well I’ve been fortunate enough in my
life to have had two careers but I don’t
have a clique at them and the first of
those careers has been as an
educationist which is why I’m here with
you today but the second career has been
as a professional mountain guide and
this is a photograph of myself or my
eldest son on the top of the North Col
of Mount Everest taken a few years ago
now the North Col of Everest is seven
thousand one hundred meters twenty three
and a half thousand feet and you may be
asking well why am i starting a talk on
curiosity and powerful learning against
the back cloth of the North Col of
Everest well for a couple of reasons
the first is to demonstrate to you that
I’m a really neat and cool sort of a guy
but seriously with a real reason I was
guiding on Everest at that time was
because of this young man here Paul
silat Oh Paul is a service user with
MacIntyre care which is the country’s
largest charity for those with a mental
disability
what and Paul lives and works inside the
charity but what sets him aside from his
colleagues is his obsession for
mountaineering and I’ve been privileged
over the years to a guide Paul and some
of his friends to a large number of the
world’s great great mountains on one of
those trips Paul expressed his sort of
fixation about Mount Everest and I
didn’t think it was quite possible to
actually get Paul to the summit of
Everest because the acclimatization
takes so so long but I did feel that
actually climbing to the North Col of
Everest which is nowadays regarded as
being a mountaineering objective in its
own right and was of course the sort of
the gateway to the early British a sense
of Everest I did think that that was
possible and this is a photograph of
paula myself just below the top of the
north
I thought quite a lot about Paul as some
of you know because I believe it’s at
this point on the North Col of Everest
that my two Koreans
so come together at all Paul because I
want to demonstrate that under the right
conditions even somebody with a with a
disability like Paul’s can do quite
extraordinary things and I believe this
is what we do in education as well our
moral purposes educators is to create
the conditions inside our schools in our
system to enable every young person to
reach their potential whatever their
potential may be five years before I
actually was on this ascent of Everest I
was appointed it’s the chief adviser on
school standards to the Secretary of
State in our government and became
responsible in the early 2000s for the
quality of education inside the nation’s
schools and those of you who almost as
old as I am will remember that we had a
a a great deal of educational reform in
in the late 90s where we accelerated the
standards of literacy and numeracy in
quite a spectacular fashion amongst
generation a generation of young of
young people which is just now beginning
to to work through into our system but
when I took over responsibilities I was
consult with all I was excited about the
rise in standards I was concerned about
the way in which we’re achieving this
because it was very much a top-down
reform very heavily target driven and I
was beginning to be concerned as to
whether although we were raising
academic standards will be building
learning capability into the lives of
our young people and so I began to she
in concert with ministers like Estelle
Morris and David Miliband we began to
shape reshape the educational policy
agenda we would have focused on the
personalization of learning where we
would continue to raise standards but
also increase the learning capability of
our young people as well
and some of you will remember the policy
document X
and enjoyment and there’s a clue in that
term that we’ve we producing at that
time to sort of generate these high
levels of personalization in the
learning of our young people so it seems
to me there’s a as educators we have
three goals that we’ve heard a lot about
those already to today doctor we
shouldn’t we need to help our students
acquire youthful useful and important
areas of knowledge we help them and we
need to help to become powerful learners
by expanding and making articulate their
repertoire of learning skills and by
that token we need to help them become
fine caring and principled citizens the
question is how do we go about achieving
that and I don’t think we do it through
sort of didactic environments like this
like like this painting of the classroom
of the University of Bologna in 1350
although my worry as I spend increasing
amounts of time in in our nation’s
classrooms and those around the world
they don’t look an awful lot different
from what you’re seeing in blonde yeah
in 13 in 1350 so Ken Robinson in his
very famous TED talk spoke about the
same themes I just like to so share a
little extract from that talk by Ken
with you now
Oh
[Applause]
but either to really sort of powerful
implications from what Ken was saying
there the first is that have really high
performing educational systems focus
relentlessly on the quality of teaching
inside their classrooms and and to try
to reduce the variability between
classrooms the focus is is on action
inside the school or rather than the
structural changes that our system seems
to be bedeviled with and the second
implication that I draw from what Ken
was saying is that our goal as educators
is to try to build powerful learners my
three goals are on the top of the slide
and underneath that are the types of
learning skills I believe that we have a
responsibility to induct our students
into and to help them acquire and
through through doing that they become
curious and powerful learners so it
seems to me that curiosity which is the
metaphor I am using for powerful
learning in which we’ve heard quite a
bit about already today curiosity really
matters and all of the research evidence
suggests the curiosity is fundamental to
academic success to job performance to
relationships to life satisfaction to
problem-solving and more recently we’ve
been hearing about research which says
that it contributes to longevity as well
a question that faces us is how do we do
this do we actually believe with
Einstein that actually curiosity is a
delicate little plant which aside from
stimulation stands mainly in need of
freedom I would like to believe that was
true
and in some context I think it is but in
a lot of the schools that I work with in
this country in this city and around the
world we have to adopt a different a
different tack if we want our students
to be curious we have to teach them but
the question is how do we do that
[Music]
[Music]
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did
I wish I had time to play it again I’d
like to take a few minutes if I meant to
explain to you how I am in my own work
attempting to achieve this goal of
enabling our students to become curious
and powerful learners and I’m doing this
through the use of an approach to
professional learning amongst teachers
which I call instructional rounds it’s
based upon the medical model of of
training which actually happens inside
the hospital and by these sort of the
professor you’re asking two questions
diagnosis what is wrong with this
patient and and treatment how do we make
them better I’ve been conducting these
instructional rounds here in Bolton over
the last few months with actually quite
quite impressive results let me give you
an example of what we were doing in
Easter Academy just just before Easter
the Academy invited two dozen teachers
or head teachers from other schools in
the city to to join in on the round and
they asked for the volunteers six
volunteers from the staff to open their
classrooms open to to visitation by the
round members the only instruction that
I gave to that group of observers in the
morning before the observation was that
I will not allow or permit any
evaluation any judgment over the order
of an individual teacher we are here to
describe the practice inside the school
and its impact upon student learning
description description description no
evaluation no judgment and that was very
difficult for a lot of our colleagues
and so we went off on our rounds and we
went to spent about 15 to 20 minutes in
each classroom taking down descriptive
data if you can think about it we at the
end of the morning we had 24 people six
as a hundred and forty-four individual
pieces of data on the practice in ISA
Academy and that afternoon I took them
through a pretty rigorous inductive
analytic process to try and make sense
collectively of the data that we that we
had gathered the aim was not to say how
good teacher a or teacher B was but what
is the presenting practice in the in the
school once we have actually achieved
agreement and unanimity on an
observation I would summarize it I would
return it to the group and then I would
try and translate that into a theory of
action statement a hypothesis that
described the impact upon teaching on
the learning of the students in in the
school when a teacher does X and
students do Y when teachers consistently
ask higher order questions then students
are more engaged and begin to develop
their own curriculum knowledge when I
began doing this about six years ago now
in Melbourne again the reserve the the
reception was highly enthusiastic people
were saying to me David I really am
beginning to understand now what’s
actually going on inside that classrooms
because I would normally use a checklist
right and that was the same reaction I
had from colleagues in the Academy last
month so what I did in the early days
was I began then to synthesize all of
those all of those theories of action
that I was beginning to generate and
what was interesting for me was that the
more of these I did and I did them in
Australia in London and Chile in Beijing
the more I did the less I began to learn
because it was the same types of things
coming out time and time again so I
thought perhaps were onto something here
we can synthesize these the perhaps
we’ve got the sort of a sense of what
actually genuine practice looks like
inside class inside classrooms and the
same things were coming out irrespective
of whether in a primary school a
secondary school an Fe College or a
special
for the same types of constructs
beginning to emerge and there you see
them on the screen now I began to take
them back to the teachers I originally
work with they said David yes those are
what we were seeing right so those are
the constructs rather than the theories
of action that come up in a moment but
they said to me the teachers won’t there
David yes some of these things I have
control of as a teacher others I don’t
and so I began to realize there was some
theories of action which related to the
whole school and some to the teacher
then some old cynic said to me David
don’t get too excited about this this is
only the work of teachers and that will
really be really riled me and so I went
through my colleague and friend John
Hattie who’s some of you will know or
his work you will know he wrote a book
called visible learning which is hand
now has a global reach and in that book
John began he the research scientists
began to analyze about 80 different
teaching behaviors and try to calculate
its impact upon learning using the
concept of of effect size so how far can
we push the normal curve of distribution
toward towards the right so John
collaborated with me and we use his
research to actually calibrate the
impact of these theories of of these
theories of action so here are the four
theories of action about the whole
school the first is to prioritize high
expectations both schools I go into
nowadays have authentic relationships
but not always high expectations are we
generating a curriculum which is based
upon inquiry rather than didacticism
thirdly do we have protocols about how
we teach how we ask higher order
questions how we formulate groups which
are consistently appro applied across
the school and do we have a language
about learning that we are consistently
using to actually help and induct our
students into into do we have a set of
articulated learning protocols the
effect sizes of these are quite
interesting the first three are around
about point four which will give you
about lying percentile points or of
increase in terms of not in terms of
the one on learning that it more
directly affect students is much high
round about point seven which will give
you fifteen percent our points then we
come to the theories of action for the
teacher do we harness learning
intentions do we build a narrative for
the lesson and connect that to success
criteria at the end are we setting kill
our students challenging tasks in the
zones of proximal development that that
margin between existing knowledge and
new knowledge are we asking a range of
questions with a emphasis on
higher-order intellectual thinking are
we are we giving the appropriate
feedback we’ve heard a lot about that
today as well are we using assessment
for learning techniques where students
assess each other against explicit
criteria and are we using cooperative
groups to capture those metacognitive
moments where students can deconstruct
what we’re saying in in whole class
situations and try to make and try to
make sense of them since to me that this
is a very powerful way of generating
knowledge of effective practice from the
practice of teachers and as I come to a
close I want to try to emphasize and
that if you look down that these sort of
principles of learning you can see that
you can see that they are directly
affected and directly generated are the
theories of action that we’re using and
by that token collectively we are
enhancing the the level of curiosity and
creativity that our students are
actually utilizing it and acquiring so
for example we can when we use learning
intentions we’re helping students to
link prior to new knowledge when we are
when we are using challenging tests we
are accelerating the cognitive
development of our youngsters when we
when we are using learning protocols
we’re providing the scaffolding for
learner
autonomy so what I’m trying to do since
uh Murray well I’m trying to say is that
we can teach curiosity we can can teach
creativity by creating these powerful
learning conditions for our students as
much as I did with Paul on Everest the
really important point though is that
these theories of action are not given
to you by some sort of aging
superannuated professor or some
political master these theories of
action have been generated inductively
from the powerful practice of thousands
of teachers
unfortunately around the world but now
increasingly here at Bolton so in
conclusion I just would like to share
with you there’s sort of definition of
learning experiences that I wrote with
one of my mentors Bruce Joyce some time
ago
learning experiences are composed of
content process and social climate as
teachers we create forum with our
students opportunities to explore and
build important areas of knowledge
explore and build develop powerful tools
for their own learning and to live in
humanizing social conditions thank you
you
life to have had two careers but I don’t
have a clique at them and the first of
those careers has been as an
educationist which is why I’m here with
you today but the second career has been
as a professional mountain guide and
this is a photograph of myself or my
eldest son on the top of the North Col
of Mount Everest taken a few years ago
now the North Col of Everest is seven
thousand one hundred meters twenty three
and a half thousand feet and you may be
asking well why am i starting a talk on
curiosity and powerful learning against
the back cloth of the North Col of
Everest well for a couple of reasons
the first is to demonstrate to you that
I’m a really neat and cool sort of a guy
but seriously with a real reason I was
guiding on Everest at that time was
because of this young man here Paul
silat Oh Paul is a service user with
MacIntyre care which is the country’s
largest charity for those with a mental
disability
what and Paul lives and works inside the
charity but what sets him aside from his
colleagues is his obsession for
mountaineering and I’ve been privileged
over the years to a guide Paul and some
of his friends to a large number of the
world’s great great mountains on one of
those trips Paul expressed his sort of
fixation about Mount Everest and I
didn’t think it was quite possible to
actually get Paul to the summit of
Everest because the acclimatization
takes so so long but I did feel that
actually climbing to the North Col of
Everest which is nowadays regarded as
being a mountaineering objective in its
own right and was of course the sort of
the gateway to the early British a sense
of Everest I did think that that was
possible and this is a photograph of
paula myself just below the top of the
north
I thought quite a lot about Paul as some
of you know because I believe it’s at
this point on the North Col of Everest
that my two Koreans
so come together at all Paul because I
want to demonstrate that under the right
conditions even somebody with a with a
disability like Paul’s can do quite
extraordinary things and I believe this
is what we do in education as well our
moral purposes educators is to create
the conditions inside our schools in our
system to enable every young person to
reach their potential whatever their
potential may be five years before I
actually was on this ascent of Everest I
was appointed it’s the chief adviser on
school standards to the Secretary of
State in our government and became
responsible in the early 2000s for the
quality of education inside the nation’s
schools and those of you who almost as
old as I am will remember that we had a
a a great deal of educational reform in
in the late 90s where we accelerated the
standards of literacy and numeracy in
quite a spectacular fashion amongst
generation a generation of young of
young people which is just now beginning
to to work through into our system but
when I took over responsibilities I was
consult with all I was excited about the
rise in standards I was concerned about
the way in which we’re achieving this
because it was very much a top-down
reform very heavily target driven and I
was beginning to be concerned as to
whether although we were raising
academic standards will be building
learning capability into the lives of
our young people and so I began to she
in concert with ministers like Estelle
Morris and David Miliband we began to
shape reshape the educational policy
agenda we would have focused on the
personalization of learning where we
would continue to raise standards but
also increase the learning capability of
our young people as well
and some of you will remember the policy
document X
and enjoyment and there’s a clue in that
term that we’ve we producing at that
time to sort of generate these high
levels of personalization in the
learning of our young people so it seems
to me there’s a as educators we have
three goals that we’ve heard a lot about
those already to today doctor we
shouldn’t we need to help our students
acquire youthful useful and important
areas of knowledge we help them and we
need to help to become powerful learners
by expanding and making articulate their
repertoire of learning skills and by
that token we need to help them become
fine caring and principled citizens the
question is how do we go about achieving
that and I don’t think we do it through
sort of didactic environments like this
like like this painting of the classroom
of the University of Bologna in 1350
although my worry as I spend increasing
amounts of time in in our nation’s
classrooms and those around the world
they don’t look an awful lot different
from what you’re seeing in blonde yeah
in 13 in 1350 so Ken Robinson in his
very famous TED talk spoke about the
same themes I just like to so share a
little extract from that talk by Ken
with you now
Oh
[Applause]
but either to really sort of powerful
implications from what Ken was saying
there the first is that have really high
performing educational systems focus
relentlessly on the quality of teaching
inside their classrooms and and to try
to reduce the variability between
classrooms the focus is is on action
inside the school or rather than the
structural changes that our system seems
to be bedeviled with and the second
implication that I draw from what Ken
was saying is that our goal as educators
is to try to build powerful learners my
three goals are on the top of the slide
and underneath that are the types of
learning skills I believe that we have a
responsibility to induct our students
into and to help them acquire and
through through doing that they become
curious and powerful learners so it
seems to me that curiosity which is the
metaphor I am using for powerful
learning in which we’ve heard quite a
bit about already today curiosity really
matters and all of the research evidence
suggests the curiosity is fundamental to
academic success to job performance to
relationships to life satisfaction to
problem-solving and more recently we’ve
been hearing about research which says
that it contributes to longevity as well
a question that faces us is how do we do
this do we actually believe with
Einstein that actually curiosity is a
delicate little plant which aside from
stimulation stands mainly in need of
freedom I would like to believe that was
true
and in some context I think it is but in
a lot of the schools that I work with in
this country in this city and around the
world we have to adopt a different a
different tack if we want our students
to be curious we have to teach them but
the question is how do we do that
[Music]
[Music]
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did
I wish I had time to play it again I’d
like to take a few minutes if I meant to
explain to you how I am in my own work
attempting to achieve this goal of
enabling our students to become curious
and powerful learners and I’m doing this
through the use of an approach to
professional learning amongst teachers
which I call instructional rounds it’s
based upon the medical model of of
training which actually happens inside
the hospital and by these sort of the
professor you’re asking two questions
diagnosis what is wrong with this
patient and and treatment how do we make
them better I’ve been conducting these
instructional rounds here in Bolton over
the last few months with actually quite
quite impressive results let me give you
an example of what we were doing in
Easter Academy just just before Easter
the Academy invited two dozen teachers
or head teachers from other schools in
the city to to join in on the round and
they asked for the volunteers six
volunteers from the staff to open their
classrooms open to to visitation by the
round members the only instruction that
I gave to that group of observers in the
morning before the observation was that
I will not allow or permit any
evaluation any judgment over the order
of an individual teacher we are here to
describe the practice inside the school
and its impact upon student learning
description description description no
evaluation no judgment and that was very
difficult for a lot of our colleagues
and so we went off on our rounds and we
went to spent about 15 to 20 minutes in
each classroom taking down descriptive
data if you can think about it we at the
end of the morning we had 24 people six
as a hundred and forty-four individual
pieces of data on the practice in ISA
Academy and that afternoon I took them
through a pretty rigorous inductive
analytic process to try and make sense
collectively of the data that we that we
had gathered the aim was not to say how
good teacher a or teacher B was but what
is the presenting practice in the in the
school once we have actually achieved
agreement and unanimity on an
observation I would summarize it I would
return it to the group and then I would
try and translate that into a theory of
action statement a hypothesis that
described the impact upon teaching on
the learning of the students in in the
school when a teacher does X and
students do Y when teachers consistently
ask higher order questions then students
are more engaged and begin to develop
their own curriculum knowledge when I
began doing this about six years ago now
in Melbourne again the reserve the the
reception was highly enthusiastic people
were saying to me David I really am
beginning to understand now what’s
actually going on inside that classrooms
because I would normally use a checklist
right and that was the same reaction I
had from colleagues in the Academy last
month so what I did in the early days
was I began then to synthesize all of
those all of those theories of action
that I was beginning to generate and
what was interesting for me was that the
more of these I did and I did them in
Australia in London and Chile in Beijing
the more I did the less I began to learn
because it was the same types of things
coming out time and time again so I
thought perhaps were onto something here
we can synthesize these the perhaps
we’ve got the sort of a sense of what
actually genuine practice looks like
inside class inside classrooms and the
same things were coming out irrespective
of whether in a primary school a
secondary school an Fe College or a
special
for the same types of constructs
beginning to emerge and there you see
them on the screen now I began to take
them back to the teachers I originally
work with they said David yes those are
what we were seeing right so those are
the constructs rather than the theories
of action that come up in a moment but
they said to me the teachers won’t there
David yes some of these things I have
control of as a teacher others I don’t
and so I began to realize there was some
theories of action which related to the
whole school and some to the teacher
then some old cynic said to me David
don’t get too excited about this this is
only the work of teachers and that will
really be really riled me and so I went
through my colleague and friend John
Hattie who’s some of you will know or
his work you will know he wrote a book
called visible learning which is hand
now has a global reach and in that book
John began he the research scientists
began to analyze about 80 different
teaching behaviors and try to calculate
its impact upon learning using the
concept of of effect size so how far can
we push the normal curve of distribution
toward towards the right so John
collaborated with me and we use his
research to actually calibrate the
impact of these theories of of these
theories of action so here are the four
theories of action about the whole
school the first is to prioritize high
expectations both schools I go into
nowadays have authentic relationships
but not always high expectations are we
generating a curriculum which is based
upon inquiry rather than didacticism
thirdly do we have protocols about how
we teach how we ask higher order
questions how we formulate groups which
are consistently appro applied across
the school and do we have a language
about learning that we are consistently
using to actually help and induct our
students into into do we have a set of
articulated learning protocols the
effect sizes of these are quite
interesting the first three are around
about point four which will give you
about lying percentile points or of
increase in terms of not in terms of
the one on learning that it more
directly affect students is much high
round about point seven which will give
you fifteen percent our points then we
come to the theories of action for the
teacher do we harness learning
intentions do we build a narrative for
the lesson and connect that to success
criteria at the end are we setting kill
our students challenging tasks in the
zones of proximal development that that
margin between existing knowledge and
new knowledge are we asking a range of
questions with a emphasis on
higher-order intellectual thinking are
we are we giving the appropriate
feedback we’ve heard a lot about that
today as well are we using assessment
for learning techniques where students
assess each other against explicit
criteria and are we using cooperative
groups to capture those metacognitive
moments where students can deconstruct
what we’re saying in in whole class
situations and try to make and try to
make sense of them since to me that this
is a very powerful way of generating
knowledge of effective practice from the
practice of teachers and as I come to a
close I want to try to emphasize and
that if you look down that these sort of
principles of learning you can see that
you can see that they are directly
affected and directly generated are the
theories of action that we’re using and
by that token collectively we are
enhancing the the level of curiosity and
creativity that our students are
actually utilizing it and acquiring so
for example we can when we use learning
intentions we’re helping students to
link prior to new knowledge when we are
when we are using challenging tests we
are accelerating the cognitive
development of our youngsters when we
when we are using learning protocols
we’re providing the scaffolding for
learner
autonomy so what I’m trying to do since
uh Murray well I’m trying to say is that
we can teach curiosity we can can teach
creativity by creating these powerful
learning conditions for our students as
much as I did with Paul on Everest the
really important point though is that
these theories of action are not given
to you by some sort of aging
superannuated professor or some
political master these theories of
action have been generated inductively
from the powerful practice of thousands
of teachers
unfortunately around the world but now
increasingly here at Bolton so in
conclusion I just would like to share
with you there’s sort of definition of
learning experiences that I wrote with
one of my mentors Bruce Joyce some time
ago
learning experiences are composed of
content process and social climate as
teachers we create forum with our
students opportunities to explore and
build important areas of knowledge
explore and build develop powerful tools
for their own learning and to live in
humanizing social conditions thank you
you
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