A big part of parenthood is attributing your children’s faults and annoying habits to your partner’s genetics. When my eldest son has a major breakdown after losing on Super Smash Bros and he flees the room in a rage, I like to remind my wife of when she did the same after a card game loss to my slightly startled parents.
But my children’s restlessness, their inability to focus, their need to occupy every limb in order to control the itch to fidget - these bits of my kids, I admit that’s all me. I doodle, shake my leg, drum my fingers in complex rhythms. I can’t sit still, I hate being inside for long periods. I am a pain to live with. And I found concentrating in school very difficult, too.
So the fact that more and more people are now talking about the benefits of movement to learning is obviously catching my (usually wayward) attention - for the potential benefits for my kids, more than for me.
Exploring new areas of education research
For example, this week, developmental psychologist Josie Booth told a Scottish Parliament committee that we need to move away from seeing physical activity and classroom lessons as separate, and that innovative teachers were combining the two rather than “compartmentalising”.
Meanwhile, the idea of “embodied cognition” may have been around for some time, but it is now being discussed much more frequently in relation to education - Tes covered it back in 2019 in a podcast and since then we have seen several interesting blog posts on it via social media.
No one is calling for a need to teach history through dance (unless that is your thing), nor is this about a return to the widely discredited Brain Gym. Rather, it’s simply about having a greater recognition of the role of the body in learning and thinking about how that might play out in the classroom. To me, that seems a sensible area to explore.
The research world shedding a chink of light on to this personal problem made me wonder how many children today are still struggling with challenges that have solutions out there waiting to be discovered by teachers - but that are just out of reach of the evidence-informed educator’s gaze.
It’s something Harry Fletcher-Wood also ponders this week in his compelling explanation of the untapped value of behavioural science to education. He believes the field of research hasn’t found a home in education because it - and much else - has been crowded out by the domination of cognitive science research.
“A potential reason why behavioural science hasn’t yet taken off in education may be that the meteoric rise of cognitive science has left little space for educators to focus on other types of research,” Fletcher-Wood explains.
It’s an argument that others have been making, too. Developmental psychology has been championed for some time in EYFS, but proponents claim it has largely been ignored by policymakers and, thus, it has not made any meaningful incursion into primary and secondary classrooms. Meanwhile, economists have had a hard time making in-roads into education, too, because the monetisation of education is, to many, distasteful. Sociologists, neuroscientists and more have struggled to gain recognition as well.
Spreading our evidence-based wings
Like Fletcher-Wood, I believe the CogSci revolution of education has been mostly positive. One of the joys of my time at Tes has been watching the profession read, challenge and translate the research of the cognitive science discipline. But its omnipresence, as Fletcher Wood says, means other, broader investigations and translations have had little time to bud and grow in the majority of schools. Maybe now is the moment for that to happen?
Yes, that can lead to blind alleys and dead ends, but we would be foolish to write this off as time “wasted”. The more we broaden the choice of paths we take (if done sensibly, of course), the more becomes available to us - a new perspective, a new appreciation, a new thought entirely can emerge.
To enable this to happen, we would need more of a culture of experimentation in education, one propagated at a leadership and a policy level. Teachers need to be given time to explore. Because of the high-stakes nature of teaching, a laser focus on known knowns is inevitable, but if we were to allow a little more fidgeting in the world of ideas, I believe we would reap benefits for pupils and also show that we trust teachers a lot more than we seem to do currently.
Jon Severs is the editor of Tes. He tweets @jon_severs
