Chapter 11
Embedding and Spreading Assessment for Learning and Learning How to Learn Ideas and Practices within and beyond the Classroom

The Learning How to Learn project

The Learning How to Learn (LHTL) project was built on the assumption that, in the 21st century, individuals and communities will constantly need to learn new things, apply their knowledge in new contexts, create new knowledge, and exercise wise judgement about what is important and what is not. Learning content will always be important, but learning how to learn will be equally vital.

This presents a challenge for teachers and for schools who will need to focus on two things simultaneously: teaching the substance of subjects, and helping students to learn the ideas and practices associated with the process of learning itself. For many teachers, this requires them to learn new knowledge (about learning), develop new skills, and reassess their roles. Teachers need to learn, as well as their students, and schools need to support them in this, which requires organisational learning. There is a sense, then, that learning how to learn is necessary for students, teachers and schools – an important connection.

The ‘Learning how to learn in classrooms, schools and networks’ project set out to investigate two key questions based in these insights:

• How can learning how to learn practices be developed and embedded in classrooms without intense outside support?
• What conditions in schools and networks support the creation and spread of such knowledge and practices?

There was an imperative not only to investigate ‘what is’ but also ‘what might be’. For this reason the LHTL project was designed with two components – development and research – to investigate how innovations in LHTL practice are created and implemented, and what impact they have. It fundamentally linked two fields of existing educational research: pedagogical research and research on teacher and school development and educational change.

The project team (Figure 11.1) drew its members from four universities. It worked with 40 secondary, primary and infants schools from seven local authorities. According to performance tables and inspection reports, most of these schools were broadly ‘average’ at the start of the project – with room for improvement.

Conceptual basis of the project

We used the phrase ‘learning how to learn’ in the title of our project although we did not have a satisfactory definition of the concept at the beginning of our work. We assumed that it had something to do with self- monitoring and self-regulating aspects of meta-cognition but our interest in finding out what can be done by teachers and students in classrooms, to promote learning how to learn, led us away from regarding it as a psychological property of learners (such as a disposition or general ability). Instead we saw it as a set of practices that can be developed by students to help them to learn autonomously, in new settings, when teachers are not present to support or encourage them. These practices would be crucial for lifelong learning.

Such LHTL capabilities would involve the development of dispositions and skills but these were unlikely to be sufficiently generic to allow them to be fostered in specific study skills or ‘learning to learn’ courses. Neither could they be assessed

by measures that lacked a substantive (subject) context in which LHTL could be demonstrated. It was partly as a result of a failed attempt to develop a test of learning to learn based on what students actually do in unfamiliar contexts, and partly as a result of reading more deeply in the literature (philosophical as well as psychological), that we came to the conclusion that LHTL cannot be separated from learning itself, i.e. learning something. Rather it is an activity involving a family of learning practices (tools) that enable learning to happen. This explains our preference for ‘learning how to learn’ over ‘learning to learn’ – the how word is important.

Like Robert Dearden, an educational philosopher writing at IOE 30 years ago, we rejected the idea of a ‘super-powerful unitary skill’ because of ‘the enormous divergent variety of first-order learning’. More persuasive to us was the idea that LHTL is a ‘family of structures of second-order learning’, from which practices may be selected according to the nature of the first-order learning being pursued. This means that first-order ‘learning’ and second-order ‘learning how to learn’ are inextricably linked.

However, Dearden regarded ‘learning autonomy’ as having priority in the LHTL family.¹ We agreed. However, if LHTL is a family of practices, ‘learning autonomy’ is not just another structure or practice in this family. Rather it is the objective or desired outcome of all LHTL activity or practices. This moves it onto another plane: an important point for us because promotion of learning autonomy, and agency, became the key focus of our project.

The discipline of a development and research project forced us to think about the particular family of second-order LHTL activities we might recommend to teachers, or encourage them to develop. Practices associated with formative assessment or ‘assessment for learning’ (AfL) held promise because previous research and development of formative assessment, with which some of the team had been associated,² had demonstrated the potential for improved learning and achievement. Such AfL practices clustered under four main headings: (1) rich classroom dialogue and questioning to elicit students’ understanding; (2) formative feedback to help students know how to improve; (3) sharing learning objectives, criteria and exemplars of what counts as quality learning in domains; (4) peer- and self-assessment.

If learning autonomy is the goal, and LHTL is the activity oriented towards that goal, then AfL can be viewed as providing tools for the activity. The connections can be represented hierarchically in a simple diagram that represents some quite deep thinking (Figure 11.2).

Design of the project

Although we planned to build on existing research, we designed the LHTL project to go beyond replication. Most research into the effectiveness of formative assessment (or AfL) had been conducted on a small scale with intensive support. If such innovations are to go ‘system-wide’, we knew that they would need to be implemented in authentic settings with much less support. Thus we chose to provide little more than the kind of help schools might find within their local authorities or from their own resources. Then we observed what happened. We were especially interested in how the project ‘landed in schools’ and why innovation ‘took off’ in one context but not another. Our particular interest was in the conditions within schools and networks that are conducive to the ‘scaling up’ and ‘rolling out’ of AfL and LHTL practice.

Development work in schools was initiated by the academics in our team (who were the schools’ critical friends). A whole-school INSET day introduced teachers to the evidence base which was important in convincing them that AfL was worth trying. Then we shared with them some of the practical strategies that other schools had developed. An audit and action planning activity enabled them to discuss how they would like to take the project forward in their schools. Some chose to work through optional workshops that we provided; others selected or adapted them. (All these resources are now available in a book of tools for teachers.³) Each school decided how best to implement innovations, often with the help of local authority advisers who acted as local co-ordinators.

The other main intervention from the project team was to feed back to the school co-ordinator, and sometimes other staff, the results of the baseline survey we conducted into staff values and practices. This revealed differences among sub-groups of staff and stimulated discussion and action. We provided materials to support more general continuing professional development (CPD) and school improvement strategies. At network level, school co-ordinators’ meetings provided development opportunities.

Our research used careful and systematic data collection and analysis to enable us to analyse patterns across our sample as a whole, and over time, and to examine school differences on common measures. We developed research instruments at each level (classrooms, schools and networks) with a view to integrating them to provide a holistic picture.

We carried out our development and research work in authentic settings where many factors interact. (Schools were subject to multiple innovations and changes at the time.) We did not expect to be able to carry out carefully controlled experiments, because we could not hold other variables stable. For these reasons we knew that we would not be able to claim, with total confidence, that any change we observed was the direct result of our specific interventions.

Nevertheless, we theorised that certain variables might be expected to have an influence on others and we proposed to investigate these as carefully as we could. This we called a logic model of linked factors in a causal argument (Figure 11.3).

We used our quantitative and qualitative data to interrogate these links. The quantitative data gave us evidence of associations and the qualitative data gave us insights into possible explanations. These could not be the kind of explanations

offered by controlled trials because the whole point of this project was to see what would happen when ideas generated from carefully controlled small-scale experiments ‘go wild’ – when they cease to be ‘controlled’.

For practical reasons we organised our work on three levels and gave sub-teams responsibility for developing instrumentation and analysis in relation to classroom, school or network phenomena. In practice these levels were deeply connected. This is powerfully illustrated by the fact that teachers themselves learn in their classrooms, in their schools, and with colleagues in other schools linked through personal and professional networks. Our work sought to examine these across-level relationships in teachers’ learning, which became a particular focus of the project.

Teachers learning in their classrooms

Twenty-seven lessons were videoed as part of observations of a sub-sample of 41 focal teachers from 20 of the project schools. Almost all the lessons were filmed at the midpoint of the project and so they provide snapshots of classroom practice. Alongside these video recordings we were able to place evidence from interviews with the same teachers about their beliefs about learning, and their pupils’ comments on the lessons. These snapshots also sat within a wider picture of teachers’ practice and values distilled from survey data collected from 1200+ teachers in 32 schools (more of which later).

Three main dimensions of classroom practice (factors) emerged from the wider questionnaire evidence which provided a useful initial framework for the study of the video evidence. These were: the extent that there was evidence of teachers ‘making learning explicit’, ‘promoting learning autonomy’ or pursuing a ‘performance orientation’ (i.e. in contrast to what Dweck calls a ‘learning or mastery orientation’⁴).

What became apparent from the video material was that assessment for learning practices were being handled very differently in the various lessons observed. It seemed that AfL strategies had been adopted, in some lessons, in ways that reflected what might be called the ‘spirit’ of AfL, showing a deep understanding of the principles underpinning the practices. In other lessons the implementation of AfL seemed more mechanical, more the ‘letter’, focusing on surface techniques. One factor in particular seemed to differentiate one type of lesson from another— promoting learning autonomy. An example may help to illuminate the distinction we made.

Many teachers in many schools have now adopted what they describe as AfL practices or strategies. One is the practice of ‘sharing learning objectives’ with students. A second practice is associated with ‘traffic lighting’ which was first developed as a way of allowing students to communicate their confidence in their learning, during the lesson, so that the teacher could respond appropriately by adjusting the activity as the lesson proceeds. Underpinning both these practices are ideas about the importance of students understanding their learning, becoming active agents in it, and for teaching to be responsive to how learning is progressing through the flow of activity in lessons.

The trouble is that without an understanding of these underlying principles, the first practice can become ritualistic, reduced to writing of the learning objective on the board at the start of every lesson without much reference to it subsequently. Or the learning objective can be reduced to a task objective, i.e. what students are expected to do, not what they are expected to learn. The second practice can become equally distorted by becoming just another way of marking students’ work. Undoubtedly teachers and students have found it attractive and useful to use colours rather than grades or scores. But if this is all that it is, the practice is unlikely to fulfil its formative potential for promoting learning autonomy.

However, some of the teachers that we observed took these same practical suggestions but interpreted and implemented them in ways that captured what we called the ‘spirit’ of AfL. An example can be found in the DVD that TLRP has sent to every school in the UK, together with a booklet entitled, Principles into Practice⁵. Here the teacher turns the learning objective into a question for discussion, accessible to all learners, and uses the ‘traffic light’ idea to create cards that students can show, at any point in the lesson, to indicate their feelings about how they are progressing in their understanding.

The question concerning teachers’ own learning is: what was it that led such teachers towards a deeper understanding and interpretation than others?

Analysis of our questionnaire and interview data suggests that teachers’ beliefs about learning affect how they implement AfL in the classroom. Much of the roll-out of AfL in England, promoted in the recent past through the National Strategies, has focused on giving teachers procedures to try out in the classroom without considering what they already believe about learning in the first place. Evidence from our questionnaire data suggests that some teachers feel more able to promote student autonomy in their classrooms than others. Certain patterns also emerged from analysis of interview data indicating that those teachers who articulate a clear commitment to student autonomy are more likely to realise it in the classroom. For example, the teacher in the TLRP DVD expresses a strong conviction that her job is to make her classes less passively dependent on her and more dependent on themselves and one another.

Teachers holding similar views were also more likely to take responsibility for students not learning rather than blaming the students themselves (or some barrier external to the classroom). This led them to question how they might approach differently those activities that failed, or capitalise on those tasks that went well. As one teacher put it:

Another said:

In understanding these findings, however, we could not ignore the context in which teachers in England work. Teachers and students alike work in a system dominated by the demands of the curriculum, tests and examinations. The pressure is to cover the course or teach to the test rather than take the time to explore students’ ideas and understanding. Therefore, one way of understanding a gap between what teachers say they believe and what they actually do in the classroom, is to understand the pressures of the current climate.

Using a software package, we coded 37 transcriptions of interviews with classroom teachers. Of 16 major coding categories, one was ‘performance orientation’ (140 passages) and another was ‘barriers to student learning’ (366 passages). When these two categories coincided we found three sub-categories: ‘pressures of curriculum coverage’, ‘pressures of national testing’ and ‘pressures of a tick-box culture’.

The tensions and dilemmas that teachers face and their struggles to bring their practice into line with their educational values, whilst coping with pressures from outside, were a strong feature of their learning in the classroom. Some appeared content with ‘going through the motions’ of trying out new practices but a small proportion (about 20 per cent) ‘took them to heart’ and, with a strong sense of their own agency, tested and developed these ideas in their own classrooms in creative ways.

The next challenge for the LHTL project team was to find out what kinds of support within and beyond schools would allow the 20 per cent to come nearer to being 100 per cent.

Teachers learning in their schools

In order to investigate the conditions in schools that might promote changes in classroom practice we constructed a questionnaire to be administered to staff in our project schools on two occasions, two years apart. This had three sections, each relating to a dimension of interest to us: classroom assessment practice and values; teacher learning practice and values; school management and systems practices and values.

The basic assumptions that shaped this aspect of our research were:

• The promotion of AfL and LHTL in classrooms represents a considerable innovation in teachers' practices.
• This requires teachers to learn these new practices.
• Such learning needs to be encouraged by a supportive school culture.

We carried out factor analyses on each of the sections on the first (baseline) administration of the questionnaire (1212 responses) to identify underlying factors. We identified the following:

Three classroom assessment practice factors:

• Making learning explicit
• Promoting learning autonomy
• Performance orientation

Four teacher learning factors:

• Inquiry (using and responding to different sources of evidence; carrying out joint research and evaluation with colleagues)
• Building social capital
• Critical and responsive learning (through reflection, self-evaluation, experimentation, and by responding to feedback)
• Valuing learning

Four school management factors:

• Deciding and acting together
• Developing a sense of where we are going
• Supporting professional development
• Auditing expertise and supporting networking

Using these factors we were able to examine values–practice gaps, differences between and within schools, changes over time, and associations between factors on the different dimensions. There is too much to report here, so you will need to read the book!⁶ Here, I will just touch on some of our most important findings very briefly.

Gaps between teachers’ values and their practices at the beginning of the project were mainly related to promoting learning autonomy (practices noticeably behind values – teachers admitted doing less than they thought important) and performance orientation (practices noticeably ahead of values – teachers did more than they thought important). By the end of the project, teachers were reporting to us that they were rebalancing their assessment approaches in order to bring their practices into closer alignment with their values. They did this by reducing practices with a performance orientation (by an average of 9 per cent) and by increasing practices with a focus on promoting learning autonomy (by an average of 7 per cent). Given the size of the sample, these were statistically significant changes.

Some people might ask: Does the reduction of performance orientation affect results? Well, performance data from sample schools indicated no negative impact of these changes on national test and examination results but there were some interesting success stories. For example one school, towards the end of the project, achieved 84 per cent 5A*–Cs at GCSE in 2004 (and 92 per cent in 2006), and high contextual value-added scores. The majority of its teachers consistently valued making learning explicit and promoting learning autonomy almost equally highly (and above performance orientation), and their values–practice gaps were minimal. The head teacher attributed this to the project, though we would be more cautious. He said:

After factor analysis, we carried out multiple regression analyses to find out to what extent the variation in classroom practice might be accounted for by teachers’ own learning practices and/or school management practices.

What appear to be important, at the level of the school (see Figure 11.4), are: (1) a clear sense of direction; (2) systems of support for professional development; and (3) the management of knowledge, i.e. school systems for locating the strengths of staff as a basis for building on this expertise through networking. However, the impact of these factors on classroom practice, particularly those practices

associated with learning how to learn and the promotion of learning autonomy are mediated by teachers’ own learning practice, particularly collaborative classroom-focused inquiry. Thus, the key school condition for the promotion of learning how to learn by students appears to be development and support of teacher learning through their inquiry into classroom experience. This inquiry might include learning from research, but also working with other teachers to plan, implement and evaluate new ideas. This is one of the most important findings from the project and provides substantial evidence for the value of practice-based inquiry by teachers, which has been widely promoted by educators from John Dewey onwards. But it also provides a very explicit focus on the development of learning autonomy as a goal.

However, data from co-ordinator and head teacher interviews revealed that embedding changes in classroom practice, teachers’ professional learning and school systems, is a process that takes time. It is ongoing in that it is never completed since contexts change. As one head teacher eloquently said:

Embedding occurs through differing combinations of approaches and practices which reflect the fact that schools have people with different strengths, dispositions and priorities. Schools are also at differing stages of development and organisational maturity. And they face differing changing contexts. Cluster analysis of our staff questionnaire data demonstrated the extent to which different groups of staff within schools have different configurations of values and practices. In secondary schools subject differences were particularly marked, and there were differences between primary and secondary schools. These, and other, within-school and between-school differences indicate a need for differentiated approaches to CPD for different categories of staff, and to the development of school improvement plans. One size does not fit all.

Our evidence also indicates that each approach or practice has both structural and cultural aspects, which interplay in complex ways. Cultures develop through structures, and structures are shaped by cultures. School leaders, subtly, or more directly, change structures and shape culture. They both lead and model and, very importantly, they can support distributed leadership so that others who are not necessarily in positions of formal leadership can exercise influence – structurally and culturally. However, we need to bear in mind the need to challenge some existing embedded practices, structures and cultures in order to embed learning how to learn.

The challenge for leadership, as revealed by our data, is, essentially, to create space and the climate for reflection and sharing. This includes encouraging dialogue, reasoned dissent and risk- taking. We came to view what Argyris and Schön⁷ call ‘double loop learning’ as particularly important at school level. This involves stepping back from the familiar plan-do-review cycle to examine each stage before stepping back in to do something new. This process, at organisational level, mirrors the process of strategic and reflective inquiry for teacher learning, which in turn mirrors the process of developing learning autonomy, through AfL and LHTL, by students.

At all levels collaborative knowledge creation and sharing is crucial, which in our project was the particular focus of our study of teachers learning through networks.

Teachers learning through networks

The primary research question for our investigation of networking was: How can the knowledge and skills of learning how to learn be effectively transferred within educational networks? This implies an understanding of the nature of educational networks, which we proposed to map.

There was also strong interest in the levels of teacher competence and confidence in using network technologies. We discovered that our initial confidence in the role of technology in educational networks was seriously misplaced.

Most of our sample schools were well equipped with new technology. But these resources were little used for ‘school-to-school’ electronic networking. Most teachers used their classroom and staffroom computers’ Internet connections to gain access to schemes of work (49 per cent) and lesson materials (74 per cent) but only 26 per cent reported using the Internet to find out about teaching techniques. Email and the Web were often used to replicate and supplement existing processes, rather than enabling new patterns of interaction, sharing and professional development. There was, however, considerable optimism and anticipation on the part of teachers, managers and local authority officials about what network technologies, such as video conferencing, would be able to offer once technical constraints had been resolved.

In our investigations of networking more generally we found it particularly useful to distinguish between ‘whole network’ thinking (the view from 10,000 feet) and ‘ego-centred’ models (the way it looks from where I am now). On the basis of this latter view of networks, we carried out a mapping task that allowed us to understand the nature of the networks that teachers (in our case LHTL co-ordinators in project schools) and head teachers had access to, or were part of, and how they used them as part of teacher and school learning.

These data from network maps forced us to recognise weak links, that is, links where there is not a strong relationship involved but where the knowledge is valued. For example, teachers attending a conference might pick up some good ideas and be enthused by a speaker such that they go back to school and try a new approach. The speaker has no strong relationship with the teachers, but nevertheless this is an important link. These weak links contrast with strong links that characterise so many, so-called, ‘learning communities’ (which we distinguish from networks). Strong links are important but difficult to sustain so we concluded that weak links need also to be valued and exploited more.

Another important finding was the difference in the kinds of links that different people within a school had established. Head teachers are usually regarded as the ‘networkers’ of a school because they have more opportunities to work outside the school and are seen as gatekeepers to knowledge. Some of their links are personal and involve friendship. More usually, however, head teachers build links with one another in affiliation networks, which they are then able to use when they need help:

LHTL project co-ordinators, on the other hand, had to build new networks to go with their role. This brought new knowledge and ideas into the school by bridging to other networks and sources of expertise.

These informal networks and links are valuable resources for schools. Learning how to understand them is in a sense the ‘learning how to learn of networking’. We concluded that schools could benefit from developing their understanding of different types of networks and links, and by giving teachers opportunities to network. These are new aspects of the way we think about teacher learning that will be important to develop in an increasingly ‘networked society’.

From our development and research work with project schools we have distilled a number of key messages with implications for teachers, school leaders, local advisers and school inspectors, teacher educators and policy makers. (See below.)

Our message for leadership is the one that I want to draw attention to here because so much else follows from it. The key challenge is to create the space and climate for managers, teachers, support staff and students – especially students – to reflect on and share aspects of their practice, especially their learning practice. This includes encouraging and stimulating reflection, dialogue (even dissent), strategic thinking and risk-taking. In this way, new ways of learning and teaching can be tested, embedded and sustained. Without it, they remain surface changes which decay and disappear when the next initiative comes along.

Implications for practice and policy

In this section I take the messages summarised above and outline some of the implications for various groups of practitioners, advisers and policy-makers. I hope the discussion will have relevance to educators both within and beyond the bounds of the UK, and for times present and future.

Teachers

If learning how to learn is about pupils taking responsibility for their own learning, then teachers need to provide learners with opportunities to exercise responsibility. This does not mean abandoning them to their own devices but it does mean planning activities with this in mind and developing the ‘flow’ of lessons to maximise these opportunities. Perrenoud’s⁸ concept of ‘regulation of the learning process’ is helpful here because it shifts the emphasis from seeing the teacher’s role as prescribing what tasks (stuff) pupils do, to seeing it as a kind of orchestration of the learning itself. This presents a considerable challenge because it asks teachers to reconceptualise their roles, and the familiar division of labour in the classroom, and move away from ‘performing teaching’ to ‘supporting learning’.

Refocusing on the regulation of the learning process – being watchful, reflective and strategic so that teachers can help pupils to be watchful, reflective and strategic in their own learning – does not imply that the ‘process’ is all, and that what is being learned is of no account. On the contrary, it demands that teachers have what Shulman⁹ refers to as content matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and, perhaps most importantly, pedagogical content knowledge, i.e. the knowledge of how subject matter can be learned and taught most effectively. There is a sense in which teachers’ thinking and regulating activity in the classroom needs to operate on at least two levels at the same time: moving between the learning itself and learning how to learn.

A group of researchers, working with Lee Shulman, has published a set of papers in a 2004 special issue of the Journal of Curriculum Studies (volume 36, number 2, published by Taylor & Francis), in which they examine a pedagogy for fostering communities of learners. On the basis of their studies of learning in social studies, biology, English and mathematics, they argue that effective teaching and learning have to combine both generic and subject specific elements. This implies that teachers have to adapt generic strategies to fit the needs and requirements of subjects. This requires them to have subject knowledge as well as pedagogic knowledge and to be able to see how they inter-relate and, indeed, conflict. In turn, this means that teachers need to develop subject-specific practices from general principles about pedagogy. Further, they must also have a deep understanding of these principles to enable them to go beyond procedural superficiality. This may look complicated but it is how expert teachers work. The challenge is to help more novice teachers to develop such expertise.

The practices associated with assessment for learning are helpful tools in this respect because they are ways of making space for explicit dialogue about learning and for sharing and transferring the responsibility for learning to the learners themselves. However, as our evidence illustrates, they can unwittingly be used (or even misappropriated) for other purposes if teachers are not clear about the principles that underpin them. This implies that even if novice teachers are encouraged to try out the practices first, before they fully understand their rationale, they will benefit from thinking more about their underpinnings as soon as they have developed some confidence in using them. They will then find ways of adapting them to new contexts, or using the principle to create new practices. The AfL practice of increasing ‘wait time’ between the teacher asking a question and taking an answer, is an example. When teachers realise that the principle is about creating space for pupils to think and reflect, a crucial aspect of learning, then teachers create other opportunities for pupils to think, individually or through group discussion.

Moreover, as teachers become aware of the principles underpinning AfL they blend such practices into the stream of lesson activity. They no longer feel the need, for instance, to write lesson objectives on the board but can internalise them and refer to them at any appropriate moment in classroom dialogue. Further, they involve pupils in discussion about the objectives and how they relate to pupils’ personal objectives and learning. This avoids the danger of such practices becoming ritualised and ultimately ineffective.

The suggestion that relatively novice teachers need to develop the skills and understanding of those who are more expert, implies that, like apprentices, the former will benefit from learning from the latter. This is often difficult in schools where teachers do not have many opportunities to work alongside one another to develop their collective expertise in and through practice. However, our research produced powerful evidence that opportunities for all teachers to engage in collaborative classroom-focused inquiry was a key condition for developing practices associated with promoting learning autonomy. Such classroom-focused inquiry can take many forms. At its simplest it might involve teachers taking advantage of opportunities to visit one another’s lessons and having structured discussions as to what is observed. A more formal approach is the format of ‘research study lessons’ pioneered in Japan and developed in England by Pete Dudley, a TLRP Research Fellow linked to the LHTL project (see http://www.tlrp.org/proj/phase111/rtfdudley.htm also http://www.ncsl.org.uk/networked/networked-publications.cfm)

Collaborative classroom-focused inquiry should help teachers to develop the support they need to deal with some of the dilemmas and tensions they face in trying to innovate in what is often perceived as a constraining policy context. Our interviews with teachers provided much evidence of the pressures they experience from the demands of a crowded curriculum, the deluge of central initiatives and a high stakes testing regime. Yet a minority were able to rise above this and, instead of blaming circumstances beyond their control, they reflected critically on their own role in pupil’s learning and how they might improve things. This sense of responsibility and their own agency needs to be cultivated in all teachers. Opportunities to work collaboratively, in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect, will help build the social capital needed for teachers to share, reflect upon, and develop their ideas and practices. These constitute the intellectual capital of schools.

But we also noted the challenge of scaling up worthwhile activity so that all teachers and all schools might benefit. On this issue, our evidence indicates that teachers benefit from developing networks with teachers in other schools. (Some of these network links may be of the weak type noted above.) It had been thought that the electronic tools would help with the spread of ideas, and hence assist ‘going to scale’. Unfortunately, the supply of computers has not, according to our evidence, brought about much change in the ways that teachers communicate their professional knowledge. This is not to say that it will not happen. The tools exist and teachers are likely to benefit from using them, although more attention needs to be given to overcoming barriers, such as lack of time or space, inaccessible hardware and unreliable software. In contrast, we found that teachers made valued face-to-face informal links with teachers, and others, beyond their own schools. These can also be used and developed to provide an explicit channel for exchanging practice knowledge.

Of course, teachers need support to do these things, to which we turn next.

School leadership

The key responsibility for school leaders, indicated by our study, is to lead learning, including learning how to learn, in their schools. This means building the culture and creating structures that enable pedagogical innovation to become embedded not only in day- to-day routines but as a way of thinking and being. While this may seem to be stating the obvious, in a climate where bureaucratic demands are heavy, school leaders are faced with considerable challenges in balancing external pressures against their aspiration to lead a dynamic knowledge-creating organisation. While, as our case studies attest, no single approach could be advocated as markedly more effective than another, a commitment to LHTL, and support for teaching staff, were critical elements. With that as given, there was a dividing line between those who believed in leading from the front in search of more rapid change and consistency of approach, and those who favoured team-building and distributed leadership, so as to release the creativity across the school. We took the view that structural and cultural approaches complement one another and that those in positions of leadership need to consider both.

According to our survey results, what is vital to promoting learning autonomy in both pupils and teachers is for school leaders to do the following:

• Develop a sense of where the school is going.
• Audit the expertise that exists within the school so that this intellectual capital can be mobilised, used and spread.
• Find out about the network links that staff in schools have developed in order to strengthen these and make them more purposeful.
• Support professional learning among teachers, individually and collectively.

Particularly important in this last respect is support for professional learning through collaborative classroom-focused inquiry.

All of this will demand the allocation of resources, which in times of pressure on budgets, may require some reprioritisation. However, our evidence suggests that even small amounts of money used to enable teachers to visit one another’s classrooms, within the school or in other schools, can have very considerable benefits. Of course, if these small amounts of money are multiplied to cover all teachers in, say, a network of schools, then the funding needed is considerable.

But material resources are not all. Most important is the need to build a culture in the school which actively encourages teachers to take informed risks in developing practice and to develop critical reflection on the outcomes of their innovations in order to improve them. This might also entail critical reflection on those things that constrain them, including structural conditions that prevail in the school and impinge from outside. For those in positions of leadership, it implies an ability to view difference and ‘dissent’ as potentially fruitful, in turn requiring confidence, reflexivity and a capacity to mediate solutions. In other words, work by leaders to transform their schools into ‘learning organisations’, especially through double-loop learning, is an important condition in promoting learning to learn by teachers and their pupils.

These suggestions concern the broad conditions in schools. Our research also provides the basis for more specific guidance. For example, our analysis of the concept of LHTL leads us to the view that time-tabling separate lessons for learning how to learn would be counter- productive. LHTL can, we believe, only be developed in the context of the curriculum. An infusion approach is preferred because LHTL may look different in different subject contexts. This implies that, in whatever way AfL and LHTL practices are introduced, they will need to be evaluated and adapted for specific contexts, e.g. subjects and age ranges (James et al., 2006b, offer suggestions for whole-school professional development activities). On the other hand, the fact that we found differences in practices and beliefs according to teachers’ subject specialisms also raises a question about a potential role for across-subject working groups within schools. Some project schools found these especially helpful in challenging teachers’ taken-for-granted assumptions and in encouraging them to try practices found to be effective in other parts of the school. In secondary schools, where departmental structures can dominate, such opportunities for boundary crossing were found to be important, although there needs to be links between departmental and across subject groups.

School leaders can be helped to identify what needs to be done in their schools through the way they approach school self-evaluation. This is increasingly important in a policy climate in which schools are encouraged to follow prescriptive formulae. Just as assessment for learning may be associated with procedural techniques, so self-evaluation can be easily confused with audit and form filling, as a prelude to inspection. We believe the research instruments developed by the LHTL project may be helpful in fostering a more reflective process of self-evaluation, one more strongly embedded in the day-to-day life of school and classrooms. With a firmer grounding in AfL and LHTL principles, self-evaluation can feed creatively into school improvement policies, exemplifying the values of a ‘learning how to learn’ organisation.

These development tools can be downloaded as ‘self-evaluation resources’ from the project website (http://www.learntolearn.ac.uk).

Local advisers and school inspectors

In England, the role and function of the local authorities are constantly under review and subject to considerable local variation. Similarly the way Ofsted approaches its work is changing. So it is not sensible to make specific recommendations. However, the implications of the discussion in the previous sections are that consultants, advisers and inspectors need to understand the import, for their work, of what is being suggested.

In the case of advisers, they might be expected to provide support for these developments, for example, through their advice to school leaders, through their provision of local Inset courses and, and perhaps most importantly, for their support for networking. In the LHTL project, local advisers worked with us as local co-ordinators. They were geographically closer to the schools than university-based critical friends and, because they had an existing relationship with the project schools, were often able to respond more quickly and effectively to requests for specific help. By having better ‘inside knowledge’, they were also able to act as brokers between schools and better placed to set up networking opportunities. These could be at an informal level but they could also link teachers and schools into existing or new networks, such as the Networked Learning Communities, sponsored by the NCSL during the time of our project, or those more recently created by the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust and the DfES. All these things can be considered by local authorities interested in pursuing the ideas arising from our research.

In the case of inspectors, there is a need to develop monitoring instruments and reporting structures that are sensitive to innovations in LHTL. A tick-box approach to monitoring LHTL practices is unlikely to be appropriate because, as explained above, it is the purposeful flow of activity in the classroom that is most important. Also, the focus needs to be less on the performance of the teacher than on the learning that arises from the activity of the pupils, and what the teacher does to support their learning. Observation of behaviours alone are unlikely to provide enough information about the learning that is taking place.

Recently inspection has shifted to provide shorter and more focused inspections, affording less time for classroom visits and reduced opportunities for dialogue with pupils and teachers. This is a consequence of the shift in emphasis to place the school’s own self-evaluation centre stage. In so doing inspection teams have, themselves, to deepen their own understanding of the relationship between AfL, LHTL and self-evaluation and what inspection can do both to assess its quality and offer support for its further development.

This implies, however, a substantive change in perspective from an approach based on the demonstration of specified competences, to an approach that sees practices as infused with values, one open to adaptation according to a teacher’s judgement of the best thing to do to enhance pupils’ learning at a given moment.

Teacher educators

The discussion earlier about novice and expert teachers implies that there is a personal trajectory in the development of LHTL ideas and practice. An introduction to AfL practices is a starting point but needs to be developed and deepened through an understanding of the principles that underpin them. Teachers need to be encouraged to develop their own practice knowledge and to share and test that knowledge through collaborative classroom-based inquiry. This cannot all be accomplished in initial teacher training, although more might be done in relation to AfL and LHTL than is evident in England at the present time. For example, in association with our project, a group of secondary Postgraduate Certificate of Education trainees were provided with a semi-structured observational framework, derived from the analysis of the LHTL staff questionnaire which they used to guide their observation of videos of classroom lessons. These semi-structured observations allowed them to identify effective practice, relate it to their own evolving craft knowledge, and discuss relationships and tensions between values and practices, in the teachers they observed, and in themselves (see Marshall et al., 2005, for a full account).

Rarely do ITT course find time to deal with assessment issues adequately, let alone assessment for learning, despite the fact that activities associated with assessment take up so much of practising teachers’ time. A case can be made for AfL and LHTL to be given more prominence in training courses because they are centrally concerned with pedagogy. An unfortunate consequence of using the ‘A’ word in ‘assessment for learning’ has been to place treatment of it, as an ITT topic, at the ends of courses, on the assumption that assessment follows learning rather than being integral to it.

Realistically, however, it is in continuing professional development (PD) that most support for the development of AfL and LHTL ideas and practice might be expected. A role for school-based Inset, local authority-based professional development, and university and ‘other provider’ courses might be envisaged. The problem in England, at the present time, is that such CPD provision is fragmented and lacks rationale and structure. If the development of LHTL in schools requires teachers to grow their ideas and practices through trying them out on classrooms, and in reflective dialogue with colleagues, then one-off courses and ring-binders of materials are unlikely to serve the purpose, although, the occasional good speaker can make a lasting impression.

What may be needed is CPD, for the promotion of LHTL and other areas of pedagogical innovation, supported by an infrastructure for professional development that is truly ‘continuing’ and provides space and time for sustained reflection and developmental progression. This is likely to be mainly school-based, and need not be intensive, but it does need to keep development bubbling away, as teachers, have expressed it.

Policy-makers

As our evidence makes clear, the policy context can act as a powerful facilitator or barrier to innovation. Although at the present time in England a version of AfL has been incorporated into the National Strategies, it can be perceived as yet another initiative, adding to the burden of current central prescription, to be ‘monitored’ by Ofsted and evaluated as effective only if test and examination scores rise. This is not helpful. If learning how to learn is effective, it should not be judged, either by checklists or by school performance at the end of a Key Stage, but by the extent to which learners are equipped to thrive and flourish in their lives beyond the Key Stage and beyond the school. Finding appropriate indicators is difficult to do but not impossible. A international group has been set up by the European Commission to develop a pilot indicator for Learning to Learn. Our project has contributed to discussions on this.

Innovation in LHTL, as in other areas, rarely proceeds by diktat and, however uncomfortable this may be for policy-makers who, for good reasons, want measures of the return on investment of tax-payers’ money, the time has come to ease off prescription and ‘initiativitis’, and provide support in broader terms to develop the dispositions, skills, knowledge and cultures that will encourage transformation of schools into learning organisations. Alternative forms of accountability need to be found that add to this support rather than distort it.

So, we are not looking for another central initiative on LHTL. What we would like to see, essentially, is a change in the discourse across all those agencies concerned with what goes on in schools. This would make strategic and reflective thinking about the processes of learning, by pupils, teachers and by schools as organisations, a priority, and it would value productive struggle to ‘surface’ and resolve dilemmas. Teaching and learning are human endeavours and they cannot, ultimately, be controlled in technicist ways.