Some primary schools occasionally involve children in extended periods of this kind of ‘manic creativity’, in which, for a few days, the normal curriculum is temporarily replaced by a frenzy of arts-based activity – composing, rehearsing, painting and cutting out – that culminates in an enthusiastically-received presentation to parents and others

1 Classrooms as communities, where the teacher is building a sense of community in which students are actively engaged and have a chance to shape the way things are organized.

2 Is there more I could do to help learners develop their ability (and inclination) to practise more effectively? Could I help students understand that every time they write, they are not just ‘doing it’ well or badly, but practising and experimenting with their writing?

Being able to escape from what Karl Duncker,13 in his series of experiments in the 1940s, famously referred to as ‘functional fixedness’ – the inability to see more than the most obvious or habitual affordances – has to become a key educational aim for a teacher who takes the idea of distributed intelligence seriously. As Luis Moll has put it, ‘A

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

In order to get the most out of our tools, we have to practise with them, and as we do so we discover more of what they can do, and become more adept at exploiting their potential.

What schools are set up to do depends on society's view of the world especially the world which it imagines its young people will inhabit when they are grown up – and on the difficulties, challenges and opportunities which it thinks that world will present. Those challenges are to do with national prosperity and security; social cohesion and equity

We use our intelligence to figure things out, and then we build tools that embody this intelligence, so we don’t have to do it all over again, every time we want to achieve the same goal.

cultivate the pattern-making