Developing Learning-Centred Classrooms and Schools

One of the most curious things about life in classrooms and schools is how little it focuses on learning. Since classrooms appeared on this planet 5,000 years ago they have been characterised by teacher-driven activity systems. In those Sumerian classrooms where boys were learning cuneiform writing, the teacher inscribed syllables into the first rows of tablets of clay, the boys then had to inscribe their version, at which the teacher corrected their attempt, turned the tablet over and did some more. That form of relationship is described as the IRE cycle: Initiation - Response – Evaluation, and research of the last fifty years continues to find it as a dominant pattern in current classrooms ^2/3.

Another puzzle about classrooms is how much they stay the same. The dominant patterns return to reflect long-standing and dominant cultural beliefs: “teaching is telling, learning is listening, knowledge is subject matter taught by teachers and found in books”⁶. And in recent decades in UK, the introduction of National Curriculum, national strategies and controlling inspection has led the patterns of classroom interaction to become even more teacher-centred.⁷

The effects of these patterns on learners is significant. Their experience as learners is hidden. As Nuthall summarised : “Whether a student learns or not reflects the students' understanding of classroom tasks, management of social relationships, and the extent to which the student shares the cultural understandings and background knowledge of the teacher and other students”.¹⁰

Starting the journey

One of the early enquiries in developing a focus on learning is to ask your pupils what they mean by the word “learning”. When a five year-old answered “Learning is being good and not being naughty”, his class teacher was clearly surprised and disappointed, but later reflected “I suppose we’ve socialised them into schooling and not socialised them into learning”.

Then identifying the forces which work against us, so that their negative effects may be spotted and minimised. For the past decade in the context of the school system in England I have been working with teachers on the following three “space invaders” - themes which take up the space which we would wish to give to a focus on learning.¹⁵

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