How structures and systems help learning happen (or not) - 2

The Factors that Affect Learning 4: Structures and systems 2 of 3

The pattern of these three posts about the factors that affect learning changes a little as we look at Structures and Systems. That’s because the ways in which structures and systems get in the way of learning happening is so obviously the opposite of the ways they help learning happen that it is pointless having two separate sections.

Because there are so many structures and systems in a school there isn’t space in this Substack to discuss them all. So here are the first two illustrative thoughts about how systems and structures help learning happen and how they can also get in the way. I hope they will enable you to think across the breadth of your own school. In next week’s post we’ll look at three more ways and then conclude with the checklist.

---

Let’s begin though, with our definition of learning. It is good to keep referring to this because when we talk about helping learning happen it is this definition we are talking about. Here is the definition we came to earlier in these posts:

Learning, getting better, happens successfully when our brains, through repeated experiences, engage in a good struggle to a) create or extend an existing neuronal chain b) make a neuronal constellation more complex or c) hardwire an existing chain so that it fires automatically and becomes sticky. When this happens we acquire knowledge, develop our skills and deepen our understandings in different ways and over different periods of time.

---

1

Systems and structures help learning happen when they are truly learning focused

Three Stories

For the first story, I want to bring my most important mentor back onto the stage. Fred Tiramani, you might remember, was the man who told me that despite all sorts of good things that I was getting better at, I wasn’t a very good teacher because the students in my class didn’t learn enough.

Not too long after Fred and I started talking again following his devastating message to me, a student teacher joined me in my class for about eight weeks to do her teaching practice. Still unqualified, she was good; probably better than me at the time. With the permission of my Headteacher, I decided that she was easily able to be left on her own for short periods. I used those times to visit Fred’s classroom to see what was going on. 

One of those visits took place one morning as soon as the students had come into class. During the first half hour of the morning in my class, no-one was allowed to begin any work until I had fully taken records of the attendance for the day. I needed to get them right. Our Head paid a daily visit to each class at around 0930 to record the numbers in school that day. They had to be ready and they had to be accurate. I made sure my student teacher knew this and left her to it.

---

In the twenty minutes I was in Fred’s room, I saw something very different happening. The students in his class came into the room, went to their desks and began quietly working, consolidating yesterday’s learning with repeated experiences that Fred had created for them. They worked on them at the same time as he was noting down who was in school that day and who wasn’t. Looking back, I am amazed that it had never occurred to me to do this and even more amazed that no-one had ever suggested it.

---

I want to do a little maths here for a moment. By not doing what Fred’s students were doing for the first 20 minutes of each day, and by sitting silently at their desks while I took the register, the students in my class had 100 minutes less learning consolidation time - 20 minutes per day times 5 days per week - than those in Fred’s class each week. (My class were, of course, engaged in bad learning; they learned that my work of taking the register mattered more than theirs and that class was a place where you began each day doing nothing except sit silently.)

Over a 40 week school year, this meant that my students had around 80 hours less time consolidating their learning than Fred’s students did. Given that students were in actual class - as opposed to recess, lunch, and assembly - for just about 5 hours a day, this meant that my students had 16 days less learning time than Fred’s students per year as a result of the difference in just one simple system in Fred’s class compared to mine.

Actually, Fred’s class had even more learning time each year than mine as a result of the very many systems and structures he had tweaked to help learning happen. I truly think that in my first couple of years of teaching, the difference between my students’ learning time and those in Fred’s class probably amounted to about two full months each year. Fred’s systems and structures were learning-focused. Mine were not.

---

In the second story, I am in a secondary/High school classroom. About 20 seventeen year-olds are doing a course called Theory of Knowledge. It’s a challenging course, during which students are presented with tough, thought-provoking questions that they have to wrestle with in groups. The teacher’s tricky task is to stimulate and then listen to the complicated arguments that are going on and, hopefully at the right moment, occasionally make a guiding suggestion that will help the students’ thinking in some way or another. It’s not a knowledge lesson; it’s partly a skills lesson as students develop and hone their discussion skills; it’s mostly an understanding lesson, asking students what they make of all this. It needs time.

The teacher gave a great introduction, thought-provoking, a model of clarity and laced with a potent mix of seriousness and good humour.  After about ten minutes and some comments from the students, he set out the complex issue for discussion. The students got themselves into groups and, in the very best spirit of good struggling, began to edge their way warily around the topic. In a very positive way, it took them a while to get going but after about 15 minutes or so, their discussion began to take on a deeper level. In their engaged seriousness, they knew they were onto something, even if they didn’t quite know what.

And then the teacher came alongside the Group. ‘I am sorry’, he said, ‘but you are going to have to bring this to a halt. We have to be out of here shortly. How are you doing?’ The students didn’t yet know how they were doing, although it looked like they might be about to know sometime soon. They didn’t say very much. ‘Ok’ said the teacher, ‘Write these three key points down in your notebooks. That’s where you were aiming for. Get those into your written response over the weekend.’ And, soon after, the lesson came to an end.

---

All sorts of things might have been happening here. But one of the most important is that the teacher and the class were at the mercy of a timetable system and structure that was broken down into 40 minute lesson blocks, irrespective of the age of the students, the subjects they were studying or the complexity of their work. In this particular class, the teacher had set up a lesson that was, effectively, an opportunity to reflect with other students. But, as we know, developing understanding through reflection takes the most time and they simply didn’t have enough of it.

The teacher was forced by the timetable structure into preparing a lesson that couldn’t carry the weight the curriculum placed on it. So, as time ran out, he gave his students answers that in an exercise book might have looked like the result of their thinking but were no more than his knowledge. The timetabling system wasn’t learning-focused. It shifted the simple frame of reference from deepening student understanding to ‘what can we get out of this in the short time we have available?’

---

The Big Question

Over time, I began, with other colleagues, to realise that whilst schools and classrooms obviously needed structures, systems and processes, most of them were not designed using a frame of reference that focused on children’s or students’ learning. As we reflected slowly about this, a simple, very important guiding question began to emerge. It was this:

‘What’s the difference between an ‘x’ and a learning-focused ‘x?’ where ‘x’ is any system, structure or process that exists in schools and classrooms.’

In other words, if we look at each of our current systems and structures through the lens of learning, can we begin to change things so that they help learning to happen rather than getting in the way of it. Fred had thought this through so that his question was: ‘What’s the difference between a system of taking the register and a learning focused system of taking the register?’ I hadn’t. The school teaching Theory of Knowledge hadn’t asked the learning-focused question about timetabling.

Let’s look briefly, using our orienting questions, at a few other examples of structures and systems.

What’s the difference between a display and a learning-focused display?

A display shows some work of children and students. A learning-focused display shows how learning has got better between ‘then’ and ‘now’ and explains and celebrates what has happened. A learning-focused display continually reminds everyone who looks at it about the stages of learning.

What’s the difference between a staff meeting and a learning-focused staff meeting?

A staff meeting discusses a number of procedural issues. A learning-focused staff meeting might begin by always asking for examples of how some students have got better in the preceding two weeks. It might discuss common issues around learning. It might focus on an aspect of the school’s definition of learning. It will have a learning related issue high up on every agenda. Most importantly, it will be a regular reminder to everyone that what matters most is student learning.

What’s the difference between a parent consultation evening and a learning-focused parental consultation evening?

A parent consultation evening reports on what children are like and where they are at. A learning focused parent evening focuses on making sure parents know how their children have got better and what they are having difficulty getting better at. It reinforces the kinds of children and students the school is helping to develop. It develops agreements about what both school and parents are going to do to support their children in getting better. It encourages teachers to use learning as the simple idea around which they focus what they do, and allows parents another chance to experience it.

What’s the difference between assessment and evaluation and learning-focused assessment and evaluation?

Assessment and evaluation focus on reporting where children and students have reached. Learning-focused assessment and evaluation focuses on interrogating the data to find out where students can get better and where they might be struggling. In learning-focused assessment evaluation, data is examined for indicators of how student learning can be improved rather than how performance - good or bad - can be reported on.

---

Not every structure, system or process has or can be seen through a lens of student learning but most can be and should be. Asking the simple question - ‘What is the difference between ‘x’ and a learning-focused x’ - of all the systems and structures in the school is a powerful exercise. It reveals where learning time is being wasted; where inappropriate timing causes students to be busy but not busy learning; where teachers are asked to do things that have limited impact on student learning but maximum impact on their time; whether what a whole school is also ‘learning’ through the repeated experiences that structures, systems and processes create is about student learning or not. Bringing all of this evidence together reveals whether learning is the simple idea that we are using as a frame of reference for all our activities or not.

You won’t be at all surprised to know that the structures and systems in a very good, learning-focused school or classroom are very differently implemented from being in schools and classrooms where things aren’t so learning-focused. In very good schools, all of the systems, structures and processes have clearly been designed to help learning happen; in less good schools, student learning is at the mercy of quirky or downright ineffective governmental, school, classroom and individual teacher systems, structures and processes that get in the way of learning.

---

If you are a teacher, your class has a large number of systems and structures that underpin it’s smooth running. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, such systems and structures are essential. But each of them needs to help learning happen and not get in the way. Over the next week or so, try to look at your systems and structures through a learning lens and identify what is helping learning and what is getting in the way

If you are a school leader then, similarly, your school has a wide range of systems and structures that keep things running smoothly. Effective though they might be at one level, they may or may not be helping learning happen. You might want to look at your systems and structures through a learning lens, too. You might even ask your colleagues which of the current systems and structures they feel are unhelpful in enabling learning to happen.

---

2

Structures and systems help learning happen when they create a basis for shared, consistent practice

The learning pathway of children and students through a school requires a great deal of collaboration between teachers. For learning to be effective, there needs to be similar repeated experiences for children and students experience as they move through the school. Schools need to agree what those core repeated experiences are and teachers need to agree to consent to deliver them.

It’s the visibility of those structures, systems and processes that make this consent possible. If a school agrees that young children will be taught handwriting in a particular way there should be agreed and visible systems and structures that make this possible across the school. If a school has a strong commitment to ensuring the well-being of its middle school students then the visibility of the structures and systems they use will enable students to experience the similar repeated experiences of strategies designed to help them.

---

Imagine that we are starting a new school. It is going to be a learning-focused school. We want our children and students to continue to get differently better over different time scales. We share our definition of what learning looks like in action. We have a clear and community-wide consensus about the kinds of children and students we are helping to develop. We know that as teachers we co-share the responsibility for student learning and we know that we also co-share that responsibility with parents. So what do we actually do?

What we actually do is in large part answered by the structures, systems and processes we create. In defining those systems, we lay down what we think are the most important ways to work and behave that will deliver the aspirations for our school. Without agreed structures, systems and processes, our definition of learning will become misunderstood, evidence of learning will be gathered inappropriately and used wrongly, our attitudes towards our students and their attitudes towards each other will have no common basis and so on.

It’s the effective and appropriately designed learning-focused structures, systems and processes (and the consent of everyone to work within them) that underpin the real-time actions that show how the school is focused on learning and where the interdependence and collectivity of similar practice must be shared by everyone in order for children and students to become the best they can be.

---

That’s it for this week. Hopefully, this Substack will reach you on time and not by chance. Hopefully, it will reach you because the structures and systems Substack have built into their programme will work effectively to guarantee the same consistent delivery system as it has done since I started writing.

Next week, we’ll look at three more ways in which learning is helped (or not) by the way structures and systems are implemented in the school.

See you next Monday.

Martin