[a few notes I put together a few years back. The bit on "Reading Trajectories" might be of interest].
1. Guy Claxton – Building Learning Power
Claxton uses these key words to characterise great learners:
tenacious logical collaborative
resourceful self-disciplined inquisitive
imaginative self-aware
I have these words on large “incidental learning” boards in my classroom.
TASK:
Look up, discuss and write down the meaning of the words and how they apply to learning.
Each student should think of a time s/he demonstrated each quality in his or her learning.
The whole thing could be recorded in the form of a mind-map.
Further Discussion:
As we found in our TALC session, people disagree with some of the words (eg. “logical”). This diversity of opinions should open up a fruitful debate in which students suggest other qualities they feel are part of great learning.
I have always been inspired by John Holt’s definition of intelligence, which has much in common with what Claxton is saying. I feel it may be very motivating to share this with students as part of this task. In the original, Holt uses a generic “he”. I’ve altered this to “she” just to be provocative!
The intelligent person, young or old, meeting a new situation or problem, opens herself up to it; she tries to take in with mind and senses everything she can about it; she thinks about it instead of about herself or what it might cause to happen to her; she grapples with it boldly, imaginatively, resourcefully, and if not confidently, at least hopefully; if she fails to master it, she looks without shame or fear at her mistakes and learns what she can from them. This is intelligence. Clearly its roots lie in a certain feeling about life, and one’s self with respect to life. Just as clearly, unintelligence is not what most psychologists seem to suppose, the same thing as intelligence only less of it. It is an entirely different style of behaviour, arising out of an entirely different set of attitudes.
2. Flow
Flow is a state of absorption, or being in “the zone”: when one is concentrated to the extent that all distractions fade away and the activity feels effortless and enjoyable. Daniel Goleman writes on flow in Emotional Intelligence:
Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at its best; flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. (p. 90)
Goleman goes on to explain that high-achieving teenagers experience flow for 40% of the time they spent studying, compared to just 17% for the low achievers. Low achievers also spent much less time studying at home (17 hours versus 27) – obviously because they don’t enjoy it. Goleman makes a link with Gardner’s work here; by getting students to learn in their preferred learning style we are more likely to help them enter flow.
It seems you have to be quite good at something to be able to get into flow while doing it. A. J. Marr, in an article called “In the Zone” (looking at Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s work on flow) says it’s found in “activities that perfectly matched one’s skills with the demands of performance”. Csikzentmihalyi suggests that you may be able to transform “potentially negative experiences” into flow by:
1) setting clear goals to strive toward, 2) becoming immersed in the activity chosen, 3) paying close attention to what is happening, and 4) learning to enjoy immediate experiences. (quoted in Marr article)
This group of instructions reminded me of simple meditation practices. Marr comments “pleasant emotional experiences that are characteristic of meditation have long been associated with strict attentiveness to specific stimuli […] and seen as a byproduct of that attentiveness.”
“Flow” seems identical to something called “access concentration” in the literature on meditation. This is a state in which “our thoughts and emotions […] start co-operating with our efforts to concentrate, instead of continually pulling us away from it” (Kamalashila, Meditation: the Buddhist Way of Tranquillity and Insight, p. 66). Kamalashila explains that the freedom from distractions means we have “more free energy available”. My own experience of mediation bears this out: it is possible to find oneself is a state of mind free from distraction with a very sharp focus on the object of meditation. This feels effortless and very enjoyable.
Simple meditation practices are basically just training in concentration. You attempt to keep the mind focussed on something (the breathing, for example) and keep coming back to it when you notice you are distracted. As Goleman puts it when describing flow more generally: “there seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to this zone: it can require considerable effort to get calm and focused enough to begin the task.”
There are two problems here. Firstly, it is difficult to teach meditation in classroom setting. Secondly, there’s no guarantee that students will experience “access concentration”. However, it seems to me that an exploration of this area, perhaps through a practical exercise and a discussion of the links between learning, flow, meditation and concentration is useful. I attach a sheet which explains a fundamental meditation practice “the mindfulness of breathing”, along with the following extract from Simone Weil’s essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”:
Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. Most school tasks have a certain intrinsic interest as well, but such an interest is secondary. All tasks which really call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reason and to an almost equal degree.
[…] Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.
If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in a more mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.
Whatever our opinions about the spiritual life, Weil’s point that time spent struggling to learn and concentrate is never wasted seems very pertinent. Learning can be difficult; experiencing difficulty does not mean we are failing.
Other approaches to flow: NLP
Look at the extract from Aldous Huxley’s novel Island (1962). This is interesting for several reasons. Firstly, Huxley had arrived at a theory of “multiple intelligences” many years before the research of Gardner etc. He was convinced that “everybody’s different from everybody else” (231) and that education must be personalised to suit the individual. I think that the section on “deep trance” and the distortion of time relates to “flow”. In this state we do have a different sense of time and experience “short-cuts to calculating and thinking and problem-solving”.
I don’t think hypnotism is necessary; perhaps we should be looking at NLP and ways of being able to get into flow through “anchoring” these powerful states. Anchoring is basically the deliberate creation of “triggers” for desired physiological states. Just as a smell or piece of music can trigger us to re-experience a particular emotion, NLP teaches us how to access a desired state (such as flow) by creating an anchor that we can use whenever we need to. I attach an explanation of how to create anchors from Introducing NLP by J. O’Connor and J. Seymour (p. 56ff).
TASK:
Discussion of flow. When do students experience it?
Would it be practical to lead students through the process of anchoring a particularly positive learning state?
3. Negative Capability
Again this is something Guy Claxton talks about. It is clearly related to some of his key words (eg. resilience). Keats came up with the term when thinking about Shakespeare. For him, it was an essential aspect of creativity.
At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously-- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. John Keats
Obviously, we need to nurture this kind of creative uncertainty. This concept is associated in my mind with Coleridge’s comments on “composing” which he also connects with memory and “thinking” in general.
Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Some students fear allowing their cognitive “water-insect” to be borne backwards by the current; we need to help them to see that it is part of the creative thinking process.
TASK:
Discussion of these statements with students. When do they feel creative? Does their experience fit with these statements?
4. Making Connections – Reading (Learning?) Trajectories
Being able to make links between different areas of knowledge or expertise is an essential aspect of learning. For me this manifests itself mainly through the patterns I see (or deliberately create) in my reading. There is often a link between the book I am currently reading and something I have previously read. This “trajectory” also extends beyond the current book to something I will read in the future. On the simplest level I may be reading a book by an author I’ve read before and whose other books I intend to read. Such simple “trajectories” also include reading within a particular genre or subject area. But the patterns we create in our reading can be more complex and interesting.
For example: I recently read the travel book Chasing Che (Patrick Symmes). In this book he visits Pumalin Park – a wilderness reserve set up by a radical environmentalist. This fired my interest and I am now reading Deep Ecology (Bill Devall and George Sessions); this was a book that inspired the founder of Pumalin Park (I found this out on the Pumalin website). In the course of reading about ecology I heard about a novel A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle (I’ve read one of his before) which is about an aging radical environmentalist. The web of interconnections goes further. Deep Ecology mentions the poems of Robinson Jeffers, someone I already liked; reading the book has led me to read more of his work. My interest in radical groups has lead me to find out about Earth First! and to get a journal called Do or Die! which features articles about EF! and other groups. I also want to read some of the writings of Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring was very influential in the early days of the environmental movement. All of this also reminded me of some of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially “Binsey Poplars”, which (perhaps surprisingly) has much in common with the perspective of Earth First!ers. This strand in my learning was greatly encouraged by my visit to The Eden Project in the summer. It’s linked in my mind with other important (for me) cultural objects such as the film Silent Running and the song “Woodstock”.
I’ve tried to represent this more visually on a mind-map. Clearly, the connections ramify on and on.
TASK:
Ask students to trace simple or complex “trajectories” within their reading. They should present these to the group. Students should cite a very wide range of “texts” when tracing their independent learning: web sites; TV programmes; computer games; films; popular music; magazines; books; conversations.
5. Share your own Learning
This is something Guy Claxton talks about a lot. I try to incorporate aspects of it into my teaching – for example sharing my original writing with students to show them that I am also struggling to produce effective pieces of writing for a range of audiences and purposes. I have also tried displaying my “drafts” in class – showing how a piece emerges from rough notes with lots of crossings out and so on.
6. Learning Webs
Ivan Illich said: “Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems.” I attach a short text (“Customised Learning and Peer-matched Learning Webs”) which looks at the ideas of Ivan Illich and other radical educational thinkers. I think some parts of Tomlinson are very much in tune with this line of thinking; we need to think of ways in which we can create “learning webs” within school.
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