Our core Building Better Learners programme is guided by best practice thinking in professional development. It’s a blended learning programme with researched ‘how to’ information for each teacher online coupled with professional learning team meetings and classroom based enquiries. This rhythmic way of learning together organises a consistent school-wide approach to developing pupils’ learning behaviours.
Take a look at how our programme works and the scenic detours you can take.
About our Professional Learning teams approach
Tasters…helping you to decide if this is for you.
These resources are useful in their own right and will help you consider if the development of children’s learning character fits with your school’s vision, values and culture. Either of the two online taster resources will give teachers a feel for putting learning power into practice, although they are very different in scope. One takes a close look at the learning habit perseverance while the other briefly introduces teachers to the whole range of learning behaviours. Their role is to help staff to become aware, or re-aware, of the purpose and value of building pupils’ learning habits; what they mean, why they are important, how pupils respond and how they develop.
Narrowing the learning gaps
This resource takes a broad approach embracing the whole range of learning behaviours and enables teachers to develop profiles of their pupils as learners.
Narrowing the learning gaps offers a swift start for schools that are sympathetic to the aim of building better learners, but have no previous experience. It will also help reinvigorate teachers’ use of learning power, where it may have waned in the pandemic.
The resource lays out, in story form, a highly practical introduction to how schools might tackle some of the post pandemic questions around students’ performance and is based around two main pieces of content:
- a set of tools — ‘Learning Charts’ — revealing interesting and vital information about students’ learning; and
- an extensive ‘Catalogue of Ideas’ giving teachers lots of ways to develop their practice linke to their students’ stage of growth.
Re-energising your learners’ resilience
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e-energising your learners’ resilience is a school-wide online resource kit to help teachers revive and develop students’ emotional learning behaviours.
Learning is impossible without resilience: that tendency to be ready, willing and able to lock onto learning and research tells is that this behaviour has taken a big hit as a result of COVID lockdowns. Loss of resilience breeds a brittle and impatient attitude.
This resource is designed to help teachers to enable their students re-energise and secure those learning behaviours that contribute to being a Resilient learner.
A companion resource for school leaders Re-energising learning – support for leadership teams is designed to help senior leaders to support teachers to make the most of the resource.
Year 1: Engaging
Finding Learning Power
Finding Learning Power is resource, not a course. It has a central role throughout the programme helping staff make a serious analysis of their pupils learning behaviours and answering questions such as;
- What are your students like as learners…now?
- What sort of a learning character do they have?
- How does it change, can it be built/strengthened?
- Which learning behaviours do your students need to strengthen…now?
- Does learning character play any part in influencing the attainment of higher vs lower performing students?
These unusual yet vital and urgent questions form the stimulus for this resource and become the very basis for developing and strengthening them as learners. It offers teachers and the school:
- a manageable set of tools to enable them uncover, collect and analyse information about their students’ learning character;
- an outline of the research, value, makeup and growth of peoples’ learning character;
- a spreadsheet package to help schools monitor, evaluate and manage their students’ learning behaviour data.
These tools help the school discover and use a rich picture of their students’ learning behaviours, rather than simply attainment, to underpin their approach to helping them improve, develop or catch up on their learning.
This tool can be used frequently throughout the school’s journey but using it for the first time is likely to take about a month
A companion resource for school leaders Leading Finding Learning Power explains how the resource can be used and offers practical resources to help its introduction to staff. Alternatively TLO offers Zoom assisted sessions to introduce this resource to staff.
Take a closer look at;
- Section 1.3 – Up close and personal with learning of the resource to give you an idea of how it works. [ link but disable the downloads]
- Section – 3.3 Introducing Finding Learning Power showing how you might launch the resource with staff. [Brian link but disable downloads]
Playing the Learning Power Game
Playing the Learning Power Game is the first online content aspect of our blended learning programme. When blended with Professional Learning Teams and Classroom Based Enquiries its guaranteed to help the school achieve learning friendly classrooms and student awareness of their learning powers.
We’ve titled this course Playing the Learning Power Game because games can be used as a metaphor for learning anything and you tend to get better at anything if you treat it as a game.
This programme is about learning to play the familiar game of learning but with an additional ingredient of your students’ learning dispositions or powers. This subtle addition changes the game of education to one of building learning character at the same time as building knowledge. The programme explores guidelines and conventions that help to frame learning in ways that allow positive learning dispositions to flourish…setting up the game, getting to grips with some new rules and tactics and learning to appreciate how you score it’s all important new endgame…that of the self-managed learner.
It’s in this phase that teacher development really begins. The blended learning programme is designed to help leaders and teachers explore questions such as:
- Where do we start in making learning power a practical reality in the school?
- What are the key learning behaviours really about; how might we explain them to students; how do we help them to progress?
- What’s the best way to get a learning language going across the school?
- How can we create learning friendly classrooms where learning behaviours can be surfaced and developed?
- How might we celebrate the development of learning habits.
Take a closer look at;
The big picture of Playing the Learning Power Game ( link to Unit page section 1 including toggle box)
How Playing the Learning Power Game is structured ( link to Unit page section 2 including toggle box)
A companion resource for school leaders Leading the Learning Power Game designed to take a leadership perspective on developing students’ learning power, giving leaders a glimpse of the strategic concerns that will arise.
Take a closer look at;
A big overview of this resource [ link to section 1
For some tips on leadership strategies { section 4 Leadership strategies of Leading the LP G (primary)]
Launching the programme in school
We offer three alternatives to making a start on Playing the Learning Power Game
DIY version
- A full pack of material includes Presentations, presentation notes, activity resources and resource book for staff.
ZOOM assisted version
TLO is able to provide an introduction to the programme for staff via;
- Session 1. 1.5 hrs The supple learning mind and collecting and analysing learning profiles.
- Session 2 1.5 hrs 3 weeks later. The learning friendly classroom.
- Session 3 1hr with senior leaders. Leading a learning powered school.
- Start times and dates to be discussed. Materials will be supplied by TLO.
In-school training day version
A TLO consultant can launch the programme in a full training day. Half day training for all staff (9.00 – 1.00), half day with senior leaders and learning champions who have been selected to lead the Professional Learning Teams as part of the blended learning programme.
Year 2: Establishing
Progressing the Learning Power Game
Progressing the Learning Power Game the ways of working established in phase 1 are continued in phase 2. The phase is made up of 12 modules which can be undertaken in any order by teams, but the rhythm of development remains consistent.
Having made a start on the foundational four learning behaviours, Perseverance, Collaboration, Questioning, Revising, and taken a swift venture into 8 more learning behaviours students will now be ready to engage more constructively in their learning. In this phase learners will broaden their learning repertoire to build a complete learning toolkit, and consequently teachers will broaden the range and depth of behaviours used in lessons.
At the heart of Progressing the Learning Power Game lies a deeper concept of progression in learning behaviours. What does ‘getting better’ look like when fleshed out a bit? It is the focus on a broader sense of progression for the wider group of learning behaviours that makes this next phase of the programme so fascinating and worthwhile.
The narrative of each learning behaviour expands as the progression charts appear in far greater detail and the language of learning becomes more specific and more helpful. This enables learners to understand learning at a deeper level and ultimately to make plans for how they can become more effective learners as their skills and learning dispositions broaden and deepen.
Take a closer look at the structure of the modules
Link to section 9 topic 1b toggle box in Playing the Learning Power Game 2022 (FLP)
Take a look at the Perseverance module of this phase and notice how the learning progression chart is expanded. Link to Perseverance module.
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