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Learning Without Limits
"The style and language used by the authors make the book readable and therefore a book that practising teachers can actively use as a guide to improve their practice ...it is amply demonstrated that teaching can and should be an activity whose primary focus is to enhance students’ learning capacity and not limit it." Journal of Inservice Education This book explores ways of teaching that are free from determinist beliefs about ability. In a detailed critique of the practices of ability labelling and ability-focussed teaching, Learning without Limits examines the damage these practices can do to young people, teachers and the curriculum. Drawing on a research project at the University of Cambridge, the book features nine vivid case studies (from Year 1 to Year 11) that describe how teachers have developed alternative practices despite considerable pressure on them and on their schools and classrooms. The authors analyze these case studies and identify the key concept of transformability as a distinguishing feature of these teachers' approach. They construct a model of pedagogy based on the mind-set that children's futures as learners are not pre-determined, and that teachers can help to strengthen and ultimately transform young people's capacity to learn through the choices they make. The book shows how transformability-based teaching can play a central role in constructing an alternative improvement agenda. This book will inspire teachers, student teachers, lecturers and policy makers, as well as everyone who has a stake in how contemporary education and practice affect children's future lives and life chances.
292 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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November 20, 2013
It would be stupid to say that you could get away with not doing a Masters in Teaching at Melbourne University if you read this book – but, but – given that Melbourne University stresses differentiated learning and therefore forces an almost obsessive focus on the interests and needs of the student, well, reading this book wouldn’t exactly hurt.
I have read this because it was recommended in another book I read recently, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
One of the things that we tend to believe, because we struggle to believe it can’t not be true, is that some people are innately smarter than other people. It is somewhat amusing to watch the twists and turns people make to justify the advantages they have had while also pretending that these advantages played no part in their achievements. At least, it would be amusing if it didn’t generally also involve them finding ways to ensure ‘the competition’ is kept in their place.
This is one of the things about the 7 Up series from the UK that has stayed with me. The three upper class boys in one of the shows (possibly 28 Up) complain that when they were 7 they were asked about their potential schooling and they were able, more or less, to say which university they would be going to and their likely careers after that. One of the children in an orphanage is also asked this and replies with the memorable line, “What’s a university?” If you don’t know that a path even exists, how likely are you to take it? The upper class kids complain later in life that the whole thing had been made to look so simple for them, but that really it involved lots of hard work and effort. And this is utterly true. But they had been socialised into performing that effort and they had reasonable expectations that that effort would pay off. If you have never known someone to have gone to university, what expectation can you have that that particular path will lead anywhere?
But this book is much more interested in challenging the idea of streaming kids into ability groups. It presents a history of such streaming, streaming based on notions of ‘general intelligence’ – all of which have been discredited over the years by educational research. The problem is that people just don’t fit nicely into the boxes we seek to put them into. In that sense there is no such thing as a ‘single ability’ classroom – they are all mixed ability.
And the other problem is that we don’t really live in a world where giving kids ‘the basics’ is ever going to be enough now. The world is changing too quickly and so if kids leave school only being able to count, read and write, they are really going to struggle with the world they will be forced to adjust to. It isn’t that they don’t need to be able to do these things, but what they need to be able to do more is think and learn, they need to be life long learners because the jobs that allow you to leave school at 14 and not learn anything again until you retire at 65 don’t exist any more. “You can spend a fortune, but you can’t spend a trade” used to be a saying – you don’t hear it any more. Marx was onto this one – he pointed out somewhere or other that the history of technological innovation was a process of moving the hand further and further away from the point of production. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb – if your hand is close to the action of producing something… beware.
Ability streaming is actually not good for anybody – high, low or middle. Kids are not stupid, they know where they have been placed and being placed has remarkably detrimental effects on kids. There was a piece of research that was done in an introductory course given to Army recruits where they did a shooting ‘test’ and at the end of the test they were ‘graded’ according to their ability to shoot. Accept they had done no such thing. What they actually did was randomly assign people to groups – you are a great shot, you are crap, you’re ok. They made sure both the new recruits and their trainers were told which group each person was put into. Then they came back at the end of the training course and tested the recruits ‘for real’ this time. And the ‘prophesy’ came true. The problem was that when they told the trainers people had been assigned at random to those groups, the trainers refused to believe them. You see, they are professionals, they don’t have biases, they know how to recognise talent. Just like orchestras now have to do ‘blind tests’ to assess musicians to joint them, because if they don’t and are able to see who is performing then women don’t sound as good as they do otherwise.
This is why some teachers in the UK started to see if there were ways in which you could teach kids without crushing their will to learn via the age old means of destroying motivation known as grading them into ability groups. This book comes out of a project where they followed teachers who avoided ability assessment and teaching and instead sought to provide the best possible education for all kids in their classrooms. Bizarre idea, I know.
What they found was that these teachers had remarkably similar strategies, so much so that the writers of this book could come up with a method to encourage teachers to move towards this style of teaching. First and foremost is treating the kids like people – in fact, one of the teachers in a primary school said she thinks of the kids as people and that alone makes all of the difference. Nietzsche – a philosopher I’m not terribly fond of – says somewhere that a teacher takes nothing seriously other than his students, not even himself.
The point is that it isn’t enough to know your stuff – it isn’t enough to know the difference between rational, irrational and complex numbers, say, nor is it enough to know general stuff about how kids learn, but you really need to understand the kinds of things kids are going to find hard in the content you are providing them with and then you need to know how to overcome those hurdles. This is sometimes called ‘pedagogical content knowledge’. And you need to know your students. But the problem is that we don’t trust teachers to do this – so we present them with packed curriculums and we have external standardised assessments and all of this rewards teachers who do things that research shows makes real learning almost impossible. It really is too tragic to be funny.
The best part of this book is the long middle bit where the teachers selected for the project have a chapter each on how they teach and how they seek to engage their students in learning. This is a real delight to read and gives some wonderful tips on how to go about creating a ‘learning without limits’ classroom.
Like I said at the start – this book could well have been written for the masters course I did in teaching. It is hard to believe that there is any argument about providing teachers with the tools that would enable them to differentiate their teaching so as to meet the individual needs of the students in their class – but most of what we do ensures that this can’t really happen. And mostly that is because we have this idea that people are born with fixed abilities that can’t be changed, even with the best will in the world. I think that even if this were true for most of the kids in classrooms it would be criminal to organise an education system upon that basis. That it has been shown to be virtually NEVER true only makes matters a thousand times worse.
I have read this because it was recommended in another book I read recently, Eugenics, Race and Intelligence in Education (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
One of the things that we tend to believe, because we struggle to believe it can’t not be true, is that some people are innately smarter than other people. It is somewhat amusing to watch the twists and turns people make to justify the advantages they have had while also pretending that these advantages played no part in their achievements. At least, it would be amusing if it didn’t generally also involve them finding ways to ensure ‘the competition’ is kept in their place.
This is one of the things about the 7 Up series from the UK that has stayed with me. The three upper class boys in one of the shows (possibly 28 Up) complain that when they were 7 they were asked about their potential schooling and they were able, more or less, to say which university they would be going to and their likely careers after that. One of the children in an orphanage is also asked this and replies with the memorable line, “What’s a university?” If you don’t know that a path even exists, how likely are you to take it? The upper class kids complain later in life that the whole thing had been made to look so simple for them, but that really it involved lots of hard work and effort. And this is utterly true. But they had been socialised into performing that effort and they had reasonable expectations that that effort would pay off. If you have never known someone to have gone to university, what expectation can you have that that particular path will lead anywhere?
But this book is much more interested in challenging the idea of streaming kids into ability groups. It presents a history of such streaming, streaming based on notions of ‘general intelligence’ – all of which have been discredited over the years by educational research. The problem is that people just don’t fit nicely into the boxes we seek to put them into. In that sense there is no such thing as a ‘single ability’ classroom – they are all mixed ability.
And the other problem is that we don’t really live in a world where giving kids ‘the basics’ is ever going to be enough now. The world is changing too quickly and so if kids leave school only being able to count, read and write, they are really going to struggle with the world they will be forced to adjust to. It isn’t that they don’t need to be able to do these things, but what they need to be able to do more is think and learn, they need to be life long learners because the jobs that allow you to leave school at 14 and not learn anything again until you retire at 65 don’t exist any more. “You can spend a fortune, but you can’t spend a trade” used to be a saying – you don’t hear it any more. Marx was onto this one – he pointed out somewhere or other that the history of technological innovation was a process of moving the hand further and further away from the point of production. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb – if your hand is close to the action of producing something… beware.
Ability streaming is actually not good for anybody – high, low or middle. Kids are not stupid, they know where they have been placed and being placed has remarkably detrimental effects on kids. There was a piece of research that was done in an introductory course given to Army recruits where they did a shooting ‘test’ and at the end of the test they were ‘graded’ according to their ability to shoot. Accept they had done no such thing. What they actually did was randomly assign people to groups – you are a great shot, you are crap, you’re ok. They made sure both the new recruits and their trainers were told which group each person was put into. Then they came back at the end of the training course and tested the recruits ‘for real’ this time. And the ‘prophesy’ came true. The problem was that when they told the trainers people had been assigned at random to those groups, the trainers refused to believe them. You see, they are professionals, they don’t have biases, they know how to recognise talent. Just like orchestras now have to do ‘blind tests’ to assess musicians to joint them, because if they don’t and are able to see who is performing then women don’t sound as good as they do otherwise.
This is why some teachers in the UK started to see if there were ways in which you could teach kids without crushing their will to learn via the age old means of destroying motivation known as grading them into ability groups. This book comes out of a project where they followed teachers who avoided ability assessment and teaching and instead sought to provide the best possible education for all kids in their classrooms. Bizarre idea, I know.
What they found was that these teachers had remarkably similar strategies, so much so that the writers of this book could come up with a method to encourage teachers to move towards this style of teaching. First and foremost is treating the kids like people – in fact, one of the teachers in a primary school said she thinks of the kids as people and that alone makes all of the difference. Nietzsche – a philosopher I’m not terribly fond of – says somewhere that a teacher takes nothing seriously other than his students, not even himself.
The point is that it isn’t enough to know your stuff – it isn’t enough to know the difference between rational, irrational and complex numbers, say, nor is it enough to know general stuff about how kids learn, but you really need to understand the kinds of things kids are going to find hard in the content you are providing them with and then you need to know how to overcome those hurdles. This is sometimes called ‘pedagogical content knowledge’. And you need to know your students. But the problem is that we don’t trust teachers to do this – so we present them with packed curriculums and we have external standardised assessments and all of this rewards teachers who do things that research shows makes real learning almost impossible. It really is too tragic to be funny.
The best part of this book is the long middle bit where the teachers selected for the project have a chapter each on how they teach and how they seek to engage their students in learning. This is a real delight to read and gives some wonderful tips on how to go about creating a ‘learning without limits’ classroom.
Like I said at the start – this book could well have been written for the masters course I did in teaching. It is hard to believe that there is any argument about providing teachers with the tools that would enable them to differentiate their teaching so as to meet the individual needs of the students in their class – but most of what we do ensures that this can’t really happen. And mostly that is because we have this idea that people are born with fixed abilities that can’t be changed, even with the best will in the world. I think that even if this were true for most of the kids in classrooms it would be criminal to organise an education system upon that basis. That it has been shown to be virtually NEVER true only makes matters a thousand times worse.
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