Adopted bonobo

What can happen when you tweet about bonobos. Thank you Glasgow Science Festival.

Teach the controversy in science

A few days ago I linked from Twitter to an article in Times Educational Supplement Scotland about first-year university biology students who did not believe in evolution.

The last two paragraphs of that article are quotes from an intelligent design spokesman. So I emailed the editor suggesting that an article on science and education in TESS should not be a platform for "people who peddle propaganda and have no interest in science or education."

She replied as follows: "Alastair Noble is a former HM Inspector, and we thought if it was interesting enough to run in the [Edinburgh] science festival, it was worth reporting on."

Now this seems perfectly reasonable. It's what newspaper and magazine editors routinely do in the interests of fairness, when they seek comment from opposing points of view. It's journalistic balance.

But on the same day I received an email from Glasgow Science Festival, saying "I wonder if we should make more of this. It's one vehicle for getting people discussing it. What do you think, should we try and get it talked about more?"

Here's my reply to GSF:

"The problem with any kind of engagement is that it gives them a platform, which allows them to bring very effective PR techniques into play that were first developed for the tobacco companies then later honed and improved for the climate change deniers.

It's a fight in which they are using weapons that scientists and science communicators largely don't understand.

These people give the appearance of rationality while trying to undermine reason as a way of understanding the world. It's a fundamentally and deliberately dishonest approach. So any attempt to engage honestly and openly with them only strengthens their position in the public mind.

It's all about "teach the controversy" which scientists unintentionally support and collude with, whenever we grant them an opportunity to debate with us in public - as do editors when they aim for journalistic balance, when the two sides of a dispute are anything but balanced."

GSF replied that they agreed with all that, but:

"I wasn't really thinking about a public debate or any GSF content that might be used as a platform like this. You have to fight a corner. We thought about this last year when a prominent climate change denier was offering to come to GSF and take part in an event. We decided not to risk it, as it would be hijacked. That's exactly what happened to Roger's event here.

Still, I think GSF should at least engage in some way. He was an HMI for heavens' sake. There's a lot of people and many scientists who will not have seen this TESS article, not know about Curriculum for Excellence and the Scottish Qualifications Authority and maybe we should do something for them - disseminating information, counter arguments, arming people with facts etc that might help and encourage scientists to wake up a bit and lobby SQA and Learning and Teaching Scotland."

So to summarise: The ID people managed to get a small say at an Edinburgh Science Festival event. As a result TESS, the country's leading educational publication, invited them to comment on new research findings in biology education. My own comment on this led Glasgow Science Festival to start thinking about giving more prominence to ID, if only to help scientists counter their ideas and opinions.

That is Teach the Controversy in action.

St Luke's High School's high achievers

St Luke's High School, East Renfrewshire is the school that's bucking, by a mile, the obvious correlation in the above chart between attainment and socially advantaged catchment area.

Here's how St Luke's High does it.

Why evolution is not mentioned in the new Scottish Curriculum

A spokesperson from Learning and Teaching Scotland, said: "The use of the word 'evolution' was not avoided for religious reasons or to avoid any particular sensitivities.

"Evolution is addressed through the biodiversity and interdependence element in science, which deals with survival of the species and adaptation to the environment. This is complemented by the inheritance line of development which develops an understanding of how organisms develop and pass on genetic information to the next generation."

From Times Educational Supplement Scotland 24 April 2009

Smiling sweetly

We writers don’t get out much and I’ll tell you why. Bad things happen when we do.

As Jean McLeish tucks into a little haggis on a stick, which the waitresses at Edinburgh’s National Gallery keep pushing on us, like they're on commission, I can’t help thinking of all the food this woman snatched from my children’s lips. Or would have done, if they weren’t both well into their twenties at the time.

I’d been writing freelance features for TES Scotland for five years when Jean appeared out of nowhere, with great ideas and well-crafted stories. The first line of hers I ever read sticks in my mind: “Chloe's tooth diamond is a twinkling distraction amid the building site paraphernalia of paint, ladders and hard hats”.

“Hey, that’s great,” I thought. “She’s got to go.”

Five years later Jean is still there, turning out high quality features every week. “Did you enjoy the educational debate,” I smile sweetly and act civilised.

“It was fine,” Jean replies. “Although I’m more interested in people than policy. Did you?”

“Didn’t make it in time,” I tell her. “Got bumped by a bus, detained by the surly, slow-writing driver, then ran round and round the National Gallery for ages, searching for a way in. Finally realised it was down here in the Gardens but the big gate was padlocked. I had to scramble over the railings to get in.”

“Good heavens, how awful,” Jean sympathises and steps back a pace. “I’m surprised you’re not even more sweat-stained and dishevelled.”

An elegant woman in a black dress floats past. “Thanks for coming, Douglas,” says the new editor. “No problem, Gillie,” I lie fluently.

The occasion is the relaunch of TESS as a magazine and the formal handover from Neil Munro, editor for ten years, to Gillie Macdonald. It’s a chance to hear her vision for the future and meet writing colleagues I never see.

Among the tall pillars and vol-au-vents, I hunt down Gregor Steele, whose fortnightly columns are funny and insightful. “Where do you get your ideas?” I ask the former physics teacher, unoriginally. “Life,” he tells me. “And physics, which is full of metaphor.”

I find Julia Belgutay, whose weekly column capturing kids’ talk makes me laugh out loud. For example: “She bought a book because she thought it was about Lance Armstrong, but it was about bike saddles.”

“I get good stuff from young people because inside my head I’m the same age as they are,” Julia tells me.

I meet news reporter Henry Hepburn, tall, slim, friendly and the official TESS tweeter, Jackie Cosh, who manages to write while bringing up four kids, and Chris Small, appointed to the News team from Children in Scotland. We share our liking for Jonathan Sher, their distinguished but genial research director, a committed children’s advocate from North Carolina.

Gillie’s talk gets off to a great start among the two Gaelic speakers at the gathering, when she tells a joke in the language of her father, author Finlay J Macdonald. A quick translation allows us southerners to join in the jollity. Then she gets serious.

The format of TESS might have changed, she says, but it’s still all about up-to-the-minute education news. “We’ve a new four-page focus that looks in detail at one topic a week. We’re taking all the expertise of our education correspondents – there’s no specialist team like it in Scotland – and providing depth now, to go with the range.”

The features section, which highlights good practice around the country, remains. “We see it as a crucial part of our role, particularly when schools don’t have money for CPD.”

Online teaching resources compiled over the years by TES UK will be plundered each week. “There are thousands of them, all free. We will take the best of those and tailor them for our Scottish readers.”

Comment, discussion and debate will be encouraged: “Don’t just read an article and think about it. Write in and tell us. You can have 900, 450 or 300 words, depending where we put it. We want to hear from you.”

Then there’s the most interesting section for many readers. “TESS used to be the place to go for jobs in education. It is again. Classroom teachers, headteachers, independent schools – they’re all there now in one place, at the back of the magazine.”

She recalls recent publishing industry awards: “2008 business and professional magazine of the year: Times Educational Supplement Scotland. 2009 editor of the year: Neil Munro. 2010 features writer of the year: Emma Seith.

“That is a track record we won’t throw away,” Gillie concludes. “I am excited to see what we can do in 2011.”

As distinguished guests and ink-stained scribblers sidestep the haggis-ball pushers and disperse, I say goodnight, find my car, take a look at the damage inflicted by the bus, decide it’s superficial and drive off into the night. It was a lovely evening in the end.

I got to get out more.

Sally Bercow

I like the photograph. But I'd have cropped it much more tightly, like this:

It makes a far better image.

But being less revealing, it's not as effective in sticking two fingers to the fogeys.

Sugata Mitra at the Scottish Learning Festival

Who needs teachers?
The high point of this year's Scottish Learning Festival, for me and many others, was the keynote by Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, and the man whose experiments all over India have convinced him that "education is a self-organising system where learning is the emergent phenomenon."

In other words if we give children a computer and the right conditions they can teach themselves anything. A "friendly but not knowledgeable mediator" is useful. But a teacher is not required.

I had interviewed the professor by telephone for TES Scotland the previous week, but he had kept some good stuff back for his keynote. I'm going to try to capture the content and flavour of that talk here, as well as some of the humour that makes his talks so enjoyable - the humour of a man, gently amused himself and generously sharing it with his companions.

"Having experimented for years in these very remote places," he told the packed Clyde Auditorium, "I came to the remotest place I know - Gateshead."

He chuckles, and so do we. "That's how I start my Indian lectures," he says, in a storytelling aside: 'Five thousand miles from New Delhi, across the River Tyne, there lies the hamlet of Gateshead."

Passion
But while humour is the medium at times, the message could not be more serious, and Mitra's commitment to the research he launched 11 years ago with the first hole in the wall computer - and took all over the subcontinent and beyond - is readily apparent.

"It sounds like a lifetime's work," I had commented, after listening to his description of what he had done and what he still wanted to do - an extensive longitudinal study that would determine if his methods "had really levelled the playing field".

His hesitant response had surprised me. "Yeah, well, it looks like. One gets into these things, you know. People sometimes ask if I have this passion for teaching children. I have no such passion. I have a curiosity about how the brain works. I like to know why people think the way they do - why they remember, why they forget. We need to understand what is happening inside the neural circuits - once we know that we will really understand education."

But if the initial passion was a scientist's search for knowledge and understanding, the motivation now is broader and deeper. "I wanted to know the physics of thinking," he had told me. "But that landed me into children's education and this work - which is so important socially that my conscience will not now allow me to get away from it."

The scale of the social problem all over the developing world is illustrated by India, he says, where schools and teachers are in such short supply that conventional efforts to educate are bound to fail. Over 120 million Indian children do not go to school, he says, because they have none to go to. Making up that deficit would require tripling the number of schools and teachers.

"There is not enough money to do this, nor enough time. The problem is just too large to solve with traditional linear methods of scaling up."

Dust-devils and DNA
So is there another way? Mitra's experiments have convinced him that there is, he tells his audience, and that it lies in the idea of a self-organising system, a concept well-known to physics. There are also similarities, he points out, with the "spontaneous order" of the economist Friedrich Hayek.

"That is what we are seeing in my experiments, and several educationists have approached the idea. The difference is that when they were talking about these ideas the internet did not exist. I have an unfair advantage. I can stand on their shoulders and go further."

The stock-market is a self-organising system. So is the weather, he explains to his audience. "A dust-devil is a self-organising system. There is a bit of a breeze and suddenly the structure forms and starts to move around. A self-organising system is one in which the system structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system."

The capacity for surprise is what distinguishes such systems. "They show emergence," says Mitra. "This is the appearance of something not previously observed. We react with surprise when a little Tamil-speaking girl says 'replication of the DNA molecule'. It's emergent. It happens from within the system."

This is the reason, he suggests, that children were able to teach themselves how to use the hole-in-the-wall computers he left without instructions, in cities and villages from the Himalaya to the southern coastline. His response to the curious kids who would gather as he was building these - and building in robustness to the weather - becomes a little refrain in his keynote.

"What should we do with this," the children would ask Mitra in their own language, for most spoke no English. "I don't know," he would reply. "And anyway I'm going."

Lingua Franca
A few months later he would come back to find the children using the computer and the English words needed to do so, having taught themselves and each other in the meantime. He describes one seminal experiment in Hyderabad - "a sprawling, south Indian city with many private schools for the poor.

"They exist because they promise to teach English. So parents pay a few pounds a month to have their children educated, because being able to speak English makes a huge difference to their future.

"The schools do their best, but native English speakers do not go into the slums of Hyderabad to teach. They have to use local teachers who speak a language called Telegu. They have a very strong accent which is almost unintelligible."

Again the amused aside, shared with the audience: "If you thought Geordie was difficult then go to southern India."

Given this language barrier, what Mitra did next - setting up a computer in Hyderabad equipped with a speech to text program - should have been pointless. "You talk into the computer and it types the words, " he explains. "I trained it in a neutral British accent. So when the children spoke into it the computer typed complete nonsense, which made them laugh. I told them I would leave it for two months and they should try to make themselves understood.

"The children said, 'How do we do that?' and I said - and this is the crux of the method - 'I don't know. And anyway I'm going. "

Two months later a couple of very interesting things had happened. The children had improved their English, which was now clearer and more intelligible, both to an English-speaker and to the computer. But they had also done something more fundamental and richer in educational implications.

Stick to facts?
"They had invented their own pedagogy," Mitra tells the audience and pauses to let that sink in. "I learned that not only can children achieve an educational objective but they can invent the pedagogy itself."

He contrasts this with the conventional classroom in which "we take it on ourselves to make the pedagogy" and the children are "the recipients of it."

The realisation that youngsters in his experiments were doing far more than learning facts and some skills came slowly, Mitra says. In the streets of Delhi, where he had set up his first hole-in-the-wall computer, the kids had now begun to Google their homework. "Their teachers were telling me that their English had become fluent and they had become deep learners."

He was doubtful at first. Were they doing more than just copying off Wikipedia? Was there any real understanding being developed?

By the end of the second phase of experiments, around India and beyond, Mitra had demonstrated that groups of children could teach themselves to use a computer, navigate the internet and improve their English. He had begun to suspect they could do much more.

So when the opportunity arose to pursue his research in England he bought himself an overcoat in November 2006, he says, "and came to Newcastle after 45 years in Delhi." The scepticism he met at Newcastle University challenged him to devise more ambitious tests, which in turn led to deeper understanding of the implications of his research for education in the developing and developed world.

The hypothesis he now decided to test experimentally was that "Tamil-speaking 12-year-olds in a Tsunami-hit village in southern India could not teach themselves the biotechnology of DNA replication on their own".

Method of the grandmother
The experiment disproved this hypothesis. The kids could teach themselves biotechnology - but only at first to a level of 30% in tests. On their own, in a foreign language, from a starting point of 0%, this was already educationally startling, says Mitra. But it was still a fail. He began to ponder how to help the children to pass.

The answer he hit upon - a "friendly but not knowledgeable mediator" - became a vital piece of the jigsaw that Mitra was beginning to call minimally invasive education. "A local organisation had an accountant, a young girl, who was great friends with the children and played football with them," he tells us.

"I asked if she would help them pass the test. She wondered how, when she didn't even study science at school. I said: 'Use the method of the grandmother. Stand behind the children and admire them. Say: 'How did you do that?' 'Can you do a bit more of this?' 'I couldn't understand a word of that, if I was your age.'"

The young "grandmother" did a fantastic job, Mitra says. "Two months later the children's test scores were up to 50% - the same as they'd have got in formal schooling.

"It is all in this month's British Journal of Educational Technology."

Mitra now began testing his ideas in schools in England and Australia, where the biggest problem he encountered, understandably, was getting the teacher out of the room. Digging deeper into the question of real education or regurgitation led to a surprising discovery, he says.

Mitra set half a dozen GCSE science questions to a primary class working in groups at computers. The fastest group got all of them right in 20 minutes, the slowest in 45. When tested as individuals on the questions the class scored an average of 76%, he says "This is incredible for 10-year-olds on GCSE questions.

"But the teacher said, 'So what? They just Googled the answers or looked up Wikipedia.'"

First prize
So two months later Mitra came back and tested that same class again, individually and without access to a computer. "I knew I had hit the jackpot when I took back the answer sheets and corrected them," he says. "Because the average score was ... 76%.

"There was photographic recall of what they had done, because they had done it themselves."

The same experiment has been repeated many times since, he tells us, with similar results. Indeed one experiment in a Gateshead school recently threw up an even more startling outcome, which he is "still struggling to explain", he says.

"The post-test results after six months were higher than the originals."

The teacher's explanation is that the children kept thinking about the questions, coming back to them, investigating, finding out more for themselves.

Mitra has summarised his findings about Self Organising Learning Systems, in a document that also provides practical advice to schools interested in trying them out: "These techniques and facilities can be constructed in any school and will result in significant improvement in children’s learning and examination performance," he says.

"You cannot force a self-organising system to do anything - any more than you can force an apple tree to make apples."

But what we can do, he says, is understand the nature of a self-organising system and create the right conditions for emergence. Mitra's experiments oblige us, as teachers, to re-examine our expectations of pupils. "The bars that we set for our children may be way lower than the bars they set for themselves," he says.

They also shed a 21st century light on the age-old question of the curriculum. What should schools be teaching children? "I think this is very closely related to your Curriculum for Excellence," he tells his predominantly Scottish audience.

"We are looking at two skills - reading comprehension and information search and analysis. We have to measure carefully improvements in both of these."

Sugata Mitra concludes his Scottish Learning Festival keynote with a statement of the hypothesis that has emerged from a decade of research in schools across the world - ever since that first hole-in-the-wall in the slums of New Delhi. "Education is a self-organising system where learning is the emergent phenomenon."

Right now this is speculation, he points out. But if it's true it will lead us to a physics of education and a hitherto unheard-of ability to predict educational outcomes.

"I believe a physics of education lies just around the corner," he says. "And that therein lies the future of education."

Sugata Mitra's keynote presentation at the Scottish Learning Festival 2010.