Claxton’s 4 Rs

In his 2002 text Building Learning Power, Professor Guy Claxton proposed the idea of ‘4 Rs’ that are essential for effective learning.

·         Resilience: 'being ready, willing and able to lock on to learning'.

·         Resourcefulness: 'being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways'.

·         Reflection: 'being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning'.

·         Reciprocity: 'being ready, willing and able to learn alone and with others'.

Personally, I believe that Resilience is the most important element of learning. This is reinforced by research such as that of ex-teacher and psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth. Lee Duckworth studied public schools in Chicago and found some of the strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores and some of the smartest kids were not doing so well. It led her to conclude that doing well in school, and life, depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily. It depends on what she called ‘Grit’, or what Claxton called Resilience.

            Lee Duckworth asked thousands of high school students to take grit questionnaires, waited a year and then saw who graduated. She found ‘grittier’ kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when matched on things like family income, standardised test scores and how safe they felt at school. This begs the question: So how do we build grit at Biddulph High School? How do we instill a solid work ethic in our students? And how do we keep them motivated for the long run?

            Lee Duckworth’s data shows natural talent doesn’t make you ‘gritty’. In fact, data shows ‘grit’ is usually unrelated or inversely related to measures of talent. The best way to build ‘grit’ in students is something called ‘growth mindset’. This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Dr Carol Dweck. This the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed; it can change with your effort. Dr Dweck has shown that when kids learn that the brain grows in response to challenge, they are much more likely to persevere when they fail because they don’t believe that failure is a permanent condition. I like this idea so much that I have a ‘Growth Mindset’ poster as my desktop background and take every opportunity I get to remind students that their potential isn’t limited by their natural talent.