Creating a Learning Powered School

How you learn changes over time and responds to the qualities of the learning environment, be that in the classroom culture, in the comfort of a home or in the workplace. As environmental circumstances change, they can have either a constructive or a destructive influence on developing, or ignoring, the potential of learning power.

As understanding of the nature of learning grew, building learning power formed as an approach to helping young people to help themselves become better learners. It went beyond the ideas of metacognition and self regulation by trying to build a child’s learning character…how they… approach, take part in, maintain interest in, make meaning from and reflect on…learning

It’s about creating a culture in classrooms that systematically cultivates a researched range of learning behaviours into learning habits; enabling students to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently, collaboratively and creatively.

Building Learning Power refocuses schools on preparing young people better for an uncertain future; to educate not just for exam results but for lifelong learning; to thrive in the increasingly turbulent twenty-first century. Students need to have learnt how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.

Vision

Building Better Learners is a carefully crafted whole school development programme for schools that want to ensure their students knowingly become better learners. It helps schools to prepare their students for a lifetime of learning, by:

• growing their independence as learners;
• ensuring they understand how they learn, and how they can get better at learning;
• empowering them to lead a productive lifetime of learning.

Heritage

The programme combines a rich research heritage from Carole Dweck, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Art Costa, Sir Ken Robinson, Dylan Wiliam, Chris Watkins, John Hattie and Guy Claxton, and unravels;

• The formative work of finding out about your students’ learning behaviours
• The practical work of shifting classroom cultures to better accommodate learning behaviours
• The fine grained work of purposefully blending the use of learning behaviours into lesson design
• The blending work of gradually adding more of the original researched learning behaviours into the mix.

Shape

The programme has two very different phases;

Phase 1 Building Powerful Learners. An introductory on-line programme that introduces the ‘what’ of the learning mind, the features of classroom learning cultures and the growth of learning behaviours. It goes on to explore practical ideas for developing four key learning behaviours; perseverance, questioning, collaboration and revising. It’s about establishing the approach across the school. See section 4 for more detail.

Phase 2 Expanding and deepening practice. An expansive, differentiated follow-on programme that you might view as a library. It offers a range of on-line courses and specialised resources which schools can mix and match to meet a wide variety of their specific needs across the school. See section 5 for more detail.

Developing teachers’ working practices is known to be hard and delicate work which needs support to ensure the ideas take root in classrooms. Our suggestions for staff development practice are heavily influenced by the work of Dylan Wiliam and EEF’s Effective Professional Development guidance report.

The programmes offer a careful blend of:

1. online learning units or resources that… are available at any time, faithfully present researched content, are broken into manageable chunks and encourage the use of prior knowledge;
2. learning team sessions that……are placed throughout the programme, provide a carefully structured agenda to ensure effective meetings, offer social support, act as a forum for affirming and reinforcing progress;
3. trying things out in classrooms where…teachers develop plans and monitor their actions because “learning by doing” is integral to the development of expertise.

This trio of learning opportunities work together to help teachers replace long-standing habituated practices with more effective ones.

Phase 1 is about making a confident start. Building Powerful Learners has 8 on-line units. Each unit takes a couple of hours to read and digest and offers a range of activities to try out in classrooms over about a month. All staff undertake the same units . It covers the essentials of developing powerful learners drawing on the Professional Learning Teams model.

1. The big picture of learning — reveals the “what” of learning itself.
2. The big picture of classroom culture — examines the “how” of a learning culture.
3. The big picture of progression in learning — explores what getting better at learning looks like.
4. Building the habit of Persevering — encourages building the “how” of perseverance.
5. Building the habit of Questioning — encourages developing the “how” of questioning.
6. Building the habit of Collaborating— encourages expanding the “how” of collaboration.
7. Building the habit of Revising — encourages accommodating the “how” of building revising.
8. Looking Back, and Moving Forward —reflects on changing practice and explores the possibilities of what next.

Press the button to find out more about the content for phase 1, Unit by Unit

Phase 2 is about both expanding and deepening the start made in Phase 1. This phase offers a selection of three different packages that can be used and re-used by all staff and/or groups of staff spread over a couple of years. You might choose to do one, more or all from:

Building the Scope – Expanding the range of learning behaviours being brought into play

• Access units introducing:
  • Absorption, Noticing, Making links, Reasoning, Imagining, Capitalising, Planning, Distilling, Meta learning, Empathy & Listening.

Building Depth – Deepening and securing teachers’ understanding of a learning -friendly classroom culture

• Access units that further develop:
  • Devolving responsibility for learning to students
  • Talking to deepen students’ understanding learning
  • Constructing lessons with learning in mind
  • Celebrating the growth of student learning behaviours.

Building Coherence – Developing two school-wide strategies

• Creating Students’ Learning Profiles
  • Enables schools to uncover, collect and analyse information about each of their students’ learning characters, and to use the outcomes to better understand how to support individual students to grow their learning power.
• Creating Curriculum and Lesson Plans
  • Explores more deeply the skill of integrating the use of learning behaviours into individual lessons and into the design of the curriculum.

The prospect and potential of taking on the initial Phase 1 Building Powerful Learners programme will inevitably raise all manner of important questions. There are strategic, leadership and management questions that deserve consideration before school leaders can make a reasoned decision about whether or how to implement Building Powerful Learners.

Here we outline the leadership considerations necessary for the successful implementation, namely: Shared Values; Skills; Staff; Systems; Structure; Style; and Strategy.

Take your time to reflect on all seven aspects – it is only when you address all seven that you will have laid the foundations of success.

1. Shared Values

How does Building Powerful Learners fit with our school’s ethos?

• Do the programme’s aims fit with the school’s vision and values?
• Does this fit well with our vision of the purposes of education?
• If our vision / mission statement does match, is our vision lived in the day to day life of the school, or is it more aspirational and indicative of a direction of travel?
• If our vision is at odds with Building Powerful Learners, do we need to open up a conversation about the core purposes of education?

If, at this stage, you feel that Building Powerful Learners may well be the way forward for your school, you’ll find the following six questions essential as the school moves towards implementation.

2. Skills

What sort of skills/competencies would the programme enhance:

• in our students?
• in our teachers?

3. Staff

How could we accommodate the Blended Learning staff development approach suggested?

• What’s the best way to organise this staff development model across the school?
• How will we achieve high levels of engagement with the programme?

4. Systems

How do we prevent it becoming a workload issue?

• What sort of time and effort will staff need to make?
• What changes to the school’s operations will need to be accommodated?
• How will we prevent Building Powerful Learners becoming a workload issue for teachers, support staff, the programme lead, and senior leaders?

5. Structure

Who will lead it and what accountability may be needed?

• Who will lead this change strategy and what accountability may be needed in the system?
• How will the programme leader keep senior leaders informed of developments?

6. Style

How are we going to support the programme?

• How will leaders create the conditions where teachers are encouraged to take risks, to try things out, to fail in safety?
• How will leaders demonstrate an ongoing interest in the enquiries that teachers are undertaking?

7. Strategy

How do we expect Building Powerful Learners to work? How will we create and agree a plan to pull all this together?

• Will this be a top-down ‘initiative’, or will we involve all staff in the forward planning?
• How will we keep the strategy ‘tight but loose’? – tight enough to create momentum and maintain sustained interest, yet sufficiently loose to flex and accommodate emerging needs as necessary.