Other educational research Several other strands of research have strongly influenced the development of Building Learning Power. Here we note just a few of them. Professor Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has significantly advanced our understanding of creativity and creative learning. His concept of flow, a state of focused attention in which one is wholly engaged in learning and…
… it doesn’t matter how experienced we are, we all entered uncharted waters as we welcomed our students back to school. As one Head Teacher has put it: So, where do we start when our students are in so many different places mentally? What might help teachers and students to navigate and inform…
Last week’s blog went behind the scenes in Ms Mann’s Year 6 maths lesson and captured her working her learning power magic. But Ms Mann is not alone – all the teachers in her school are pursuing the same aim: to build better learners. As their website declares:- “At St Herbert’s we have adopted Building…
I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days last week at a new free school in London that accepted its first intake (120 year 7 students) last September. Having previously spent two days working with the newly appointed staff in June, I was keen to see how their vision was taking shape. The…
When I talk to students about the types of lessons they enjoy, they invariably mention lessons where they are ‘active’. For them, active means playing sport in P/E, or acting in Drama, or doing an experiment in Science, or making something in D&T, etc. Dig further, and what they mean by active learning is that…
There is much talk of the flipped classroom and of flipped learning – some of you may have attended FlipCon UK this week (Twitter was positively alive with it!). The terms, which are frequently used interchangeably, concern, at a basic level, what would have otherwise been covered in class being covered at home and in…
It was interesting to read The Chief Inspector of Schools referring to Key Stage 3 as the Wasted Years in his address to the ASCL conference on Friday. For many years, Y8 – usually the second year of secondary education – has been called the dip year; when learners’ initial enthusiasm for their new teachers and varied…
World Book Day: at once a wonderful innovation to encourage enthusiasm about books amongst children and parents…. and a busy parent’s last-minute nightmare! It is Wednesday 2 March, midday, and whilst idly surfing facebook ahem doing important social media research, I notice that World Book Day is less than 24 hours away. A slight sweat…
The Early Years curriculum, mercifully lacking too much ‘stuff they need to know’, has long focussed on developing positive attitudes to learning through a blend of play and adult-led learning. These ‘positive attitudes’ have now been named the Characteristics of Effective Learning, a section of the EYFS that is too frequently overlooked as it runs…
How do pupils get better at learning? The idea of building pupils’ learning power has been around for several years now and hundreds of schools proclaim on their website that their school is using the ideas to enable their children to learn better. One of those three powerful words….Building Learning Power…. is the word ‘Building’. It is…
Molly Coffey – a recent A-level student at Landau Forte College, Derby – talks about her experience of Building Learning Power in school and how it helped her learn more effectively. Big thanks to Molly for making this video.
It’s not every day you get to listen to an internationally renowned professor, learn about a highly significant research project, and laugh till your sides split at the tales of a Bradford headteacher. These three elements threaded their way through a special day for schools in the western shadow of the Pennines. The North-west is…
We are built to learn by imitation. Evolution has equipped us with brains that are designed from the moment of birth to do what people around us are doing. When a baby sees you make a fist or a smile the neurons in her brain make her ready to do the same thing. It’s through this…
Published by Oneworld, August 2008 The main arguments of the book Teacher in inner-city school: ‘Adele, how many legs does a grasshopper have?’ Adele: ‘Oh man, I wish I had your problems.’ Education is, above all, a preparation for life. That means: helping to give all young people the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and values they…
And so the school summer holidays reach their tipping point: heads return to their offices in readiness for the examination results and the ubiquitous Back to School signs appear in all retail outlets. The countdown begins and late summer distractions are welcome before the onset of the new year’s anxieties and opportunities hold sway. Notwithstanding…
There are many changes, pressures, dissatisfactions and opportunities that are leading thousands of people around the world to ask the kinds of hard questions out of which philosophies and approaches like BLP have sprung. The economic imperative Education is often justified – by governments and others – as an investment in national competitiveness and prosperity, producing a workforce that…
BLP has a clear social, moral and philosophical rationale. It puts at the heart of education the development of psychological characteristics that are judged to be of the highest value to young people growing up in a turbulent and demanding world. And it has a robust scientific rationale for suggesting what some of these characteristics…
Building Learning Power is about: Helping young people become better learners Developing their portable learning power Preparing young people for a lifetime of learning What is BLP based on? An extensive body of research into learning and the brain Recent research into the key dimensions of learning power Practical trials in schools across the country…
