Too often when we ask our children or students about school, we ask “How are things?” And almost invariably we get predictable responses like “OK” or “Boring” or even “Lousy“. The response has become so predictable because they know that we are not very serious about asking them what has happened to them in school. Guy Claxton suggests that we ask them:

• What was hard for you today?
• Which learning muscles have you been stretching?
• Did you ask a good question?
• Did you risk tackling something new?
• What did you manage to improve?
• Did you make any interesting mistakes?
• Did you learn anything useful by watching someone else?
• How could you have helped your teacher get that tricky stuff across better?
• How would you have organized the lesson differently?

Source: Guy Claxton’s “What’s the Point of School?”

If you look at these questions, they suggest a “learner reflective mode”. It suggest to them that they should constantly be thinking about how they learn and what they are learning. It is a reflective practice that they can share with their peers, and not only with adults in authority.

If such questioning becomes habitual, it becomes part of the useful and effective repertoire of an independent learner. He learns to assess the manner he learns. His own questioning will power his own learning as opposed to answering questions from adults like parents and teachers, or worse from examination papers!

If you would like to read more about Claxton’s practical advice about how to create enthusiastic learners and more effective teaching, click on the book cover above.

At the Rulang Primary School, a 2,100-student public elementary school specializing in robotics teaching, teachers looked at me somewhat puzzled when I asked whether letting a 7-year-old child know that she is the worse of her class isn’t putting too much pressure on her too early in life.

“No,” school principal Cheryl Lim shrugged. “We rank them in a way to tell them that this is their ranking at this point in time, and that they can do better next year. It’s not to tell them that they are the worst in their class.’‘

~ Quoted from “Singapore’s obsession holds lessons for us all”, Miami Herald

No, the above example is not what I would like to see in Singapore schools. I would love to see instead teachers and principals doing something a little differently. In Guy Claxton’s book, “What’s the Point of School?”, he suggested that teachers should be seen by students to be engaged in their own learning in their subject areas. He provided some examples.

Learning the bagpipes

Claxton tells the story of a school principal, Peter Mountstephen, in Bath, England. At the start of the school year, Peter would stand in front of the school assembly and try to play a new musical instrument he has never played before. In a previous year, he tried to play the bagpipes, and after that he made an awful din trying to play the violin. Amidst titters from the students, he then publicly commits himself to learning the instrument in that one year. He then talks about the “learning muscles” that he would have to employ to to learn the new instrument. He talks about the need for perseverance, the commitment to practise, courage to ask for help and other learning muscles. After that, every once in a while he would show everyone the progress that he is making on his violin. He will also talk about the problems that he is encountering.

Peter doesn’t just stop there. He would make it a point to meet the students of the school. He would ask them what they think would be difficult for them in that particular school term and also discuss what they can do to try and overcome them together with the class teachers.

Claxton also suggested, for example, that an English language teacher puts up his drafts of his own poems for students to see his progress with them. A science teacher may for example, keep an experiment of his own going in one corner of the lab and keep his students informed maybe even involved in his experiments. A design teacher may wish to showcase his efforts to solve a problem. A PE teacher may want to show his students his attempt to learn a new skill.

Just imagine a school with staff with such an attitude. What do you think was Peter trying to do? How will children in such a school regard learning? What do you think the learning environment will be like in such a school?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

- Albert Einstein

How often do teachers allow students to ask questions in school? Not very much actually. Studies have shown that teachers usually do most of the talking. Most teachers don’t even practice “wait time”. A constant droning of the teachers seems to be the norm in most classrooms. Many teachers will disagree but as Betty K. Garner has pointed out in her book, Getting to “Got It”, most teachers are surprised to see that when they have been videotaped, that they are the ones doing most of the talking in the class and they are also the ones who answer their own questions.

The rush to complete the syllabus doesn’t allow for much reflective thinking on the part of the students (and teachers too). Yet getting students to ask questions is an excellent way to gauge how much learning has taken place. As Garner said:

“The true level of understanding is evident in the kinds of questions students ask.”

Teachers therefore should model asking open-ended questions. The concomitant side of this is of course to give students time to think about these questions, and better still, ask further questions about what they are learning. Unfortunately, the only kinds of questions that seem to be prevalent in the classrooms are the kinds that we see being given as part of the homework or written assessments so common in schools of today.