Building Better Learners: Phase 2

Online course: The Professional Learning Power Game

The Professional Learning Power Game is the core of the second phase of Building Better Learners. It consists of thirteen online units, each expected to take about four to six weeks to implement in classrooms, using the professional learning team model.

The units are:

• Putting Perseverance into learning
• Putting Questioning into learning
• Putting Collaboration into learning
• Putting Revising into learning
• Putting Making Links into learning
• Putting Imagining into learning
• Putting Reasoning into learning
• Putting Capitalising into learning
• Putting Listening into learning
• Putting Planning into learning
• Putting Noticing into learning
• Putting Me Learning (meta learning) into learning
• Reviewing our progress

Each of these except the last explores one key learning behaviour: how to develop and grow it over time.

The final unit provides teachers and the school with ways of assessing the progress made to date. It can be used at times chosen by the team, or perhaps the school, throughout the programme; it is not intended to be left until the very end! See also Reviewing Learning below.

The units can be undertaken in any order.

• A team might start with those learning behaviours that fit particularly snugly with their subjects or curriculum topics before extending the range of behaviours as they gain confidence;
• Or they may all choose to focus on an area of common concern before moving on to considering subject-friendly ones;
• A confident team might choose a learning behaviour that seems at first blush to be a distant fit with their subject area — this can be a stimulating creative challenge;
• A unit can be revisited, perhaps as a refresher or to explore at greater depth.

Unit structure

Each unit follows the same form, divided into four sections.

Three individual teacher sections

Teachers work their way through the materials at a time and place to suit them. Each section will usually take about 45 – 60 minutes to work through and think about. The materials introduce new thinking and practical ideas for staff to get their heads around prior to their team session.

A Professional Learning Team meeting section

This brings staff together as a learning team at monthly intervals (typically six to eight staff per team), convened and led by a learning champion from your school. Staff share and discuss how they have moved their practice to incorporate learning behaviours, consider new material introduced in the individual online learning sections, and plan their learning enquiries to be implemented in the next month. Each team session is planned to last about an hour to 75 minutes.

Each unit is accompanied by a Learning Diary. This helps participants to distil important messages, home in on key pieces of information, and design learning experiments specifically for their pupils.

You can find fuller descriptions of one typical learning-behaviour unit and the progress-review unit via the buttons:

Online resource: Finding Learning Power

Finding Learning Power continues as a resource that sits alongside the course, helping teachers to watch and record their students’ developing learning power.

Online resource: Reviewing Learning

The Reviewing Learning online resource is a substantial compendium of evaluative resources which sits outside the course. It is made up of a rich array of assessment and evaluation tools that can be used by schools or teams or individual teachers or students themselves. It describes how, why, where and when you might use such resources, and includes issues such as learning culture, dual focused lessons, coaching.