It seems that Ofsted, the government’s official educational inspection and regulatory body, is starting to pay attention to the fact that the government’s obsession with exam results has created the disastrous outcomes predicted by teachers, researchers and educational experts, and they are creating a new inspection framework that will include a new ‘quality of education’ score that can then be monitored.1 According to a source for the Sunday Times, ‘Schools where teachers just think about how you get exam results and not what is best for the children to learn will be marked down. The chief inspector wants to shift a culture that is betraying a generation.’ This is a positive move, but the inherent subjectivity of qualitative assessments was what they were rallying against in the first place, so it is unlikely for real change to occur any time soon.
What seems to be at the heart of the educational aims of all parties is that students should be given access to good quality content, have their talents nurtured, give them the skills and resilience to thrive in adulthood and to meaningfully participate as citizens in society. It is the how to accomplish this that becomes problematic and divisive.
An important theme that regularly comes up in discussions of education, citizenship and future success is creativity, a theme that is close to the heart of this magazine. Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has now spent more than 50 years researching and promoting educational reforms that have creative practice at their core. In our next issue of Creative Teaching and Learning, we will be featuring Project Zero and highlighting some of their research contributions over the past 50 years.
With its roots in arts-based education, Project Zero has been at the cutting edge of educational research, finding ways to connect cognitive psychology, problem solving, creative and critical thinking and brain organisation with educational practice. Their current research continues to explore the challenges facing education today and tomorrow. How can schools create access and personalise learning for a diversity of students? How can students develop 21st-century skills such as life-long learning, critical thinking and creativity? How can teachers recognise and develop each child’s full intellectual potential? These are all questions that the DfE is attempting (inadequately) to address, and they would do well to incorporate some of the answers being offered by the Harvard team in their next iteration of the educational plan.
As a way of introducing the richness and importance of Project Zero’s work, in this issue we have three feature articles relating to the Cultures of Thinking (CoT) project led by Ron Ritchhart. Classrooms that employ a Culture of Thinking value and make visible both an individual’s and a group’s collective thinking and promote it as part of the every-day experience of all group members. For the first article, Jeff Watson and Roger Winn show how they changed their secondary maths and chemistry lessons to incorporate these values with excellent results. Secondly, Erika Lusky uses Ron Ritchhart’s research to demonstrate how language reflects our thinking capacity and show how this can be harnessed for meaningful results in the classroom, and finally, Julie Rains shows on how her primary school media classroom has benefitted from implementing the collaborative activities and reflective practices of the CoT framework.
Another important feature of learning that Project Zero has spent time considering is that of assessment. They have noted that while assessment is essential to any learning process, it directly affects what is taught and therefore, traditional, test-based models are problematic. From their perspective, assessment is an episode of learning and that schools spend too much time judging children and not enough time trying to help them. At the core of their assessment practice is the belief that human beings differ from one another and there is absolutely no reason to teach and assess all individuals in an identical way. It is also important that students and teachers should be active protagonists in (not passive recipients of) the assessment process. This focus has been borne out through research and there is hard evidence that this approach to assessment is meaningful and that it works.2