Switching on to learning
October 2007
Kim Thomas
When John Howells came to Leasowes Community College 21 years ago, he found it “pretty traditional” in its approach. Previously, he’d worked at a school where staff were “looking at the child, not just the subject” and were trying to find ways of tailoring their teaching to individual children.
Leasowes is a comprehensive school for ages 11 to 16, with specialist status in business and enterprise. John wanted to introduce a new ethos to the school: one in which students were encouraged to take a more independent approach to learning, and in which they had the opportunity to immerse themselves more fully in a subject. Equally important, students would be given the opportunity to bring their own skills and interests to the classroom. John cites Howard Gardner’s definition of ‘intelligence’ as “the ability to solve a problem or to create a product in a particular social culture or grouping,” adding: “We try and emphasise that for most of the children their intelligences are not reflected back in school.”
He has tried to change this in two ways. One was to introduce large blocks of time devoted to a single subject or project. John was lucky enough to have his early experiments in doing this at Leasowes observed by educational researcher Paul Widlake, who found that the approach helped the children take greater responsibility for their learning.
The other was to explore the uses of technology to support learning. “The technology is part of the students’ world more than it’s about the teachers’ world. So you start looking to exploit the technology from where the learner’s coming from, not where the teacher’s coming from,” says John.
The result is a model of learning that, in some respects, looks radically different from the one most of us are used to. For 16 years, Leasowes has made every Friday a day where each class works on a single subject for five hours. This gives students the opportunity to explore a single topic in some depth, often outside the classroom, says John: “We have a grade A-listed garden near us, so this Friday there’ll be a maths problem-solving day around the woods, there’ll be an orienteering day, and the geographers will go and look at how we get erosion from water. It’s there for them to see – it isn’t just an exercise in class.”
The impact of these extended blocks of time, says John, is that students learn more than they would normally. The use of full days has allowed the school to move away from a “mechanical” model of learning, in which each lesson follows the same pattern of an introduction followed by a brief period of learning, and a review. That model makes it very difficult to personalise learning, he says: “The likelihood is you’ve only got 40 minutes to personalise it with 25 children. Five hours with 25 children and you can have 20 minutes with each child if they need it.”
The other advantage of the Leasowes model is that it enables the children to learn more quickly: “The faster you can feed back, the more likely you are to genuinely get improvement. The longer the time lag between a child doing something and a child getting it back, the less improvement you’ll get and the less engagement you’ll get.”
The idea of using big blocks of time has been extended to much longer periods: what is known in Leasowes as the ‘Fast Track’ week, in which the school goes off-timetable for a week to investigate a single subject: “That depth of learning becomes very personalised because students contextualise their learning – we take them out on visits then ask them to come back to reconstruct knowledge in a particular way. It may be text, it may be animation, it may be role-play, but it can be their choice.”
The proximity of the school to Cadbury’s, for example, gives the Year 10 business studies students learning about finance and marketing the opportunity to see how a real business operates: “We’ll take all the students down to Cadbury’s for a day to show how they market stuff, to show how they’re organised, with a personnel department, and they have the opportunity to talk to professionals there. They then bring that back and do a piece of project work. During the week, personnel officers may come in and talk to them about selection.”
Technology gives the children the opportunity to become more independent in their learning, says John: Leasowes students have the opportunity to explore ideas by recording podcasts, creating animations and designing websites. In one example, a few years ago, some students had had their history lessons disrupted by teacher absences, so the school took the children off-timetable for a week, and gave them a project to create online resources on medieval health. “It transformed most of the kids within a week,” says John. “They totally switched back on. They had digital cameras available, and they used role-play; they captured all that stuff and put it on the website to show the type of things they were learning to a public audience, and at the end of it we had a tremendous resource.” The students largely worked independently of the teacher, he says: “The teacher’s role had been to create the challenge, and the children accepted the challenge.”
One of the school’s most successful projects has been Mediaonics, a course taught on Fridays, that gives Key Stage 4 students the opportunity to use a variety of interactive tools, often helped and advised by specialist digital artists, to create a
At Leasowes, the potential uses of technology to engage children are constantly being explored. One new project uses Accipio Learning, as a way of teaching children at risk of permanent exclusion. Accipio provides live, interactive lessons to students in a virtual learning environment: the individual student sees the lessons on the screen and hears the teacher, but none of the students can see each other.
The radical approach at Leasowes has attracted the interest of many schools who increasingly find their students disengaged and unable to learn independently. In recent years, says John, education has become something that is “done” to pupils: “That isn’t going to make them as successful and dynamic and entrepreneurial as everyone wants them to be.”