The page below offers a closer look at the learning power behaviours and their relationship to the curriculum purpose of developing Ambitious Capable Learners.
Which learning behaviours best support Ambitious, Capable Learners?
Building ambitious learners (Perseverance): having a realistic and achievable life plan; pursuing self-generated goals with tenacity; reaching high, self-imposed standards through focused effort; relishing and rising to challenge and difficulty.
Building Meaning (Making Links): Seeing connections between disparate events and experiences – building patterns – weaving a web of understanding across subjects and ways of working.
Building curious learners (Questioning): motivated by asking questions of themselves and others, being curious and playful with ideas – delving beneath the surface of things. Exploring possibilities and asking what if… Skilled at finding things out for themselves.
Building critical thinking (Reasoning): using logical and rational skills to solve problems methodically and rigorously: constructing good arguments and spotting the flaws in others; listening attentively to understand what is being said and listening critically to evaluate the quality of others’ ideas.
Building creative thinking (Imagining): using imagination and intuition to explore possibilities playfully; looking at things in different ways; able to devise new ways of understanding and explaining information; producing original, novel and inventive ways to communicate ideas.
Building effective communicators (Empathy): understanding others; putting themselves in other people’s shoes, so that they can communicate effectively with a variety of audiences.
Building strategic learning skills (Distilling): understanding what is and what is not important or of value; able to summarise and paraphrase to draw out salient features and to separate key points from underlying detail; able to carry key ideas forward to aid further learning.
The Donaldson report, Successful Futures, recommends that the ‘wider skills’ of critical thinking and problem solving, planning and organising, creativity and innovation, and personal effectiveness be built into the curriculum at all phases, not only at Key Stage 4 as was previously the case.
The key ‘wider skills’ that underpin Ambitious and Capable learning are
- critical thinking and problem solving – marshalling critical and logical processes to analyse and understand situations and develop responses and solutions
- planning and organising – implementing solutions and executing ideas and monitoring and reflecting on results.
Questions you might want to ask
Something to think about . . .
In summary: To attain this view of ambitious and capable learning, students need to be interested in, enthusiastic about and persistent in learning, taking responsibility for it, be informed and understand how things fit together, and be able to explain their thinking to others.
- Do you agree that this short paragraph captures the essence of an Ambitious, Capable Learner as defined in Successful Futures?
- If not, what would you add or subtract?
- Using our definition, or yours, what proportion of your students are like this?
- Does this vary by year group ? By gender ? By perceived ‘ability’?
- Do you think that students who attain highly are, by definition, Ambitious and Capable?
- Or is it the other way round, that students attain highly because they are Ambitious and Capable ?
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