[MUSIC] So how does somebody become an expert learner or better learner? >> I'd argue the first thing you'd need to do is to have opportunities. and, that's often what's, what's missing, that we, we assume kids can't cope with things. This would be too difficult and the, and the likes. So you need opportunities. And I've got some interesting stories in there of, Steve Redgrave, the, the rower, a top Olympic in, in the UK, top Olympic gold medalist who just went to a school where there wasn't any particular rowing tradition. It was, he'd, he'd not passed his 11-plus. He wasn't in a, private school room, but he just had a teacher who was mad about rowing. So he just took this bunch of kids from, we call it a secondary modern school, but that may not mean anything, non-selective school. And he just used to borrow boats and take them down to the river nearby. And they, make them practice rowing. And, the first race they did, they, they won and they were the national champions within two years. And against the pleasure I got from it was against all these private schools in very smart uniforms, rowing down the thing. And this lot come in string vests and all sorts of things and go powering, powering past them. So, that whole thing about, you've got to give kids opportunities, and that sometimes means giving them a bit more choice about what they do. I mean, we tend to straight jacket what you've got to do in school. And, and we don't pick up enough, I suspect on interests, kids' interests. I, I started as a secondary school teacher and then moved into educational psychology. I retrained. Simply because I was, trying to work out what, why don't some kids learn? And why, why, why don't they do, and part of this is I think because school never links to the stuff they're really interested in. So, part of my push would be to say, can we find out what kids are interested in? Do we take time in schools? Do we give them choices that allow them to do the things they're interested in? And I suspect more and more we don't because we're so busy ramming through a curriculum and having to seek certain exams, and this, this kind of think that we don't, don't do enough that way. I think one of my guiding principles that came out from having been an educational psychologist was that everybody's good at something. It's just that we don't find out more often than not. because it could be something very much at home. It could be just, the film Cares is a great example of that, bringing up, orchestral kid, brings up a whole cast of the school never find out and think he's got no interest, no, no activities that you want to do. And yet, he knew all you needed to know about orchestral. And, and that was very much my finding with lots of kids who learned nothing in school, but could tell you everything you wanted to know about the football team they supported. And kids who couldn't remember poetry who can recite all the lyrics of their favorite pop singer. So, there's, there's a real mismatch here that we, we haven't made those kind of connections. And I think, in experts make that, their motivated, they want to get good at it and they want to find out more because they can see, they can see the interest in it and get passionate about it, so that's certainly one, one area, I think. >> So, would it be fair to say with, with a child like you've, as you've just described, that a school might label that child as, as then not being very intelligent, or not having, or being quite low ability? >> Yeah. Well, which actually could be seen as a bit of an excuse for actually not finding out what the child is good at. >> That's right. And, I, because I was in the education cycle, I was continuously meeting, meeting these kids that the school were saying, just not learning anything. You know, it's hopeless. And that, that kind of talk and yet you find out that they're certainly not hopeless when it comes to the knowledge of fishing or something like that. You know, they're, they can learn, they know how to learn. They just, there's nothing in school that has engaged this, so that's part of the shift. I tell the story of Bill Gates, Microsoft, Bill Gates. who, his computing skills simply came about because the school had a computing room. And it had, a, a, a terminal link to a mainframe which, in those days, was very rare in the university. So you could do, real time programming. And the school just let him do it. And he went on. And by the age of 14, 15, he was doing computing, payroll programming for quite large companies with his mate. And at the age of 18, the sch, he was approached by a very big utility company in the state, say can you come and program our payroll? And the school to their credit said, yeah, let's call it your, let's call it your school project, and he disappeared for three months. You know, and put Westinghouse's payroll together and things like that so, this is the idea of cashing in, if you like, on an interest and developing it and giving in feedback and encouragement and that kind of thing. I mean, these are dramatic stories. But I think we can do similar small-scale stories with, with all our kids, really. >> So what seems to be quite common in schools at the moment, particularly in schools that I'm familiar with is they tend to latch on to certain ideas, so it might be something like multiple [CROSSTALK] or something like learning styles. And the school does a large push [CROSSTALK] in that area with the view that that will help the students in that school become better learners. I mean do you think those theories or ideas, do they, have they got something to offer schools? >> I think they have got something to offer. I, some have much sounder evidence based than others, you know, by the time you're up to, some of the accelerated learning and brain gym stuff where you hold your left ear to get your circulation going and things. I mean we're into, we're into some wacky stuff there as with fish oil and one or two other things, but there are some that are better grounded than others that's what I'm saying. But I think with most of these things, it's the school really putting down a bit of a protest about we're interested in learning, not just delivering the curriculum, and getting better results as kind of protest movement I think. And so I, I kind of support that. I think some of it, has, as I say, much less of an evidence based than others. So I'm, I'm personally involved with assessment for learning which I think is a strong evidence base. I know the attraction of, multiple intelligences because we're saying it's not just this kind of intelligence. You've got to develop these other almost social, social intelligences and emotional intelligence does that as well. I'm quite critical of the theoretical foundations of emotional intelligence. I still don't know what it is, really. I know what it's not, which is IQ. And everything that isn't about that kind of intelligence. The IQ test intelligence gets put under this great big umbrella that's called emotional intelligence. And sometimes it's just an excuse for not pushing harder on the, the school-based achievements. Just saying when it's important, you're a, you're a rounded person, et cetera. So, there's, I'd have lots of question marks. But, I'm broadly sympathetic to anything that says, look, let's, let's try and work out how we think kids learn and how we can encourage, how we can organize, to help this those, those sympathies.
