Guy Claxton

A framework for teaching learning: the dynamics of disposition

This paper draws on examples from New Zealand early childhood settings to illustrate a dynamic approach to learning dispositions. It sets out three dimensions along which a ‘learning curriculum’ can strengthen valued responses to learning opportunities: increasing their frequency and robustness, widening their domain, and deepening their complexity and competence. It is suggested that learning environments can be variously affording, inviting or potentiating (powerful) and that in potentiating learning environments teachers explain, orchestrate, commentate on, model and reify learning responses, and frequently the families and children participate in these processes as well. Although the question of ‘what’ learning dispositions is set aside, the paper argues that it is better for teachers in early childhood settings and classrooms to be explicit about valued responses and their trajectories than to leave them implicit, and therefore often unacknowledged and unattended.

Hubris in leadership: A peril of unbridled intuition?

Research attests to the perils of hubristic leadership in politics, the military and business organizations, however whilst researchers have identified hubris’ correspondences with personality disorders and various organizational and individual level factors, the cognitive and affective antecedents of hubris have been largely overlooked. In this paper we argue that intuition, existing as it does at the nexus of cognition and affect, is a central factor and that when intuition becomes misunderstood, unchecked or unbridled within the ‘cognitive economy’ of a powerful individual hubristic behaviour is more likely to appear. In what follows we will: review the concepts of hubris, Hubris Syndrome and intuition; propose intuition as an overlooked cognitive and affective source of leaders’ hubris; discuss the relationship between unbridled intuition and hubris; suggest how the perils of hubristic leadership stemming from unbridled intuition might be avoided or mitigated.

School as an Epistemic Apprenticeship: The case of Building Learning Power.

Abstract For schools to make the jump from the 19th to the 21st century, they need to re-focus their attention. Instead of worrying about the content of the syllabus, the form of assessment, or how to re-engage the disengaged, they need to ask: what kind of mind training — or, more formally, ‘epistemic apprenticeship’ — is going on, day in, day out, in classrooms? I show that any topic can be used to cultivate passivity, dependence and credulity, or to build resilience, creativity and self-evaluation. It depends on the physical, practical and pedagogical cultures that teachers create in their classrooms. Globally there have been many recent attempts to do this re-focusing, with very mixed, not to say disappointing, results; this has often been because there has been insufficient clarity and precision about how teachers are being asked to change their practice. The Building Learning Power (BLP) approach, deriving from a growing network of academics, teachers and a small publisher, has spent the last 15 years researching what these practical shifts in pedagogy actually look like. Small changes are required in the way teachers conceptualize ‘powerful learning’, in the design of activities, in classroom discourse, in the attitudes towards learning which teachers model, in involving students in the design and evaluation of their own education, and in the forms of assessment used. A recent evaluation shows the BLP approach to be effective in boosting student engagement and achievement, whilst at the same time strengthening the habits of mind that young people will need to thrive in the tricky, turbulent waters of the 21st century.

Creative-mindedness: when technology helps and when it hinders

Creative-mindedness is the broad disposition to come up with a good idea when you need one, and work it through. It relies on a number of factors: the absence of beliefs that might cause one to neglect or misrepresent useful aspects of ones own mind; the possession of a rich and partly unsystematic neural compost of experience, snippets and understanding; an intuitive grasp of when and how to think clearly and precisely, and when and how to think vaguely and dreamily; an awkward but irresistible sense of wonderment and scepticism; patience and persistence in the face of confusion and frustration; and the ability to amass and deploy material, spatial, technological and social resources in a way that is fluidly appropriate to the evolving nature of the creative project. This last factor is perhaps the most important of all: the presence of mind to orchestrate both ones own mental resources and habits, and the affordances of the outside world, in a way that optimises their ability to mesh with themselves and with each other. Creativity means being smart about yourself, smart about the world, and smart about how to fit the two together.