Building Learning Habits Plus, Advanced Organiser (pre day 1)

Please undertake the following in advance of meeting with your Building Learning Power facilitator on the first face-to-face session.

The Learning Journey

Building your students’ learning power is far from a quick fix. It will take time to accomplish, possibly 3 or 4 years to really embed the underlying philosophy into classrooms. Changes will need to be made at whole-school level to create the conditions within which teachers can make adjustments to their teaching habits so that students’ learning behaviours may flourish.

• Phase 1 of this change process – Making a Start – should take around a year to address, is driven by the programme you are about to embark upon – Building Learning Habits Plus.
• Phase 1 involves two face-to-face days with the school’s selected ‘learning champions’ to get the programme up and running, with ongoing online support thereafter to enable the champions to engage others in the process.
• Phase 2 – Moving beyond the basics – should take a further year to complete, as should Phase 3 – Broadening the Scope. Both phase 2 and phase 3 involve one further face-to-face day for champions and ongoing online materials to support the development of learning power.

Why do schools need to change ?

You will probably have heard the story of the boiling frog:

A frog, dropped into a pot of hot water, will instinctively jump out because of the heat.

A frog, dropped into cool water, will happily remain in the water. However, if the water is slowly heated, the frog remains in the water until boiled, oblivious to the minute changes in temperature.

To what extent have we, as a profession, become boiled frogs ? The cumulative, unnoticed effect of small changes eventually leading us to a place that we do not really like?

Read chapter one of our book, The Learning Powered School, which explores why schools have to change.

Review point. Having read the chapter,

• What is the one thing that Excites you about this change ?
• What is the one thing that Worries you about this change ?
• What is the one thing you still Need to find out about this change ?
• What Suggestions do you have as to what to do next ?

Please bring your thoughts on this to day 1.

What do highly effective learners actually do ?

When you ask teachers what highly effective teaching looks like, they generally answer with assurance. There is a shared, professional language for discussing the teaching process that enables us to describe effectiveness with some precision. But what of the learning process? Why is there not a shared language for discussing learning within the profession?

To begin to understand the language used in Building Learning Power to describe effective learning, read the following extract The Learning Powered School