Michele Ledda thinks Nintendo in the classroom is a no brainer

A new scheme involving 900 children across 16 schools in Scotland aims to test the effectiveness of Dr Kawashima’s More Brain Training computer games in improving pupils’ behaviour, concentration and achievement in maths tests. The games involve a number of mathematical, linguistic and other problem-solving activities ‘designed to exercise the brain by increasing blood flow to the pre-frontal cortex.’

The scheme follows a small trial carried out by Derek Robertson, of Learning and Teaching Scotland, the authority responsible for curriculum development. Thirty pupils were made to play More Brain Training games on the hand-held Nintendo console for 15-20 minutes every day for ten weeks before the start of the lessons. They were given maths tests before and after the trial, which showed a 10% improvement.

Robertson is very enthusiastic about the scheme. "Game-based learning can provide dynamic and culturally relevant contexts that engage, motivate and challenge today’s young learner," he told the Times.

Anything that helps children learn should be welcomed, but there is a problem. Whatever the scientific merits of the trials - and Robertson has been honest about the limitations of his first experiment - we cannot motivate pupils to study mathematics through a scientific or technological fix.

In 2006, former education secretary Alan Johnson had great hopes for an experiment carried out in County Durham* which would test the effectiveness of fish oil supplements in boosting 'youngsters' brainpower and improve behaviour in the classroom.' Johnson told the Sunday Times: "The government is committed to ensuring that children are provided with healthy food and the nutrients they require during the school day, not just to aid their physical health but to ensure they can study hard and behave well." Now we have an attempt to use the therapeutic and motivational effect of computer games to achieve the same goals.

The problem of pupils' motivation and behaviour does not lie in the brains of modern children, which are not physiologically different from those of their ancestors. Nor does it lie in the impact that modern technology has on children's lifestyle and 'culture' (Robertson calls the current generation of school pupils 'digital natives').

The so-called 'problem of motivation' is an expression of an entirely adult problem that keeps being displaced onto children.

It is a problem of authority, of not knowing what to do. Teachers do not think they have the authority anymore to tell children that it is important to learn maths, English, history, or any other subject. They no find it increasingly difficult to define what is good for their charges and to decide, among other things, what an educated citizen should know by the age of eighteen.

The crisis of authority is not peculiar to teachers. It affects all adults in positions of authority, such as parents, teachers, doctors and, perhaps most of all, politicians, including those who devise education policies.

In this context, trying to borrow the authority of science or technology as a substitute for adult judgment can only exacerbate the problem, by showing pupils that we don’t really believe in knowledge and we are trying to piggyback maths onto computer games. A moral problem cannot be solved by a technological fix. We should instead devise a human-centred solution. We need teachers to regain control of teaching and believe both in the importance of their discipline and in the ability of their pupils.

Children can only be motivated if they see that adults have the confidence and authority to tell them what it is they need to know.

For details of the Durham experiment, and more, listen to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Defending abstract knowledge does not make you an epistemological dinosaur argues Mark Taylor

In an interesting debate at the Royal Society of Arts*, sociologist Michael Young made a rarely heard point, namely that the teaching of knowledge matters. More importantly, he pointed out that knowledge is neglected because policymakers assume that there is no connection between knowledge and the needs of the economy. In consequence, the educational system has become a vehicle for a kind of mass vocationalism, based on targets, league tables and outcomes, which have changed the character of schools into places that are no longer distinctive for attempting to give children knowledge that they cannot acquire elsewhere.

Young cautioned against assuming, in response to this change, that schools are democracies or that they should be used to resolve authority issues in the wider society. To understand the place of knowledge in schools today we need to understand that knowledge is both context-dependent and context-independent. With that distinction in mind, he counselled against conflating these two aspects of knowledge in schools, and noted that context-independent knowledge - in the form of abstract ideas - must sometimes be taught counter to the experience of the child. Indeed, the teacher must impose it on the child.

With arguments like these Young comes across as an epistemological dinosaur - if a welcome one - in the present climate of anti-intellectual governmental and academic approaches to education. These approaches were partly expressed in the response of Geoff Stanton. Stanton, in seeking a defence for the anti-knowledge shift observed by Young, claimed that vocational pedagogy is ‘more complex’ than its academic equivalent. It appears that the more the curriculum loses its previous connection (however poorly taught) with academic subjects, the more observers like Stanton claim that new methods are more sophisticated than previous ones. But Stanton’s defence really only justified the replacement of properly examined academic knowledge with the messy and ever-growing range of self-assessed ‘subjects’ currently being thrown at schools. In this sense, Young is indeed right that schools are losing their previously distinctive educational place in society and, with ‘subjects’ as diverse as ‘parenting’, ‘family learning’, ‘happiness’ or ‘health and beauty’, it is increasingly hard to know where school begins and family ends. Clearly, therefore, vocational pedagogy conflates educational process and content and mystifies the crucial fact that all schools ought to provide a rigorous education in academic subjects which - given that all topics of study have underlying academic principles - would then enable progression to their vocational applications to be made.

So has Young got it right in defending knowledge? Not quite. In focusing so much on knowledge per se, as opposed to subject knowledge of different academic disciplines, Young ends up debating the knowledge content of almost everything, rather than defending the distinctive subject content of a general academic education. Philosophically, this may be inevitable, but pedagogically it is problematic, because it allows the acceptance of the potential ‘subject’ in every newly assessed form of modern behaviour. So, instead of challenging the current approaches to education as he would wish, he ironically opens the theoretical door towards a defence of them. For example, in saying that the knowledge base of beauty therapy must be taught as seriously as that of physics and chemistry, he implicitly weakens a defence of an academic curriculum for all pupils, and ends up in the thick of the current contorted ‘debates’ about how many new undisciplined experiences can be thrown into the curriculum to make it ‘relevant’ to the 21st century. After all, through Every Child Matters, the government has transformed ‘enjoyment’, ‘engagement’, ‘health’ and ‘happiness’ into forms of knowledge which they seem to think can be measured. Indeed, the government appears to have a more radical approach to knowledge than some of the social scientists Young criticises.

Although knowledge should be defended in the form of the subjects that explain the world to us, if it is defended at too abstract a level, it parrots in the secondary sector the post-modern confusion evident at university level. The result is the increasing elevation of cross-curricular thematic learning and experiences above the teaching and applying of the core principles of individual academic subjects. Pupils who learn in this way are in danger of turning up at university intellectually confused and lacking in the real subject knowledge they need to challenge their tutors. This is the opposite of what Young intended. He forgot that even the defence of knowledge is context-dependent.

*What are schools for? A debate between Michael Young and Geoff Stanton, RSA, 30 January 2008: http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=2451

'Being the best' for children means being an educated, and not a just a trained, teacher says Dennis Hayes

There is a new OfSTED consultation paper on improving inspection of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) which is an odd title as the TDA – the Training and Development Agency for Schools that funds what OfSTED inspects – only talks of Initial Teacher Training (ITT). Some university departments talk without hesitation about training teachers while others cling to the word ‘education’ in the titles of their programmes. One national body representing university departments of education calls itself the Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). Another body representing the unions and professional associations calls itself the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers (SCETT). So are today’s teachers educated or trained? Before anyone gives the easy answer that induction into a profession requires both education and training, let me make a clear distinction between the two.

Teacher Education can be easily distinguished from Teacher Training. Teacher education is built around the study of ‘educational theory’ or what the disciplines – psychology, philosophy, sociology, history – tell us about education. Educational theory in this sense is essential to pedagogical and professional understanding. Teacher Training – as devised and required by the TDA - constructs initial professional development around the achievement of competencies or standards and has often only fashionable and faddish notions such as ‘learning styles’ or ‘multiple intelligences’ as ‘theoretical’ content. Structuring any course around ‘objectives’, whether you call them ‘competencies’ or broad ‘standards’, transforms that course into training.

What teachers get today is this training and, as if to make the implications of this clear, the government has even removed ‘education’ from the titles of the government department dealing with schools for the first time since 1870.*

But what children deserve are teachers who are educated. New teachers’ obsession with practical matters and ‘getting the buggers to behave’ is the result of the philistinism of ‘teacher training’. What else is becoming a teacher about when nothing theoretical appears on the PGCE curriculum?

Many teacher trainers – let’s use the correct term - might believe that the government’s new proposals for a master’s level qualification for all teachers might signal a change of direction**. A master’s level qualification taken over a period of time might enable a generation of teachers to study theory and be educated as professionals. This was always the sanguine intention of those who wanted a longer period of initial professional development. What teachers will get is a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning (MTL). Much of the detail, beyond the title of the award, is not worked out but it will not be a Master’s degree in education. It looks like an extended set of competencies is going to be required.

I am not collapsing, unlike some of my colleagues in university- and college- based teacher training, into the philosophical fantasy of nominalism – the idea that if we give something the name ‘education’ it will become a reality. The real task is not changing what things are called, but it is to bring back teacher education. That is why getting into an abstract debate about what practical ‘pedagogy’ teachers need to supplement theory avoids the main problem when attempting to 'be the best'. All teacher training is now entirely practical and it’s just not good enough for our children. The message to the children's secretary is to be the best, to be the ‘Education Secretary’, and put the education back in to preparation for teaching and into our schools.

*The Manifesto Club petition to the PM to put ‘education’ back in the titles of government departments takes up this issue. Read about it here, and sign it here.

**The DCSF document 'Being the best for our children: releasing talent for teaching and learning', was published in March 2008. Read it here.

Education Forum Podcast - No. 2

The second in a series of post-forum podcasts is available to download now. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, David Perks, Dennis Hayes and Shirley Lawes discussing family learning and other current education stories.

Download mp3 (28:05) (128kb)

Education Forum Podcasts

The first in a series of post-forum podcasts is available on the Education Forum Section of the Institute of Ideas website. Listen to Education Forum members Mark Taylor, Toby Marshall, Dennis Hayes and Dave Perks discussing the Children's Plan and several current news items.

Download mp3 (30:40 mins) (128kb)

Mark Taylor thinks that the Children’s Plan is a contemporary 'Minor Carta'

Few people appear to have realised the real significance of the name change that occurred when Ed Balls became Secretary of State on 28 June 2007, and promptly created the Department for Children, Schools and the Family to replace the Department for Education and Skills. However, the truth really is in the title: there is no desire to educate the people anymore. Instead, after 10 years in power, the Children’s Plan exposes the intellectual wasteland at the heart of Labour’s education policies.

Balls claims that the plan responds to the desire for more support, and observes that children’s needs must come before traditional institutional structures (although he wants schools at the centre of the newly unstructured structure). The plan wants Britain to be the best place in the world to grow up by 2020, but does not explain how the necessary comparison will be developed with other countries to work out whether this has been achieved.

The plan’s chapters attempt to rationalise – but not really order – the multifarious existing policies which already affect children, from registered childcare to 20 mph traffic zones, to obesity checks, parenting advisers, softer skills, Surestart, testing and zero carbon schools. A unifying theme of the plan is ‘partnership with parents’ and a ‘new relationship’ between schools and parents based on a personal tutor for every child. One conceptual innovation serves to cohere this rationalisation: ‘social pedagogy’, a term I expect we will be hearing more of in the next few years. Unfortunately, it appears, like personalisation, to express the collapse of the intellectual relationship between government and people and its replacement with a behavioural one.

Perhaps this is too harsh a judgement on the government? Surely, there is still education in the plan? Certainly, the case is made for a Master’s qualification for all teachers. But will it make them masters of teaching subjects or masters of diagnosing stages of intervention? And what will they teach if, as the plan states, the curriculum is being built around ‘assessment to identify support and intervention’? Similarly, a system based on ‘stage not age’ testing (another idea in the plan) will ultimately lead to more testing, not less, and people may eventually forget what they are supposed to be testing for (also see my BOI 2007 essay on exams on the website). And will it really be possible for children to think for themselves when involved in so many needs assessments to gauge the required support? And won’t the multiplication of adults in supporting roles simply confuse everyone about the source of intellectual authority in the classroom? In any case, social pedagogy suggests a shift in teacher training away from the theory of knowledge about the world and towards a knowledge of theories about the child. The curriculum, negatively in my view, will therefore tend to focus more on internally referenced psychological limits than externally referenced epistemology. The result may be to further isolate teachers who really want to teach their subjects, and possibly to indoctrinate others in lowering their intellectual expectations. If the plan succeeds, teachers may eventually be seen as just another of the ‘key workers’ who support children. And the voluntary parent-teacher association may become the compulsory parent-state association.

The plan was created from a ‘consultancy’ with adults and children, as well as the convening of three ‘expert’ groups for age groups 0-7, 8-13 and 14-19. With such coverage, the impression can be given that the plan is coherent, and that the public have spontaneously ‘demanded’ support. However, this is far from the case, and the question really has to be asked about whether this is a plan at all, as opposed to an attempt by Ed Balls to understand his remit. The expert groups based their findings around a superficially enlightened desire to offer ‘opportunity’ rather than ‘deficit’ models of childhood. This adds up to less than the sum of its parts, however, because the groups all replace the intellectual liberation potentially offered by academic subjects by stages of childhood. Thus, they are experts on everything but education, and the only debate within their findings is intra-psychological (about when to intervene), rather than educational (about what to teach and when to let go). These reports therefore legitimise the shift expressed in the main plan from the idea of education in academic subjects to intervention in the lives of diminished subjects. References in the main plan to how it conforms to UN articles on the ‘right to an education’ cannot hide the fact that this only means - a more evasive idea - personal development.

In short, a new ‘care elite’ is institutionalising itself in government, more through imaginative default elsewhere than the power of their own ideas. Their increasingly confident educational and political use of the language of support and parenting obscures the truth that people who have become successful principally for social reasons are trying to convince others that success is only rooted in the personal sphere – as long as the latter are supported by the former. This represents a morally dubious conflation of care and authority over both children and adults. Seen this way, the Children’s Plan, in a Runnymede moment, is a contemporary 'Minor Carta'. The question remains whether any children, and that appears to be all of us these days, will really want to be partners in such a diminished view of education, government – and ourselves.

The full text and the Executive Summary can be found at the DfES website (pdf).

Mark Taylor’s 'Battle in Print' essay, 'The debate over examinations is little more than a War of the Poses', can be found at the Battle of Ideas.

Lynn Erler argues that educators need to know about neuroscience to avoid ‘neuro-myths’

The Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) is a research initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), running from 2000-2011 and supporting to date over 65 education research projects. The TLRP commissioned a review, which appeared in 2007, of neuroscientific findings considered to be of relevance to education and educators. The review was carried out by UK-based researchers Uta Frith and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and was followed up by a TLRP seminar series called “Collaborative Frameworks in Neuroscience and Education”. These moves mirror concerns that are world-wide, according to the OECD, over the infiltration into formal education of scientific developments that can alter learners’ thinking and activities in the classroom. In the US, for instance, schools use medications for hard-to-control and difficult-to-teach children.

The short pamphlet, Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities is based on the Frith/Blakemore review and the TLRP seminar series. It is an attempt by specialists to present an idea of the impact, breadth and influence on education of neuroscience-related issues to non-specialists (educationalists, the public in general) in an accessible way. The contributions are from researchers in neuroscience and psychology, and include 98 references to science publications that are already impacting on developments in education-related industries. Some publications present some clear conceptual models that are useful and can be thought-provoking to people involved in teaching and learning, particularly school-based education.

The 28 pages of the pamphlet contain succinctly presented information about the brain, brain development and brain “care” including neuro-myths, developmental disorders of dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD which have supplied the principal thrusts of neuroscience research and consequent alleviation projects and products, explanations of why “brain-based” education programmes may help learners be more alert in the classroom but can be classified as neuro-myths that have little or no scientific basis. “Issues on the Horizon” that cross between neuroscience and education are then addressed in the final section. Scientists have been appalled at what has been done with snippets from ‘scientific’ reports and are looking at the future and have issued here a report that informs but also warns and admonishes for collaboration between science and education to ensure “careful educational and scientific scrutiny at all stages” (p. 24), of what is already possible in the classroom in terms of tracking and controlling brain functioning.

Neuroscientific research findings have been and will continue to inform aspects of education, particularly in areas of disability and learning impairment. However, there have been other “spin-offs” identified by Frith and Blakemore (2000) as neuro-myths, which have filtered into UK schools as commercial “brain-based” programmes. The reader is put straight about several such programmes that “too often do not survive scientific scrutiny” (p. 15). For example while a conceptualisation of “learning preferences [styles]” may be of value in encouraging teachers to use “a full range of forms and different media” for learning materials, the “existing research does not support labelling children” (ibid.)

The document concludes with two strands:

1. What is already, and will shortly be available from neuroscience in the realm of cognitive enhancers (e.g. Ritalin and drugs for Alzheimers are used by enterprising student who hope for higher exam results), and the use of neurofeedback to increase and improve productivity such as carried out on students at the Royal College of Music.
2. The limits of neuroscience, which has until now only been able to focus on the individual and which has a long way to go in conjunction with many other disciplines - psychology, social sciences, education - to be able to provide holistic improvements in learning.

The authors of the document wish for collaboration between neuroscience and education to conceptualise frameworks for working together to scrutinise the transfer of concepts between neuroscience and education, to avoid future repetitions of “popular ideas about the brain [that] have flourished without check and are impacting upon teaching and learning already” (p. 24) without scientific and educational evaluation. While brain gym might be considered innocuous and in fact a support for being alert in the classroom, more insidious enhancement mechanisms are already available and are being used, not to mention future developments, which are sure to be said to emerge from “ science”. The pamphlet is an attempt by scientists to inform educationalists and to urge them to action: to become informed and together with scientists to inform, and not to leave developments to the government to regulate.

Just how the collaboration across neuroscience and education is going to take place is not ventured in this document, which is a huge detriment. Clearly an exchange across disciplines must be undertaken and a response from the educational community is in order. To be able to enter into a dialogue and to influence future policies at all levels, however, educationalists need themselves to propose a clear conceptualisation of what it means to be human, what it means to learn with dignity and to be respected for human difference.

Neuroscience and Education: Issues and Opportunities was launched at Portcullis House, Westminster on 15 May 2007.

The pamphlet is available as a pdf: http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/Neuroscience%20Commentary%20FINAL.pdf