Transforming teaching and learning with ICT

Finding effective ways of preparing pupils for high stakes tests and examinations is topical in the English education system and a subject of much debate.The researchers were keen to find an alternative to the kind of low-level memory work which is sometimes seen as effective. Instead, the PELRS project focused on ‘transformative’ learning whilst at the same time meeting the national curriculum attainment targets.

By ‘transformative’ learning, the researchers meant students:

• learning creatively – contributing, experimenting, solving problems
• learning as active citizens – acting autonomously, taking responsibility for their own learning
• engaging intellectually with powerful ideas, using thinking skills, grappling with ideas/concepts
• reflecting on and evaluating their own learning (metacognitive strategies).

We explore how teachers brought about this change of focus and show what transformative learning looked like in practice in the following sections.

Before undertaking the PELRS work many of the teachers at the four schools involved planned to use ICT and e-learning resources in rather strict ways within their lessons. Often they had a very finite and restrictive ICT-based task in mind for the whole group. In contrast, the PELRS project encouraged teachers to plan learning events where students were given much greater degrees of freedom and choice about which ICT resources to use and how they should be used. In this way, PELRS gave students spaces for beginning to take some responsibility for their own learning.

Readers may like to read a case study which shows how a school encouraged pupils to choose which software they wanted to use for a task and how the pupils welcomed the opportunity it gave them to learn independently.

Teachers in the PELRS study started with a plenary session in which they outlined the curriculum focus and learning goals (normally taken from the national curriculum). The teacher then invited the pupils to suggest how they would like to work towards their goal. In particular, they could decide on their learning activities and choose resources to help them, including books, e-learning materials, and ICT tools such as the Internet, CD-ROMs, digital cameras, interactive whiteboards and laptop computers. Often, students drew on both ICT and traditional resources from a variety of different locations (classroom, library, specialist ICT suite, home and online).

Frequently, after the negotiated plenary sessions at the beginning of the learning events, the students organised themselves into groups so that they could work together to find things out and create a finished product. It fitted the PELRS emphasis on co-learning and enabled students to give each other mutual support. Usually, each group took responsibility for researching one particular strand of the topic and presenting it to the whole class in the final stages of the learning event.

Teachers planned PELRS work to take place over several lessons or during an extended period when the normal timetable had been suspended. The work entailed moving away from the usual pattern of teaching lessons as discrete blocks in which students were presented with the learning outcomes at the beginning and reviewed what they had learned at the end.

One of the main aims of PELRS was to re-direct computer use from specialist ICT lessons focused on skills acquisition, to enhance subject learning within the national curriculum. The research partnership developed four themed pedagogic strategies: pupils as teachers, pupils as media producers, pupil voice and learning online. With all four strategies, the aim was to change the traditional roles of teachers and learners – from teacher-led to student-led – through emphasising co-learning between them. In all four strategies, the focus was on transforming pupils’ learning experiences, so that they became as creative, active, engaged and metacognitive (selecting thinking strategies deliberately to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own learning) as possible.

Pupils as teachers

With this strategy, pupils took on the role of teachers – they researched a topic (by searching the web and books etc) then taught it to their peers. For example, a Year 6 class was learning about the life cycle of plants and concepts such as interdependence, reproduction and habitat. The teacher gave groups of four different elements to research then teach to the rest of the group. The pupils reflected on different teaching strategies and media. Although ICT tools were popular, many groups also used more traditional technologies when preparing work. One group, for example, used the interactive whiteboard to deliver a short PowerPoint presentation. They then used a paper resource they had designed which had detachable parts of a plant. They invited other pupils to pin the parts in the correct place on the diagram.  

Pupils as media producers

With this strategy, pupils used e-learning resources to create their own media – digital video, still images, music or animations – linked to specific parts of the curriculum. For example, the German teacher at one school had found that students were often reluctant to talk in class in the target language. She decided to ask students to make a short film about their school in German. The project demonstrated to the students the importance of speaking in the target language. The fact that the film was to be viewed by others motivated the pupils to work hard and do as good a job as they could. As they filmed, the language teacher helped them to extend their script and add new scenes. The teacher’s spontaneous questioning about new vocabulary showed the pupils that learning more German was beneficial and could help them make better films.

Pupil voice

This strategy allowed pupils to discuss and recommend the ways in which they wished to be taught using ICT in school. For example, pupils at a secondary special school for pupils with moderate learning difficulties indicated that they would like to have some time for structured work on computers in each lesson. The teachers found out the kinds of activities which the pupils enjoyed and which benefited their learning and added these to their lesson design. They found some pupils had particular talents, for instance in using computer animation and image manipulation.

Learning online

This strategy put learning and collaborating online in the foreground.  For example, a class of Key Stage 2 pupils were formed into pairs and given access to the school's CD RoM facilities on planets and the solar system and access to the Internet. During the plenary session at the start of this learning event, the teacher and pupils discussed the relative merits of sources of information and how the pupils could navigate between the various resources available to them.  Many pupils found material on the solar system which challenged their thinking about these topics and allowed them to engage with powerful ideas. For instance, one group of pupils wrestled with a statistic they had found about the amount of fuel needed to keep the sun burning (about thirteen petrol tankers per second).

The PELRS approach meant that teachers structured students’ learning through:

• giving the choice of a wide range of possible resources, and 
• planning the task so that it encouraged creativity and diversity of responses.

The effect was to shift the ownership of knowledge to the students.

For example, in a primary school, a whole day was devoted to an exploratory project on Victorian people. The teachers provided names of people, chosen to represent a diverse and interesting cross-section of Victorian life and they gave the pupils a list of things to find out about them. The pupils had access to the Internet as well as all the other ICT and traditional resources in the room for a day. They were given freedom to report back to the whole class in any way they liked. The teachers encouraged the pupils to think creatively about how they could provide evidence of meeting the learning outcomes and there was a conscious move away from a homogenous approach to ICT resource selection which could result in all pupils in a class producing identical or near identical products. Giving pupils choices led to greater diversity of learning between small groups and enabled more productive knowledge building when the groups presented their work to each other.

Practitioners may like to read a case study which explores students’ views on how they used the Internet to help them learn.

In another school, the teacher used the ‘pupils as teachers strategy’ as a means of encouraging pupils to learn scientific concepts about the reproduction of plants. Pupils used the Internet as well as traditional resources to collect information. Some groups decided to make PowerPoint presentations to teach other pupils what they had learnt. But not all groups wanted to use PowerPoint. Some developed paper-based resources such as informational posters and one group produced a role play which was captured on digital video. This more active role as knowledge producers raised the level of motivation and also the intellectual engagement. When the teacher checked for knowledge retention several months later, the children were able to recall the concepts and the correct scientific terminology and use them with confidence.

Practitioners may like to read a case study of another example of peer teaching.

The open-ended project briefs gave the students scope to display their own creativity and allowed them to choose their own methods of working. This increased their motivation and active engagement in learning, and led to different patterns of talk in the classroom.

Increased motivation and engagement: less time managing behaviour

Video data revealed that students were highly motivated by the new style of working. Student researchers reviewing the videos commented on the students’ increased engagement with work with surprise. For example, a student commented: ‘Look at John, he’s really working, that’s amazing, he usually spends most of the time messing about’. The teachers noticed how with the increased levels of motivation and engagement, they were spending less time than usual managing their students’ behaviour.

Changes in patterns of talk

Videos showed examples of students approaching teachers and asking questions, for example about information they had found on the Internet. Teachers viewing the videos commented how they felt such student-initiated speech exchanges had been rarer before the project . At the same time, teachers noticed that their own talk seemed to have moved almost completely away from administrative and behavioural matters (ie. instructions and reprimands) and was more focused on the curriculum topic in question.

The research demonstrated how the PELRS approach helped the students learn to take responsibility for their learning through co-learning and  self-evaluation.

Learning from each other

In one primary school, in an area of social deprivation, the pupils’ engagement with the task and success in learning were transformed by the process of finding information and preparing to teach their peers. Yet their actual presentations to the whole class were disrupted by the inattention of their peers. All the groups were keen to give their own presentations, but were so used to paying attention only to the teacher that they switched off their attention when the teacher stood behind them at the back of the room.

In a second iteration of this learning event with another class, the teacher made the shift in the pupils’ role more explicit, talking to them in advance about what would happen during the presentations and how she and they together would learn from the other pupils and the importance of paying attention to each other after they had worked so hard. With this more careful preparation for the role shift, the second class paid good attention to each others’ presentations. It also led to the pupils thinking more carefully about their role as teachers and the need to hold their peers’ attention.

Learning how to learn

During the PELRS project, pupils became used to watching themselves engaging in classroom activities and this led to spontaneous comments on themselves and others, both as learners and as presenters. One group of nine pupils who made a digital video about their work for presentation to a GTC conference took a large number of ‘takes’ of each of the planned sequences because they were concerned to produce the highest possible quality of presentation. The editing work was done by one of the pupils in the group with minimal intervention from his teacher who was confident this pupil could produce a polished end product suitable to be shown to an external audience. To the great amusement of the conference audience when the video was shown, he added at the end a compilation of the ‘out takes’ which served to illustrate the group’s process of self-evaluation as well as expressing their desire to produce something a bit different and more fun than a straight presentation.

Practitioners may like to read a case study about how other students made films for learning, and how they gained from the process.

Teachers found that the change from a more directive, teacher-led role freed them up from having to demonstrate that they knew more than their pupils. This was particularly helpful to those teachers who felt they lacked technical expertise because:

• it meant that teachers did not need to feel anxious about any lack of expertise with ICT on their own part. Rather, they could celebrate pupils’ ICT skills and accept and value their varying levels of expertise
• it opened up the classroom to knowledge and information which the teacher had not pre-selected.

For example, a media studies teacher taking a year 10 group was keen to use computer design software for a marketing project, but found the software complicated. Talking to the class, she discovered that several students knew the software, and she decided to let them peer-train the other students, and herself. The classroom dynamics totally altered, with knowledge distributed across the learners. Whereas in previous years students had used paper-based tools to design their advertisements for a new product, this time, the students chose to work in the computer suite using a graphics package which enabled them to produce more ‘professional’ quality images and logos.

In another school, a group of primary pupils were expected to search the Internet for information about germination and the growth of plants. When they found information about plants that live in arid, sandy areas of the world for example, one group called the teacher over to discuss what they had discovered. The researchers commented how pupils’ new role as selectors of knowledge seemed to give them a reason to initiate a discussion with the teacher. Working in this way also seemed to change the teacher’s role to co-learner, especially where the teacher had previously known almost nothing about this kind of plant, shifting the role to knowledgeable co-learner. Encouraging the pupils to take pride in their discoveries and share them, both with their teachers and their peers, helped to create new understanding of the nature of knowledge acquisition, creation and use in the classroom.

The PELRS project revealed a number of barriers which prevented ICT from being used in ways that transformed learning:

• organisation of the school day into short time-frames – this made it difficult  to give pupils control over ICT resources and allow them to use the exploratory power of the Internet. It was particularly difficult in secondary schools where the constant movement of students between rooms affected access to ICT equipment. All innovative work in the secondary schools and much of the innovative work in primary schools took place in special ‘off-timetable’ learning events
• rigid, formulaic lesson planning – where all resources, objectives and outcomes are predicted in advance and controlled by the teacher
• higly restricted access to the Internet – during the first two years of the project, access to the Internet was often far from ideal. Aggressive Internet filters sometimes made it impossible for pupils to use the Internet to access anything other than sites pre-determined by the school’s technical experts. By the third year of the project, most schools had more sophisticated filtering systems that allowed more sensitive discrimination between sites so this major barrier was reduced
• the need for expert help – despite teachers’ growing technical competence, the new style of working threw up problems which could only be overcome with expert help. For example, multiple groups working with still or video images require access to editing software and the necessary network resources to move this data around. Many teachers reported they needed more help in solving these particular issues.
  

The researchers designed their project in response to research that had found that despite high levels of government spending on ICT in education, the impact of ICT on learning, in terms of enhanced national test scores and GCSE results, was minimal.

The ImpaCT2 evaluation of the UK National Grid for learning (NGfL) programme (see further reading), which was co-directed by the lead PELRS researcher, had revealed some possible reasons why ICT had had such a minimal impact:

• schools viewed ICT as a specialist subject rather than a new tool to support learning across the curriculum, which meant that students hardly ever used a computer in English, maths and science lessons. The limited effect on national test scores was therefore hardly surprising 
• there was an enormous difference in the way that children used ICT at school and at home. At school, pupils were expected to follow instructions in ICT lessons (often in worksheet form) in order to acquire skills in using office software, whilst at home, they multi-tasked across a range of ICT, including Internet browsers, messaging services, building personal websites and downloading music.

The project teachers’ starting point was the generic pedagogic framework (GPF) below developed by the researchers in discussion with them. The research found that teachers felt it was a valuable starting point for discussion because it ‘opened up a space for reflecting on their practice’. To help stimulate discussion amongst other teachers, we briefly explain the key elements here.

The learning focus is at the centre of the diagram. It has as its goal both the curriculum selected by the teacher (drawn from the National Curriculum) and the PELRS ‘transformative learning outcomes’ of creativity, active citizenship (making choices / taking responsibility for one’s own learning), cognitive engagement and metacognition.

The teaching and learning process is represented in the diagram as a three-way interaction of pupils and teachers and ICT. The pupils’ role in planning how their learning would take place is given a central position, but within the learning focus framed by teachers and pupils. Roles of teachers and pupils are negotiated with the implication that these roles are interchangeable or shared, and that co-learning rather than individualised learning takes place. Both pupils and teachers are placed in a social rather than an isolated environment, with the family and peers interacting with pupils and other adults influencing learning. This resonates with Vygotsky’s work. To find out more about Vygotsky’s theory, you may like to look at our earlier RoM Social interaction as a means of constructing learning.

Learning with ICT is depicted within a larger frame that incorporates the home and virtual environments as well as the school. ICT is seen as a set of mediating tools over which pupils can exercise choice, and through which they can learn through play, and experience flow (becoming absorbed and ‘losing themselves’ in the activity). 

Each of the four themed strategies follows the same generic framework, but contain more specific suggestions as guidance for planning a learning event within the theme. The PELRS diagrammatic representation of pedagogy aims to make the process of change explicit to teachers and pupils by inviting change to their traditional roles, emphasising co-learning between them and the negotiation of their roles.

Practitioners who are interested in finding out more about the framework underpinning PELRS learning events, may like to explore the interactive version available on the PELRS website (see further reading).

Initially, the research and development team worked with four schools (two primary and two secondary) in Manchester and Bolton, selected for their commitment to innovative uses of ICT and located in catchment areas with socio-economic backgrounds varying from impoverished to average. (All also had slightly better than average levels of ICT equipment for English schools at the time). The project focused on developing, implementing and evaluating innovative pedagogies with ICT whilst teaching curriculum subjects, rather than the discrete teaching of ICT skills.

The research and development team worked in partnership with the teacher-researchers and pupil-researchers to develop examples of successful, innovative changes to teaching and learning practices. The teachers planned the learning events, participated in the analysis and interpretation of data, and presented their work in public. A university-based researcher worked alongside the teachers and pupils, making video recordings and interviewing pupils. Frequently, he talked to the pupils while filming them to get their explanations of what they were doing now, what had led up to it and how they were planning to go on.

At any one time, at least four pupil-researchers (a mix of gender and ethnicity chosen for their ICT expertise) in each of the four schools worked with the university researchers, commenting on current usage of ICT in the school, suggesting new strategies for its use drawn from their experience at home, and participating in analysis of video data from their classroom. They were often able to uncover misinterpretations of data and explain puzzles, such as why they did not tell the teacher that they found a particular piece of maths software boring. (‘If we did we might not get to use the computers at all, and that would be worse’).

Teacher-researchers also spent time with the university-based researchers observing the same selections from the video data as the pupils so that interpretations of teachers, pupils and university-based researchers could be compared to deepen and illuminate interpretation. Thus the process of change was conducted concurrently with research into new kinds of teaching and learning with ICT and the resulting impact on pupils’ learning.

Case studies illustrating the resulting models of transformative teaching and learning with ICT are available on the project website. In the third year PELRS worked with twelve further schools who adopted and customised these models, and the PELRS strategies and GPF, demonstrating their robustness and transferability. 

Teachers may like to consider the following implications in acting out the main messages of the study.

• When teachers encouraged pupils to make creative choices about how they learned a particular topic and what tools they wanted to use, they fostered a greater sense of autonomy and responsibility for learning which enhanced pupils’ motivation and engagement. Could you find more opportunities for pupils to use ICT in ways that enable them to take on responsibility for learning? 
• Working collaboratively on joint ICT led presentation projects was effective both in helping pupils to take control of their learning and in helping them to acquire curriculum content and retain it months later. Would your pupils benefit from working together on an ICT based presentation, then reflecting on what they learned from the process?
• Teachers found that a lack of technical expertise on their part need not prevent their pupils from making good use of ICT. Finding out which pupils had good ICT skills or knowledge of particular software packages helped because teachers could ask such  pupils to train their peers as well as the teacher, enabling the class to learn new ICT techniques.  Would encouraging your pupils to share their ICT expertise across the group enable you and your pupils to make greater and/or more effective use of technology?

Leaders might like to consider the following implications.

• The researchers worked with the teachers to develop successful, innovative changes to teaching and learning involving ICT. Would you find it helpful to encourage your colleagues to discuss how they currently use ICT, and brainstorm alternative ways that have the potential to enhance teaching and learning? Could you encourage them to try out their ideas or perhaps some of the PELRS strategies, then ask them to share their experiences of what was effective?
• PELRS activities place demands on a school infrastructure which are not normally made by traditional learning activities. For example, multiple groups working with still or video images require access to editing software and the necessary network resources to move this data around. Could you and your colleagues share ideas on ways of solving these practical challenges?
• If your pupils are involved in making digital videos and/or PowerPoint presentations etc as teaching tools for their peers, would you find it helpful to make them a starting point for conversations with parents about the teaching and learning that takes place in school and perhaps ways that parents might support their children’s learning at home? Could you experiment with different ways of making these examples of pupils’ work accessible to parents, such as showing them at parents’ evenings, making them available on the school website or sending them home to parents on a CD? 
• PELRS activities revealed some barriers which prevented ICT from being used to maximise the transformative potential of ICT. In particular: the organisation of the school day into short time-frames; and highly restricted access to the internet through security software. Could you explore the extent to which these barriers exist in your school (perhaps by administering a questionnaires to pupils)? Could you involve pupils in working with teachers to find ways of overcoming these barriers?
  

Gaps that are uncovered in a piece of research have a useful role in making sure that future research builds cumulatively on what is known. This is particularly important but also challenging in the field of use of ICT where the technology itself moves on very quickly and where changes to practice work at many levels and are hard to capture.  But research also needs to inform practice, so practitioners’ interpretations of the gaps and follow-up questions are crucial. We think four kinds of studies would usefully supplement the PELRS project findings:

• follow up studies across a bigger sample, and where there are comparison groups and a wider range of evidence
• longitudinal evaluations of the approach, comparing intervention and control groups in and between schools
• studies that explore the use and impact of ICT with and between different age groups
• comparison studies that explore the impact on pupil learning of different approaches to ICT use.

What is your experience?

Do you have any evidence about initiatives aimed at promoting learning through ICT? We would be interested to hear about examples of effective initiatives that promote self-directed, creative learning, such as film making ventures which we could perhaps feature in our case study section.

Your feedback

Have you found this study to be useful? Have you used any aspect of this research in your own classroom teaching practice? We would like to hear your feedback on this study. Click on the link below to share your views with us.
research@gtce.org.uk