Redesigning Schooling – 2: What kind of teaching for what kind of learning?

Professors Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas address the fundamental questions: what are the desired outcomes of learning for each school? What kinds of teaching and learning will deliver those outcomes? And what kind of leadership will create those kinds of teaching and learning? In providing a structure and stimulus for answering these questions, the authors clearly explain and integrate much relevant work by international thinkers and leaders in education. Their analysis explains many of the ways in which our education system needs to change. It examines alternative approaches and gives guidance on how school leaders can integrate them into successful pedagogic leadership

Schools are in urgent need of redesigning. While some are giving their students a genuinely fitting start to life in the 21st century, many are not. We have not yet achieved the critical mass of thinking and practice that will change the system as a whole. The people who will be doing the requisite thinking, and exploring the necessary and effective shifts in practice, are the headteachers and their staff. Politicians are not in a good position to do this, because their time horizon is based on the five-yearly election cycle. Genuine radical change is certainly too slow and too complicated to be reduced to sound bites and election winners. Even academic educationalists, sadly, won’t do it either, because they do not have the requisite sense of urgency. Their bent is mostly to be cautious, balanced, analytical, argumentative and reactive, rather than committed, imaginative and practical. With a few exceptions, they will not take the lead. SSAT’s Redesigning Schooling initiative is therefore absolutely crucial, focusing as it does on inspiring, enthusing and encouraging school leaders, up and down the country, to seize the change agenda and be bold and thoughtful in exploring new directions. Headteachers know schools well, they know children well, and they have both the understanding and the staying power to see through innovations that will genuinely take root and make the requisite difference.