Deactivating the Default Mode

Well, exam season will soon be upon us and the press will be filling column inches with endless pontification on the best way to revise. There will be avant-garde educationalists advocating hanging upside down from the nearest birch tree whilst supping a jasmine-rich infusion of nettle-leaf tea and there will also be any number of dyed-in-the-wool headmasters who will be pleasing parents everywhere with suitably draconian revision regimens operating on metronomic schedules.

If you ask me (and nobody has - but I'm giving you my tuppence anyway) the key thing with revision - and settle down on the edge of your seats now for a ground-breaking piece of educational insight - is not how much time you spend revising, but what actually do with that time.

I once taught A Level Latin to a young lady who struggled with some of the more fundamental aspects of the subject such as - well, er, - Latin. She would burst into tears after every examination result and declare to anyone who would (or indeed could) listen, that she had spent seven hundred hours revising and there had been no change in her performance and life wasn't fair. When I questioned her on what she did to revise, she looked at me as if I were entirely daft. "I highlight all my notes, of course," she said - giving me the distinct impression that were I to suggest she did anything else with her time, I would be contravening some universal law and the country of Yemen might transform into a bowl of petunias in protest.

It is for far wiser men than I to give guidance to pupils on their revision - but there is no equivocation about the fact that passive learning does not exist. It is not a thing. Well, not in any meaningful sense. I was something of a nerd in school and I was disquieted, one particular Monday morning, to find that one of my peers had seated himself next to me in Chemistry. This was a turn-up for the books as I was - at the time - overseeing a complex and deleterious war on my face between the forces of acne on one side and guerrilla facial hair groups on the other. The conflict had made me something of a 'no fly zone' for most of year 9. When I asked my newfound friend why exactly he had made the perilous choice to play wingman to the outcast, he informed me that his mother had told him he had to. She was convinced that some of the learning would 'rub off'. Ultimately, he earned little other than some dandruff and a good dose of social alienation.

We don't learn simply by being in the presence of knowledge and understanding. It isn't osmosis.

That's why we're taking a different approach at the Summer School this year. The academic strand of the Oswestry School Summer Programme is not some sort of bolt on or just intensive book-led language learning. It is about meaningful content with ideas and concepts that will be incredibly useful to those pupils who attend in their future education and lives. That's why we'll be delivering it in the most exciting and dynamic way we can - and that's why we'll also be putting the emphasis on active learning and engagement. Neon orange pens will be in short supply!

As with any revision programme - key to this is variety. Pupils will be working in groups, in pairs, on their own - they'll be attempting puzzles designed to foster skills of problem-solving and giving both written and oral feedback. Our teachers will be guiding them as they work through plenary material and then also getting alongside them 1:1 as they push themselves to apply new knowledge and understanding independently. This Summer School is about learning to learn every bit as much as it is about the learning itself.

Peer-led teaching, for example, provides a fantastic way to cement fundamental concepts. There is often no better way to fully secure understanding of thing than to teach it yourself. Exercises that require this of our pupils will build confidence and academic fluency as they work in warm, welcoming classroom environments where mistakes and failures are not stigmatised, but encouraged.

I recently made my first foray into the disturbing world of TikTok - someone had advised me it would be a good means of publicising the Summer School. I'm not sure if 10 views counts as viral, but I'll take it as a success. What struck me, though, as I scrolled through what I can only describe as a carelessly curated museum of the inane, was just exactly the level of passivity pupils experience on a daily basis and the shocking difference from when my generation hit that age.

I remember when the country was rocked by a survey, undertaken, I think in the late nineties, that suggested that the average UK inhabitant watched around 3.5 hours of TV per day. It made headlines. We chastised ourselves as a couch-potato nation.

In today's world it is estimated that UK teens spend between 4 and 8 hours on social media.

And what are they actually doing? They aren't posting - they aren't engaging (more than a slight twitch of the thumb to show approval), they are largely just letting it wash over them. My mother used to give me a talking to if I spent more than half an hour reading a book - she considered this too much time 'doing nothing'. I would strongly disagree with her perspective - but even if you were able to understand it, at least a book requires the intersection of author stimulus and imaginative experience. In the scrollaverse, everything is done for you - indeed, the current trend of putting captions to accompany all text is yet another indicator of that - the brain needn't do anything active.

My children are engaged in this sort of behaviour - I'm no saint - but what I have found interesting in talking with them, is the fact that when you ask them what they have been watching, they really have no recollection. They might be able to remember the odd funny or interesting moment, but by and large the social media content passes through them like water - stealing time, concentration and leaving precisely nothing behind by way of gratitude. It's frighteningly Dark-Mirror.

The responsibility of the teaching profession, then, lies in designing and creating activities and experiences which eschew passivity in favour of active engagement by every pupil at every level.

It is essential that we get past the child's expectation that when they sit in a lesson it is as if they are sitting in front of a screen and that, by some mystical process, the conceptual understanding of the teacher will migrate into their minds.

This means careful lesson planning. It does not mean gimmicks. No teacher should feel that they are somehow required to formulate a Broadway spectacular for every period - this puts us back into passive territory. It means exploring flipped classroom methodology, it means coming up with ways to give pupils the opportunity to apply what they have learned; it means pushing more responsibility onto the shoulders of the learner and ensuring that while classrooms are warm and welcoming, they are also laced with just that healthy level of discomfort which will prevent the brain from entering 'default mode'.

Lessons with Summer School pupils are precious - to us because they aren't with us for long and for them because they have elected to be here. That's why we are designing a learning experience that we hope they will be able to look back on proudly for the rest of their lives.