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Education 3-13

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Accelerated learning: A revolution in teaching method?

Peter Silcock

To cite this Article Silcock, Peter(2003) 'Accelerated learning: A revolution in teaching method?', Education 3-13, 31: 1, 48

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To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03004270385200081 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004270385200081

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ACCELERATED LEARNING: A REVOLUTION IN TEACHING METHOD?

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Peter Silcock
Findings by researchers in education and psychology support a handful of classroom procedures which, if followed by teachers, should lead to pupils learning at maximum capacity. The three most important are as follows. Firstly, pupils should be prepared for tasks to maintain their ongoing comprehension. Secondly, steps need taking to ensure their personal commitment to studies. Thirdly, they should feel in 'mindful' control of their own activities throughout.

Introduction
Advances in teaching method often happen as spin-offs from changing theories of learning and development. Recent work in cognitive and developmental theory follows this rule, promising (on some accounts) to alter classroom methods radically, provided favourable school circumstances are realised. Ideas worked out by neo-Piagetians such as Adey and Shayer (1994, 1996) agree with theories of self-monitoring promoted by writers on assessment (e.g. Gipps, 1998) and learningtransfer (e.g. Desforges, 1993). Teaching linked to these ideas should guarantee pupils learn at maximum capacity (as far as one can guarantee anything in education!). It may seem bold to claim a breakthrough in pedagogy. But there is no reason to doubt such a breakthrough is within reach, if we have the will to base policies on knowledge we already have. Three principles are thought especially important. These are: (a) b)
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c)

Their ongoing control (via self-monitoring) of what they do.

'Comprehension, commitment and control' are overlapping ideas, covering a range of teaching practices. Yet each affects learning outcomes separately. They are claimed as bedrock in prescribing intellectual, emotional and socio-political requirements teachers must always plan for in classrooms. Admittedly, a big fly in the educational ointment here is that political legislation making teachers fully accountable for curricula stops them discharging much control to learners. But human psychology does not change just because politicians wish it would. If the following account is correctly founded in good theory, it stays correct whatever the prevailing ideological climate might be.

Comprehension
Just about everyone now accepts the 'constructivist' belief that human beings shape their own minds through their own actions within given socio-cultural settings. So, as a first principle, teachers must respect the attitudes and states of mind of learners relative to

The importance of adequate preparation such that learners comprehend the tasks they face; Their commitment to their work;

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goals set. To be precise, writers such as Driver (1983) suppose there are two essentials for learning even to begin to occur. One is that learners make sense of tasks they face. The second is that they have the intellectual tools needed to manage the job in hand in ways expected of them, and see that they have. A girl faced by a scientific exercise must know both what the exercise asks of her and be confident, in her own mind, she has suitable means for tackling it. It isn't always easy to fulfil these conditions for every child in a class, and writers display varying degrees of caution in the way they suggest ground is prepared. For example: in Resnick et al's (1992) programme for teaching maths to 6-7 year olds, children discuss their 'intuitive' grasp of number problems before these are introduced formally. Out-of-school experiences are mulled over in a way to make some real contact with maths to be taught. Then, new terms are introduced quickly during discussions about issues raised in earlier sessions. Adey and Shayer's (1994) 'Cognitive Acceleration Through Science Education' (CASE) work with 11-12 year olds begins, similarly, with a period when students learn a scientific language in normal discourse before they move to curricular problems. The norm is for teachers to fit new material into existing knowledge; and, certainly, if we are really interested in speeding up learning, long term, time spent preparing ground at the outset is time well spent. However, someone might object that the nature of m o d e m schooling is such that children have to learn material they cannot meet out of school. It is a school's job to bring pupils from a state of ignorance to one of knowledge, and to argue for a painless transition ignores the reality that it is bound to be hard throughout - especially for pupils from experientially impoverished backgrounds. No-one can make the path of improvement smooth for everyone all the time. Moreover, as Adey and Shayer (1994) stress, learning accelerates when pupils conquer real challenges set for them not when problems are pre-eliminated. What a thorough experiential preparation of topics does is ensure that pupils are equipped to meet these challenges: it doesn't eliminate the most stringent difficulties or make them, in some sense, less intimidating and more emotionally palatable. The central point is that teaching anything which pupils cannot link to what they already know falls at the first hurdle, since children will not understand it (though they might, still, reproduce it in tests and exercises). Of course, making new knowledge part of

one's personal store is often a slow business and so depends on a persistence on the part of learners despite initial difficulties. But such persistence needs a head start. It needs some kick-in to a topic to convince learners they might make long-term headway, providing they stay the course. So questions following hard on the heels of those about task preparation address how best to ensure learners persist with their lessons despite inevitable, early setbacks.

Commitment
Desforges' (1993, 1997) thinking about the role of pupil-commitment in learning is instructive. He tells how, as part of some classroom research, he set an eight year old (Claire) the seemingly impossible task of writing a story beginning 'And they all lived happily ever after' (1993, p.5). The thrust of his tale was that Claire found the task irritatingly difficult yet persisted with it because she was 'mindfully' committed to the goal set for her. She saw herself as a story-writer in a way she didn't see herself committed to other things. As Desforges believes, mindful (purposeful, selfaware) commitment is more than being motivated: we can be emotionally committed to pursuits with which we would rather not (in an intellectual sense) engage, and find topics interesting we nonetheless won't pursue. Yet mindful commitment is a doorway not only to persistence in learning. It transcends context. Children personally involved with studies transfer these beyond school gates simply because they are seen as having long-term relevance. Research of Bereiter (2001) and Desforges and Lings (1998) divide, school learning into that which is non-transferable because schoolspecific (most of it) and that which occurs as part of a learner's wider, personal agenda, and is transferable. Only the latter is likely to become part of that store learners happily apply to their lives. But how do we persuade our pupils to commit themselves to school lessons? This may be the sixty-four thousand-dollar question for teachers. Everyone who has ever confronted a reluctant learner and has run the standard repertoire of ploys from benevolent coercion to bribery will know that we can take learners to the brink of achievement but if they refuse to make that final leap, we cannot guarantee they ever will. Fortunately, we can stack the odds in our favour. We can do this, firstly, by preparing the ground in the way described above: if pupils' present knowledge is valued, the transition to a new state becomes less problematic. Secondly, we can make transparent to pupils why their studies are important (even when not

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especially motivating). This works to a degree with adults: it is common enough for students on teachereducation courses to pursue topics they find difficult simply because they know that a professional career depends on mastering these. Even the youngest children can often see why a study o f (say) mathematics might serve their likely job-interests. Yet these moves are peripheral to the main requirement of any effort towards getting learners committed to school work. A 'true' education is exactly that where learners grasp what is worthwhile for its own sake rather than as means to other ends (such as passing tests or hitting learning targets). The back-cloth to teaching as an educational process is a system where subjects are engaged with voluntarily, i.e. for their own sake. Children applying themselves voluntarily to work thereby acknowledge its worth: i.e. they make a value-commitment (see Silcock and Duncan, 2001, for a longer discussion of this). Unfortunately, in our present performance-obsessed system, children must succeed in linear fashion (reach prescribed subject 'levels' at set ages) in given areas if they are not to depress their school's position in league tables. This requirement reflects extraordinarily naive adult beliefs about children's capacities to learn whatever we want them to learn. Adult expectations matter, certainly. But what matters more is that pupils' own developing value systems (what interests and absorbs them, what they find most diverting) play some formative role. If we wish pupils to make valuecommitments to what they learn in school we must allow them to do so differentially, outside coercion. In any case, why do we expect more of our pupils than we would ever expect of ourselves? Developmental theories tell us is that children do not develop equally across all domains: progress is - in other words value-related. We all develop in some areas more rapidly than in others. And we do so largely because we choose to do so: that is, we attend with varying interest and commitment to different things. It is quite natural (and inevitable) that children, like any other human beings, will invest value in some studies more than in others. Chances are that where their personal commitments are respected (i.e. they aren't considered failing because requisite levels aren't reached) pupils will find some worth in all school subjects sooner or later, from the perspectives of commitments already made. But the best we can do (and should want to do, ethically speaking) is to make sure they feel sufficiently in control of events to be able to ascribe personal value to those special things they want to do.
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Actually, commitments can never be wholly predecided by someone else (e.g. by teacher action). For if they could, (as Wilson, 2000, advises, on moral choices) the commitments made would not be that person's, they would be someone else's. To repeat: those who truly commit themselves to a project realise its worth for them, as well as knowing they are potentially capable of accomplishing the tasks are involved (related to the comprehension already discussed). Where we are forced to study maths or science or history, we have no reason to become committed to those things. We have to study them anyway.

Control
Children learn through their own efforts. We cannot learn for them. All teachers can ever do is arrange opportunities for pupils to engage profitably with curricula. 'Transmission' or 'delivery' policies are misnomers, for no-one ever 'transmits' or 'delivers' knowledge directly to anyone else. Some re-casting of what is taught in terms of existing knowledge must happen for something to be learned at all. What Adey and Shayer introduce as central to quality learning (1994), as do Bereiter (2001) and Desforges (1993, 1997), is the role of a self-monitored overview (meta-cognition) where learners have fair control over what they are doing. This is why, in their CASE work, Adey and Shayer free learners to suggest their own solutions to problems, discuss and explain these to others, debating and arguing about outcomes. But, once they begin to make progress, pupils are led to an understanding of principles behind the scientific work engaged with. Teachers, in these settings, do, actually teach: but their teaching is a careful guiding towards scientific ideas (or historical, geographical, religious etc. etc.: see Littledyke and Huxford 1998). This teaching is a fo.r!n of 'intervention' not 'instruction', as Adey and Shayer explain (1994). Since teachers intervene rather than impose, pupils stay in charge of what is happening - they are assisted to do something for themselves, rather than having something done to them. For this reason, Tharp and Gallimore (1993) define teaching as 'assisted performance'. In her address to the 1998 ASPE Conference, Caroline Gipps underlined why pupils must recognise their own strengths and weaknesses. She advocated giving learners consistent, detailed feedback about where they are going right and where wrong in their studies. Black argues the same (1998), as does Broadfoot (2001): learners have to know where they are succeeding and where they are not succeeding with

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problems (information being derived from teachers' formative assessment of their pupils' work). The learning theory espoused is that learners progress via their own commitments, in situations they understand and over which they exert control. This latter principle can be hard for teachers to accept, since these days they are expected to be sole 'classroom managers'. But it is not meant as an absolute. Learners do not move forward on their own, regardless of anyone-else. They are assisted via interventions. Or, to use a term increasingly popular now, their successes are 'co-constructed'. A dual agency is responsible - learners' and teachers' decisions 'scaffolding' each other. The feedback Gipps and Black insist on, or the kinds of self-monitored assessments Broadfoot (2001) advocates, are still vital - it is quite impossible for anyone to conquer a learning difficulty completely without some knowledge of why current solutions aren't working. And, as Black points out, this feedback is part of a general climate of openness in classrooms where pupils 'place' themselves relative to their situations. We all feel alienated from time to time by circumstance, and we usually do so because we cannot place ourselves happily within a set-up: often, this is because we simply do not understand the set-up itself we lack relevant information. Pupils, similarly, easily divorce themselves emotionally from classrooms or subjects where they are unsure what is going on.
-

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between pupils and teachers. Discussion, debate and disagreement, as well as teacher support and positive peer-group relationships are paramount. This social dimension of 'co-construction' ensures that principles of mathematics, science or whatever are learned securely, lifting learners from one level of understanding to another. This is the culminating step in those high velocity gains many parents and most politicians seek - j u m p s in cognitive ability explaining sudden advances in learners' capacity. At secondary level, such principles are the 'formal operational' principles of subject disciplines. In primary schools, they are 'lower' level, concrete and practical concepts. Teaching is often hard just because the twin requirements are that learners achieve for themselves what teachers must nonetheless guide them towards. We cannot do the learning for pupils; but nor can they learn, unassisted, what society demands that they learn. Finally, to link pupil-control to the prior two principles, there are rather minor chicken-egg difficulties here. Pupils gain a self-monitored mastery over learning on the back of success and commitment; yet they are most likely to commit to learning following on that success which is an outcome of careful self-monitoring. How can learners lift themselves up by their own boot-straps? The answer has to lie in a meticulous, step-by-step organisation. Not only should teachers always move from known to unknown, they should regularly revisit familiar territory to ensure the webs of knowledge which are called 'cognitive structures' really are interconnecting. We will all tolerate some failure when we sense ultimate success. And we will glimpse a satisfactory outcome where we stay within the context of what is already known. Ultimately, teachers lead students towards academic principles and procedures embodied in school subjects which, in themselves, provide controlling perspectives on the world. In the meantime, comprehension, commitment and control must be features of school context if they are to become intemalised, ultimately, as that mature mental state, sometimes called personal autonomy, education exists to foster.

Nevertheless, the rule is not that learners should always be given maximum information about themselves. Black (1998) cites research showing how pupils familiar with their own strengths and weaknesses but not their positional grades outshine those given the added summative/positional grades. More information does not always equate with improved learning. Students who get final marks for their work (know their position in class) usually have to swallow along with these a relative failure of performance. Although they will know how to improve (are also assessed formatively), their progress is stymied by a realisation that they still have very limited control of their situations. Whatever they do, there is always someone who will probably outclass them. It isn't only teachers who give formative feedback to learners. Open classrooms are classrooms where a democratic form of social organisation affects all who work within them. Learners and teachers have rights of participation and involvement such that information passes freely between the pupils themselves, as well as

Conclusion
Accelerated learning results from qualitative leaps in understanding (increases in capacity according to Adey and Shayer: 1996), outcomes of activities guided by three ideas - comprehension, commitment, and control. These inter-relate (to respect one is to make it easier to respect the others) but each, also, operates
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independently. Learners can control and understand activities but be uncommitted to studies; a committed learner may understand work but not be free to progress in desired ways; and someone may be mindfully committed but lack basic concepts needed for tasks (and so on). These three ideas identify what is believed to make for successful learning. To conclude, it is worth trying to pin them down as precisely as possible in terms of their actual functions. Each has its own impact upon the experiences of learners, affecting them differently. Pupils are emotionally or personally 'empowered' in situations where they can freely commit themselves to topics they see as having personal value for them. They will (it is argued) do this where they have some 'say' in activities and forms of organisation and where they feel in control of events. They will gain charge of themselves when teaching makes sure they grasp tasks from a standpoint of already familia~ knowledge. Finally, learners are socially and politically enfranchised in democratic settings where regular feedback gives them overview of their own progress. To describe learning situations in this way is to describe their 'process' features. I have discussed these within a unified educational policy (Silcock, 1999) stretching wider than the principles themselves, visiting other ideologically charged questions (such as questions about pupils' legitimate rights within education, the extent to which teachers can organise democratic classrooms within imposed curricular frameworks, and so on). The past two decades have seen governments using vast resources and increasingly centralised powers to raise educational 'standards' by manipulating school curricula and teacher-behaviour. They have largely ignored theories telling them that it is learnerbehaviour - rather than teacher-behaviour - we have most to influence to raise standards. It may seem somewhat paradoxical to suggest that constraining teachers markedly leads to teachers over-controlling learners such that they lose sight of their own roles in their own activities. Yet education hinges on pupils exerting a self-monitored (mindful) control. The equation is simple enough, and can be simply stated. Teachers must liberate pupils from rigid social and curricular frameworks so that the pupils can, actually, learn. There is little doubt that if this happened pupils' achievements would accelerate, in intrinsically worthwhile ways. Whether there remains the political will and courage to allow teachers the freedom to effect such a change to schools is another matter.

References
Adey, P. and Shayer, M. (1994) Really Raising Standards. London: Routledge. Adey, P. and Shayer, M. (1996) 'An Exploration of long-term fartransfer effects following an extended program in the High School Science Curriculum', in Smith, L. (Ed.) Critical Readings in Piaget. London: Routledge. Bereiter, C. (2001) 'Situated Cognition and How to Overcome It', in J. Collins and D. Cook, D. (eds.) Understanding Learning: Influences and Outcomes, London: Paul Chapman with the Open University. Black, E (1998) 'Inside the Black Box', paper delivered to the Hertfordshire Regional ASPE (Association for the Study of Primary Education) Group, Wheathampstead. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the black box, Raising standards through classroom assessment. London: King's College. Broadfoot, P. (2001) 'Liberating the Learner through Assessment', in J. Collins and D. Cook (eds.) Understanding Learning: Influences and Outcomes. Milton Keynes: the Open University, Paul Chapman. Desforges, C. (1993) 'Children's Learning: Has it Improved?' Education 3-13, 21(3), 3-10. Desforges, C. (1997) 'Children's Application of Knowledge', paper delivered to the Nineth Annual ASPE (Association for the Study of Primary Education) Conference, Dartington Hall: Devon. Desforges, C. and Lings, P. (1998) 'Teaching Knowledge Application: Advances in Theoretical Conceptions and Their Professional Implications', British Journal of Educational Studies, 46, 4, 386-398. Driver, R. (1983) Pupil as Scientist. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Gipps, C. (1998) 'Assessment, teaching and learning', paper delivered to the TenthAnnual ASPE (Associationfor the Study of Primary Education) Conference, Fitzwilliam College: Cambridge. Littledyke, M. and Huxford, L. (1998) Teaching the Primary Curriculum for Constructive Learning. London: David Fulton. Resnick, L.B., Bill, V., Lesgold, S. (1992) 'Developing thinking abilities in arithmetic class', in A. Demitriou, M. Shayer, A.E. Efklides (Eds.) Neo-Piagetian Theories of Cognitive Development, Implications and Applications for Education. London: Routledge. Silcock, E (1999) New Progressivism. London: Falmer Press. Silcock, E and Duncan, D. (2001) 'Values Acquisition and Values Education: Some Proposals', British Journal of Educational Studies, 49, 3,242-259. Tharp, R. and Gallimore, R. (1993) 'A theory of teaching as assisted performance', in Daniel H., (Ed.) Charting the Agenda. London: Routledge.

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Peter Silcock has worked in teacher education for many years and has been researching the implementation of the English/ Welsh National Curriculum in primary schools since 1989. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire, and National Chair of the Association for the Study of Primary Education.

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