Who is Guy Claxton? (02:42)
Cindy:
Guy, thanks so much for being here.
Guy Claxton:
It's my pleasure, my pleasure, Cindy. Thank you.
Cindy:
So could you set the stage for our audience and tell them a little bit about you? What is the work that you do that you're most passionate about?
Guy Claxton:
I'm a bit of a one-trick pony and I think it's a good trick though. So my one trick is learning to learn really, is the general field that I'm in. I'm a cognitive scientist by training, have a PhD in experimental psychology but I've spent most of my working life working in education because I find that more... fulfilling and more interesting to work in real life contexts. And pretty early on, I started getting interested in and fascinated by learning. And I now have a very strong commitment, a very strong belief that how people learn and how well they learn is very loosely related to something like IQ and is very strongly determined by... habits of mind or aspects of mind or knowledge or skills, all of which can be learned and acquired. So my research is around that area. How do we help people get better, get smarter, get stronger, get more flexible as learners. And by learning I mean everything, not just school learning, but learning for life. I think education is about equipping people to learn for life. with confidence and creativity and calmness of mind.
Cindy:
It's such important work, Guy, because you, like you said, you make learning something that is accessible for everyone. And I think that's such a necessary thing in the world now.
Guy Claxton:
Absolutely, I mean I think it's probably, I'm slightly dubious about whenever I hear the emphasis on 21st century skills because I think a lot of 21st century skills were also 9th century skills or whatever
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
it may be. You know life has always been full of surprises, frustrations, confusions, disappointments, powerful, confident, flexible learners. So I think there are some things at the moment, there are some particular challenges, some of which I have not yet got my head around very fully, like the whole kerfuffle at the moment about AI and chat,
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
GBT and all of that kind of thing. But certainly like the challenge of that's part and parcel of that, the challenge of fake news and the challenge develop a high quality 24-7 online what Ernest Hemingway once referred to as a crap detector. That is to say the ability to discern as well as you can that which is true and wholesome from that which is malign and malicious.
How going to school should be like going to the gym (06:00)
Cindy:
I am so glad that you brought up the concept of time and the concept of chat GPT. Because one thing I'm noticing is that it seems like there's kind of a fire being lit in the education world that because of chat GPT, we're being forced to question what is the worth of school and what are we really teaching students. And this is not new for you. You've built a whole framework around this. So can you talk about the framework that you've created and you've touched on it, but just kind of elaborate
Guy Claxton:
Sure,
Cindy:
a bit more.
Guy Claxton:
sure. I mean I think chat GPT is a particular case in point and I think you know one of the first things to say is if kids in school get the idea into their heads that what they're there for is to get certificates, is to jump through examination hoops and hurdles, then chat GPT is a major threat. that. It's like it turbo charges plagiarism, which we've always been concerned about that. However, if your purpose of being in school, and I'll keep coming back to the idea of purpose because I think we need to keep going back to what is the fundamental purpose of what we're doing. If your purpose
Cindy:
why.
Guy Claxton:
in school is to equip people with the skills and the attitudes to flourish in the world, whatever they're going to be, whether they're going to be working in an intellectual sphere, whether they're going to be care workers, whether they're going to be hairdressers, whether they're going to be burger flippers or whatever, there are a certain set of mental attitudes and habits, which I think everybody would benefit from. For me, I think of it like, I think in metaphors a lot. and this is one of my key metaphors at the moment, is it is like for me the trunk of personality that everybody needs. Not that we want to turn out everybody who's like everybody else, a whole lot of millions of little clones, but I think there are a core of mental resources and mental assets, all of which are capable of being cultivated in the right context. in the right way that all young people whatever their path in life is going to be can benefit from and then out of that can grow the specialisms of your own personality and your own vocation and what have you. So I think being clear about that distinguishes between the purpose. Now if that's your purpose then cheating on exams just becomes stupid. Like, you know, if your purpose is to get fit, I can remember a long time ago, I often tell this story, I used to go to what was then, this is about 40, 50 years ago, state-of-the-art gym, which had some equipment, this was way before digital computers, but they had the equipment that printed out a little ticket after you'd had a go on it, like a little paper ticket that told you how good you'd been. you know how many repetitions you've done, how long you've taken, what strength, etc. And I had a friend who used to go along to the same gym and he would wait around until someone much bigger and stronger than him had a go on the pecs machine, let's say, and then he'd nick the ticket, he'd steal the ticket and take it home and show his girlfriend and say, there, see how strong I am? Now if your goal is to impress your girlfriend that is a rational thing to do. If your goal is to get stronger and fitter, it is not a rational thing to do, to try and bamboozle yourself or anybody else. And I think school suffers from the same problem. So the shift, my whole concern, at a philosophical level or a values level, is to say we need to re-prioritize from the transmission of knowledge and the passing of written, memory based exams which invite that kind of how do I game the system then and it invites
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
it of school leaders too. It becomes a system that we try to game when it's set up that way. But if we inspire people with intrinsic motivation, if we can persuade millions of young people that they go to school like going to school is like going to the gym. You get fitter and stronger and more attractive by going to the gym if you put in the hard work. If you go there to cheat, you don't put in the hard work and you don't get fitter and stronger and more handsome and more beautiful and develop the six pack that you think is gonna attract the most beautiful partner or whatever you like. So school leaders really
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
need to be on it as far as this prioritization is concerned. And I think we have a real need for school leaders, whatever the system that they're working in, whether it's IB or English A levels or advanced placement, or whatever it might be, we as school leaders need to be really clear about our own value base. What kinds of people are we trying to produce? With what knowledge? With what forms of expertise? And with what aspects of learnable character? and we need to be really clear about that. Then we can say to ourselves, there are external pressures on us, there is university entrance, there are other kinds of things. How do we weave those things in? But we need to be really solid in everything that we do as leaders, as we engage with staff, as we create policy, as we create the website for the school, as we talk to prospective parents or... customers if it's an independent fee-paying school. We need to live and breathe what is our offer, what is our pledge to parents and students about what they're going to leave, what assets they're going to leave with. And if we get that right, then the whole issue of cheating or getting a getting a robot to write your essay for you becomes seen in a different light. People
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
might still do it, but with a different motivational context, it becomes much less attractive. It becomes much more stupid or self-defeating to try and cheat at that game, just as it would be to try and cheat in the gym.
Cindy:
really like that gym metaphor. And I almost can imagine using it both with teams at the beginning of the school year, and even with students in a classroom.
Guy Claxton:
Yeah, absolutely.
Cindy:
You know, as you're beginning these tough discussions around chat GPT and the purpose of school to bring
Guy Claxton:
Mm-hmm.
Cindy:
it back to something so tangible in real life of like,
Guy Claxton:
Mm-hmm.
Cindy:
anytime we're putting ourselves in a position of learning and growth, we can put ourselves in that position or we can cheat ourselves. And that's the choice that we need to be able to make.
Guy Claxton:
Yeah, absolutely.
Cindy:
That's cool.
Learning or Performance Culture? (13:50)
Guy Claxton:
And then, you know, we'll come on to talk about, so what does that mean for the culture of a school and for the culture of a classroom? And I make a,
Cindy:
It's fine.
Guy Claxton:
it's not a complete opposition, because there are some interesting overlaps, but to begin with, it helps, I find, to distinguish between whether in your classroom you have a learning culture or you have a performance culture. If you have a performance culture... then cheating becomes a rational option. If you have a learning culture, then it doesn't, it isn't. So our job, and a lot of the work that I've been doing that you referred to Cindy earlier on, is about how you clarify, how you bring clarity and precision to those objectives of education. What is it in addition to tradable qualifications that we are? offering, that's an important part of our offer. And then the second part, to be really clear about that and to build research-based but also accessible, appealing, plausible ways of talking about those assets, those desirable
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
outcomes of education. And then the second question is and what the hell does it take to do that? or what are you saying to me as a teacher about what I need to think about as I think about the way the furniture is laid out in my classroom, what I pin up on the walls of the classroom, the kind of language
Cindy:
Oh.
Guy Claxton:
that I use, the kind of activities that I create, the degrees of responsibility that I give to students, whether I consider my job to be gradually progressively escalating the degree of responsibility that I hand over to students. See it my job is to build their capacity to handle responsibility maturely and then to give it to them by degrees, by increments, so that when they go out of school they won't have learnt to be taught, they'll have learnt to learn.
Cindy:
to learn. You touched on a word of yours that I just adore because I think it is so relevant, this idea of learning capacity. So
Guy Claxton:
Hehe.
Cindy:
might you elaborate on that term? What is learning capacity?
Guy Claxton:
Well, learning capacity simply is how do you, what are the resources that you bring to learning situations? And by learning situations, I mean situations, I mean there are, the neuroscientist in me says, we're learning all the time, the brain is pre-consciously
Cindy:
all the
Guy Claxton:
tuning
Cindy:
time.
Guy Claxton:
itself to what's going on around us. That requires very little in the way of intention. It requires attention, but it doesn't require much in the way of conscious intention. But an awful lot of our learning is intentional. That we need to be, it's a response. You know, we click into gear as learners when we are experiencing a range of emotions. I think the triggers for learning are things like confusion, frustration, surprise.
Cindy:
curiosity.
Guy Claxton:
Disappointment. Sorry?
Cindy:
You're mentioning all pretty like intense, almost negative emotions. I wonder about things like curiosity, wonder,
Guy Claxton:
But
Cindy:
awe.
Guy Claxton:
surprise, curiosity, and all, absolutely. Those are the kind of intrinsic things that make me proactive as a learner. So absolutely, there's that side of what a great educator at Harvard, Israel Scheffler, referred to as the cognitive emotions, or I would say the epistemic emotions, the emotions that are to do with learning and knowing. finding out. So, and we've underestimated those. I mean, one of the simple things that sometimes goes wrong with schools is that teachers fail to realize that curiosity is the most powerful built-in engine of learning. And sometimes we're in such a hurry to get to quantum theory or differential calculus or the causes of the Civil War that we forget to switch on the engine of learning. And then we wonder why it's hard work. And we wonder why kids sort of are passive about what's going on. So absolutely making sure that we get those triggers right. But then how do we respond? What are the resources that we have to respond? So the world doesn't divide into two groups of people, but the two ends of the spectrum. You might have people who are, whenever they're frustrated or confused or challenged, they retreat. They say this is stupid or this is boring or I don't do things like that or that's too hard for me or I don't like those kinds of people or I'm not going to go there because I won't know how to behave. And at the other end of the spectrum you have people who go, wow that's interesting, whose curiosity kicks in, who say, you know, compatible with a certain and taking care of myself, my default is to move towards things that are challenging or puzzling or demanding,
Cindy:
to lean in.
Guy Claxton:
to lean into them rather than to run down my rabbit hole and pull up the cat. And school traditionally has not been focused anything like enough on How do we build those dispositions? What is the, what can we be doing? Can we teach maths? Math you say, in the singular in America. And we say, in England we say maths. And then I discovered my wife is from Northern Ireland. And in Northern Ireland they say marthes. So there's marthes or maths
Cindy:
Balls.
Guy Claxton:
or math, you would say. So how do we teach maths? adding fractions or long division in a way that builds curiosity, resilience, imagination and collaboration. How do I configure
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
the culture and the activities in my classroom so that at the same time as kids are learning why 1 over 2 plus 1 over 3 does not equal 2 over 5, they are also learning to be more confident. more determined, more inquisitive, more positive about the possibility that they could figure it out on their own or in conversation with their buddy. So we're learning, so that lesson adds an increment to their independence, an increment to their lifelong disposition to be self-reliant and not to be xenophobic. in their attitude towards difficulty or other cultures or whatever it may be. So the first part of my precision when you ask what is learning capacity is to say what are the threads that go to make up that strength of character. How do we identify those threads? They're not separate, they're woven together. So I've already mentioned some of them and you've mentioned some of them as well. Some of them are very obvious. and any teacher would immediately recognize them. Curiosity, resilience, growth mindset, collaboration, being a good collaborator. Those are often some of the core things. And then we move into imagination, creativity, criticality, skepticism, and then we start thinking about more slightly more esoteric qualities like intellectual humility is a very important one that's being researched a lot at the moment. And boy do we need a lot
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
of that in the world at large. How much intellectual
Cindy:
Yes,
Guy Claxton:
arrogance
Cindy:
I used
Guy Claxton:
do
Cindy:
to
Guy Claxton:
we
Cindy:
think,
Guy Claxton:
do?
Cindy:
but now I think.
Guy Claxton:
That's a very good learning, what do they call them at Harvard?
Cindy:
Thinking Routine.
Guy Claxton:
Thinking routine, thank you. Very good Ron Richard thinking routine. But it's like, you know, but
Cindy:
I'm sorry.
Guy Claxton:
we have in the world, not like I used to think, it's like I used to think and I still think, you know, because I'm stuck in my ways,
Cindy:
I will die on this hill.
Guy Claxton:
because I'm a non learner. And you look around at what passes for politics, certainly in my country. And what you see is people who have a very quick and crude intuition about something. And then they have a kind of superficial, slick form of intelligence or cleverness, which is devoted to trying to promote that intuitively leapt to conclusion or opinion. And then trading those arguments. And you know, it's like I think there are basically three types of thinking. There's exploratory thinking, where people are learning. There's justificatory theory where you're trying to convince someone else that what you already believe is the right thing to believe. And there's combative thinking, which is trying to diss somebody else's position. And most of the politics we see in the world is some combination of type 2 and type 3 thinking. When are we going to see a politician who says, that's really interesting, I don't know about that, that's a really complicated question. Who could I go and ask about that? Who's good on that? Come back at me in a week. I need to go away and think about that. You don't often hear that, do you?
Cindy:
Right.
Beyond buzzwords, growth mindset (24:08)
Guy Claxton:
You don't have many role models of a genuinely thoughtful, inquisitive thinking person. And sometimes it takes time. You know, Einstein said, I'm no cleverer than anybody else. I just stick with difficulty longer.
Cindy:
Great quote.
Guy Claxton:
right? So that sticking with things for a long time, resilience, staying, which I gloss as staying intelligently engaged with difficult things for longer than you might otherwise have done, is a really core asset. That's a really key part of the trunk of this tree, isn't it? Rather than giving up quickly because you're feeling stupid, because
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
which says, if I was a bright child, I would do this quickly. And if I can't do it quickly, I start to feel upset because that means I'm feeling stupid, right? Now, what
Cindy:
Yes,
Guy Claxton:
kind of
Cindy:
this
Guy Claxton:
a
Cindy:
is
Guy Claxton:
damaging
Cindy:
a.
Guy Claxton:
earworm is that to feed into kids' minds? The idea that if you're clever, you get everything right fast, first time, without effort. That is a very dangerous meme. to stick into kids' minds, but some teachers are busy transmitting that bit of malware, that bit of mental malware. So there are some very simple things like that we just need to flip over. Once you articulate them, it's obvious, isn't it? That to teach kids, we even, in my country, we even used the words, used to use the word slow as a euphemism for stupid of school children.
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
Betty is a slow child, a slow learner. Well, let me tell you something, Beethoven was a slow composer, Mozart was a slow composer, Shakespeare was a slow writer. Slow is an essential part of getting somewhere difficult, taking your time to get it right,
Cindy:
That's
Guy Claxton:
to get
Cindy:
so
Guy Claxton:
it
Cindy:
cool.
Guy Claxton:
right. Somebody, I heard a nice quote the other day, maybe it was Igor Stravinsky, someone, a real virtuoso musician, and someone came up to them after a concert. said to them I would give my life to be able to play like that and Stravinsky said I did. Right?
Cindy:
Mmm.
Guy Claxton:
It's like, give kids the idea that if you, you know, that, that persistence, intelligent persistence is one of the most powerful assets they can have. And demonstrate that in your own reactions, your own life as a teacher, talk to them, put posters on the wall that, you know, of Michael Jordan saying, the reason I got so good is because I made so many mistakes. Or whatever it might be, it's like, let's start giving children accurate messages about what it is to be a learner, rather than this kind of old fashioned idea that if you do things fast, if you do things quickly and correctly, that makes you a good little boy or a bright little girl.
Cindy:
This is such a practical way of thinking about growth mindset, because growth mindset to me has almost become one of those buzzwords. And this really unpacks it into
Guy Claxton:
Yeah.
Cindy:
not just assuming you're going to get it on the, on the first try, but knowing that something is worth pursuing and struggling over. And that's where the reward is in learning.
Guy Claxton:
Sure, it's unfortunate that I know, Carol Dweck is a friend of mine, and I know how frustrated she gets by the way growth mindset has got turned into a thing. You know, like multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences got turned into a thing. And then it gets diluted and trivialized and turned into something. You know, if you go into a school and they say proudly, it's
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
not something you do, it's something that grows naturally in the right culture. A lot of people are talking about you have to do, you have to approach growth mindset by stealth. It's about creating an environment within kids, within which kids discover the deep joy and pride of putting all your effort into something over time. coming out with a solution that you didn't think you could get or a product that you didn't think you were skillful enough to make and the back the glow of that pride that discovery that through effort per ardua ad astra through hard work to the stars is the old latin tag isn't it that discovery is like life transforming rather than,
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
you know, that just flips you from someone who starts to get angry and defensive and upset if they can't do something quickly to someone who says, I remember Carol Dweck in a talk of hers in Washington that I attended a long time ago, doing an experiment with a little a six-year-old boy and she deliberately given him six puzzles that were too difficult that he was going to fail at and he'd failed at them and she said to him, do you want to do another one? he kind of almost literally rolled his sleeves up and said bring it on Mrs. Dweck, I love a challenge. Right? Now too many of those kids in your classroom and they might be a bit of a pain in the backside but you know in general that's what we would rather have, isn't it? Rather than kids, so many kids in classroom have developed a kind of learned helplessness. You know they sit there with their hand up even Sometimes before the teacher has finished telling them what it is they're going to have to do, saying, I don't get it, miss, I can't do it, sir. I'm only a poor little thing. Please rescue me from this small amount of difficulty that I'm experiencing. And sometimes teachers trot along like a kind of over caring carer and say, what seems to be the trouble? Let me explain it to you again. Let me show you more clearly how to do it. Let me rescue you from this awful predicament of for a moment feeling confused. Like, how stupid is that?
Cindy:
silly.
Guy Claxton:
teached kids that they need to be rescued when they can't be fast and correct is building dependency, isn't it? The very opposite of what
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
we say we want our kids to be. So you're absolutely right, Cindy, when you start to unpack these things they become common sense. Unfortunately though, it's a rather uncommon common sense, isn't it?
Building independence and resiliency in schools (31:14)
Cindy:
So what are the practices that you've seen that are most effective in building this sense of independence and resiliency and learning?
Guy Claxton:
Well, you have to start looking at the culture of the classroom. So this starting point of saying, you know, it's not one thing that I have to do. It's a whole lot of little adjustments that I can make which shift the mood music of the classroom. Or I think of like, I often use like a surfing metaphor. Instead of there being an undertow in the classroom. which is surreptitiously subverting children's learning power, is drawing them insidiously in the direction of becoming more dependent, more compliant, more addicted to the right answer, more frightened of making mistakes, less imaginative, less adventurous. Right? You know those kids, don't you? Right? There is,
Cindy:
We all
Guy Claxton:
in
Cindy:
do.
Guy Claxton:
some classrooms, there is that... undercurrent that is pulling you know if you're going to do well on the exams shut sit down shut up be quiet do what i tell you until the kids become almost mute and the only question they ever ask is this going to be on the exam miss right what happened to the intrinsic motivation they had when they were two years old it's been snuffed out so what we need to do is be looking at the culture that we create and i think Ron Richart, some of the other people out of Project Zero at Harvard, which I think is the most, what's still underachieving, it's still the most wonderful source of clear, accessible, research-based ideas. It's astonishing and disappointing to me that Project Zero and Ron Berger and his EL education schools. and Ron Richart and his Cultures of Thinking and Dave Perkins and his Teaching for Understanding that these haven't kind of swept the board globally because it's so obviously the kinds of things that we ought to be doing and they and I in my own small way have been working to identify what are the little cultural tweaks that any teacher can embed in their day-to-day practice. which shifts that under toe so that now, week after week, semester after semester, kids are being drawn in the direction of being more adventurous, more collaborative, more open-minded, more intellectually humble, more resilient, and so on. For me, that's the $64,000 question about education. It's not to do with computers
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
or smartphones or anything else. It's... what are these little clever shifts that any teacher could make cumulatively. You don't do them all at once. It's not like, you know, some new initiative, the magic bullet that some people think they're looking for, like flipped classroom. Oh, we're all going to do flipped classroom. Or growth mindset. Or... I don't know, there's always some kind of latest things. Oh, we're gonna get a Harkness table and that's gonna make everybody think in a different kind of way. I have news for people, you don't have to spend $30,000 on a large rosewood oval table to get kids listening and talking and thinking to each other. You just put the damn chairs in a circle. So these things become fetishes, don't they? It's like, oh, what's the latest thing? What are we going to do? Whereas I think the only thing that works is the relentless working in to your natural practice as a teacher, these little shifts
Cindy:
Hmm.
Guy Claxton:
that change the mood music of the classroom. So that now, or to
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
shift my metaphor, we're now slowly and systematically fitting the learning turbocharger to kids' minds. so that they are going to be able to travel further and faster whatever it is they need to learn, including school stuff, but not limited to school stuff. So they will do better on the exams. We have loads of case studies. You look at the research around the EL education schools as well, showing that if you invest in this approach, in designing the culture of the classroom, so that it is gradually building students' confidence and capacity to think for themselves, to figure things out with their learning buddy, to be more, to bring their imagination, to be more resourceful in their thinking about learning. If we invest in doing that, guess what? The exam results go up. Unlike some people, some... people who haven't really understood the kind of thing that David Perkins and Ron Richart and I and Art Costa and a whole bunch of people are talking about. And they think somehow or other that if you're gonna start thinking and talking about teaching thinking skills or teaching learning skills, that the very word teaching to them implies that it's gonna take precious time away from the content. Right, there's some kind of. They have in their minds a tug of war metaphor, which says, you know, people, if you're gonna start talking about growth mindset and fluffy stuff like that, that must necessarily mean that you no longer really care about algebra and Shakespeare and difficult content. And it's just not true.
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
It's a stupid, pernicious mind worm. that unfortunately is too prevalent in education and that stops people exploring what I'm talking about because they have a mental barrier. They have a mental block about it, which says, but the results will suffer, or but the kids will start to get unruly, discipline will break down, or they immediately foresee some negatives which close their mind. to the possibility that actually a room full of kids who are powerful self starters, who've all got that learning turbo charger, that confidence and creative, they're a joy to teach. They're not more difficult
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
to teach. They're much more fun to teach because teaching is less hard work. Whereas if you have a group of kids who are performative and anxious and frightened of making mistakes. disinterested if you've forgotten to switch on the engine of curiosity then it's no surprise that teaching sometimes feels like rolling boulders up a muddy hillside like the labors of Sisyphus. You know it's like you know let's put let's make the hillside go downwards so we put an interesting question somewhere here and the kids go whoo-hee you know let's go with that.
Cindy:
I was over here drawing a little picture because immediately the golden circle came to my head that we spend an exorbitant amount of time focused on the what. And the what might be growth mindset, the what might be the test, the what might be the content that we're teaching. But if we can flip that in schools and align, like you said, at the start of our conversation behind the purpose, the why, when that becomes the leading question, the rest of these practices figure themselves out. So it's just shifting that mindset. I
Guy Claxton:
Yes.
Cindy:
think it's just the biggest change we need to see in schools.
Guy Claxton:
see it, I mean here comes another metaphor. I tend to prefer biological metaphors to mechanical metaphors, but in this particular instance I see the 21st century school as being like a well meshed set of gears, you know, and it's like the output of this system of gears is the why, you know, that's like what would, what are we going to judge ourselves by? What do we want our kids to know? What do we want them to be able to do? What strengths, what habits of mind? What learning characteristics? What strengths do we want them to have? If we're clear about that, then we can start turning all the other gears so that they move smoothly, systematically, and cumulatively in the direction of producing those young people. But I know an awful lot of schools, so that includes a few IB schools, I have to say, who haven't- done who haven't really thought that through, who haven't thought everything through to say you know in every staff meeting whatever we talk we're talking about whether it's the school budget or the bullying policy or whether how much responsibility we allow students in the library or whether we're going to build in independent study time into the school whatever it might be There should immediately be somebody around that table who said, hold on a minute, how is our solution to this problem gonna contribute to the big, to our aim? And often there isn't that person. Often it becomes firefighting and piecemeal in a school because it's so busy and we're so hurried and there's such a pressure to get through the content of the curriculum and there are so many external pressures from superintendents and national. jurisdictions and examination boards that we forget to do these vitally important things like switching on the curiosity motor and so on.
Cindy:
I love your gear metaphor and it makes me think about, I don't know if this is too abstract, but this idea
Guy Claxton:
Go
Cindy:
of these
Guy Claxton:
for
Cindy:
gears
Guy Claxton:
it.
Cindy:
not just work, let's try it,
Guy Claxton:
Ha ha ha!
Cindy:
these gears not just working in one machine, right, that the goal is that you're giving these gears that are transferable, that like, yes, this works in this context and it makes the machine function. But I could take that same gear and put it into a new machine, you know, my new company or. learning to make bread, and that same gear
Guy Claxton:
Yep,
Cindy:
will function beautifully in multiple
Guy Claxton:
yep,
Cindy:
machines.
Guy Claxton:
yeah, absolutely. And that's why, you know, that's why we need the issue of transfer that you were just raising, is has for a long time has been one of several elephants in the room for education. People haven't really grasped that. There's been a naive psychology, a bit of what psychology is called if they've learned it properly, whatever that means, then whatever it is that skill or that knowledge should become resident in their heads, in their brains in such a way that like a fish in a pond it will rise to the surface whatever context or demand should appear down the road. And the brain isn't like that. brain is a highly
Cindy:
No,
Guy Claxton:
situated,
Cindy:
and-
Guy Claxton:
highly context question and it is possible to teach in a way that builds generalization. That's the difference between a skill and a disposition by the way. A skill is something that is tends to be located in a particular place. Now I need to use my making white sauce skill. Now I need to use my fixing a puncture skill. and the context primes you very clearly. But my persisting in the face of difficulty skills are often not primed or not triggered so clearly by the context. You might go, I can't be bothered, or I forgot. That's why the thinking skills movement became disappointing. It was because we taught kids thinking skills. but we didn't put in the extra hard yards to turn those skills into dispositions so that we taught, you know, Edward de Bono's court learning materials or higher order thinking skills or whatever it might be. But because they only got to the level of being skillful, when kids walked out of that setting, they became dormant. They didn't,
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
the phrases come to mind in the right situation. kind of teaching where we need to get to. This is why people tend to use words like habits of mind, the phrase that Art Costa inherited from Dewey. Habits of mind or character strengths or key competencies. There's a whole language globally now which is like trying to move beyond, although people still use the word skills, 21st century skills, soft skills. non-cognitive skills. Art Costa and Ben Akalic and I wrote a paper for, I forget the journal, it was an American journal called Hard Thinking About Soft Skills, which was about why we shouldn't be using words like skills and certainly not words like soft skills or non-cognitive skills because they debase the currency. A skill is something that is localized. It's something that you can do, not something that you do do. So we need, the goal that we need to get to, this is part of the increasing precision that we need to have, is to get kids to the point where their resilience becomes like a default position for them in life, perseverance,
Cindy:
Thanks for watching.
Guy Claxton:
difficult thing. That's interesting. Is it safe enough? I'll go and have a look at it. I'll go to this. foreign country, I'll explore this country. And you know, I mean, that's a very good example actually. I had a PhD student from China a little while ago who did a project on how students, overseas students from China or Asia or South America, wherever, when they came to study at a British university would tend to divide into those groups. Those, a group of them who created little China for themselves and lived within it. And those who said, oh, I'm in London now. What's London like? What are English people like?
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
Let me go out, let me get a Saturday job handing out leaflets outside a shop so that I can meet some English people and find out what they're like, rather than recreating a little bubble of whatever it might be, Chineseness or Nigerianness or Englishness, if English people are going to study in Salzburg or Harvard or wherever it might
Cindy:
that
Guy Claxton:
be.
Cindy:
lean in, lean out
Guy Claxton:
Yeah, yeah,
Cindy:
that
Guy Claxton:
absolutely,
Cindy:
we were talking about.
Guy Claxton:
absolutely. But leaning in judiciously, you know, sometimes curiosity killed the cat occasionally. So, you know, we need to keep a little bit of judiciousness and circumspection around, not to become reckless. All of these, interestingly, all of these dispositions can become dangerous if they become too exaggerated. They're all a matter of, a matter of, it's a matter of balance, isn't it? It's like if I become too resilient, that begins to turn into becoming dogged or... What's the other
Cindy:
stubborn.
Guy Claxton:
English word? Stubborn, pig-headed is a good English word for that, right? Or banging your head against a brick wall or not giving up. It wasn't until I was in my 30s that I realized that if I got part way through a book that wasn't interesting or informative, I could quit on it. right? I had permission to give up. I didn't have to pursue it to the end if it wasn't giving me either the enjoyment or the information or the stimulation that I needed. So it's interesting. It's like the more you dig into this dispositional side of what ought to be going on in schools, the more interesting it becomes and the more psychologically interesting and the more complex it becomes. But if you start with, you know, on balance by default, We would prefer our kids to be resilient, imaginative, critical, you know, critical is a good idea. All kids should have a built-in, I love this Ernest Hemingway phrase, built-in shock-proof crap detector. You know, how urgent
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
is that in these days of fake news? And we should be devoting time, we should be teaching crap detection across the curriculum. Every day there should be opportunities to build the sensitivity that you have to say this doesn't smell right or who's trying to tell me this or is this in somebody else's interest that I believe this or where could I go to double-check to fact-check this it's like everybody needs that in that module in their brains of on-board safeguarding these days
Cindy:
especially
Guy Claxton:
don't they
Cindy:
now.
Guy Claxton:
especially now so why aren't we teaching that why aren't we as a way of building your ability to critique historical accounts, for example.
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
And a lot of history teachers do, but it's not yet standard that we use the history textbook as an object of criticism rather than as the fountain of all knowledge.
Cindy:
The Bible.
Guy Claxton:
The Bible,
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
right? It's like, you know, so I've been in very interesting lessons where groups of pairs of kids reading, you know, they may be using the old-fashioned history textbook, but they're reading pages 65 to 73 with the intention of trying to uncover the cultural positioning of the textbook
Cindy:
bias.
Guy Claxton:
writer, right? Why not? Anybody could do that. You could recruit what's been going on in lessons for a long time with just a little switch, just that little switch of activity from history is a device encourages passivity in the face of authoritative looking text, to history as an exercise machine for building an informed, skeptical, questioning attitude towards knowledge claims. Once you articulate that, anybody could do it, right? It's not rocket science.
Cindy:
Yes. The question well asked is half answered, right?
Guy Claxton:
Exactly, exactly right. Or often like, you know, seven eighths answered.
Cindy:
So yeah,
Guy Claxton:
Definitely.
The connection between skills and dispositions (51:02)
Cindy:
I'm so glad you brought up this connection between skills and dispositions, because that for me was a major aha, and it came from you. I was cruising
Guy Claxton:
Uh-huh.
Cindy:
your website a few years ago, reading through an article, and I believe the article said increasing your learning power.
Guy Claxton:
Hmm.
Cindy:
And it was just like this light bulb went off for me. And you said, you could have the skill, you can do something, but if you're not willing and ready to do
Guy Claxton:
Yeah.
Cindy:
that thing in the real world, then what's the point? And I'm an IB teacher, so for me, I thought, wait a minute, we have a set of skills and we have a set of dispositions. What might it look like if we married these together? If always when we're talking about one, we're talking about the other.
Guy Claxton:
Well,
Cindy:
And it was a game changer for my practice.
Guy Claxton:
Great, yeah, very good. Although I have to say a large part of the credit for that way of articulating it goes to Dave Perkins, who's one of my major gurus in the learning to learn. I think he's just a fabulous thinker and a model of good thinking and accessible writing. I think he's, I bow down to Dave Perkins. So the idea that, you know, let me put it simply in my own language. that there isn't really a difference between a skill and a disposition. A disposition is simply a skill that you're disposed to use. So there are degrees you become more and more disposed
Cindy:
Mm-hmm.
Guy Claxton:
to persist in the face of difficulty. And that becoming more disposed means that persisting or being imaginative or asking awkward questions, you know, it's like... it becomes more part and parcel of you. It becomes a more robust, proactive part of you. Number one, that's the first strand of something becoming dispositional. The second strand, it becomes broader. Instead of existing in just one or two domains of your life, it now starts to show up, not just in English, but also in history and also in your dance class, and also in the way you talk to your grandma the work that she did during the war or you know whatever it might be. So it's like we're strengthening the skill, we're broadening that disposition so it becomes more pervasive in the way I approach life and thirdly it becomes richer or deeper and more skillful. That's the skillful side, more flexible, more sophisticated. So you know it's like Ruby used to only ask questions when she was with a teacher she felt safe with. But now she's asking more and more questions. She can't not ask questions and she's asking questions in history and science as well as just in English. And she's... what was the third strand? Ah, I've forgotten the third strand of my disposition. And her questions
Cindy:
broader.
Guy Claxton:
are becoming more forensic. No, broader, richer, stronger, broader and richer. Right, so the richer is like her questions are becoming more precise, more targeted. And I've sat in really interesting science lessons in which students, the activity has been training students to understand the precision and the particular application of good scientific questions and how a good scientific question. different from a good historian's question? Is different
Cindy:
Hmm.
Guy Claxton:
from a good poet's question? Is different from a good gardener's question? Right? There is a family resemblance but they all sharpen up in different spheres. So here again we're getting more precise, we're getting clearer about what the job of the teacher is. So we're moving from this concept of skill to an environment and this is why the whole environment, the whole school environment becomes important because those dispositions will grow, they'll deepen, they'll strengthen and they'll broaden if there is some synergy between the way you're being taught in maths and the way you're being taught in, not just the way you're being taught in physics, but the way you're being taught in geography and business studies and drama as well. If there is some common purpose, and common understanding between all of these teachers teaching very different content, but teaching it in a way where there is clear possibility for transfer of your imaginativeness,
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
your possibility thinking, your collaborative self-rescuing skills and so on. All of those show up slightly differently in these different contexts, but because you're discovering broader set of contexts, you're also generating, creating a more generic sense of this is who I am, of how these
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
attitudes spill out from any particular context to become more generic. Not that you can implant them as if they were generic, you know, that's... Edie Hirsch says, you know, you can't teach thinking skills, it's a nonsense. he's right up to a point. You can't just transmit a generic skill to someone. It's like that thing I was saying about, you know, you can't just give someone a little bit of a skill in context A and then imagine that it's inside their head and it's going
Cindy:
automatically.
Guy Claxton:
to be relevant automatically in all other contexts from B to Z, right? No, it has to grow. You have to grow in your sophistication and your... what Dave Perkins calls sensitivity to occasion. It's a nice phrase. So that you become smarter about when to persist, when to ask this kind of question rather than that kind of question, when to try and help someone else out, and when it's smart to let them struggle for a bit longer, and so on. So there's quite a lot of, I think, interesting and intricate thinking behind this. shift, this mindset shift from the we're about transmitting knowledge, we're a performative culture, we're about getting poor kids to college, to use an American slogan, right? Two, we're about, we are about that, we are about equity, we are about these things, but deep down at the bottom of the river where the big fish live, those big fish are these dispositions. of independence, adventurousness, resourcefulness, collaborativeness, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, skepticism, and so on.
Cindy:
So that portrait of a learner is what guides all of our decision making as a school, or is what should be guiding our decision making as a school.
Guy Claxton:
Yeah, the core of the tree. And as you progress in your career through the, what I sometimes call the epistemic apprenticeship of school, right? So you're gradually becoming, these dispositions become, as I've been saying, not only more consolidated within you, but they branch out, so they become more sophisticated, more situation specific as you go along. So you learn that collaboration is a much more sensitive thing than just sitting next to someone looking at them and nodding. You know it's a very, you know, it's like learning to be a good collaborator, learning to be a good listener. You know if you're, if you train to be a psychotherapist, you will discover that learning to be a good listener is a highly complex sophisticated skill. Learning to be empathic. as Carl Rogers said, learning to lay aside your own system of values and beliefs temporarily so that you can move around in another person's world without judgment. Isn't that beautiful idea? That you can temporarily lay
Cindy:
so
Guy Claxton:
aside
Cindy:
poetic.
Guy Claxton:
your own set of values. Carl Rogers wrote that a long time ago in a book called A Way of Being. But that is, you know, that takes a lifetime. to learn how to do that in a way that is subtle and appropriate and helpful and that's
Cindy:
But we
Guy Claxton:
well.
Cindy:
can start. If that's
Guy Claxton:
We
Cindy:
our
Guy Claxton:
can
Cindy:
intention,
Guy Claxton:
start,
Cindy:
we can start there.
Guy Claxton:
you can start with four year olds and then you build it up. So this is one of my, a lot of your listeners I gather may be working in IB schools. This is why I've done a bit of work with the IB organization and I was unsuccessful in persuading them. that the learner profile is a good start, but it's really not good if you're using the same learner profile with the PYP that you're using with the DP. It should have expanded and grown and become more differentiated, become more subtle and sophisticated. Your understanding of what those characteristics are should be deepening and refining. as you go through school. So I think there should be, if I was appointed director general of the IB, I would want there to be a much stronger developmental theory of those characteristics, that behind the learner profile, there should be a strong psychology of the development of character, the development of epistemic character. You're looking skeptical.
Cindy:
I was gonna say, can I put on my real nerd glasses for a second? Ha ha
Guy Claxton:
Yes,
Cindy:
ha.
Guy Claxton:
please, yes, whatever glasses you like.
Cindy:
So this is why your work was so inspirational for me, because I've similarly felt kind of stuck with a learner profile. I kind of sat on the side and felt pretty stagnant. Where it really unlocked was this idea that I've got the ATL skills. And part of my work as the teacher is to recognize the subskills in my unit, to really dive
Guy Claxton:
Yeah,
Cindy:
into
Guy Claxton:
yeah,
Cindy:
what are the
Guy Claxton:
yeah.
Cindy:
specific disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills they're going
Guy Claxton:
Right,
Cindy:
to learn.
Guy Claxton:
right,
Cindy:
And
Guy Claxton:
notice
Cindy:
then...
Guy Claxton:
that you're still using the word skills by the way.
Cindy:
I know because we call them skills to our approaches to learning.
Guy Claxton:
I know, I know. I would just put a question mark around that, but
Cindy:
Okay,
Guy Claxton:
sorry,
Cindy:
you've given me my next homework. You've given
Guy Claxton:
sorry
Cindy:
me my next
Guy Claxton:
Cindy.
Cindy:
homework.
Guy Claxton:
Sorry, this is not a tutorial. Go ahead, Cindy.
Cindy:
But I'm just wondering if that's how we give depth to the learner profile. That like, do I need to define evidence-mindedness? Like if I have open-mindedness and I'm looking at open-mindedness through the lens of research and through the lens of critical analysis, then
Guy Claxton:
Mm-hmm.
Cindy:
evidence-mindedness
Guy Claxton:
Yes.
Cindy:
is a disposition that falls under open-mindedness. But
Guy Claxton:
Yes.
Cindy:
are you saying it would make more sense to further define that explicitly?
Guy Claxton:
Now you've hit on a kind of area of uncertainty for me because what part of me says yes, that it is useful to have like, you know, in the staff room, if not in your classroom, a detailed road map, like a fishbone diagram of how each of these overarching... what does the IB call them?
Cindy:
attributes.
Guy Claxton:
attributes, how each of those becomes more differentiated, can be differentiated into different kinds of ways. On the other hand, the other bit of me says, keep that in your back pocket. Don't worry too much about coming out with the definitive map of these things,
Cindy:
Right.
Guy Claxton:
but teach with that, with the idea that this is going to proliferate, it's going to differentiate.
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
Teach with that in mind and constantly keep raising that in your classroom as a question for discussion and exploration with your students. I've seen groups of seven and eight year olds dive in to the concept of collaboration and figure it out for themselves like what goes into making a good someone who's a good collaborator, what lies behind, how do we unpick the complexities. of being caring. When is it wise not to be caring? Should be a question
Cindy:
Yes.
Staying flexible within systems (01:03:43)
Guy Claxton:
on the, you know, like that's buzzing around, that should be in the air of every IB school and IB classroom. A sense of, you know, these are not things that were written on stablet tablets of stone and Moses did not bring them down from the mountain. Right? These are
Cindy:
Bye.
Guy Claxton:
works in progress. that should be stimuli for it's like you know in Christianity the ten commandments I mean just the name the ten commandments says
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
these are not for questioning right these are ultimate I prefer the Buddhist view which has that it's like there are five similar kinds of things but in Buddhism they're framed differently there here are some kind of some principles or some hypotheses. Try them out. See whether in fact your life does go better if you don't steal or don't cloud your consciousness with mind-clouding drugs. Just you know, figure it out. So it's like a way of drawing attention to fruitful areas for exploration and for deepening rather than set in stone, these are commandments,
Cindy:
Hmm.
Guy Claxton:
you know, do what you're told. Because you know, you can always come up with test cases, can't you, where any one of the commandments, you could say, yes, but in this situation, in this desperate situation, you know, if someone is about to rape my child, am I, you know, what do I, and I have a knife, what do I do? So it's like philosophy for children or whatever. It's like, let's introduce kids progressively. Let's be mindful about using the language of attitudes, aptitudes, dispositions, learning strengths, character
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
strengths, 21st century skills, if you must. Use that as... drawing attention to fruitful areas of exploration for each of us individually. What does that mean for me? And how can I boost my resilience? How could I start to transfer the resilience that I have in my soccer training into my maths lessons? What would that take for me to do that? Would be the kind of coaching question that a learning
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
power teacher would be constantly would have in her mind as she's reviewing a student's progression.
Cindy:
beautiful. I think this idea of not being rigid in a system has come up again and again that like
Guy Claxton:
Hmm
Cindy:
the IB is a beautiful framework. It's a beautiful start for a way to think about these questions. And
Guy Claxton:
Absolutely.
Cindy:
since the PYP came out with the new model, agency sits at the center of the new model. And I think that's really intentional because it's meant to say none of this is a tablet that's being handed to you. If it's not working in your context, change
Guy Claxton:
Mm.
Cindy:
it.
Guy Claxton:
Mm-hmm.
Cindy:
If it's not deep enough for your class, edit it, add to it. And so as educators, how to keeping that sense of agency and that sense of purpose at the
Guy Claxton:
Mm-hmm.
Cindy:
center of our practice and then expanding outward from there. Oh, just,
Guy Claxton:
I
Cindy:
I'd want to go to that kind of school. I would
Guy Claxton:
don't
Cindy:
want to send my kid that to that
Guy Claxton:
know
Cindy:
kind
Guy Claxton:
how
Cindy:
of school.
Guy Claxton:
to describe it. Yes, definitely.
Cindy:
So cool.
Guy Claxton:
Yeah.
Cindy:
We've talked a lot about, you know, just theory and these beautiful kinds of schools that we'd love to see. And I'm
Guy Claxton:
Yes.
How can leaders get started? (01:07:50)
Cindy:
wondering, you've worked a lot with schools and leaders and institutions, and what are the kinds of changes leaders can make to really bring these changes to life and get the ball rolling?
Guy Claxton:
Well, we have, we've produced, this is the time for the commercial. We've, my collaborators and I have produced a series of books, only one of which is published in the US, I'm afraid, but the others are available. The others are published, which are around what I'm now calling the learning power approach. I first developed what I call building learning power as. my attempt to try and articulate what dispositional teaching would look like. And that was 20 years ago, 2002, I wrote the first Building Learning Power book. But obviously, there was an awful lot that I didn't know and an awful lot of other things going on around the planet that I wasn't aware of, some of which I've already mentioned. And So I became increasingly uncomfortable about becoming associated with a particular brand and wanted to kind of just take two steps back and say I'd rather feel position myself as a spokesman for a kind of an emerging school of thought about education rather than you know clinging on to you know I sell habits of mind or I sell building learning power or I sell new pedagogues for deep thinking or whatever it might be. You know, I didn't want to be that. I wanted to try and... So we put together a series of books around... It may sound too much like another brand, but what I think of the Learning Power approach, which is like the broad family of that share 95% of their DNA, which I would say is a large part of Project Zero. and some of the names I've mentioned, Michael Fullon, who I haven't mentioned, but certainly Ron Richart, Ron Berger, David Perkins, other people out of Project Zero. Ben Akalek and Art Costa and loads of others who don't come to mind at the moment. And we put together a series of four books. The first is an overall book like the Founder of the Philosophical and Scientific Foundations. This is built on rock, this approach. It's not just one some mad a few mad professors pet ideas. You know this is solid. It comes out of good psychology. It comes out of good neuroscience. It comes out of well thought through philosophical future thinking and so on and so on. Then the second book is a workbook for elementary school teachers, much more detailed, like a workbook. So how do you do it? The third book is the same but for high school teachers. On the fourth is a book for school leaders, which is called Powering Up Your School. And it's an unusual book. because it revolves around, not around another framework for leadership, which I think school leaders are fed up with, you know, is another now we're going to talk about here's another theory or another model of leadership. It's actually built around about 20 or 30 stories of real life school leaders who have committed themselves to developing this kind of culture in their schools. And by general applause, a general reaction, have been pretty successful at doing it. How did they do it? What did they have to do first? How did they go about it? How did they get the staff on board? How do they articulate the core vision in a way that they feel comfortable with? How do they design a robust in-school process of continuing so that every teacher is constantly experimenting with the next little tweak to her practice and is being supported by other people in the school. In other words, how do you create a culture, a strong, how do you strengthen the culture of professional learning amongst your staff? And I would include in that the custodian and the librarian and the secretary,
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
or all of those people as well, culture setting roles to play in the school. How do you
Cindy:
Are they
Guy Claxton:
establish...
Cindy:
real stories or more? Sorry.
Guy Claxton:
No, no, they're real stories. And of course, so there's lots of diverse... There are some warts on all stories. It's like, if I could do it again, I wouldn't do it this way. But
Cindy:
Right.
Guy Claxton:
there are also kind of many paths up the mountain. So there's not one true methodology. for getting there, but there are some things that seem to have worked well for large numbers of relatively large numbers of school leaders. So things
Cindy:
You read
Guy Claxton:
like,
Cindy:
my mind.
Guy Claxton:
yeah.
Cindy:
I was going to say, what were the themes that emerged from these stories?
Guy Claxton:
Right, right. Well, I can't... I don't have the time or the scope to go through. I was gonna see if I've actually got the... I'm not sure if I can move and wave this book at you. I will powering up your school. Here it is on my bookshelf, if anybody would like to get hold of it. So it's written by six people of whom I'm one and the other... five are school principals. So they are they are they are my co-authors and co-owners of this approach. So putting time into, roughly, if I go through some of these things, practicing talking the talk as a school leader. One of the things that holds school principals back is not yet feeling comfortable about talking in this territory. They don't feel that they can talk. They're much more comfortable talking about college entrance and grades and budgets and, you know, the rowing club and the blah, blah. And they might feel, a lot of them feel as if they're on thin ice. So one of the really important things to do is to, you know, get listening to podcasts, read, you know, some of the very accessible literature. there is around this. So build your own confidence so that when you're talking to parents who are thinking of sending their child to the school, you have your elevator pitch which is short and convincing and which is heartfelt and which you can elaborate around a bit if you want to. And you can do that with the staff as well. Being persistent with those kinds of things. So always making time in staff meetings, building a culture of inquiry around this is very useful. So like often a gentle way in for a school leader who wants to shift the culture this way. Sometimes slow is smart, sometimes it's better to be the tortoise rather than the hare, is to take time in building up a culture of curiosity amongst your staff and amongst your parents. well. What do we want our kids to be like? What's our common endeavor? And it's like if you phrase it like that, what are the challenges? What do you see in the world? If we're not just raising economic actors, people who are going to you know fulfill a role in a national economics agenda, but if we're raising human beings who we want to live fulfilled and happy lives, what are the threats to that? What strengths do you need to go on that journey through your life? Let's talk about that. And not only talking about how well she's doing in chemistry or that she's
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
a bit behind with her reading. Keep making that a core part of the conversation and generate interest and passion around that. Like we could do better. There is more, isn't there more that we could do? Little things that we could each do. in our classrooms and in our domains in the school. What I'm just trying to read my notes here. Yeah, so another entry-level thing like sort of along those lines, I'm thinking of a particular school leader, one of my co-authors here, a wonderful woman called Rachel McFarlane, who's now moved on to higher things from being a school principal. But the first school that she tried to introduce these things to, she just kind of wrote, raised the idea of children's learning skills or learning habits and said wouldn't it, let's, would it be interesting just to know what's going on in the differences in a high school? What's going on? So could you all, let's create a kind of simple little questionnaire and let's just see, well, you know,
Cindy:
Mm.
Guy Claxton:
how much kids are using their, how resilient they're being in their modern languages lessons, how well they're using their imaginations in their math lessons and so on. And let's see if we could just generate a bit of data here. know there may be places where we're doing very well with this but we've not we haven't realized it we haven't articulated it to ourselves and if we haven't articulated it therefore we haven't valued it we haven't said this is what we
Cindy:
cool.
Guy Claxton:
mean in our school by good teaching it's not just quiet classrooms and good exam results right there's now something else that counts as good teaching um then sort of you know collating that data and sending it around and just you know inviting a discussion, getting department heads to talk to their people in the science department about you know so what is interesting about this, what how does this reflect looking at our teaching in this mirror, what do we see and what are we happy about and where do we see interesting points for thinking about whether we could do more to build critical thinking in science, for example. I used to be a science teacher, a chemistry teacher, a long, long time ago. My mom wanted me to be a chemistry teacher. And then I discovered psychology.
Cindy:
Aww.
Guy Claxton:
But that's another story. So how do we have lost my thread? If I digress too often, I lose the ability these days to get back to what I was talking about. So over to you for a moment.
Cindy:
What I liked there was that it's not an assumed deficit model. It's not, guys, we're definitely not doing this. We're messing up. It's,
Guy Claxton:
No,
Cindy:
let's
Guy Claxton:
no,
Cindy:
collect
Guy Claxton:
absolutely
Cindy:
the data
Guy Claxton:
not.
Cindy:
and let's see if
Guy Claxton:
Yeah.
Cindy:
this is what we value. Let's see what we're doing that aligns with those values and where we
Guy Claxton:
Yeah.
Cindy:
might improve. And looking at data as something that we're collecting for our own curiosity and wonderment, as opposed to something that's going to be used to punish us. Or, yeah, to punish us.
Guy Claxton:
Right, and not only is that smart in terms of getting buy-in, but it's also smart because it's modeling the emphasis on becoming powerful learners. So you're encouraging the
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
teachers to see themselves as powerful learners, constantly thinking and questioning. So another, you know, one element of the learning power classroom would be teachers building students' capacity to give perceptive respectful feedback to their teachers about their lessons.
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
Now some teachers would find that really scary and some students would not know how to do that in a way that was perceptive and respectful but you can help them learn
Cindy:
Oof
Guy Claxton:
how to do it, you can coach that development, you can build that capacity and there are lots of schools that I know that have done this. who found that that's actually has built a greater sense of community and belonging amongst the student body. That that was an unintended but very welcome side effect. And teachers can be a little bit nervous to start with because they're frightened that, you know, kids are gonna be horrible to them. But you give them a little bit of training.
Cindy:
Hahaha.
Guy Claxton:
You give the kids a bit of training about how to handle delicate egos so that they don't. you know, so the teachers begin to relax and to see this as a very supportive thing. Not only that, but also it's like two minutes at the end of your lesson. Just, you know, talk to your neighbor, what worked well for you in this lesson? What did, what did, you know, you can even use something like, it's a little trick that's very common in the UK called two stars and a wish. When you're giving people feedback, you say, say two nice things. And then, you know, maybe even better if. So you could set it up that way. So get the people, get each pair to think, give the teacher two stars. I like the way you presented that, Miss, that really worked well for me. But I would have worked better for me if you'd given us longer to try and figure it out before jumping in and telling us the answer. Because I think we were nearly there and we could maybe, if you'd given us another couple of minutes, we could have figured it out for ourselves. Right? So it's building students capacity. to think like teachers, to learn to participate, first as critical audience, but then maybe in a more proactive way, into learning how to design learning for themselves. What goes into designing effective learning, which is one of the learning power habits in our thing. So how do you become a good designer of your own learning? The answer is you don't become a good designer of your learning by sitting hour after hour in lessons that have been designed 100% for you. Where there's no opportunity for you to say, you know, for the teacher to say to you, there are a couple of words in that test that a lot of you seem to be getting wrong, right? That you can't remember the spelling of. Just go into your little buzz group for two minutes. See if you can come up with a really neat way of remembering that spelling that we could share with everybody else. Right? Like anybody could do
Cindy:
Yes.
Guy Claxton:
that. It's like sharing the responsibility. So teachers become the story, the students become problem solvers as well as problematic. And they're often very good at it. They often come up with very smart little things that they can do.
Cindy:
I'm just hearing this idea, and I don't know if this is a phrase anywhere, but this idea of like cyclical modeling, that the cultures that we want to see, we need to model as leaders to teachers, teachers need to be modeling to students, students need to be modeling for each other. And that's really when the culture shifts, is when
Guy Claxton:
Mmm
Cindy:
everybody is working in harmony and cyclically modeling it.
Guy Claxton:
Very nice, I haven't come across that concept, but it's very nice, isn't it? What it does remind me of is a way of, I mean, one of the things that often comes up is how do you track the development of these dispositions? People often get quite hung up on the assessment question. How do we know that they're developing a growth mindset? Which is a really important question. I've heard Carol Dweck say when someone says, how do you measure growth mindset? And do you think it's important to do so? And she says, yes absolutely I think it's very important to do so but not yet. In other words you shouldn't wear the old-fashioned English metaphor for this. You shouldn't waste... you shouldn't spend too much of your time figuring out how to weigh the pig. You should be putting most of your time into figuring out how to fatten the pig. So don't worry about Don't worry about the assessment question too much. But one way is have three or four simple different levels and articulate them. So, you know, doesn't show much evidence of this disposition. Shows it only in one or two domains or only occasionally shows it a bit more. And up at the top, which I really like, I don't know where I first encountered this. So it's like, you know, like you'll become a beginner and then a bit better and then. intermediate and then pretty good. And then when you get to the top level, that's role model. right? So you become then,
Cindy:
I've not seen that.
Guy Claxton:
right, it's good, isn't it? So instead of just, you know, being a kind
Cindy:
I like
Guy Claxton:
of gold
Cindy:
it.
Guy Claxton:
level or platinum level questioner
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
or whatever, right now you have a responsibility that comes with you to kind of to contribute this to your teachers and to the other people in the school. I remember going into a primary school, an elementary school, where I sat in on the inaugural what did they call it? Student senior leadership team. As a group of seven, eight and nine year olds, whose job it was to give feedback to the head teacher about how we can make our school a more powerful learning environment for all of the kids here. And they had to apply to be on this committee and their application form required them. to identify which was going to be their signature strength as a learner and which was going to be their, I'm not very good at this yet, but I'm working hard at it as a learner. So as they introduced themselves to each other on this inaugural meeting of the little team, they did it through saying, this is my signature strength. And the other kids would acknowledge, yeah. And they said, Leon, he's incredibly empathic. He really knows how other kids are feeling. And Jeanette is, yep, she's really good at persisting and at helping other kids. She'd be great at helping other kids. Just stick with it when they feel like I can't do it or they feel like giving up. And then the other good thing was, and then they said, and my getting better at learning strength is this, and this I'm not very good at this yet, but I'm working on building this one up. So isn't that nice? So it's like, you know, you're building the articulacy in the students. They're developing a mindset where they just naturally see themselves as people who are deliberately and enthusiastically stretching and strengthening these capabilities and then sharing them with each other.
Cindy:
Well, and it sounds like almost beyond role model then, mentor
Guy Claxton:
Hmm.
Cindy:
is the next level
Guy Claxton:
Yeah,
Cindy:
from
Guy Claxton:
yeah,
Cindy:
that or
Guy Claxton:
exactly.
Cindy:
coach.
Guy Claxton:
Yeah, yeah.
Cindy:
That's
Guy Claxton:
So
Cindy:
cool.
Guy Claxton:
role model slash mentor coach. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, brilliant.
What is Guy’s superpower? (01:27:53)
Cindy:
Guy, what's your superpower?
Guy Claxton:
Oh my goodness. I've never been asked that before.
Cindy:
I'm honored to be the first.
Guy Claxton:
Yeah.
Cindy:
Ha ha ha!
Guy Claxton:
Did you have that up your sleeve all the time for that question or did this just... I'm playing for time
Cindy:
I don't even
Guy Claxton:
here.
Cindy:
where sleeves, guy? It's all out.
Guy Claxton:
You don't even have sleeves. Okay. What's my superpower?
Cindy:
Pffft
Guy Claxton:
I think I'm... Yeah, I know what it is. It's because of my training as a cognitive scientist, I am very good and I'm very discerning. and very, that'll do, very skilled at reading technical literature in cognitive neuroscience
Cindy:
Yes, okay.
Guy Claxton:
or sociocultural studies. Like I can span, I span really the whole gamut, everything from counseling psychology, positive psychology through to neuroscience or whatever. And my superpower is digesting that. being able to know what would be of interest to teachers and finding, maybe if you've experienced a bit of this, finding an appropriate metaphor or image or a form of words
Cindy:
You
Guy Claxton:
that
Cindy:
know.
Guy Claxton:
conveys that idea vividly and successfully to other people. I think that's my super power.
Cindy:
Synthesis, you're a synthesizer. Yay,
Guy Claxton:
I'm a synthesizer
Cindy:
what a great
Guy Claxton:
and
Cindy:
superpower.
Guy Claxton:
I'm a communicator. I'm a high quality
Cindy:
a
Guy Claxton:
popularizer.
Cindy:
meaning maker.
Guy Claxton:
Popularizer, maybe. So a lot
Cindy:
What
Guy Claxton:
of
Cindy:
a
Guy Claxton:
my
Cindy:
skill.
Guy Claxton:
academic books have been in that vein. Like they've taken a body of an emerging body of research, like the cognitive unconscious, for example. I wrote a book called Hairbrained Tortoise Mind back in 1997.
Cindy:
Yeah.
Guy Claxton:
which brought together that like a whole set of overlapping, supportive, complementary areas of research that hadn't been put together before into a way of looking at what came to be called the cognitive unconscious or the adaptive unconscious or what I called in that book, the undermined. And then, so
Cindy:
That's a cooler phrase, I think.
Guy Claxton:
a series of other books that are sort of developed out of that book have also been in that range. Some of them haven't sold very well and that's because they sit in a, I'm never gonna be Malcolm Gladwell, unfortunately, because they're a bit too academic for the Malcolm Gladwell and they're a bit too popularly for anybody who's a bit snooty. about academia, but they sell well enough, like for people who are willing to kind of find something a bit chewy, but also there's a helpful metaphor here and there to help them get along with it. So that's been my sort of position really as a kind of middleman, middle person between academia and the practical world of education.
Cindy:
Well, I just adore your writing. I think every time I go back and read an article, it's like every sentence can be unpacked in a different way or understood differently based off of where you're at in your learning journey, which
Guy Claxton:
Hmm.
Cindy:
is a real gift in writing. You have a low floor and high ceiling with everything you write, which I think is just
Guy Claxton:
Thank you.
Cindy:
a gift.
Guy Claxton:
That's a very nice compliment. Thank you very much.
Cindy:
Well, my friend, I think it's a lovely place to pause. This has been just a blast of a conversation. I just adore talking to you and you've expanded my thinking and I just feel very privileged.
Guy Claxton:
That's great. Once you get me going, as you would have discovered, I'm difficult to stop. So I hope I haven't talked too much.
Cindy:
It was amazing. Thanks so much, guys.
Guy Claxton:
Okay.
