Learning Tasks and the four capacities
Sep 4th, 2007 by Don Ledingham
I was contacted today by a teacher who wanted to know more about what I was looking for in relation to my school visits and my focus on learning tasks.
I suppose I’ll be able to answer this better once I’ve been through an entire cycle of visits but I suggested that a good starting point might be to think about how they develop the four capacities through the types of tasks they set children.
All too often the task is related to the content to be taught e.g. “By the end of the lesson the children will know more about X or be able to do “Y”", whereas we’d like teachers to be exploring how they can develop the pupils’ wider range of attitudes, skills and capacities - in addition to widening and deepening their knowledge.
It’s really about combining the traditional content driven objective and linking it to a learning experience which will extend, challenge and engage the learner. So just how might a maths lesson enable a learner to become an effective contributor? - over to the experts! (the teachers).
It sounds like there are a lot of anxieties over these visits. Do you think you’ll be getting a true vision of schools?
Lynne
I’ve been visiting schools in East Lothian for the last two years but without a focus. I was in Ross High School today and I was able to engage in dialogue with staff at a totally different level than I ever have in the past. Hopefully as the visits continue over the sssion they will play an important role in maintaining our focus on the learning and teaching process and keep me in touch with the challenges facing teachers.
Don
I think your visits are very important and think you will build up an invaluable picture of schools. I hope staff remain ‘open minded’ in their approach to your visits.
Don,
I think there is still a lot of tension between the need for teachers to cover the course (getting pupils to know more about X, or do more examples of Y) and the desire to meet the four capacities. I suspect that teachers are naturally anxious to make sure that they get their classes “through the work”, given the unavoidable driving force of external examinations. I think lessons will always have a strong content focus, while there are prelims, NABs and final SQA exams to face.
It was interesting, therefore, to read about the innovative approach to school design, timetabling and curriculum planning expressed in the Thomas Deacon Academy in Peterborough, hailed by mangement guru Tom Peters in his blog and discussed in detail in the Observer. (see http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?rss=1¬e=http://www.tompeters.com/blogs/main/009943.php)