Primary school programme – overview
Building Better Learners
Building Better Learners is TLO’s professional development programme for primary schools looking to embed learning power into their school life as a strategic development.
Building Better Learners is designed for whole-school implementation, with the aim of helping the school become fully ‘learning powered’. A school will typically take two to three years to work through the full programme; although some schools spread the programme over a longer period. So this is definitely a strategic investment in professional development and school improvement.
The major part of the programme is based on a suite of online materials, designed to blend with teachers’ daily practice and regular professional development. This can be supplemented by a small number of live interactive online sessions led by TLO’s Principal Consultants.
REMOVE DIAGRAM
Building Better Learners: Phase 1 (Engaging)
Core Programme
The programme in Phase 1 is designed around a model of professional development based on professional learning teams. Essentially, groups of six to eight teachers who meet regularly, every four to six weeks, to focus exclusively on developing their practice with learning power, as they move through the programme together.
Major Components of the programme
The Building Better Learners programme is structured in two phases.
Phase 1 is an online course Building Powerful Learners .This eight unit course enables teachers to:
- explore how learners might become not just better learners but effective lifelong learners;
- engage their learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.
The programme combines three types of action to enable teachers to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become skilled in developing their students’ learning power.
1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types;
- Essential Read …essential must read text.
- Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when they can.
2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help teachers discover and analyse essential information
3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for teachers to try, check and perfect in their classroom
This is complemented by an online resource for school leaders:
- Leading Building Powerful Learners supports the school leaders who will be responsible for the programme as it unfolds, including preparing to launch the programme in the school.
As preparation for the course, and indeed the whole programme, there is a choice of three ways of launching it.
- In-school launch by TLO trainers, typically a full school-closure day.
- ‘Zoom-assisted’ launch: this includes a small number of live virtual consultancy and training sessions, for both leadership staff and general teaching staff. Sessions are typically scheduled to last 60–90 minutes.
- ‘Do It Yourself’: In school launch led by senior leaders using the comprehensive launch-related resources provided within Leading the Learning Power Game.
Building Better Learners: Phase 2
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.
Supporting Resources
Both phases of the core programme can be optionally augmented by further live virtual consultancy sessions, typically scheduled to last 60–90 minutes, and with associated resources.
Other items that may be helpful include the online BLP Activity Banks; the downloadable Learning Habits at a Glance cards; books and classroom posters. Information about all these can be found in the Publications section of the website.
In particular, a standard but optional starter pack of printed publications — books, posters, etc. — is offered with Phase 1 of Building Better Learners.
Schools that have taken building better learning seriously have quickly realised the centrality of professional development in making it work.
Changing the habits of a professional lifetime is not simple. It involves un-learning and re-learning: unpicking, readjusting, trying things out and seeing what works. It’s about staff using their own learning power to effect changes in themselves. Becoming proficient, and then developing further so that the ‘new approach’ becomes second nature, takes time and effort.
Find out more:
You can find more extended description and discussion of the programme’s what and why by clicking the button. There is quite a lot of material, but it is intended to be easy to browse or skip around according to what interests you.
Introduction to Building Better LearnersUPDATE
More detailed descriptions of the programme’s components can be found via the buttons below:
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