Curriculum for Excellence in Glasgow

Glasgow University
 

According to Glasgow City Council Education Services they now know much more about how children and young people learn. They say that it is imperative that we all understand that how we teach is as important as what we teach.

http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=11891&p=0

Actually it would be quite difficult to know what children are being taught in school these days because pupils no longer have textbooks and there is little work to be seen in school jotters. It is questionable what schoolchildren carry in their bags apart from their lunch boxes and PE kits.

Here is another piece of Glasgow City Council wisdom:

Sharing the learning outcomes keeps children and young people motivated and focused on the learning as opposed to the task or activity.

So there is the `learning` as opposed to the `task or activity`- and this is supposed to make sense.

They have more to say about learning with regard to thinking:

It is important to encourage children and young people not only to think but also to think about their thinking...Through the teaching of thinking skills, children and young people can be equipped with knowledge on how to think when approaching tasks and problems, especially during a collaborative process.

Well let`s think about the different processes here. There is the learning who knows what because it is opposed to the task or activity; and thinking about thinking; and the collaborative process - three processes of questionable importance that seem to be given more weight than what is actually learnt. So this is how we teach and it is gobbledygook. As well as this we are told that young people will be supported in recognising their own learning style (visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic) which turns out to be another complete waste of time.

 We need to refer Glasgow City Council to a review of learning styles by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork. It is quite shocking that Glasgow City Council Education Services claim to know so much when they are obviously ignorant of this important review. 　

As described earlier, the concept of learning styles encompasses not only a large body of written materials but also what seems to be a thriving set of commercial activities. The writings that touch on the learning styles concept in its broadest sense include several thousand articles and dozens of books. These figures may seem surprisingly large, but one should keep in mind the sheer number of different schemes or models of learning styles that have been proposed over the years. For example, in a relatively comprehensive review, Coffeld et al (2004) described 71 different schemes, and they did not claim that their list was exhaustive. 

The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of students` learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.pdf

A great deal of Curriculum for Excellence remains to be demonstrated.