My own primary education took place in an environment that was heavily influenced by the 1967 Plowden Report. Plowden’s committee favoured a more child-centred education, starting from the premise that “at the heart of the educational process lies the child’, rather than curriculum, exams or data. These days are long gone, but it is worth revisiting the report’s view that

“One of the main educational tasks of the primary school is to build on and strengthen children’s intrinsic interest in learning and lead them to learn for themselves.”

For the last couple of years of my primary school, one afternoon a week was given over to topic work, in which we would each choose a topic of our own to work on. I recall teaching myself about tea, local history, and, er, gambling. The process was more important than the content - this was the start of a life-long love of libraries, and of the realisation that I could teach myself (almost) anything. I doubt there would be many schools willing to take the risk of giving 10% of curriculum time to pupil-led learning, but some do. It’s more common in nursery and reception than further up the school, but this comes back in the sixth form, with A Level coursework and EPQs. There’s even a distant echo of Plowden’s vision in Teachers’ Standard 4, which requires all teachers to “promote a love of learning and children’s intellectual curiosity.”

This sort of independent learning is one way that pupils can move on from cheating with AI to use it actually to help with learning. The World Wide Web remains an amazing tool for a literate, connected and critical self-motivated learner, but it’s not that different from learning in a library. The AI chatbots change this - they provide an interactive style of learning, close to personal tutoring. A teenager who asks Chat GPT to teach them about something can do more than read content: they can enter into a dialogue, asking follow-up questions, as well as answering the AI’s own questions. I’m impressed by the approach Sal Khan has taken with the Khanmigo, but much of this is available through the general purpose tools such as Chat GPT, Gemini and Claude. Not all pupils are curious enough to make use of these things themselves, but this is where schools should do so much more: empowering and motivating pupils to learn things for themselves, rather than just listening attentively to what is taught. How might we do this? Here are three practical suggestions:

Shift the focus from theory and problems to projects. We shouldn’t lose the underpinning theory of computer science or a problem-based approach, but I’d love to see much more project work happening. With younger learners, MIT’s OctoStudio and Scratch offer so much scope for pupils to create their own games and animations, far richer in scope and content to what’s in primary schemes of work. It’s inspiring to see what young people have made in Scratch via its community site. Sometimes their code is a little “smelly’, but this seems a small price to pay for the evident enthusiasm and tenacity. This is harder with text-based programming, and step-by-step tutorials or toy problems don’t quite capture the magic of independent project work. Perhaps the trick is finding the right tool or platform? For older pupils interested in music, Ear Sketch and Sonic Pi might work; I’m a huge fan of P5.js for creating interactive, visual art, and am very pleased to see that the Python equivalent is supported by Raspberry Pi’s new, online editor; for gamers, Pygame is OK as a starting point, but PC based Unreal Engine for Fortnite looks amazing. There’s much more to computing than coding - and that media-based projects can be just as powerful a way in to independent learning.

Tinkering. Deliberately encourage pupils to experiment, explore and play with code, digital media and technology more generally. When introducing example programs, wait a while before going through them step by step, rather encourage pupils to figure this out for themselves, by reading the code, running it and then, crucially, through editing it to see how changes they make affect what it does. You can take a similar approach to media tools: you don’t have to demonstrate all the formats and filters yourself, and having pupils play with these helps build their curiosity. Scratch is a great source for examples - when young people share their work on Scratch, it’s under an open licence which encourages others to remix this code. Older pupils might start experimenting with open source code shared on Git Hub. Many who have gone on to do amazing things in and with tech share this willingness to tinker: to take an experimental approach to figuring out both how something works and what they can do with it. This is also a great strategy for debugging: there’s more to this than just making changes until something works, rather it’s about thinking through what might be causing the problem and then trying a fix for that.

Use questions to encourage curiosity. Think about how you use questions in your lessons: are these all about retrieval or checking for pupils’ understanding? Or are you using them to get pupils thinking more deeply or more critically about things? From time to time, use questions to show your own curiosity. Make use of open questions, particularly if there are many possible answers. Harpaz and Lepstein describe fertile’ questions as open, undermining, rich, connected, charged and practical. Fertile questions are great starting points for class discussion and some independent reading, as well as good preparation for longer exam questions. Once pupils are used to working with questions like this, they can come up with their own examples too. Make time in your lessons for pupils to ask questions: you’re teaching a fascinating subject, about which many of your pupils are eager to learn more. Don’t be afraid of admitting if you don’t know: model how you might find out, bounce their questions back to the class, and follow up in a later lesson after you, and they, have had time to investigate.

Bringing out pupils’ curiosity in class will make lessons more engaging, but it also motivates independent learning, and equips pupils very well to make the most of all that AI now offers.

Originally published by ICT for Education in Sapientia 6, October 2024