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This episode we’re speaking with Guy Claxton. Guy is a theoretical cognitive scientist with a particular interest in the expandability of human intelligence – from the practical, to the botili, to the intellectual, and the intuitive. He has a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford, where he has also taught, in addition to the UCL institute of education, kings college loddon, and Bristol university.
Guy is a prolific author and has written over 30 books, including bestsellers, and his practical programs have influenced teaching and learning right across the world. From Ireland to Poland, Argentina to Australia, and numerous countries in-between.
I was particularly interested to have guy on the podcast to discuss two of his books, The Learning Power Approach, and Powering Up Students. Together, these books aim to arm teachers with the understanding, and the know-how, to support the development learners that display learning power, which included dispositions such as imagination, determination, organisation, creativity, and curiosity. This is a wide ranging interview that is a wonderful balance of philosophical musing, theoretical exploration, and practical advice and has also opened several interesting avenues for future exploration.
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Elements of Learning Power
- Curiosity: Having an inquisitive attitude towards life
- Wondering: Being alive to puzzles and incongruities
- Questioning: Seeking deeper understanding
- Exploring: Actively and adventurously investigating
- Experimenting: Trying things out to see what happens
- Attention: Locking your mind onto learning
- Noticing: Being attentive to details and patterns
- Concentrating: Maintaining focus despite distractions
- Contemplating: Letting perception unfold
- Immersing: Being engrossed in learning
- Determination: Sticking with challenges that matter to you
- Persevering: Staying intelligently engaged with learning
- Recovering: Bouncing back quickly from frustration
- Practicing: Mastering the hard parts through repetition
- Imagination: Creatively exploring possibilities
- Connecting: Using metaphor and association to leverage new ideas from what you know
- Playing with ideas: Allowing the mind to bubble up with possibilities
- Visualising: Using mental rehearsal to refine skills and explore consequences
- Intuiting: Tapping in to bodily based nuances and inklings
- Thinking: Working things out with clarity and accuracy
- Analysing: Reasoning with logic and precision
- Deducing: Drawing inferences from explanations
- Critiquing: Questioning the validity of knowledge claims
- Systems thinking: Thinking about complex states of affairs
- Socialising: benefitting from and contributing to the social world of learning
- Collaborating: Being an effective and supportive team member
- Accepting: Being open to ideas and feedback
- Imitating: Being permeable to other people’s good habits
- Empathising: Adopting multiple perspectives
- Leading: Playing a role in guiding and developing
- Reflection: Standing back and taking stock of learning
- Evaluating: Appraising the quality of your own work
- Self-evaluating: Knowing yourself as a learner
- Witnessing: Quietly watching the flow of your own experience
- Thinkering: Blending doing and thinking together
- Organisation: Being methodical and systematic about learning
- Learning-Designing: creating your own learning activities
- Planning: Anticipating the needs and pitfalls of the learning journey
- Resourcing: Building your bank of learning resources
- (Ollie would add) Adjusting: Monitoring progress towards goals and changing tack as needed
Links/resources mentioned in the show
- James Mannion interviews Claxton on the RethinkingEd Podcast (lots about Claxton's backgroujnd)
- David Perkins on Practice, Practicing the Hard Parts
- Margaret Carr, learning stories
- Neil Mercer on talk rules (via the ERRR podcast)
- Book: David Perkins, Making Learning Whole
- Book: Ron Berger, Learning that Lasts
- Book: Mannion and McAllister, Fear is the Mind Killer
- ‘Hard thinking about soft skills’, recent article with Art Costa
- Claxton's article: Rethinking Assessment, a crib sheet,
- Also see Ollie's book: Cognitive Load Theory in Action
- Australia – Woodslane Publishing
- UK – John Catt Publishing UK
- US – John Catt US
- Everywhere else – (See your country’s Amazon store)
This episode of the ERRR Podcast is brought to you by John Catt Educational. Use this link along with the code provided within the podcast to get 30% off all books from John Catt Educational! https://www.johncattbookshop.com/books/errr
Listen to all past episodes of the ERRR podcast here.