Realising that young people are influenced from many sides, guided learning seeks to involve parents, peers even role models from wider society in the motivation behind children’s learning.  For all this, the position of the teacher is still identified as being paramount.

I remember the message from my first theory lecture a teacher training college.  Be AN authority rather than IN authority.  Thus, under a guided learning pedagogy, the teacher is the person who can offer routes to students, suggest pathways that they might take rather than direct the down a well-trodden but not necessarily successful road.

That, at least, is the theory.  Under such conditions (goes the philosophy), young people become self-motivated, their learning makes sense and has relevance to both them and, crucially, their situation.  The wider community is involved creating a link between school and home.  At the heart of guided learning is the individual pupil, but the biggest artery feeding that heart is the teacher.

Just another trend, a toolkit to put on the shelf, a fad that will deliver little but cost a lot?  Or an innovative approach to education which will bring about huge improvements in the way our children learn?  Such is the debate over guided learning.

Like much that is new in education, this ‘ground-breaking’ approach has its pedagogical roots in the past.  Not that this means that guided learning is something that we should dismiss without due consideration.  Isn’t quality teaching about taking elements of this, bits of that and touches of the other to create a philosophy that works for us as teachers, and for our students in their particular settings? Briefly, guided learning works as follows.  The theory is that the student takes charge of their own learning.  In that respect, there is a nod to the child centred theories of the 1960s and 1970, ideas which sounded great on paper but forgot that the game is played on lino-floored classroom.  However, recognising that young people are not always in the best place to make rational decisions about what they need to learn, the theory goes a little further, employing a holistic approach to that guidance on offer.

Politics Once More in the Classroom Or is guided learning a politically driven philosophy?  An attempt to reduce the influence of the teacher to that as a facilitator, a supervisor who can simply direct students to the correct text book, the right video, the most appropriate online source?  Teacher as librarian rather than highly equipped and widely skilled professional?  Is it even more sinister than this?  Teacher as traffic cop, directing students along this road or that, occasionally stopping a crash from occurring.  The thing is, does the teacher becoming simply a kind of educational sat-nav open up opportunities for students to take charge of their own learning, or simply remove the need for that teacher, who can be replaced by a lesser qualified and hence cheaper alternative? The answer to those questions depends an enormous amount on individual feelings towards educational policy.

But let us try to remove politics from education.  There’s a thought.  Can guided learning become a beacon lighting young people towards educational enlightenment?  Its advocates, of course, say yes.  Cynical old classroom teachers will be doubtful, having faced years of new ideas which never receive the chance to be tested properly before the next ‘blueprint’ reaches the staff room.

A strong case can be made both ways.  In support of guided learning, surely anything that encourages students to take charge of their own acquisition of skills and knowledge must be a good thing?  Against it lies the weight of history.

Guided Learning – Theoretically Sound Theoretically, the concept of metacognition stands at the apex of learning theory, the top point of the top triangle in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Metacognition means that an individual student knows not only what they need to learn, but how to do it.  It is the ultimate stage of child centredness, it is the definitive point of independent learning.  Guided learning, when it works, will deliver metacognition to our students.

More than this, turning the teacher into a facilitator of pupil’s learning rather than the arbiter of it is immensely liberating.  We all know the thrill of supporting a student who is motivated, who has set their own challenges and who simply seeks a nudge in the right direction.  Those moments stand out in our professional minds.  They are the reason we entered teaching in the first place.

But, of course, they do not happen very often.  Because, let’s be honest, most students need to be taught, they will not teach themselves.  They need an imposed discipline, at least until they establish their own, and we all know that setting those standards means applying rules and, let’s be honest here, limitations regarding the freedoms our students are allowed.

Visions of Utopia Next, let us be realistic.  We can picture the philosophers and the failed classroom teachers with a zealous light in their eyes envisioning an environment where every student is engaged in their own learning, setting their own targets and tackling their own problems.  In this rose-tinted photograph the teacher dispenses advice – but not instruction – to the eager faces before her.  It is like one of those drawings of which school architects are so fond, that show a wonderful new building around which students walk in pairs, or gather in little groups to discuss Dickens or Brexit.  These panaceas contain no litter, no pupils hiding in corners, mobile phones to ears, no beating up a first year behind the bike sheds.

Schools rarely work in the way the educationalists would like.  But if they did, can we imagine a class of thirty, packed tight into a tiny classroom, each doing their own learned thing?  Consider the resources that would be needed, the IT infrastructure and the hardware.  What an investment would be needed.  Can we see it happening in cash strapped austerity Britain? So, in conclusion, I rather feel that guided learning is somewhat like most of the other bright new ideas imposed on teachers over recent years.  There are bits of it that are sound, and the underlying theory is good.  In practice, it will never work as intended.  The best schools and strongest teachers will read, absorb and adapt the theories in a way that adds another piece to the never completed jigsaw of educational success that they are building, piece by piece.

Consider guided learning, but don’t be bound by it.