There are two distinct groups of skills within the context of a curriculum. The first are those generic skills that would apply to pretty much all areas of learning, and the second are those that could be categorised as subject-specific skills.
The generic ‘learning and thinking’ skills are the ones that people seem to get most fired up about. They’re also the ones that seem to have spurred mini industries into knocking out different coloured thinking hats or puppets called ‘Ricky Resourcefulness’ or (my personal favourite) ‘Rhiannon Reciprocity’.
To start with, I don’t think any child ever became more resourceful by sitting in an assembly listening to a story about a puppet who dealt skilfully with an unforeseen set of circumstances. I’ve even got a feeling that as a young teacher I was made to take part in such a scenario, as the character ‘Robbie Resilient’, to teach the unsuspecting children an important life lesson about perseverance. It’s a very vague memory because I’ve tried to blank it out.
The reason this doesn’t work is not because the idea is wrong or even that the learning and thinking skills we’re attempting to develop aren’t valuable. It’s because the application of them is often a superficial attempt to add these skills as a quick fix on top of an existing curriculum model. If this is the case, you can have all the displays you like about resilience, resourcefulness and reciprocity, but it won’t make the slightest bit of difference if there isn’t the opportunity for the children to develop and practise them.
These kinds of skills should be the by-product of a curriculum, and so before building a curriculum that aims to achieve this goal, it’s a good idea to clarify what we’re hoping to achieve. Fortunately, rather than having to reinvent the wheel, there are places to go for exactly this kind of information.
My first port of call was to go back to a document called ‘A Framework of Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills’ that was originally created by the QCA.1
It was targeted at children aged eleven to nineteen and comprises of six groups of skills which, along with English, mathematics and ICT, are ‘essential to success in learning, life and work’.
Ignoring the fact that it was really aimed at children older than primary age, the first step we took was to pick out the kinds of skills we wanted to emerge as a result of every aspect of our curriculum.
The basic skills bit wouldn’t be classed as learning and thinking skills at all – it’s the main focus of what we do in schools and you would struggle to find anyone who didn’t value it as an outcome. However, active learning and creative thinking definitely fall into the generic skills category.
If we didn’t have a curriculum that developed the basic skills then it would be fair to say that we were failing our children. I think it’s also reasonable to suggest that the curriculum would be a failure if it didn’t also instil a desire to learn by producing children who ‘seek out and enjoy challenges’. You could say exactly the same thing about collaboration or perseverance, and you can definitely say the same thing about creative thinking.
Every aspect of creative thinking is about being an effective learner, and you’re not an effective learner if you can only do it when you’re in school and being told what to do. I’m not a fan of phrases like ‘lifelong learner’ but this is exactly what we’re talking about, and it’s exactly what the world beyond school is looking for. We all want young people to be literate, numerate and technologically capable, but we also need young people who can think for themselves.
Beyond these three aims, the other skills we were interested in were then organised thanks to our first key decision: to achieve a slimmed down, ‘less is more’ curriculum, we stopped working in six-week, half-termly blocks and started working across an entire term. This instantly provided the opportunity to do things properly for a change, and to prevent us from falling back into a pattern of trying to squeeze everything in, we identified key areas of the curriculum that we would only teach once in the year. In history, geography, the arts subjects and design technology, each year group would learn about just one topic; we would work on the topic for a term and do it exceptionally well.
In terms of structure, we gave each term a specific focus. Our autumn term was named ‘Discover’ and was history themed; the spring term, ‘Explore’, had a geography and design technology focus; and the summer term, ‘Create’, was arts themed.
With the overall structure sorted, we could map the remaining skills to the terms in which it felt most appropriate:
Some of the skills are repeated across the terms – for example, ‘Show empathy’ and ‘Identify questions to answer and problems to solve’ feature in all three terms. This is based on the fact that we shouldn’t be teaching history, geography, design technology or art without also aiming to develop empathy, and if we’re interested in developing independence and curiosity, then a good place to start is by encouraging the children to identify and ask questions. The same could be said for ‘communicate the learning in relevant ways’ – it’s a constant (or it should be), so it’s in there to give it the importance it deserves.
Whilst it’s impossible to identify exactly what is needed in order to live a successful life, there’s no question that these skills are desirable. I’m not interested in a curriculum that explicitly teaches children how to ‘overcome barriers’, ‘make connections’, ‘show flexibility’ or any of the other skills listed, but I am interested in a curriculum that creates the conditions for these skills to develop – and instead of sitting around and debating their relative merits, we’re much better off spending our time thinking about how we might make it happen.
1 Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, A Framework of Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills (2011). Available at: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110215111658/http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-3-and-4/skills/personal-learning-and-thinking-skills/index.aspx.