What matters to children?
Diane Hofkins finds out from the experts
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What matters to children? This question is not asked often enough. There is much discussion about what matters to parents, to Ministers, to the Daily Mail, even to teachers. Children, meanwhile, are there to be taught, fixed, shaped, helped, controlled and prepared for adulthood.
That's why the What Matters to Children team has called their new book Learning: what matters to children (The first book was First Hand Experience: what matters to children). They want to keep us firmly focused on first principles.
The authors, Mary Jane Drummond, Diane Rich and Cathy Myer, write: "We believe that in thinking about the most appropriate curriculum and pedagogy for children from birth to 11, the best place for educators to start is with the children themselves, the people who do the learning."
But of course children are not the only ones doing the learning. Their latest book also says a great deal about how adults learn from children and from other adults. Each chapter in its alphabet of ideas contains vignettes about children, as well as their writing and drawings. A relevant children's book is recommended, as is a book by an educational thinker.
Chapter F for feelings concludes, "The process of learning is always emotional as well as intellectual; no-one can do worthwhile learning with a cold heart."
If you have anything to do with primary or early childhood education, these books will help you think about your work and the people you work with. They are lively, accessible, fun to use and well-designed. It is impossible for me to do them justice in a column.
Writing about early childhood education as a journalist only becomes easy when someone in authority is trying to count it and measure it. The nursery voucher scheme, that last stand of the last Tory government, was about numbers: numbers of places, numbers of settings, numbers of pounds, and the number 4. How many four-year-olds could you cram into Reception classes whether or not they were ready for real school?
Perhaps Labour's last stand will be the Children's Plan. It is far more complex, of course, and is underpinned by a genuine determination to narrow the gap between rich and poor, to help those in care and to motivate children to learn. But just when you have been lulled into a feeling of optimism, you find yourself mired in a bog of numbers.
Here are some of them:
- New indicators to show the performance of pupils achieving level 7 or above in English, maths and science. This reductionist measure is supposed to help the "gifted and talented". Put down your guitar and your paintbrush. Pick up your calculator.
- Improve the proportion of pupils progressing more than two levels at each key stage. Will this lead to more drilling and "teaching to the test"?
- "Our 2020 goal is that every child will be ready for success in school with at least 90 per cent developing well across all areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile by age 5." Obviously, they are expecting great leaps in genetic engineering during the next 12 years.
Opening a three-day conference on the Suffolk coast where Learning: what matters to children was launched, Mary Jane Drummond quoted RG Collingwood. "He invented a powerful question," she said. "It can be applied to anything. 'What is the problem to which this phenomenon is the solution?'."
Point three above, and other tick-box measurement, is one of the problems to which What Matters to Children is the answer.
In the best infant teacher tradition, Mary Jane and her colleagues tell much of what they want to say in stories. Ironically, this makes it easy to understand what they mean, but very hard to write about. They are stories that show the striking individuality of each child, that demonstrate their intense curiosity about the world and determination to learn about it, their grasp of big ideas.
But here's a list from chapter T, "Learners Take Time":
How is it possible to provide and organise for time?
- Spend more time on fewer projects.
- Plan for continuous rather than fragmented learning by blocking time.
- Make time available for children to think, plan, discuss, decide, try out their ideas, evaluate and change them.
- Respect and value children's day dreaming time.
- Model the time needed to complete a task, such as reading a story.
- Plan projects that take time (eg plant a garden and harvest a crop of vegetables; cook and eat them).
- Organise for a flexible approach to planning and timetabling that will give educators time to collaborate.
- Value the time spent on observing and recording children's learning, all the way along the learning journey, and not just at the end.
More information from www.richlearningopportunities.co.uk
Diane Hofkins is a NET leading thinker and former primary editor of The TES
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