Teaching Times - In This Revolutionary College Students Manage Their Own Learning
Introduction
In this article I want to explain how we work with young people, such that they can take charge of their own learning. As well as running a college on the Sussex coast, we have also been working in schools utilising the approach.
I will first, start by explaining how Self Managed Learning College works and then go on to cite one example of working in a school. The latter is based on an article written by a Deputy Principal of an 11 to 18 school in East Sussex. We have worked in eight schools with young people aged 7 to 16 and have had evaluations of all of these programmes. In some cases these have been by one of our two local universities in Brighton and in other cases it has been by the schools themselves.
Self Managed Learning (SML) College
SML College caters for 9 to 16-year-olds who are not in school. The students have chosen not to be in school for a wide variety of reasons. In some cases, because parents want to use a different approach to school and in other cases young people found school impossible, due to bullying, their autism or other factors producing increased stress and anxiety.
In the College students are supported within a learning community of 36 students and a number of adults so that they learn whatever they want in whatever ways they want and to meet whatever needs they personally identify. There are no classrooms, there is no imposed curriculum or dress code and students create their own timetables.
This is sometimes described as being less structured than school, but we rather see it as providing a different kind of structure. I will mention three particular structures that are central to our way of working.
Learning community
First, there is a learning community of all the young people and supporting adults. There is a community meeting every morning when students arrive. We sit around in a circle with everyone on equal terms. In order to ensure that equality the chairing occurs by rotation so it could be a nine-year-old or a 16-year-old chairing the meeting. The agenda is decided by students and staff and anyone can raise anything they want in the meeting. When students first arrive with us we spend a lot of time developing the community, for instance, the rules are created by the community collaboratively and policed by the community.
Learning agreement
The second structure is a document we call a learning agreement. This is a document produced by the student with support from their peers and from staff. In it they set out learning goals for themselves to assist them in organising their learning. Since every student is different each learning agreement is totally different, but it has a common structure of elucidating where the student is now and where they want get to in their life. Older students do mostly take public examinations, mainly GCSEs, but the choice of how many and what subjects is guided by the longer term goals that they are working towards. For instance, they take the GCSEs that will help them in the career options that they may have started to identify for themselves.
We have a specific methodology for achieving this and information on that and the rest of the approach can be found in Cunningham, 2020, and also on the College website.
Learning groups
Every student joins a learning group of six when they arrive in the College. These groups are divided by age as clearly the issues faced by nine-year-old are different from those faced by 16-year-olds. The latter have to consider qualifications and college entry, whereas the former can be more relaxed about those issues.
These learning groups meet for up to one hour per week and are supported by a member of the staff team who we call a learning group adviser. The role of the latter is to support the group to function effectively and to provide a link to other staff and to any learning resources the individual might need. The role of the learning group is to provide a place which is both supportive and challenging for its six members. Each student produces their learning agreement in through discussion with the rest of the group.
The group meets regularly to review how things are going. Typically once a student has created their learning agreement with their longer term goals, then each week they need to plan what they will do to achieve those. And each week there is a need to review how the previous week went. For students new to this way of working, they often find that they might have unrealistic plans for the week and they gradually learn what is feasible to achieve.
The learning group is there to help each person to pursue their own agenda and to support them in this. However, individuals in these groups work with whoever in the community they want to work with - so they may be involved in projects with students in different age groups. Also trips are planned by the community and are open to anyone in the community to go on them.
Research evaluations of the College
The most recent research study was carried out in 2019 on past students of the College by an independent researcher, Luke Freedman. Previous studies have been conducted by the University of Brighton.
In summary the evidence is hugely positive. In the small number of examples where ex-students were less positive there were no negative effects of attending the College. All this compares with research on school leavers, many of whom report significant long-term damage from attending school (see, for example, the damaging effects of bullying and of the negative impact on individuals careers through schooling). Here are the opening lines of Freedman’s report:
“SML College is an environment for learning which operates almost entirely counter to the prevailing logic of the educational mainstream. Its stated aim is simple: ‘Preparing young people for the tests of life not a life of tests.’ This study seeks to provide an answer to the question: Has Self Managed Learning College been successful in its aim?
The simple answer is yes. Evidence from survey responses and in-depth follow up
interviews demonstrates an overwhelming majority of successes defined by any measure. This is despite a student intake which contained a disproportionately high number of additional support needs, some of whom had been written off by mainstream education.
While it is impossible to know how students would have fared had they not attended the college, their responses demonstrate that in their view SML College almost always had a positive, and in some cases transformative, effect on their lives. This effect was most pronounced in students who arrived with profound psychological needs, but was present across the sample. What is it about SML College that made this possible?”
Freedman later comments:
“The hypothesis that it was often the negative experience of school that caused issues, rather than the other way around, is supported by interview data; of the students interviewed who suffered from depression and/or anxiety, all of them attributed the development of their mental health issues to their experiences in school. One explained, “… it was all of it from going to the school. Bullying was the biggest part. I was fine and happy at home.”
Further support for the idea that the experience of school was a significant cause of these issues is provided by the simple fact that young people and their families expected, or at the very least hoped, that leaving school and joining the SML College would help to address them. In many cases this expectation was proved correct.”
School programmes
People often say it’s all very well to use this approach in a small setting where everybody knows each other and where there is a caring community, but it would not be possible in a school. Hence we have shown how the approach works in schools and below I will quote from an article produced by Andrea Hazeldine, who was at the time Deputy Principal of Uckfield Community Technology College in East Sussex.
The one difference from SML College that is most obvious is that we are working within a large institution with its own rules. However, in agreeing to run a programme in a school, we are clear that the learning agreement and learning group will work in exactly the same way as occurs in SML College. However, because we are keen to transfer methodology into schools, we also ask the school to attach one their staff to our team who will be run the learning groups. Andrea’s article was published some years ago; however we have had similar evaluations since.
Andrea Hazeldine commented:
“We have had the support of a team from the University of Sussex and SML College, led by Professor Ian Cunningham, to support us in creating and running the groups.
Each learning group met for about two hours every three weeks during the spring and summer terms. We started with three groups of gifted and talented students in Year 10 (they are now Year 12) and followed the next year with groups from Years 8, 9 and 10. For these latter groups we identified students who would benefit from additional support. For instance, the Year 8 group was made up of boys who were in and out of short-term exclusions and who were identified as having behavioural issues in class.
Activities
Since the activities of each group are decided by the group they vary greatly. A Year 9 group last year, for example, had one student who wanted to be an author. The group invited in the children’s author, Jane Hissey, to question about how she became an author and what her work entailed. Although only one student was interested in a career in this area others in the group were able to support him by helping him come up with relevant questions.
As a result, others in the group learned from this experience about ways that they can explore options for themselves. For example, one girl in the Year 9 group aspired to be a netball coach. She had the support of the group to devise questions to ask her netball coach about how she got into coaching and what she needed to study at university.
These are examples of the group balancing independent learning with interdependent learning. Personalising cannot mean purely individualising. People have to work in real organisations with other people. This responds to employers’ complaints that many students coming out of education are poor at team working, self discipline and self motivation.
Hence as well as learning what they set out in their goals (content) they also learn from the process of learning even more important abilities. This is especially so when they are able to become more active learners through the process.
This was exemplified in the Year 8 group when, in an evaluation session with students and learning group advisers, senior colleagues in the College were intrigued as to why most of the Year 8 boys had markedly improved their behaviour. The learning group adviser commented that he had not asked them to change their behaviour. They set all their own goals and most of them had started to see a future for themselves that would require them to learn. For instance, a number were interested in becoming apprentices in motor vehicle maintenance, plumbing and electrical work. By visiting a further education college and a local garage they understood the need for NVQs and what this might demand of them in the short term. This meant that they decided for themselves to take relevant lessons more seriously.
The way the group worked also provided a forum for them to take collective responsibility for behavioural issues. For instance, this group, like all others, set its own ground rules. At the same meeting they came up with a ‘three strikes and you are out’ rule. One boy did collect three strikes for breaking the agreed ground rules. His peers agreed that he left – and he did (for that meeting). Members of the group were all on the daily behaviour report the College uses with identified students. At the first meeting they handed their report cards to the learning group advisers to mark. The learning group advisers insisted that they were not going to score them – this would be the collective decision of the group.
The examples of the student sent out and the report forms helped the group to see that they need to take collective responsibility and to learn teamwork and the ability to make judgements about each other. Initially this was a bit of a shock, but they quickly learned to work in this way and the number of report forms reduced over time.
Given that the peer group is the biggest influence on teenagers what we see in learning groups is the chance to mobilise the peer group for good rather than ill. We know that teachers and parents can tell teenagers not to smoke or take drugs and yet many do – through peer group influence. We cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend this does not happen. But what we can do is create positive environments so that peer group pressure works in positive ways. The Year 8 student who was sent out of the group was shocked at getting this feedback from his peers – it’s something he had never had before as normally teachers were the ones who sent him out of the class. In subsequent group meetings he was the one who most diligently policed the ‘three strikes and you are out’ rule.
Evaluation
The follow-up to the Self Managed Learning programme has shown the value of it. For instance, some of the students from the Year 10 groups produced a list highlighting the benefits of the use of the learning group as follows:
- Thinking about our future;
- Exploring further education;
- Exploring career paths;
- Learning from each other;
- Developing our independence;
- Taking more actions towards our future (not just thinking about it);
- Having a regular meeting with students and the learning group advisers to get resources/contacts to help with present problems;
- Thinking about our priorities/assets/strengths/weaknesses;
Teachers in Year 12 have commented that students from these learning groups have shown greater awareness of their future options and this had led to them being able to do their UCAS applications more effectively.”
Conclusion
In the above I hope that I have shown that the Self Managed Learning approach can have wide applicability. The biggest difficulty that we face is that adults need to learn to work in a different way to support the learning of young people.
Reference
Cunningham, I. (2020) Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm. Routledge.
A film about this work and work in another East Sussex School is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBybHthhwXE
Dr Ian Cunningham