Building Powerful Learners

The course starts not in the classroom but in looking at the learning mind and how we learn. Unit 1 introduces The Supple Learning Mind framework which classifies the learning behaviours identified by research. The framework illustrates that learning isn’t just about having a good memory but involves how we feel, how we think, how we learn with others and how we manage the process of learning (meta-learning)

Unit 1 engages staff in:

• looking at their own learning habits;
• considering the learning behaviours of their students;
• exploring with their class what they think good learners do;
• trying out activities that specifically engage various aspects of learning;
• monitoring which type of learning behaviours are being used most and least across several weeks.
• a structured team meeting to share and build understanding.

Unit 2 takes a closer look at teaching and the role of the teacher in a learning focused classroom. How do teachers need to behave in order to enable their students to become good learners? How this endeavour affects the culture of the classroom; how teachers relate to students; how they talk to students about learning; how they structure learning activities, and how they celebrate learning.

Unit 2 engages staff in:

• exploring their learning culture now;
• recognising the features of a learning culture; its relationships, the talk, the lesson design, the celebration;
• trying out activities designed to enhance student’s perseverance, questioning, collaboration and revising;
• monitoring their development and rating how the classroom learning culture is shifting;
• a structured team meeting where teachers share and build their understanding.

In Unit 3 we look at how learning habits grow, what the growth journey looks like in different learning behaviours and different learners. This initial course concentrates on four key learning behaviours, one from each learning domain. From the Emotional domain – Persevering, from the Cognitive domain– Questioning, from the Social domain– Collaborating, and from the Strategic domain– Revising. The foundational four.

Unit 3 engages staff in:

• discovering the stages of learning power growth;
• developing their own learning growth profile for the four behaviours;
• developing a variety of student learning behaviour profiles;
• recognising how their students differ in their progression in learning behaviours;
• experimenting with activities designed to strengthen learning behaviours;
• a structured team meeting to share understanding about student’s learning behaviours.

In Units 4, 5, 6 & 7 teachers are invited to explore each of the 4 key learning behaviours – Persevering, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising respectively – through the lens of the 4 aspects of classroom culture – how they relate and talk to students, and how they construct learning activities and celebrate learning.

In each unit, they:

• learn more about each of the foundational learning behaviours;
• discover how confident their students are in each of the four behaviours;
• consider how they could embed the learning behaviour into their teaching;
• think about things they should stop and start doing to create a classroom culture within which the learning behaviour might flourish;
• attend four structured team meetings to share experience and build understanding.

In Unit 8 teachers are invited to assess and analyse their actions, their understandings and their possible ways forward.

• Section 1 invites teachers to look back over the past few months and to evaluate the impact of:
  • what they have learned;
  • the ideas that they have tried out;
  • how these changes have impacted on their students’ learning behaviours.
• Section 2 distils the key messages for teaching and classroom culture and explores what teachers might do next to consolidate the positive changes they have already made.
• Section 3 signposts the way ahead and opens up further possible avenues of enquiry.

At this point there are a number of different routes open to schools in phase 2 of the journey.

• The formative work of finding out about your students’ learning behaviours.
• The practical work of shifting classroom culture to better accommodate learning behaviours, using 4 foundational behaviours to get you started
• The fine grained work of purposefully blending the use of learning behaviours into lesson design, again focusing on just four behaviours
• The blending work of gradually adding more of the original charted learning behaviours into the mix.

The programme is a careful blend of:

1. online learning sessions….that faithfully disseminate the researched content about how to build more powerful learners
2. professional learning team sessions ……actioned by the school that aim to provide sustained, meaningful assistance; learning with and from colleagues
3. trying things out for yourselves in your classrooms……because “learning by doing” is integral to the development of expertise which can only be developed if you have ample opportunity for practice, reflection, and adjustment.

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

The course introduces the holistic ideas of learning power and our experience suggests that it’s best to select one key disposition from each domain of learning; Questioning from the Cognitive domain, Collaboration from the Social domain  Perseverance from the Emotional domain, and revising from the Strategic domain; these we know as the foundational four.

Why start with these four dispositions?

• Perseverance because teachers find that it’s the disposition to keep going, to remain engaged, to relish challenge and go for goals that’s most lacking in many students.
• Questioning because this is the driver of learning; wanting to know why, how, if, when and so forth connects us with learning.
• Collaboration because ‘working together’ is a familiar classroom activity and yet few students know how best to learn profitably together.
• Revising because learning is a process and like any process it needs managing and adapting to work really well. This foundational set of four offer the soil in which other dispositions can take root more easily.

To enable these dispositions to flourish the course also introduces the four essential aspects of classroom culture: how teachers relate to students to support learning; how teachers talk to students to enable learning; how teachers construct lessons to stretch learning and how teachers celebrate to nurture students’ learning power.

“Instead of simply dishing out more good advice to students-as-consumers, classrooms are becoming places of day-by-day knowledge generation about learning”

This accompanying resource takes a leadership perspective and offers a view of the strategic concerns that will arise when the school takes on ‘Building Powerful Learners‘. It offers questions, think pieces, frameworks, slide decks and diagrams to help leaders;

• feel reassured about the purpose, benefits and frameworks of learning power
• explore important leadership roles when taking on the development of Learning Power through the school
• maintain momentum into the future
• understand ways forward beyond this initial stages

Analysing the costs and benefits of staff development involves identifying as many of the costs as possible and weighing these against the benefits that will mount up over time. The purpose is to be able to make judgements about value for money: that is to ascertain whether staff development has been an investment with identifiable benefits, or a cost which represents an inefficient use of resources.

Costs. The majority are relatively easy to calculate in financial terms. They include course fees, replacement costs, travel, manager time, disruption to teaching, staff meeting time/directed time…and so on.

Benefits. Here we’ve considered the benefits of staff development at three levels because they mount up over time: staff learning, changes in practice on the job, benefits for students.The full benefits of this programme will take time to emerge but describing them enables you to value the benefits of staff development.

Some of the learning behaviours are more critical for success in some subjects than others, while others are critical for success across the curriculum.

Teachers are encouraged to widen their reach by, for example…

• …looking at those behaviours that apply more generally and are linked to students’ attention...perseverance, noticing, listening, revising. These alone may account for any under performance.
• looking more deeply into questioning. More curious students are motivated to explore and engage, whereas a student who is lacking curiosity has little enthusiasm for learning.
• remembering that it’s well-researched that students with well-developed meta-cognitive skills attain more highly than those who don’t. So maybe think hard about exploring meta learning.
• selecting two or three behaviours that seem most appropriate to work on.