[MUSIC] We start with the question,

what did you learn in school today? If you look at this poster,
it was one I found in a school in the North of England, primary school
in which the head teacher went round and then he would ask children, constantly,
what did you learn in school today? They might say something like,
in the maths, we did the mean, the median, and the mode. He'd say, no, I didn't
ask you what you
were taught, I asked you what you learned. And as I left that school and the hea
d
teacher was taking me to the station, this little girl came up to him and she sa
id, please sir,
what did you learn in school today? That was the question to the head teacher
and the question to her teachers, too, because in that school,
they recognized that the head teacher and teachers were also learners. When we t
hink about childhood, the three worlds that I want to talk about in
which children spend their lives and try to resolve the various differences
between those three worlds. The academic word, the social world, and the cyber w
orld,
that is the world of the internet, the world of communication
by mobile phones and so on. Children move between these three worlds
and the job of teaching, of course, is to try and help them to make the connecti
ons,
meaningfully, among those three worlds. The American academic, David Berliner, u
ses the notion of nested lives and says that children learn
through the different contexts, the different nests in which
their experience takes place. If you look at this slide,
which is a quote from his work. We will see that he
talks about classrooms. The classrooms are in schools. The schools are in commun
ities and the young people who go
to them are in families, in neighborhoods, and in peer groups. He says, perhaps
it's these
that shape attitudes and aspirations often more
powerfully than their teachers. The question, what matters most,
do you think, in children's experience? What has the biggest
impact on their learning? The family, the neighborhood, their peers, school, the
teachers, policy, and political environment. All of these effects, just take
a minute or two to think, reflect. What would you say,
in your experience, in your country, in your context, what matters most? Researc
h has told us a lot about the
parent effect, which can be very strong, very powerful, it's always there in
the background of children's learning. The peer effect often much stronger
even than the parent effect. It's the relationship between
those two things that we have to understand as teachers but remember
that quote, children live nested lives? They live with their peers,
they live with their parents and they live in neighborhoods. Nowhere is that mor
e powerfully
demonstrated than in a French film called Entre les murs translated
into English as The Classroom. In that film, it really illustrates an incredibly
powerful way,
just how much a neighborhood, in this case, in a suburb of Paris,
just how powerful that is on what children are able to
learn when they come into the classroom. The very sad ending to that film is
the poor, exhausted teacher sitting behind his desk at the end of a long term an
d
the child coming out and saying to him sir, I have learned nothing. No matter ho
w hard he tried
to engage these young people, there was always that fact that they
returned to their neighborhood, they returned to their families,
they returned to peers, whose effect on their learning was so
powerful at the end of the day. A teacher has to work incredibly hard
to try and make that bridge between what happens in the classroom and
what happens in other contexts. In Oxford University,
Baroness Susan Greenfield did some research into the context in
which children spent their lives. If you look at this slide,
it has three contexts, hours in school, hours in the home, and
hours spent in the virtual world. If you think about this and
you want to put numbers beside it, how many hours would you say children
spend in a year at school in your country? How many hours at home, would you gue
ss? How many hours would they
spend in the virtual world, depending on the kind of access that they
have, perhaps through their telephones, perhaps through computers,
perhaps through other media. Well here's an answer. Here's what Susan Greenfield
found out in her search. The hours in school were much outweighed
by the hours that children spend in the home and in the virtual world. Of course
, this was researched
carried out in Oxford, in England, and of course, things would be
very different in other countries. It might be worth just stopping to think,
for a minute, about the relationship among
those three and to what extent the relationships between those three
contexts impact on your teaching. Actually, help your teaching
to become more effective, rather than less effective. The question raised
about tomorrow's world, Have a look at this and consider to
what extent you think this is true. Are we preparing students for
jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't
even been invented yet, in order to solve problems that we
don't even know are problems yet? If any of that is true, what do you think
are the implications for you as a teacher? The German educator
Hartmut Von Hentig asked, in German naturally,
warum muss Ich in die Scule gehen? This was a question he put in the mouth
of a 12-year-old called Tobias. Tobias is asking the question,
why is it I should go to school? The answer that his kind uncle gives
him is not because of the technology. Not because of the nature of
the teaching so much as the social world in which children meet with one
another from different backgrounds, from different religious persuasions,
with different abilities and disabilities. At the end, saying I believe whole
heartedly that the school is there, first and foremost, to bring young people
together, to help them to learn to live in a way that our political
society so badly needs. Finally, here are six questions
that you might like to think about. These are questions put
by this little pussy cat who really wants to be a lion and asks the questions, h
ow am I smart? Not am I smart but
in what ways am I smart? What do I know about my own learning? What works best f
or me as a learner? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What helps an
d hinders my learning? Where and when and
who with do i learn best? Now those are questions I think we would
want to put to all our students but I think they're also questions
we need to put to ourselves. Tthinking about those questions,
what do you do next? This kitten has asked six very powerful
questions about the nature of learning, and indeed the implications of that for
teaching. How would you answer those questions? [MUSIC]