Chalkface Blog

David Millband wants to ban home study leave, the practice by which students take time off before exams, because boys generally lack the self-discipline to make good use of it. I heartily concur with the analysis of the problem, but I have doubts about the solution. For one thing, girls do make use of home study leave. Surely there’s room for gender differentiation here?

Let’s look at boys’ problems from a management perspective, as if boys were employees. Suppose we have observed that our employees lack self-discipline and will only work when supervised. A bad manager will impose more supervision; a good one will change the task structure and reward structure to one that works for this particular group. This is such standard practice that you can pick it up from any basic textbook on line-management. I’ve met David Millband and he’s a bright chap. I’m sure he can do better than fall into the micromanagement trap.

The key benefit of study leave is that the student can focus on areas with the greatest potential to improve his or her results – it’s an opportunity for truly individualised learning. This is the aspect we really want to keep.

The current reward system is completely broken. The main reward for study-leave diligence is good exam results. Every student wants these but they are too abstract and too far in the future to really motivate many young people. I would like to see each student teamed up with a mentor whose job is simply to encourage, encourage, encourage. Like a sports coach, the mentor would seek to build each boy’s self-confidence and self-discipline by delivering immediate rewards for every step forward. Mentors would not in any way get involved in the content of what was being learned. Naturally enough I would link mentors and students electronically, purely because doing so would make such a system affordable.

The current task structure is in even worse shape. Since the introduction of the National Curriculum, school learning has been broken into small chunks with defined, measurable outcomes. It has been delivered as short learning tasks, each of which is formally assessed. When study leave comes along, all of that is thrown out of the window. What surprises me is that only 50% of the school population falls over when their crutches are kicked away.

Until the rest of the school system has been brought back into balance, and students given more opportunity to develop self-reliance, we must put back at least one of the crutches during study leave. There are lots of good online revision aids out there now; what’s to stop schools (or the government directly) offering these to students through an MLE. The students can still choose their own study content, but they’ll have enough support to make study leave effective exam preparation – even if they’re boys.

What is it about this “of the future” tag? Every time you see it you know someone’s heading for a prattfall. It conjures in my mind images of the Jetsons, Spandex suits and the Millenium Dome. The problem is that predictions are generally based on extrapolating a single trend, and assuming that everything else will stay the same. The Jetsons are a classic case in point: a stereotypical 1950’s nuclear family with 1950’s jobs and 1950’s attitudes – who just happen to have a circular house and a car that can fly.

Closer to home, perhaps, the British Library (of the future), conceived and funded in an age when you went to the library – but born into an age when the library came to you; or rather to your browser. That it would prove to be a white elephant could have been predicted – probably was – by anyone who knew Moore’s Law. But the lure of a bigger, brighter ‘more modern’ version of what we already had proved too great. I walk past it regularly, and often wonder if there’s anybody still inside.

Now the DfES is announcing Schools of the Future replete with, you guessed it, giant glass domes. No. Sorry. Buildings of the future, perhaps, but housing schools of the past.

In none of the proposals I’ve seen has anybody questioned whether, in an age of universal connectivity and computing hardware so cheap it comes with the cornflakes, it will still be appropriate to

• deem ‘learning’ only to happen within one building?
• force children of 11 to commute outside their local area?
• keep them in groups of approximately 30?
• insist that each group is homogenous by age?
• tie up the bulk of teachers’ time physically supervising and administrating those groups?
• insist that every child attends on the same days and at the same time?

Perhaps formal education will still be like that in 30 years, but if William Hill would take my bet, I’d give even money that the educational establishment will have reversed its view, on at least one of those questions, within 5 years.

Flickr is the latest piece of “six degrees” social software; said by experts to be technically well ahead of the field. I am interested in how these kinds of systems might be adapted to the needs of education, and the best way to find out is to participate. If you are interested too, my screen name on Flickr is “ian_gs” and I would welcome friendship invitations.

See you there!

I thought the BBC’s reporting of the Institute of Education study on homework was a bit lightweight until Stephen Downes drew my attention to the absolutely fascinating debate now raging on the BBC site. Perhaps this is the most challenging comment to professional educators:

If it weren’t so sad, some of these comments would be funny! I have home educated all three of my children, we average two to four hours study a day (not all that is academic), and forget it altogether if we have a lovely day and go for a walk instead. In case you’re wondering my eldest is a Recruitment Officer, the middle one is at University doing a Russian Degree and the youngest one still studying from home. Home Education must be the only time homework doesn’t cause stress. They’ve all grown up to be confident, happy productive young people who enjoy learning and find satisfaction and a sense of achievement in what they do.