Creating complex learning intentions?

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 teaching and what might happen in a 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 do learning intentions have to be like this?

Milligan and Wood (2009, Journal of Curriculum Studies) have talked about the need to think of conceptual understandings, and by association 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 essential unfolding - or, as mentioned 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 contingencies of real classrooms and real students and a teacher who is always looking for ways to open up spaces for consideration of new possibilities. To construct learning. 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, 1996). So, what might a complex learning intention designed to foster conversation 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 but here are some key questions I have at the moment:

• 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 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.

The geometry of learning

One thing that education seems so big on is the notion of "planning". What tends to happen is that it is done in a decontextualised, prescription fashion with little consideration for the fact that there are real students in the class. This is not helped by teachers college templates which reduce a lesson into small chunks organised literally down to the minute. There is little room for the real life contingencies of a classroom of students. The alternative to this situation today seems to be an increase in explicitly identifying learning intentions (which teachers do according to curricula mandates) and then co-constructing the success criteria for these intentions with the students. This is a solution to the problem that in our factory model of schooling students seem to have little idea about why they are there. The idea is that if it is made explicit to students why they are there, and if they are involved in the development of identifying what will count as success of the original learning intention, better learning will occur. I have used and continue to use this method with some classes but I am far from convinced that it can harness the collective intelligence of a classroom body. It seems to be based on the individualist notion that learning is an activity that predominantly occurs within the individual brains (minds) of students. There is little sense of what Sylvia Ashton Warner referred to as the organic, conversational aspects of education. So, my concerns are as follows:

• The explicit statement of learning intentions might mean that teachers focus on achieving them rather than participating in the life of the classroom and "expanding the space of the possible" (Engaging Minds, 2nd edition)
• They feel like a glossed up return to 'behavioural outcomes' and behaviourism couched in constructivist speak.
• You can have technically brilliant learning intentions and success criteria and no real engagement in learning

The problem is that everyone knows that a good teacher has "outcomes" in mind. In that sense what I have described is a very good method to ensure that the teacher has given some thought to what they are actually trying to achieve. But the teacher giving thought to what they want to teach within the framework of learning intentions and success criteria might mean that ONLY what they intend is learnt and at the expense of far more sophisticated learning possibilities that emerge during the course of the lesson. Put more simply, I wonder if the lesson becomes goal-driven rather than possibility-for-new-ways-of-looking-at-the-world-driven. Brent Davis reminds us of the difference between prescriptive curriculum and proscriptive curriculum. A prescriptive curriculum is when what is to be learnt has already been determined. It is a representationist theory of knowledge that assumes learning is about the individual conforming to an already pregiven reality. A proscriptive theory of curriculum is one which sees education as "a participation in the ever unfolding project of becoming capable of new, perhaps as-yet unimaginable possibilities" (Engaging Minds 2nd editon). This is when education actually becomes interesting and the image of a fractal (top right) can, I think, help to serve as a metaphor for "planning".

Here are a few features of a fractal:

• You get incredible complexity from incredible simplicity in a very short time. By simply iterating lines of increasingly smaller sizes you get the image above
• Change is non-linear in that it is growth oriented rather than goal oriented. In this respect it is heavily supported by neo-darwinian theories of evolution, ecological theories of learning and recent research into how the brain works
  
• There is self-similarity across scale. This means that some smaller parts retain the same pattern as the whole

So how are these ideas useful when teachers think about planning?

Firstly, with an attitude towards what might happen in the classroom and the presentation of resources that allow for new interpretive possibilities we teachers don't need to spend hours making plans for the students to follow. Complexity will arise if we create the conditions for it. There is more to this but I'll leave it at that for now.

Secondly, if change is non-linear we simply cannot determine goals of learning. This is not to say we can't expect an inquiry or assignment to be finished at a certain time, but we can't legislate what learning will occur. Perhaps we can guess what might occur, but unless we are to treat the brain as something other than a biological organism subject to the tendencies of evolution, we cannot predetermine what is to be learnt without killing the possibility for new something new and novel being "constructed".

Third, obviously there needs to be a goal in the broad sense of something that orients and constrains. With out a really clear idea of what could happen chaos will quickly ensue. By critiquing a common method of planning I am not saying that teachers can't afford not to be prepared. They need to be highly prepared for the contingencies of what could happen and have learning activities that anticipate the needs of the classroom culture.