank you for your invitation.
SPEAKER_04I have a secret hope that I might be able to visit you sometime in the south of England. My daughter is very seriously considering getting back to Bristol. She's been there for three years and she would like to be there again, which means Mama needs to go and have a holiday there.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, let me know. We'll we'll see what's on. I don't live anywhere near Bristol anymore, but uh That's okay. I can travel. That might well be a possibility. Thanks, thanks for this conversation. I really enjoyed it, Susan. Thank you very much. And for the work that you're doing with the teachers and the kids in Australia.
SPEAKER_04I'm still working on the idea of putting it into a book too.
SPEAKER_00Oh good, good, I'll wait for it.
SPEAKER_04Thank you, guy. Have a lovely day.
SPEAKER_00Okay, bye for now. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER_04Bye. Wow. That was such a privilege to be able to speak with Guy Claxton like that. How does he recall all of those researches and names off the top of his head? There was Dave Perkins, Future Wise, Making Learning Whole, and his article from the 80s called Post Primary Education Has Little Impact on Informed Reasoning. There was Emily Pol, of course, who co-authored the book Bodies of Learning, Luca Parry, another podcaster, Joe Bowler, talking about maths pedagogy, Art Costa, who said life, who said, not a life of tests, but the tests of life, Neil Mercer about interthinking, Sandra Milligan, Melbourne Metrics, Daniel Walbert, The Brain is to Generate Intelligent Action, PRJ, Antonio Damasio, Visceral Rudder, Peter Gray in Jonathan Height about the importance of rambunctious play. Taking my hat off purely but not only to the brilliance of being able to bring all of that research into a conversation so appreciated. I will put all of those references into the comments so that you can find them as well. There were so many ideas. I have a to-do list which has lengthened that includes clipping up guests so that students might be able to listen to some of my guests and tell me as a teacher, and also to share it with others, so other teachers can also get this information from their students. Which one of my guests might resonate with them and what is their thinking that might be behind that? So really bringing that circle a little bit more closed. I have more information about the video idea. Yes, I will get onto it. It's just not possible to do everything at the same time. So Guy made it clear that it needs to be situational, and 16-year-olds who aren't necessarily involved with tax, for example, might need to have that sense of their future being presented. I was already onto that idea, so that's cool. There's things about working and thinking and developing and not giving up on trying something out. So I tried the walking talking and it didn't work perfectly the first time, but that is part of being in education, not to just try an idea and throw it out, but try an idea and refine it so that it does work. Measuring, considering evidencing rather than necessarily numbers in measuring. A really important piece which I've been thinking about quite a bit, and I think the ideas of stackers are one possibility. I know that's throwing a word in there that I haven't explained. Please contact me and I'll tell you a little bit more about that particular idea. I would love to contact the London School that does continually get feedback from students after they've left school about what the school could do better for the current students to make an even better education, preparing them for their life that is beyond school. I am going to continue to ponder education as a whole, and that means every single person, as well as no particular person, how we do respond to the sort of information that we do get about things to do with how effective school is, and that's not the information in terms of test results, it is the information such as Guy was mentioning that half of the students say that school is not for them. A lot of my guests are saying school was not for them. How can we then take that information and make school more for everyone? It is supposed to be mass education. It is supposed to be for everyone who's on the school grounds and in the classroom. So I'm just very, very curious about the dynamics between both finding that information and also acting on that information and simply finding out what people want. Not only do we not do it, but when we do do it, perhaps we don't act on it. And yes, children in school perhaps are not necessarily best placed to tell us what they want, but sometimes they are. I mean, Guy was talking about a group of students who told them very clearly what they wanted was self-defense. That was not my expectation. That was quite a surprise. And to the school I work at's credit, they are in fact doing a self-defense course at the moment. Um I loved the idea of the balloon bopping on the heads of teachers when the teachers, I mean, we need to have a controlled sort of space to do something like that, but that whole concept that the younger people in the room are very aware of when an older person in the room, generally teachers, principals, and so on, are sort of using their position to create a power imbalance. And the idea of just bopping them on the head with a balloon is golden. I also super appreciated the pedagogy, the transfer, learning power approach, ideas about curiosity, collaboration. This all merges very much into what Mick was saying in his podcast about time collapsing and how he as an adult utilises the people around him to find out what he could do to make his own business as successful as possible. I still think that pulling that lens of learning from content into pedagogy, transfer, learning power type ideas as a learning intention will help for teachers in particular, but also for students to refocus what is important in the lesson. I was incredibly honored that Guy said that I was helping to make him think because obviously he has had such a large impact on the way I think. So thank you. That was a little chuff moment for me. And it was fascinating to find out about those visceral cues and understand what the meaning behind bodies of learning really is about. How we think in order to act, and that uh visceral cues within the body that lead us towards meaningful action and worthwhile action as something to tune into and be part of the whole process of making choices for what we do in the world and hopefully contribute to the world. I also really appreciated because I struggle with this personally, the rambunctious play and understanding that as long as rambunctious play is done safely, which is important, that it creates the space for us as human beings, as visceral human beings, to learn appropriate signals, to give appropriate signals, to have that interactive assertiveness between each other. So it's not so much of a power dynamic, but it's a power interplay that develops between human beings so that we can work together to make to be our best people, really. I think that's where it's going to. And I really appreciate being challenged in this area because it's not something that I've thought about before, and I feel like it might be a whole new movement of something for educators to properly focus on, not just to give occasional brain breaks, not that they're bad by themselves. So coming up, there are a bunch of really, really interesting interviews with some more guests, really diverse interviews, again, incredibly deep, incredibly vulnerable, and provide more material for us as educators to reflect on the question: was it 13 years well spent? And is there something else that we could do in school-based education that would really turbocharge the sorts of skills that young people need in their early adult life? Tell me what you thought. Send me an email. 13 Years Well Spent. 13 is a word, not a number. 13 yearswellspent at gmail.com. Tune into the next episode. Bye for now.