Building Learning Capacity

Expanding the capacity to learn:
A new end for education?
Guy Claxton

University of Bristol
Graduate School of Education

Opening Keynote Address

British Educational Research Association
Annual Conference,
September 6 2006,
Warwick University.

(paraphrased)

There is a widespread feeling that 21st century life presents everyone, as they grow up, with
high levels of challenge, complexity and individual responsibility. It is commonly said that
we are in a century of choice, problem-solving and learning. And if young people are lacking
the personal resources to thrive in such a context, then it is the job of education to strengthen
their ability to be good choosers, skilful problem-solvers and powerful learners. ICT skills
have increasingly short shelf-lives: some of them are out of date within 6 months. But the
generic ability to learn has no use-by date at all.

The capacity to learn depends, in part, on being willing to run that risk, and to do
so you need a sense of entitlement: the belief that you have a right to be curious, to ask
questions, to discuss, to imagine how things could be different. Some students don’t feel that
they do have that right. Some schools encourage students to develop a feeling of being
disenfranchised from the process of making and critiquing knowledge.

So expanding the capacity to learn means creating a climate in which that feeling of
enfranchisement and entitlement is systematically broadened and strengthened – not
weakened, undermined or simply ignored. In such a climate, students’ questions are
welcomed, discussed and refined, so the disposition to question becomes more and more
robust; more and more evident across different domains; and more and more sophisticated.

Their guiding question is: what would it mean to organise your classroom and your pedagogy
in such a way that every day, little by little, in the midst of the Literacy Hour, the Romans or
an experiment on magnets, your students were learning to learn more robustly, more broadly
and more flexibly and skilfully?

The language will need to change, to support a shift of attention to the process of
learning, and the ways in which people’s learning dispositions are growing and changing.
Activities will need to be selected, designed and framed so that they deliberately focus on
stretching each aspect of learning capacity, and this goal is not eclipsed by a more familiar
focus on the acquisition of knowledge and the completion of tasks

The teacher challenges students to think and talk about their own
learning process with questions such as:
o How did you do that?
o How else could you have done that?
o Who did that a different way?
o What was hard about doing that?
o What could you do when you are stuck on that?
o How could you help someone else do that?
o What would have made that easier for you?
o How could I have taught that better?
o How could you make that harder for yourself?

Helping them learn better is not the same as helping them become better learners.

Expanding learning capacity requires being stretched, and being willing ‘to boldly go’ where learning itself is difficult. Fun activities that engage students without stretching them are not, in these terms, worthwhile. So-called ‘bright’, ‘able’ or ‘gifted’ students who coast through school are wasting their time.

Wild topics. The intention to expand students’ learning capacity does not exclude content, but
it does influence the kinds of topics that are selected. They have to be engaging enough for
students to want to put in the effort to pursue them. There are suggestions from many sources
that the following features of a project or activity increase the likelihood that students will
want to take it seriously.
o Rich: there is much to be explored
o Challenging: the topic contains real difficulty
o Extended: there is time and opportunity to go into it in depth
o Relevant: the topic connects with students’ own interests and concerns
o Responsibility: students have some genuine control over what, why, how and when
they organise their learning
o Real: solving the problem or making progress genuinely matters to someone
o Unknown: the teacher does not already know the ‘answer’.
o Collaborative: most students enjoy the opportunity to work together with others on
such tasks

So it is not enough that schools expand young people’s capacity to learn. We have to get buyin.
We have to explain to young people that school isn’t really about the Tudors and the
Periodic table. It is about becoming a brave and skilled explorer; a cunning detective; an
imaginative creator; a tough competitor – in whatever field of life they want to work and play
in. We have to talk to them seriously about what we are up to; what they can expect to gain;
and what they will have to put in. We have to tell a story about the end of education that is
inspiring.

It is not knowledge, but character; not certificates
but courage and confidence to face whatever life throws at them. That is what they have a
right to expect. That, many of them, is what they lack. That lack is what is reflected in their
escapism and desperation. Trying to find a form of schooling that enables all young people to
get better at learning – to come at life venturesome, imaginative and questioning – is the most
important task that faces educational research. And trying to find a way of presenting and
explaining this, so that youngsters see the point, and are willing, in much greater numbers, to
put in some effort and give it a go, is the most urgent bit of PR that our society faces.