If the mind boggled at the sheer amount of labour that went into Jennifer Coates’ paper in this book*, it was still more amazed at the kind of negotiation that must have preceded the tape-recording and transcribing of another series of conversations.

These are described in Linguistic Variation and Social Function by Jenny Cheshire. She managed to record some hours of conversation of adolescent boys in an adventure playground in Reading, taken down when they should have been in school. These were analysed for nine non-standard vernacular features, most of them common to other dialects (e.g. Birmingham) but two at least peculiar to the local dialect in Reading. These were “we goes shopping on Saturdays” and “we has a little fire, keeps us warm”. Cheshire related the frequency of these grammatical features to the degree to which the different boys showed allegiance to the anti-school vernacular culture of their peer group. The boys that were most delinquent (on a “vernacular culture index”, compiled, the reader infers from the recorded conversations) used the most non-standard grammatical features. Continue reading →

Michael Tomasello is Co-Director of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He is a developmental psychologist who has challenged Noam Chomsky’s hypothesis that language is an innate structure in the human brain. Tomasello has studied the social cognition of the great apes and found a crucial difference between their apprehension of the world and ours as human beings.*

The communication of the great apes is what he calls diadic: that is, an ape interacts EITHER with another ape – grooming, threat, sex etc. – OR with the world – finding food, reacting to danger etc.

By contrast, human interactions are triadic: we communicate WITH other humans ABOUT the world. Interestingly, apes do not point to things in the world; human beings do. Continue reading →

This illuminating book, by Daniel Kahneman, begins by noting that we have to name things before we can study them. The title indicates the objects of study – two different kinds of thinking. One of the pleasures of reading this book is that one recognizes immediately the thinking he is describing, both the fast and the slow.

Fast thinking he calls System 1: it is the intuitive thinking that enables us to operate instantaneously in a complex world; it is the thinking that constructs our understanding of space and time, our automatic comprehension of human feelings and responses, and our practice of habitual skills.  At its most rapid this kind of thinking takes evasive action in a potential road accident before it happens. Continue reading →

On the first page of this book Ron Berger says: “If you’re going to do something, I believe, you should do it well.” He argues that the pride of the craftsman should apply to teaching and learning, as well as to carpentry. His book shows how this can be achieved in the most ordinary school – but only by changing the culture.

Better than any of the other literature recommended to me by the teachers at MMHS, his book explains the principles that underlie the way the school is run. Perhaps the most important of these is that the emphasis is on learning rather than teaching. The focus is on enabling young people to learn how to learn. The teachers themselves are lifelong learners and, when starting a new project, have to learn alongside the pupils. Continue reading →

This book, by Ron Berger, helped me to understand what is going on at Matthew Moss High School. As Lindsey said, when she lent me a copy, it is inspirational.

In this blog, however,  I’ll mention only one point that the author makes towards the end of the book, because I felt this passionately throughout my fourteen years in Teacher Education:

TEACHING IS HARD!!! Continue reading →

I’m still working through the material given to me by the staff at MMHS. Last week I picked up some flash cards they had given me, which, it seemed, encapsulated ELLI – Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory. There are seven cards, each inviting the learner to reflect on a different aspect of her own learning. The headings are: Meaning making, Resilience, Learning relationships, Creativity, Strategic awareness, Critical curiosity, Changing and Learning. Continue reading →

Some friends and I were reading up on work done by Bob Farmer at UCE on deep and surface learning*. One of the things we discussed was Bob’s reference in a recorded lecture to Queen Eleanor’s cousin as an example of a fact. A good student would go beyond the mere regurgitation of a fact (an example of surface learning) to link it to meanings in their pre-existing knowledge. My friend and I (as deep learners) made quite different links to wider meanings. She would have asked what the evidence for this fact was, while I would have wanted to know more about Queen Eleanor’s role in the power struggles of the time.

I discussed this with Bob on the phone this morning, and he said either would be a good example of deep learning.

*To be found inthe writings of Graham Gibbs, for instance