Dispositions

When recruiting for a new team member, what is it that you’re looking for specifically?

Children currently in our care will be between 10-15 years old by the year 2031, by which point statisticians estimate 85% of the employment opportunities will be jobs that currently do not exist, imagine this statistic by the time children in our care intend to choose a career pathway or gain employment. “There’s no point preparing children with skills and knowledge when that learning is going to be redundant” (Sir Ken Robinson).

So how could we possibly support children as life-long learners and global citizens in a rapidly changing and increasingly connected and complex world? How do we teach to the unknown?

Traditionally, education used to focus on?WHAT?but increasingly has shifted toward the?HOW?and below is?WHY…

• A curriculum must speak to our past, present, and future (Te Whariki). Educators, just as much as children need to be adaptive, creative, and resilient. The past two years have most certainly taught us that.
• Children need to ‘learn?how?to learn’ so that they can engage with new contexts, opportunities and challenges with optimism and resourcefulness. For these reasons, the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) emphasises the development of dispositions that support lifelong learning.

But what are dispositions exactly?

Dispositions are attitudes toward learning that support the development of life skills and are transferable across all contexts and settings. As we support a child to persevere with their walking or the tying of their shoelace, they are beginning to develop the life-long skill of perseverance. Perseverance is most certainly a valuable disposition to have as children move throughout their schooling and well into adulthood. This year how often have you had to engage your ability to persevere?

Dispositions are often described more formally as:

• Enduring habits of mind and action. A disposition is the tendency to respond to situations in characteristic ways’ (Aistear, 2009).
• Relatively enduring habits of mind or characteristic ways of responding to experiences across types of situations (Katz, 1993).
• The way in which knowledge, skills, and attitudes combine as dispositions, ‘habits of mind’ or ‘patterns of learning’ (NZ Ministry of Education, 1996).
• Being ready, willing, and able to learn (Claxton 2002).

Why focus on dispositions?

Dispositions are important because the “fundamental purpose of education for the 21st Century, is not so much the transmission of particular bodies of knowledge, skill and understanding as facilitating the development of the capacity and the confidence to engage in lifelong learning” (Carr and Claxton, 2004). We need to care just as much, if not more?about?how children produce their own knowledge as we do with how they reproduce existing knowledge, and this starts with learner identity. Building a positive view of self as a learner.

• Learning dispositions enable children to construct learner identities that travel with them into new contexts, across contexts and to contexts that may not even exist yet.
• Children will be the first to tell you their dispositions if this is the language that is used with them often, “I am so brave”, “I tried really hard”.
• When you use dispositional language to affirm their behaviour, this not only supports their confidence and own thinking?about?themselves as “I am someone who… tries new things, perseveres, learns from making mistakes” but also helps to develop a growth mindset.
• “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment” (Dweck, C. 2007).
• How children believe you perceive them, in addition to how they see themselves as learners will impact on how they will learn. The way children, and even adults view their own intelligence largely determines how it will develop.

In order to start the dialogue around dispositions, I often ask adults in the workplace or parents who are more familiar with traditional schooling: “When recruiting for a new employee, colleague, or team member, what are you looking for?”

So often I hear “great communication, works well as a team, resilient, can problem solve, leadership. You know, the things that can’t be taught.”

“It's not?about?the block of playdough, but the activity being the vehicle for the acquisition of the disposition to learn” (Carr, 2008). Dispositions may not be ‘teachable’ as such, but we can most certainly support and scaffold their development.

Further reflections...

What experiences are you setting today to scaffold confidence, collaboration, curiosity and all the other dispositions?