OXFORD UNIVERSITY CENTRE FOR EDUCATIONAL ASSESSMENT Annual Lecture Tuesday 12th May 2015, 5.00 pm followed by drinks reception Tsuzuki Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College What kind of learning do we want? 21st century learning, the standards agenda and expert learners There is an international policy rhetoric about the need for 21st century learning. In this the learner is seen as flexible, self-regulating and able to work collaboratively to solve problems - the skills needed to meet the demands of an ever-changing labour market. At the same time we have standards and accountability agendas which define learning in relation to performance by unaided individuals on conventional tests. These tensions are explored and a different model is offered, that of the expert learner. What do we know about how top performers across a wide range of domains have become such experts? There is a substantial expertise research tradition, based on an apprenticeship model, which has remained largely independent of educational thinking. Why has there been so little interaction and what are the main findings about expert learning? These findings are then applied to classroom teaching and learning. How can we help students move from being novices to proficient apprentices to experts in a domain? I draw on examples from The Expert Learner (2014) to illustrate how this might be achieved. Professor Gordon Stobart is Emeritus Professor of Education, UCL Institute of Education, and Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University. He trained and worked as a secondary school teacher for eight years before working in schools as an educational psychologist. He then spent twenty years as a senior researcher in policy-related environments, firstly as head of research at an examination board, then at government education agencies, before moving to the Institute of Education,. Much of his recent assessment work has, as a founder member of the Assessment Reform Group, involved promoting formative assessment as part of improving teaching and learning. His current work is on how experts learn and the implications for classroom teaching and learning. His most recent book is The Expert Learner: Challenging the myth of ability (2014, OUP/McGraw-Hill). He is a former editor of the international journal Assessment in Education: Principles, policy & practice and author of Testing times: The uses and abuses of assessment. To register your interest, please email [email protected]