The Joy of Not Knowing Even More

The Joy of Not Knowing (JONK) approach has been proven to develop a lifelong love of learning and intrinsic motivation in children. Now Marcelo Staricoff shows how it is enabling children to become leaders within a whole-school learning environment, which is allowing them to contribute in ways that were previously thought impossible.

In two previous articles entitled ‘The Joy of Not Knowing (JONK)’ and ‘Nurturing Creative Thinking from an Early Age’ (CTL, 2013) I described how a whole-school JONK culture and philosophy of education enables children to develop a lifelong love of learning and an intrinsic motivation for wanting to learn. These articles illustrated how the JONK approach, from a very early age, equips children with the skills and dispositions that enable them to become effective leaders of their own learning.

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      string(5652) "from the previous cohort involved intrialling materials produced by TLO Ltd, the publishersand promoters of Guy Claxton’s work on Building LearningPower programme.A visit to ZambiaIn the second year of the project, funding from the BritishCouncil (Teachers International Professional Development)enabled teachers from VSP schools to arrange a visit toZambia. The theme for our visit was, simply, ‘Creativity’and the fact that this was considered an important aspectof education to explore and research indicated, perhaps,a shifting emphasis in government and local authoritythinking. We did not travel to Zambia with the expectationof seeing innovative approaches to thinking and creativityin the school curriculum, but what we did see certainlyhad a profound effect on our own thinking. We saw schoolleaders, schoolteachers and education officers workingtogether in partnership to overcome the many urgentproblems, economic and social, faced by the people ofZambia. We concluded that this was, in a very real sense,creativity in action. This creative action also embodied‘resilience’, one of the key learning dispositions central tothe ‘learning to learn’ philosophy of our Vibrant SchoolsProject. We all learned a great deal about resilience duringour short visit.Greentrees Primary SchoolRay Picton, deputy headteacher of Greentrees Primary Schoolin Salisbury writes about the involvement of his school in theproject.We joined The Vibrant Schools Project in September 2003. Asa new school, we were interested in exploring innovationin the curriculum. Our first initiative involved re-organisingour timetable to free up Friday mornings for thinking andlearning sessions. As a first step, this was successful inexploring a range of themes, including children’s rights,the cultures of other countries, and The National Gallery’sTake One Picture scheme, and for trialling the use of GuyClaxton’s Building Learning Power framework. The visit toZambia opened a door of opportunity and this has had ahuge impact on the school.Following the visit, we set up a link with one of theschools we visited. Pupils now regularly write to eachother. We have also run curriculum days on Africa andfour teachers from our school visited Chainda Basic School,Lusaka, in April 2005. Four more teachers are going in April2006. We hosted a reciprocal visit by two teachers fromChainda in November 2005. This has proved central to ourintention to make the curriculum more international and sogive our children a broader view of the world. Our ongoingwork includes creating links with schools in France, Canadaand the USA, learning Spanish and French and developingglobal dimensions in the curriculum.The Vibrant Schools Project has had a profound effecton learning in our school. We have valued the experienceprofoundly. We are currently using Tracking Learning onLine as a way of developing learning conversations withchildren based on the 4 Rs (resilience, resourcefulness,reciprocity, and reflectiveness) and the seventeen sub-strands of learning dispositions. This has had a significantimpact on our children’s attitudes to learning and is 25Teaching Thinking&Creativity  Summer 2006www.teachthinking.com   focus on primariesreflected in a marked rise in standards since the schoolopened in 2002.Schools that have been part of The Vibrant School Projectfor two or more years report significant improvementsin standards at Key Stage 2. The rate of improvementfor this group of schools is significantly higher thanthe LA average. Feedback suggests that, in ‘buildinglearning power’ and through involvement in engagingand interesting learning experiences, children are moredisposed to be resilient and resourceful when placedin stressful test situations and faced with unfamiliartest questions. We see this as support for the notionthat attainment is more likely to be raised throughenhancing learning rather than through having anarrow focus on raising attainment.Odstock Primary SchoolAlthough Wiltshire is a largely rural area including somepockets of urban development, there are schools whichhave a wider cultural diversity reflected in their intake. Onesuch school within the project is Odstock Primary Schoolin Salisbury. Here, Kate Whatmore, a teacher at the school,reports on the project’s influence.Odstock Primary School is a rather unusual and,consequently, exciting place to work and learn. Althoughwe are a tiny rural village community primary school, weserve a multicultural community of children from a widerange of backgrounds. In 2003–4, teaching staff asked thequestion: ‘How do we develop and support the learningof children from multicultural and EAL backgrounds inmixed-age classes of up to four years, some of whom, inKS2, may never have been to school before?’ We turnedto the Vibrant Schools Project for what we hoped would beenlightening options.We wanted to see children valuing and controllingtheir own learning. Many of the children seemed to havelow self-esteem and lacked enthusiasm for learning. Theyappeared reluctant to take risks with their thinking andseemed terrified of making their own choices.We made a small but significant decision to adjust thelanguage we were using with our learners to talk abouttheir education. Like several other schools in the project,we substituted the word ‘work’ with ‘learning’ whereverpossible, and were careful not to say that something orsomeone, ‘can’t’ or ‘isn’t’, but rather ‘could’ or ‘could be.’This small but significant change of language made a bigdifference in the culture"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Vibrant schools

24 Nov 2006

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      string(5641) "thepublishers and promoters of Guy Claxton’s work onBuilding Learning Power.A visit to ZambiaIn the second year of the project, funding from the BritishCouncil ( Teachers International Professional Development)enabled teachers from VSP schools to arrange a visit toZambia. The theme for our visit was, simply, ‘Creativity’ andthe fact that this was considered an important aspect ofeducation to explore and research indicated, perhaps, ashif ting emphasis in government and loc al authoritythinking. We did not travel to Zambia with the expectationof seeing innovative approaches to thinking and creativityin the school curriculum, but what we did see certainly hada profound effect on our own thinking. We saw school leaders,schoolteachers and education officers working together inpar tnership to overcome the many urgent problems,economic and social, faced by the people of Zambia. Weconcluded that this was, in a very real sense, creativity inaction. This creative action also embodied ‘resilience’, one ofthe key learning dispositions central to the ‘learning to learn’philosophy of our Vibrant Schools Project. We all learned agreat deal about resilience during our short visit.Ray Picton, deputy headteacher of Greentrees P rimaryScho ol in Salisbury, writes about the involvement of hisschool in the project.We joined t he Vibrant Schools Project in September2003. As a new school, we were interested in exploringinnovation in the curriculum. Our first initiative involvedre-organising our timetable to free up Friday morningsfor thinking and learning sessions. As a first step, this wassuccessful in exploring a range of themes, includingchildren’s rights, the cultures of other countries, and TheN ational Gallery’s Take One Picture scheme, and fortrialling the use of G uy Claxton’s Building Learning Powerframework. The visit to Z ambia opened a door ofopportunity and this has had a huge impact on the school.June/July 2006 Managing Schools Today 49Teaching & learningTeaching & learningTeaching & learningTeaching & learningTeaching & learning CreativityFollowing the visit, we set up a link with one of the schoolswe visited. Pupils now regularly write to each other. We havealso run curriculum days on Africa and four teachers fromour school visited Chainda Basic School, Lusaka, in April2005. Four more teachers are going in April 2006. We hosteda recipro cal visit by t wo teachers from Chainda inNovember 2005. This has proved central to our intentionto make the curriculum more international and so give ourchildren a broader view of the world. Our ongoing workincludes creating links with schools in France, Canada andthe USA, learning Spanish and French and developingglobal dimensions in the curriculum.The V ibrant Schools Project has truly had a profoundeffect on learning in our school. We have valued theexperience profoundly. We are cur r ently usingTrack ing Lear ning on Line as a  wayof developing lear ning conversa tions with ourchildren based on the ‘four Rs’(resilience, resourc efulness,reciprocit y, and reflec tiveness)and the 17 sub-strands oflearning dispositions. This hashad a significant impac t on ourchildren’s attitudes to learningand is reflec ted in a markedr ise in standards s inc e theschool opened in 2002.Although Wiltshire is a largely ruralarea including some pockets ofurban development, there areschools which have a wider culturaldiversity reflected in their intake.One such school within the projectis Odstock Primar y School inSalisbury. H ere, Kate Whatmore, ateacher at the school, reports on theproject’s influence.Odstock Primary School is a rather unusual and,consequently, exciting place to wor k and learn. Althoughwe are a tiny rural village community primary school, weserve a multicultural community of children from a widerange of backgrounds.In 2003–4, teaching staff asked the question: ‘Ho w dowe develop and support the learning of children fr ommulticultural and EAL backgrounds in mixed-ageclasses of up to f our years, some of whom, in KS2, maynever have been to school before?’ We turned to theVibrant Schools Project for what we hoped would beenlightening options.We wanted to see children valuing and controllingtheir own learning. Many of the children seemed tohave low self-esteem and lack ed enthusiasm forlearning. They app eared reluctant to take r isks withtheir thinking and seemed terrified of making their ownchoices.We made a small but significant decision to adjust thelanguage we were using with our learners to talk about theireducation. 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Leadership

Creating vibrant schools

1 Jan 2005

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      string(5616) "accessible.)Observing children, discussing problemsSeeing herself as a developing learner, too, Amanda madesure to record and observe what was happening. As shehad hoped, the children did develop in their independenceand their perseverance. They became less afraid ofchallenges. They also quickly got into the habit of helpingeach other, and enjoyed thinking about how to tacklelearning challenges together. However, there was onedisappointment: the children still seemed reluctant tomake use of the dictionaries on their own. They had grownin resilience, reflectiveness and reciprocity – but one formof resourcefulness still eluded them. In discussing this withHannah Robertson, the colleague who was teaching theother Year One class, Amanda discovered something elseto try. Hannah had been deliberately modelling use of thedictionary – taking every opportunity to introduce wordsthat she was not sure of, and then involving the children inhelping her look up the word in the ‘grown-up’ dictionary.Hannah felt that this had had a real impact on the children’swillingness to look things up for themselves – and Amandawas all set to try the same tactic for herself. ‘Five-year-oldslearn a lot by copying’, she acknowledged; and this had sether thinking about how else she could model the skills anddispositions of ‘effective learning’.Learning to learnAmanda teaches in Cardiff, one of a dozen LEAs that aresupporting their teachers in what they call ‘4th generationapproaches to learning to learn (L2L)’ (Claxton 2004).Approaches to ‘improving students’ learning’ havedeveloped rapidly over the last twenty years, and, as youwould expect, flaws and limitations in some of thepioneering efforts have become apparent, and theirrecognition has stimulated further progress. Amanda’s20www.teachthinking.comFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementTeaching Thinking&Creativity  Summer 2004small-scale, practical, ingenious, effective experiments aretypical of this latest approach. A full history of L2L has yetto be written, but some crude trends can already be seen,and it is useful to pick them out.First there was the recognition of learning in name only.The rhetoric of ‘improving learning’ turned out simply tomean ‘raising standards’ through traditional ‘good teaching’,without any serious attention to what was going on at thelearners’ end of the educational process. Then came thefirst glimmerings of L2L with specific techniques fororganising information such as ‘spider diagrams’ or ‘mindmaps’, often encapsulated within ‘too little, too late’ add-on courses in study skills or ‘how to revise’. Over time, thissecond phase expanded to include lists of ‘thinking skills’that could be clearly identified and explicitly trainedthough special ‘thinking lessons’.Thirdly came the recognition that L2L could not just betreated as a matter of cognitive technique and skill, buthad also to embrace notions of character and style.Differences in perceptual preferences, emotional tolerancesand personality traits impacted on learning just as muchas cognitive skill. Students were diagnosed in terms of theirVAK, Multiple Intelligences or Emotional Intelligenceprofiles, and the teacher had to make sure that she was‘connecting’ with these different kinds of mind. She alsohad to optimise the physical, social and emotionalconditions for learning in the classroom, whether byallowing continual water-sipping, interspersing quiet studywith short, snappy physical exercises, or encouraging asafer, less judgemental climate.Gradually a crucial distinction came into focus: thedifference between ‘helping students learn better’, and‘helping them become better learners’ – not just to getbetter exam results, but to equip them with the genericskills, attitudes and interests of the confident, powerfullifelong learner. It was the attempt to take the latterambition seriously which stimulated the step-change intothe 4th Generation that Amanda and Hannah’s workepitomises. To do so, four difficulties had to be faced.Problems to be facedFirst, the ‘learning styles’ literature had grosslyoverestimated the extent to which people behaved thesame (a) across different situations, and (b) over time.People are much more fluid, variable and complicated thanthe simple division into ‘visual, auditory and kinaesthetic’learners would have us believe. Such typologies aren’t valid,and there is no evidence – at least for some of the mostpopular ones – that using them in the classroom makesany difference to performance (Coffield et al 2004). On thecontrary, instead of encouraging students’ growth, theseThe BLP series of publications21Teaching Thinking&Creativity  Summer 2004www.teachthinking.com Focus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical EncouragementFocus on: Radical Encouragementcategories risk trapping them in a new set of labelled boxes.(‘I can’t do that; I’m a kinaesthetic learner!’) Helpingstudents grow as learners had, instead, to involve expandingtheir portfolios of learning ‘modes’.Second, there is the specificity problem. The ‘thinkingskills’ that students are encouraged to develop tend toremain attached to the original purposes, contexts andmaterials – whether those be a regular maths lesson, a‘philosophy for children’ discussion, or a specially designed‘creative thinking’"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Becoming Learning Minded

25 Feb 2011

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      string(5630) "of activities that usethree approaches (connecting, stretching and transferring)to build skills and extend meaning. The themes are:●	Connecting – introducing the topic●	Stretching – experiencing the use of the topic●	Transferring – personalising the topic1. About learning – learning and life and how we learn2. Resilience – about resilience, absorption, managingdistractions, noticing, perseverance3. Resourcefulness – questioning, making links, imagining,reasoning, capitalising4. Reciprocity – interdependence, collaboration, listening,empathy, imitation5. Reflectiveness – planning, revising, distilling, meta-learningSo for example by connecting the teacher could introduce akey topic, establish a key concept by making connections tofamiliar ideas and then extend and deepen understandingthrough the use of metaphors and illustrations. Bytransferring the teacher makes and opportunity forreflection so that children can identify how a key conceptrelates to their own life context, asses the extent to whichthey can put the concept into practice and transfer theirlearning into wider contexts.The content of the materials available are organisedaround the learning dispositions (the 4R’s) and capacitiesdescribed by professor Guy Claxton. The complete BLPactivity bank contains over 300 activities designed to:●	 infuse building learning power into the curriculum●	aid students’ understanding of learning power●	develop a common language for learning across theschool●	build students’ effective learning habits●	spark creativityThe activities are organised under 5 themes and 24 topicsand each topic has 3 kinds of activities – connecting,stretching and transferring.Skills and strategiesThere are many programmes being used in schools thatpromote strategies for problem solving and effectivethinking. They consist of either a sequence of stagesto solving problems (eg. define the problem, makesuggestions, analyse suggestions and so on) or prompts to 49Teaching Thinking&Creativity  Vol 8:4www.teachthinking.co.uk   the primary curriculummake connections by comparing, seeking reasons, findingexamples and making analogies. Some examples are:●	The TASC wheel – Belle Wallace’s problem solvingsequence: Gather/organise, Identify, Generate,Implement, Evaluate, Communicate, Learn fromexperience.●	Thinking maps and visual tools – David Hyerle’svisual tools for thinking including diagams to assistin: Defining in context, describing, comparing andcontrasting, classifying, establishing part-wholerelationships, sequencing, establishing cause andeffect, seeing analogies. A similar approach is taken byCaviglioli, Harris and Tindall in their collection of visualtools: Thinking skills and Eye-Q. Tony Buzan’s MindMapsare well known and Logo Visual Thinking is another, lessknown, application of visual tools for organising andsorting one’s thoughts. Visual tools are valuable aidsfor developing thinking skills.●	Attention directing tools – Edward De Bono’s CoRTproject and this famous Six Thinking Hats tool directattention to ways of thinking about issues and problemsthat stop us from jumping to conclusions or followingthe most powerful arguer rather than the best argument.For example, his CAF strategy reminds people to ConsiderAll Factors; his PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting) strategyprompts us not to pass judgements too quickly on issuesbefore looking at alternative viewpoints.●	Further Information and resources – The best regularsource of information and ideas on thinking skills isTeaching Thinking and Creativity magazine. It has articleson all the approaches mentioned above as well as otherfamous initiatives such as Philosophy for Children andFeuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment. There is a CD of allarticles from the magazine since 2001. This, along withbooks and resources on thinking skills, is available fromImaginative Minds, publishers of Teaching Thinking andCreativity and Primary Leadership Today.Further informationwww.teachthinking.co.ukwww.thinkingonlinecatalogue.co.uk50the primary curriculum   www.teachthinking.co.ukTeaching Thinking&Creativity  Vol 8:4Thinking through dialogueThe influence of dialogue or ‘thinking together’ on thedevelopment of thinking and language skills is taken upby two notable approaches.●		Thinking Together – This programme of principles andactivities suggests that thinking can be improved byfocused, exploratory dialogue supported by clear groundrules. 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Creative Teaching & Learning

A new primary curriculum

16 Mar 2008

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