Michael - My Blog

Many schools have been doing "AtoL" which has involved teachers writing "Learning Intentions" and "Success Criteria" on the board every period for students to see so they understand what they are actually meant to be learning. When I first heard about these I cringed because it seemed an incredibly prescribed way of framing planning and what might happen in the lesson. Prescribing learning intentions seemed to be true blue behaviourism all over again (if it actually ever left us).They seemed to offer no sense of 'play' or to use complexity jargon they did not allow the learning to be on "the edge of chaos" - just enough structure to allow for new possibility and creativity, and not too much to kill it.But does it have to be like this?

Milligan and Wood (2009, Journal of Curriculum Studies) have talked about the need to think of learning intentions as "transition points" rather than end points.This is very close, if not identical, to the complexity idea of "liberating constraints". A liberating constraint is where enough boundaries are in place in order for something to begin its essentail unfolding - or, as mentined above, the so-called edge of chaos. LIs need to be "localities for exploration" rather than "unyielding progress towards imposed goals" (Brent Davis, 1996).

Writing learning intentions from a complexity thinking perspective relies, then, on the teacher having a theory of learning that is highly responsive to the contingincies of real classrooms and real students and a teacher who is always looking for ways to open up spaces for playful consideration of new possibilities. I like the metaphor of a conversation to describe teaching when a conversation is defined as a "reciprocal engagement in a topic of mutual concern" (Davis). So then, what might a complex learning intention actually look like? Here is an example of what one wouldn't look like from a recent activity I ran in my classroom. Technically proficient, in terms of standard social studies pedagogy reasonably sophisticated, but at the end of the day a pretty static truism. Students know this. And if they didn't, I think it would take only a few examples to explain it to them.

I don't really know what a complex learning intention would look like.

• Would it be written on the board?
• How closely should it relate to the nature of the discipline?
• Should it be controversial/contested?
• To what extent, if at all, should it be developed with students?

If we don't want to turn learning intentions into static end points which serve the interests only of a managerial, technocratic and highly bureaucratic system, rather the real young people in our classrooms, we teachers need to think quite carefully about these questions.