Two simple questions for judging the effectiveness of schools are:
  How well does the school prepare every young person for the next stage of their life?
  How well qualified are pupils as independent, confident lifelong learners when they leave school?

There are many examples of initiatives in school improvement that have given rise to positive changes in pupil performance. There many schools too that magically seem to get everything right and suddenly we see dramatic, above average performance.
Such schools have reached a point where single initiatives become joined, and then we see systemic school improvement. Systemic school improvement leads to nothing short of a transformation in the effectiveness of what a single institution can do to maximise the achievement of all its learners to the exclusion of none.

A transformational approach to teaching and learning
The following diagram presents some likely components of a strategy for transformational learning.



It begins with a vision that rises above just doing the best we can in the compromise that is schooling. It aspires to transformation. It will be followed by effective planning and the management of a process of seeking to do things more effectively.

At the other end of the process the school will judge itself by taking a rigorous look at its current outputs. It will follow up evidence of variation or unevenness of success in relation to ability. It will guard against the lure of points scores and judge itself by how well that education prepared them for a successful career.

In the middle is a package of issues concerning how learning is 'delivered'. Schools seeking systemic improvement will take steps to improve the environment in which learning takes place, the resources available for learning and the way that learning is organised.

But arguably, some of the changes that will have the greatest long term impact on the work of schools will be concerned with improving our understanding of the process by which learners learn.
Many recent initiatives in school improvement have been based on trying to understand more about how we learn, and then translate that into approaches in the classroom. One common example is that which builds on Howard Gardner's work on Multiple Intelligences to understand more about pupils' learning preferences. Other models can also help the teacher, such as Blooms Taxonomy. This places types of learning into a hierarchy. The result is a set of 'levels' that are useful in tracking the extent to which pupils are moving towards developing and applying higher order thinking skills. So far there has been no unifying model which would bring together what we understand to be the nature of learning into a format that could guide practical classroom developments. A part of this development will be to develop a useable unifying model that brings together different areas of research into learning and identifies a set of measurable learning attributes that indicate learning progression.

Define, teach and measure the underlying learning attributes

Effective learners share in common a set of learning attributes that are not explicitly taught in the largely content-led National Curriculum. Current practice in assessment for learning uses a National Curriculum level framework to track the progress of pupils. What schools also need is a diagnostic learning framework to underpin this. This will enable teachers to share with pupils targets for acquiring the elemental skills and other attributes associated with effective learners.

Current assessment practice measures progress in relation to NC subject outcomes. Work to date shows that it is possible also to place measures on attributes that have no intrinsic units. Such attention could provide a personalised learning profile for each pupil, tracking progress in each area against learning targets. ICT has the potential to automate much of the collection, diagnosis and presentation of information that can underpin learning.

In the future, we can expect that assessment will be unobtrusive, sophisticated and will be better at measuring what pupils learn, rather than how well they respond to the context of the test. Learning in the future will likely incorporate the development of a full range of learning skills as well as curriculum content.

This web page has been put here to share these ideas more widely. It is a place to post some prototypes of what could turn into useful new approaches to managing learning. It has been shaped so far by a group of educationists with a lengthy experience of working with schools, and we invites others to join in the debate. Our interest to date has been in the question of the extent to which we could define a set of learning attributes, seek to measure them as a way to monitor the development of skills for learning, and to provide dynamic feedback to teacher and learner.

News

"On 8th December a very diverse and interesting group gathered to discuss how ICT, which is increasingly surrounding us in learning environments, might be used to explore and extend our understanding of learning processes. All sorts of data that can be extracted from learning systems, and by ICT used to observe learning, is beginning to make learning activity more visible. It should be possible to derive from this data objective or subjective indicators which can help teachers and learners improve their learning and teaching processes.

Presentations and participants at the meeting provided insights from schools with laptops for all, GridClub, learning in museums, libraries and archives, media companies using “learning” techniques in what they produce, companies and organisations producing learning software, school improvement work and professional communities of practice. " reports Roger Broadie

Our presentation at this meeting can be downloaded from this link:
Presentation to Learning Metrics meeting 8th December 2004


Resources:
Bloom's Taxonomy in practice
A list of Thinking skills
Helping pupils to understand Enquiry Skills