Environments for Learning

Oct–Nov 2004

These three conferences drew some 230 participants to venues in Birmingham, Leeds and London. Our purpose was to explore:

• the fresh approaches that have been developed to understand the link between the quality of a school’s emotional environment and the capacity of the people in it to teach and learn
• the range of new strategies that have evolved to help teachers and managers in making this link
• the new enthusiasm of policy-makers for promoting ‘personalised learning’, ‘assessment for learning’ as well as Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL)

Valuable learning
Each conference was built around opportunities for participants to engage in reflective dialogue about their learning during the course of the day. Participants said that they learned from these experiences about the value of:

• Silent reflection – Silence gives people time to think. It allows the mind to focus and relax. Students can rid themselves of the mental clutter they have picked up during the rest of the day.
• Talking together – Hearing the perspectives of others makes it possible for us to clarify our own views and find ways of articulating our feelings. We also start to feel ourselves part of a group. ‘When we listen to stories,’ said one participant, ‘we listen with our own perspective and tune in to that perspective. Different people take different ideas from stories. What we hear depends on the state we are in as we listen. The different questions that emerge are all so interesting.’
• Sharing responsibility – The group discussion is enriched when everyone can take responsibility for ensuring that their own contribution is a constructive one. Knowing that others are thinking about the same problem and doing some of the work of solving it makes it easier to share ideas, listen to others views and start working as a team.
• Open process – People need to know that they are not going to be judged or mocked for what they say if they are to share their ideas and observations openly. An open process creates the best opportunity for people to learn from observing the ways in which others respond to stories, events or pieces of information.

Safe environments
James Park described how Antidote’s three-year Emotional Literacy Initiative has sought to understand the conditions that facilitate these processes. Out of this work has come a tool – the School Emotional Environment for Learning Survey (SEELS) – that tracks the extent to which the school environment enables young people to take the risks associated with learning from and with each other. The discussions we held at the conference suggested that the links went something like this:

What students feel	How students learn
Capable – other people are genuinely interested in enabling them to realise their potential	Resilient and growing – give it a go and stick at it to become a stronger learner
Listened to – they are free to say what they think or feel and, in so doing, may bring about change	Making meaning – see how things fit together
Accepted – they are allowed to explore different ways of being themselves	Reflective and creative – draw on one’s own resources in playing with ideas
Safe – it is acknowledged that their emotions have an impact on what they think, say and do	Curious – ask questions and delve beneath the surface
Included – they can find a distinctive role for themselves, and this gives them a sense of having value	Interdependent – able to work with others as well as on their own

Shaping environments
Marilyn Tew and Roger Sutcliffe used their experience of working respectively with circle time and Philosophy for Children (P4C) to highlight the different strategies that teachers can adopt to create an emotionally literate environment for learning.

Marilyn emphasised the importance of structuring young people’s experience around a three-stage process that allowed time for:

• connecting emotionally through having a bit of fun together
• reflecting together in a safe way
• ending the session so as to put all the difficult issues that have been raised back in their boxes

Roger stressed the importance of teachers seeing themselves as mediators of learning as much as transmitters knowledge. Enabling students to start constructing knowledge in their own way required an egalitarian structure that empowered people to shape questions for group exploration and play an active part in the discussion.

Classroom implications
While the focus of the conference was on the need for whole-school strategies to change a school-environment, the discussions also gave rise to the following principles for shaping an emotionally literate classroom:

• Allow space for silent reflection and thinking time
• Help the class to become a functioning group
• Offer children open questions to pursue
• Enable students to tell each other their stories
• Encourage students to place themselves in the stories they are reading
• Ensure that each student’s personal story is heard somewhere
• Give students as much responsibility as you can to shape their own learning
• See yourself as a facilitator of learning as much as a transmitter of knowledge
• Acknowledge when your own emotional experience mirrors that of your students
• Practice dialogue with your colleagues