Resources

Instinctively, it seems obvious that one of the best ways of consolidating your learning of a topic is by trying to teach it to somebody else. We see children acting as teachers every day, whether helping each other in class or with homework, teaching each other new skateboard tricks or game strategies, or even coming to the rescue of an ICT-shy teacher struggling with an interactive whiteboard.

We know that children can teach – but can the skills and specialist knowledge of this latent educational workforce be usefully harnessed, and put to work in schools?

Just by putting this idea into words, you can almost feel the hackles of the traditional pedagogue rising. Yet plenty of teachers have been working towards this end, long before the idea of teachers and students as ‘partners in learning’ became enshrined in the personalisation agenda.

One such is Dan Buckley, the former deputy principal of Eggbuckland Community College in Plymouth, and now a consultant at Cambridge Education.

As an ICT teacher in the mid-1990s, Buckley recognised that his pupils were well ahead of him in their instinctive understanding of digital technology. He was inspired by the way children became “skilled in the art of managing ICT immigrant adults”.

This led him to develop an online, learner-centric curriculum for his college. Pupils were trained to teach the skills they gained, and were required to pass on these skills to their peers.

While pupils could determine the content of their work, they were also presenting evidence of learning, of progressing up a ‘skills ladder’ – and evidence of teaching those skills to peers lower down the ladder.

Such a venture could only work, he says, when the school is deeply committed: “It’s true in all cases - if something is taught by one student to another, it has to be given the same validity as if it had been taught by a teacher.”

“If you stick to it, if you say, this is serious, it will work, and the results will amaze you.” For a demonstration of the results of student involvement, go to the website of Thomas Hardye School, in Dorchester, Dorset (www.thomas-hardye.dorset.sch.uk), click on ‘welcome’ and be blown away by the energy of the student-made video intro to the life of the school. This school has sparked its very own revolution in collaborative learning, using digital video equipment to release and channel some of the untapped creativity of its students.

The seeds of this revolution were sown in 2005 when D&T teacher Mark Richardson (now the school’s Assessment for Learning Director) secured NESTA funding to train students in basic film-making techniques. He challenged students to make short videos to teach an aspect of their current work.

“The young have a natural aptitude for software, but we’ve found they do need some upskilling, for example telling them when they really should be using a tripod.”

The results can be found on their Films for Learning website (www.filmsforlearning.org), which is blossoming into a national and even international community of young educational film-makers. “Our films have been used by teachers all over the country,” he says. “One, which explains the Doppler effect, has been used by a medical school in Amsterdam.

“One of the best things about this approach is that it naturally requires collaboration. You have to have a team, and people can take on roles and learn the skills of the sound person, continuity, scriptwriting and so on.

“Originally, we were getting students to make films that could be used by teachers. Now we find teachers want to make films for their students – and they’re getting students to help them, there’s a symbiotic relationship here.”

Practical constraints of this approach, Richardson says, were chiefly the “confidence of staff” and the shortcomings of the technology. He added, though, that not all videos required sophisticated equipment – some pupils had been making short stop-animation films using puppets, which were used to provoke debate in RE & Ethics.

Other teachers in the school quickly come round to the idea, he said, with around half the staff taking part in a video training session earlier this year. “We asked them to make a short film exploring their own subject, using nothing more than a school chair,” Richardson says.

The approach used at Bealings Primary School in Suffolk seems very different. Here, large parts of the curriculum are taught entirely through role-play, using the ‘Mantle of the Expert’ technique developed by visionary drama teacher, Dorothy Heathcote.

In this approach, children are given specific roles in fictional organisations that mirror the adult world. It could be a wildlife sanctuary, an oil rig, or any other real-life environment. Each child assumes the expertise that goes with their role.

Challenges are set by teachers, who intervene as customers or clients, with the children having to decide how to handle them. They research, calculate costs, hold meetings, make decisions, draw up plans and write reports. In doing so they learn, and also share their learning.

“All the projects we’re running have been extremely carefully planned,” says Headteacher Duncan Bathgate. The scenarios are designed so that children naturally encounter and acquire the skills and concepts of the primary curriculum.

The Bealings pupils also take an active role in the running of the school. In whole-school meetings, their votes count as much as an adult’s. “This is not some fake school council secretly steered by the staff,” Bathgate says. “There have been things we wouldn’t have voted for – for example they voted to call us all by our first names, which one or two of us were perhaps not entirely comfortable with!”

The idea that children can, individually or collectively, determine the content of their education and the environment in which it occurs, is understandably frightening for many teachers. All the teachers emphasise the need for very strong and sensitive staff management.

This is the case at Priory Community College in Weston-super-Mare, North Somerset – a school that has gone further than most in ensuring the ‘student voice’ is heard in a very real way.

Students led the design of the school’s virtual learning environment (VLE): “They showed us how to use social networking sites, and helped us develop the front-end of the VLE,” says the school’s E-learning Director, Andrew Atkinson. “That’s the reason it has taken off so well.”

Pupils are using the VLE forum to discuss school work, across all subjects: “It’s real 24/7 learning,” he says. The VLE was the basis for an English ‘future learning’ project last term, in which, with full parental consent, small groups were left to work independently for six weeks, with no adult direction whatsoever. The students made videos with their phones, and the work they presented at the end of the trial was, according to Atkinson, better than anything they’d produced in class.

Last year, a group of 12 Year 7 pupils were trained as ‘student researchers’ to go into lessons and report on the teaching and learning they witnessed. In other words, they were student observers – though Principal Neville Coles preferred not to use the word ‘observer’ because of its Ofsted-like associations. “Staff had to volunteer to have the researchers in their lessons,” he added – interestingly, it was not always the most secure and confident teachers who opted in.

The researchers then worked in pairs to report their findings, and all the feedback was assembled onto a DVD and presented to the staff. “Surprisingly, many teachers seemed more comfortable receiving feedback from students than they would from adult observers,” he adds. “And now, more and more staff want the researchers in their classes.”

Meanwhile the original Year 7 researchers have taught their skills to a new group of Year 7s, so the process is becoming an established part of the school’s life.

At Grey Court School in Richmond, Surrey, pupils were involved in the design of a real learning environment. This was the ‘Ingenium’ - a learning space built with Classroom of the Future funding, now in its third year.

After the initial excitement, the room has gradually become integrated into the life of the school. Deputy Head Marie Smith says, “It’s the space itself, rather than the technology in it, that in the longer term seems to be making the big difference.”

That said, the laptops, the digital video equipment, ambient sound system, and bluescreen technology all get regular use. As often as not, “it’s the students themselves that are taking charge, learning from each other, by a process almost of osmosis.”

She realises there’ll come a time when this once-futuristic equipment will become obsolete and have to be replaced. But who will pay? At the moment these initiatives rely on isolated pockets of funding and on inspired – and inspirational - teachers. If we are truly to leverage the massive potential of students teaching each other, a more unified approach may be required.

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