Designing a prototype – strategies for both stimulating and nurturing change

PELRS was designed as a prototype of new practices in which teachers were invited to participate on the basis that the project would begin by brainstorming how things might be done differently, rather than ‘starting where teachers are at’. Our intention was to circumvent the interlocking habits and assumptions of existing practices

56 Understanding innovation whereby schools and classrooms, constrained by the regulatory structures of the larger

education system of which they are part, retain the stability and coherence of the system by either blocking change or subverting it to ﬁ t in with what is perceived as feasible and practical. In the ﬁ rst two years we worked with four case study schools, 5 selected for their commitment to innovative uses of ICT and located in catchment areas with socio-economic backgrounds varying from impoverished to average (all also had slightly better than average levels of ICT equipment for English schools at that time). PELRS aimed to explore the possibilities for transforming students’ learning through their use of ICT. It set out to develop, implement and evaluate innovative pedagogies with ICTs in teaching curriculum subjects, not the teaching of ICT skills. In the third year, 2005–6, the project widened to include a dozen new schools that tested the usability of the pedagogic strategies and planning frameworks

and further reﬁ ned them in the light of their own school contexts. 6 Although the small scale of funding limited what was possible, work in the third year of PELRS provided evidence that its approach can be ‘scaled up’.

PELRS started with a provisional working model of the conditions that students need to meet before they can be said to be experiencing transformative learning:

• Learning creatively (exploring, producing, designing, experimenting) • Learning as active citizenship (taking decisions, solving problems, making

choices) • Engaging intellectually with powerful ideas (using thinking skills, grappling with ideas/concepts) • Reﬂ ecting on their own learning (learning how to learn through metacognition).

This working model was reﬁ ned through action research over the ﬁ rst two years to develop a theory of transformative learning mediated by context that builds on a broad range of socio-cultural theories (Pearson and Somekh 2006). This embodies the premise that the provenance of transformative learning cannot be disaggregated between agent and context (the latter embedding the affordances of its cultural tools).

PELRS developed strategies for teaching and classroom organisation that built opportunistically on spaces for change that existed in the education system. For example, previous research (see Chapter 2) had shown that young people were strongly motivated by using computers and the Internet and many had acquired considerable skills in their use through exploratory and creative uses of ICT at home, so PELRS invited students who were already skilled in using ICT to join the research team focusing on the question: ‘How could we make the experience of ICT in school more like what we are doing with ICT at home?’ We also took opportunities whenever possible to adopt the rhetoric of new policy initiatives that closely related to PELRS’ aims of transforming pedagogy and learning, such as the encouragement for teachers to give children a ‘voice’ contained in ‘Excellence and enjoyment: A strategy for primary schools’ (DfES 2003). This and other new policies that challenged the established regime of levels of attainment and national tests

Engaging with innovation 57 (that prescribed a linear path for learning) were difﬁ cult for teachers to implement

alongside continuing requirements of OFSTED and the QCA guidelines. Yet teachers were attracted to these new policies which offered more creative ways of working and PELRS offered strategies for taking them up and external support, both in terms of working collaboratively with university researchers and the formal authority that came from working with a project sponsored by the General Teaching Council. PELRS also avoided asking teachers to work in ways which conﬂ icted with their contractual responsibilities within the education system, so for example teachers in the project designed their lessons around the learning process aims of creativity, autonomy, engagement and metacognition in conjunction with the mandatory aims of the national curriculum. These strategies which can be compared to the ‘nurturing of complex systems’ advocated by Davis and Sumara (2005) (see Chapter 1) enabled us to work with a wide range of teachers and students, including the 14–16 age range in secondary schools working for public examinations.

The design of PELRS built directly on activity theory by seeking to change the traditional division of labour between teachers and students, the expected behaviours governed by formal and informal classroom rules, the culture of classroom learning and the level of commitment to a negotiated object. These included:

• Developing a framework for transformed pedagogies (see below), which represented socio-cultural theories diagrammatically, so they were easily accessible and of immediate practical use.

• Changing the patterns of teaching so that learning events began with a plenary session in which teachers outlined the learning goals (from the national curriculum) and students planned how they would like to work. In particular, they could decide on their learning activities and choose resources to help them from books and e-learning materials, including the Internet.

The PELRS ‘generic pedagogic framework’ (see Figure 3.2) represents ICT as the third point of the teacher–pupil relationship, mediating the activities of the negotiated learning focus. The learning focus placed at the centre of the diagram is the object of pedagogic practice, which embraces the whole vision of transformative learning for the students, but is concretised in each learning event in terms of national curriculum outcomes and the PELRS ‘transformative learning outcomes’ of creativity, active citizenship, cognitive engagement and metacognition. The latter are represented at the top right corner of the diagram and the arrow empty of shading that leads to them is intended to indicate that in a three-dimensional representation they should diffuse through the whole activity rather than being merely endpoints. The diagram indicates that with the help of ICT pupils have more opportunities for choice, learning through exploratory play and deeper engagement with their work; and teachers can more easily negotiate new roles for themselves and become co-learners with pupils. The learning focus (or ‘event’) is not limited in its location to school, but extends into home and on-line environments. The context of learning is also seen to be shaped by pupils’ families and peers, and by the other adults who work alongside teachers.

58 Understanding innovation

Transformative learning outcomes

1 Creative learning

2 Active citizenship 3 Cognitive engagement 4 Meta-cognition

Play

Peers

, choice and flow

Pedagogic strategies Co-learning

Learning online

Learning

Pupils as teachers

Negotiation of roles focus

Framed by

Pupils as teachers

Locations

media producers Other adults

School, home,

and pupils

virtual

influencing Pupil voice learning

ICT

Teachers

New understandings of mediated tool use

Figure 3.2 Generic pedagogic framework

During the ﬁ rst six months, the research team developed four themed pedagogic strategies which changed the traditional roles of ‘teachers’ and ‘learners’:

• pupils as teachers • pupils as media producers • pupil voice • learning on-line.

The generic framework was customised as a tool for planning learning events in the four pedagogic strategies. Teachers found these ‘themed’ frameworks a creative tool for planning a new kind of student-led learning. In all four strategies, the focus was on transforming pupils’ learning experiences to become as creative, active, engaged and metacognitive as possible.

Designing a prototype – strategies for both stimulating and nurturing change