a) Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, XXXX is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are inflexible and rule-bound in every circumstance, and equally few are reflective and adaptable in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these two extremes. The diagram alongside – Learning: Poles Apart – offers an outline view of the whole journey; building students’ emotional learning habits; building their cognitive/thinking habits; building their social learning habits and their ability to manage the process of their learning. The reluctant learner on the left and the learning powered learner on the right show the beginnings and ends of a long, exciting, but far from inevitable, learning journey.

b) Stages of growth in XXXX

The chart alongside offers a glimpse of how XXXX may grow, given the opportunity and encouragement. It is this scaling of the learning disposition that will help you make sense of the journey as you, and students, track, and influence, learners’ progress over time.

Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development.

Column 2 describes how the behaviours may look if they are enabled to grow over time,

Column 3 captures the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

c) What are the stages of growth based on?

We’ve borrowed ideas from Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Objectives of the Affective Domain to generate a very condensed version of the five main phases of growth, namely:

 1 ‘Lacks’ (grey) We have added this level where the behaviour is weak and the response is negative. This might translate into “I can’t or I won’t” in student self talk

2. Receiving. (purple)..which involves giving attention to something; becoming aware, not avoiding or rejecting it; being alert to something. This might translate to “Show me or Tell me” in student self talk

3. Responding. (blue)…which involves going beyond merely attending to actively attending; complying; taking more responsibility for and enjoyment in initiating action.This might translate to “I’ll try” in student self talk

4. Valuing. (green)..which involves accepting the worth of something; preferring something; being committed to the value of something.This might translate to “I see why” in student self talk

5. Organisation.(yellow)..which involves adding to, formulating and organising their values into how they live their life.This might translate to “I make sure” in student self talk

6. Embodies. (Characterisation in the original)(orange)…which involves behaving consistently in accordance with their values, living what they stand for.This might translate to “I can’t not do this” in student self talk

d) Where are your classes in relation to their levels of XXXX?

Level detail

In the ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are not necessarily aware of doing things well or differently. Once they get going on something they may change it but more for the joy of just doing it. Outcomes maybe rushed or lack finesse, but once completed there may be little interest in revisiting it or in any comments they are offered. External standards of what things might or should look/be like are not yet a feature of their world.

In the Receives (purple) phase, students begin to make checks on how they are doing against given criteria when prompted. They can talk about what they did and sometimes how. They rely on their teachers or parents to validate what they do/have done. So there’s a reliance on others to validate what they are doing.

In the Responds (blue) phase students have overcome a fear of mistakes and are more able and willing to monitor what they are doing. They begin to develop the idea of ‘good’ themselves and to understand why given standards are important. They respond positively to supportive feedback and talk reflectively about how they could improve with encouragement. They are now taking far more responsibility for their learning.

In the Values (green) phase, students understand the importance of keeping a close eye on progress in order to achieve high-quality outcomes that meet their goals. They see the point in making changes in the light of the original goal or external standard or internal feedback. They understand the need to learn from previous experiences and realise that learning is all about changing understandings; not just knowing stuff. In so doing they widen the scope of external validation. Once in the green phase they have taken responsibility for what they are doing because the recognise it as a ‘win’ for them.

In the Organises (yellow) phase revising has become a skilful habit; where revising itself raises more questions than answers. Yes, progress is kept under review but now students are bold enough question the original goal of the activity. They look more widely for validation and may well change to a more productive strategy or a different goal. They use critical feedback positively and are keen to look back on what and how they achieved, what they did in order to learn from the experience. They organise themselves to be like this. Revising has become a habit.

In the Embodies (orange) phase, students make ongoing checks and amends, and major rethinking, in order to meet their own, often more exacting, standards of achievement. Now they tend not to need the validation of others (marks, grades, exams, quality feedback) because their own critical sense of standards acts as their barometer. They adapt readily to changing circumstances and always reflect on what and how they have done something with the explicit intention of doing it better, more efficiently / differently in the future. Revising has become part of the character, they can’t not do it.

a) A learning classroom culture

Building students’ learning behaviours is about creating a culture in your classrooms – that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable your students to learn confidently and face difficulty calmly and creatively. By a ‘culture’ we mean all the little habits, routines and practices that implicitly convey ‘what we believe and value round here’.

So ‘culture’ concerns the details of the micro-climate that you create in your classrooms. What you do and say, what you notice and commend and what you don’t, what kind of role model of a learner you offer – all these are of the essence. The micro-climate of a classroom can inadvertently stifle, or specifically enhance, the very behaviours you are seeking to promote.

b) What sort of culture are you trying to create?

Bringing learning to the fore is to let students do more of it; to become more active in the learning process. Becoming more active learners involves offering them more opportunities to decide what to do, being given a chance to talk more and actively learn by reviewing their own experience. As students are given more responsibility for their own learning the role of the teacher changes from ‘the sage on the stage’ to ‘the guide by your side’.

What you are doing is developing students as meta-learners who become able to understand and grow themselves as learners.

c) Looking more closely at classroom culture

There are four specific ways in which teachers can create the classroom culture to build learning habits;

• strategies you could build into the way you teach to stimulate XXXX
• the sort of language you might use to stimulate XXXX
• ways in which you might celebrate / praise students’ use of XXXX
• actions you need to enable students to undertake to build their XXXX habits

d) A graphic summary

Here we’ve sketched a diagram to identify the prominent features of a classroom culture that’s geared towards growing students’ XXXX habits.

The 4 sections of the diagram are:

• Top – strategies you could build into the way you teach to stimulate XXXX;
• Right – indications of the sort of language you might use to stimulate XXXX;
• Bottom – ways in which you might celebrate / praise students’ use of XXXX;
• Left – actions that you need to enable students to undertake.

Apply your own attentive noticing skills and consider whether you already use any of these features and which you fancy trying.

In the panels below you will find brief explanations of some of the more unusual terms in the diagram.

d1) Strategies to build into the way you teach

Strategies at the top of the diagram… build into the way you teach to stimulate XXXX

1. Embed frequent review points encouraging students to view re-thinking as a part of learning
2. Give students opportunities to assess their own work against given / their own success criteria
3. Use VTR ‘I used to think’ . . to legitimise changes of mind
4. Deliberately create situations that require a change of mind
5. Encourage learners to monitor how things are going eg. Traffic lights

Visible Thinking Routines (VTR) are easily remembered routines that can be applied in wide range of circumstances. The routine ‘I used to think . . . But now I think’ is explored further in section 5 of this resource. To see more VTRs, go to the VTR website.

‘Traffic Lights’ is a classic AfL strategy – Green = it is fine, Amber = ok-ish, Red = it is going badly. Use it to encourage students to keep an eye on how things are progressing.

d2) The sort of language to stimulate revising

Strategies on the right of the diagram… to show the sort of language you might use to stimulate XXXX

1. Encourage phrases such as ‘ Do I think this activity is coming along well?
2. Focus feedback on what is needed to improve
3. Use ‘Could be’ language to stimulate learners to consider other possibilities / standpoints

Learning power is activated by the use of more tentative, could be kinds of language. Specifically, if you say definitively that something is the case, students frequently take it literally and try to remember it. But if you say, of the same thing, that it could be the case, they become more engaged, more thoughtful, more imaginative, and more critical. That ‘could be’ invites students to consider what else it could be, to consider alternatives.

d3) Ways of celebrating XXXX

Strategies at the bottom of the diagram… ways in which you might celebrate the use of XXXX.

1. Reward students for making improvements on their previous efforts using the ‘Editor’s Desk’
2. Display a good balance of completed work and annotated ‘work in progress’
3. Explore and celebrate different and alternative ways of doing things
4. Display annotated outcomes from different, successive stages of the learning process.

The ‘Editor’s Desk‘ is an area of the classroom that is reserved for re-crafting and making further improvements – not for ‘doing corrections!

The idea of displaying ‘work in progress’, annotated to illustrate the changes as the work is refined and improved, is in stark contrast to displaying the ‘finished article’. The former emphasises the processes involved in creating a good piece of work, whereas the latter focuses solely on the final product.

Both are explored further in section 5 of this resource.

d4) Actions you need to enable in students

Strategies on the left of the diagram…actions that you need to enable in students to boost XXXX.

1. View ‘corrections’ as an opportunity to improve further
2. Change tack if necessary
3. View change as a natural part of learning

By ‘change tack’, we mean being prepared to adopt a different approach when things are not going as well as expected. It requires students to monitor what they are doing as they go along, keep an eye on the end goal, and be sufficiently flexible to re-think a strategy that is not working.

e) What do you think?

• Which of the ‘build’ ideas (top) are already features of your teaching?
• Which of the ‘talk’ prompts (right) do you regularly use when talking about XXXX?
• Which of the ‘celebrate’ ideas (bottom) are already in evidence your classroom?
• Which of the ‘enable’ behaviours (left) are you intentionally enabling in your classroom?

Make a note of…

• Any ideas that look as if they might help your students to become better at XXXX.
• An idea that you want to start doing.
• An idea that interests you, but you are uncertain what it means or how you might do it.

a) About XXXX

The word Revising has unfortunate connotations with Revision [for a test]. What is meant here is being prepared to do things differently in light of feedback, to be adaptable, flexible and open to change.

However well prepared learners are, they have to expect the unexpected. They have to have the readiness to revise / refine as they go along. Good learners are able to change their plans and think on their feet. They are able to be flexible. It may be a good decision to say ‘This is turning out to be far harder than I thought, and I’m getting less help than I imagined, and there are other interesting possibilities opening up, so I think I’ll cut my losses and quit.’ Note that the decision is based on a realistic cost-benefit analysis of the actual situation, not on frustration, pique or a blow to self-esteem.

To be effective at revising, learners need to monitor how things are going and periodically review where they have got to.

b)The first big aspect of Revising…monitoring

Monitoring is the art of looking over your own shoulder as you’re working away at a problem, asking yourself how it’s going.

Getting better at monitoring involves cultivating the little voice of self-awareness that keeps the strategic goals in mind, and is ready to change tack if it seems appropriate. A football manager contemplating making a substitution is monitoring, as is a teacher who decides to throw away the lesson plan on the spur of the moment and go with the interesting discussion which is developing. Students can pick up the habit and the skill of this kind of monitoring by being around people—teachers are ideally placed—who are able to model it, and who have learnt how to learn aloud, i.e. to externalise the thought processes of the vigilant monitor.

c) The second big aspect of Revising…reviewing.

Reviewing means stopping every so often to take stock of progress, and to ensure that any emerging product—an artwork, an essay, a draft business plan—is on track. Reviewing requires the ability to look at your own work with the critical eye of an editor, and not be afraid of the possibility that some corrections may be needed. A writer may put a piece of work aside for a while and then come back to look at it afresh. An athlete may sit down and look at the video of her starting technique to see if any adjustments need to be made. But reviewing is what the low-achieving maths student, for example, is very often unable to do.

Donald Schon called monitoring ‘reflection in action’, and reviewing ‘reflection on action’. Again, modelling and coaching can help develop these abilities.

d) A well formed Revising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

• Self-monitor how things are going, keeping an eye on the goal;
• Expect the unexpected, having a readiness to re-shape, re-order, re-form plans to take account of new circumstances;
• Remain alive to new, unforeseen opportunities and ideas;
• Look at what you are doing with a critical eye;
• Strive to be the best you can be;
• Make sure things are on track and make improvements along the way.

e) Spot the XXXX in your classes

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick think about ‘XXXX you may know’. Make a note of students you know who display these characteristics.

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

f) What do you think?

• How many of your students come to mind when looked at through the lens of XXXX?
• Is there a gender balance or have you noted down more girls than boys or vice versa?
• Are the students you have noted from across all age groups or do some dominate?
• How do these XXXX characteristics help these students to be better learners?

Make a note of…

• Those groups or classes that seem to have lots of good XXXX characteristics.
• How you think you might capitalise on this.

Changing how you learn can be tricky

Changing how you learn is a complex process……..that’s why it’s hard!

And the hardest thing isn’t getting the new ideas into your head…

It’s getting the old ones out…….that’s why it takes time and effort.

It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at new ones……so we have provided materials here to help you to plan the changes you want to make, monitor what happens, and reflect on the impact of those changes; their worth and value.

Things to remember about the stages

Think about where you seem to be on the progression chart.

Remember your development as a learner isn’t a race and the stages don’t just happen, you have to make them happen.

Each stage takes quite a while to work through and become competent in. It’s not about acting in that way once or twice but acting it that way most of the time, consistently, before being ready to move on to the next stage.

Take a look back at section 2 to remind yourself of the detailed descriptions of the stages.

These XXXX behaviours may look and sound straightforward but they make up one of the most valuable and important learning habits. Working through these stages to become someone who absorbs the various aspects of XXXX into their learning character could easily take three or four years of supported and focused development.

Take it steady

If you aren’t sure where you are on the chart, and as this is your first plan, it’s better to pitch your first plan low rather than high.

There’s nothing wrong with starting in grey to purple where you will be listening carefully for teachers’ suggestions. But you could also try some of your own self-talk phrases to help you take some responsibility for thinking about your learning.

If you think you are ready to work on moving from purple to blue your aim will be to rely on your own nudges and prompts to make sure you are monitoring and reflecting on your learning.

If you think you are already doing this in some subjects you could focus your plan on covering more or trickier subjects.

If you think you are ready to work on moving from blue to green you must be confident that you are employing a range of monitoring strategies. Your aim will be to add looking back to evaluate/review to your learning repertoire and to recognise why this is a good thing for your learning.

If you think you are ready to work on moving beyond green you must be sure you’re ready to look at what you are doing with a critical eye and make your own improvements along the way. Your aim here is to be constantly on the lookout for how to improve or reinvent something in the light of deeply reflective experience.

Here is a fairly straightforward six month Action Plan format for you to complete. This means that what you are planning will be put into action, by you, over about six months. At the end of six months you will need to review your plan, estimate your progress and then make a new plan. The new plan may tackle the next phase of growth or more likely strengthen your growth in the same phase.

Filling in the easy bits:

• Record your name and class and
  • the date you made the plan
  • the date the plan will be reviewed
• In the little table indicate the level of XXXX where you feel secure. This shows your starting point. If you mark Purple to Blue it means you think you are secure at Purple and will be working towards Blue
• Record the Goals you’ve chosen and make a note of:
  • any actions you intend to try
  • the sort of self-talk you want to say quietly to yourself.

Reviewing the plan:

• After about 6 months it will be time to review your plan to prove to yourself that you are taking action and the effect this is having over time.
• When you review how your plan worked:
  • write down what went well and
  • what could have been even better.

Here’s a plan we filled in earlier to give you an idea of what the plan and its review might look like.

The best way of keeping your plan going is by getting used to looking at the changes you are making and their impact on your learning.

Self-monitoring. As your plan unfolds it’s a good idea to keep track of the actions or self-talk you are trying in your classrooms. This monitoring doesn’t have to be sophisticated or time consuming there are some very simple ways of slowing down and getting an objective view of what you are doing.

For example, you could use a simple tally chart to log the number of times you use a chosen activity, or try one of the self-talk phrases. Just noting this down can help you become more consciously competent.

Bit by bit, the more you question yourself about what you are doing the more you will consolidate your approaches to developing your learning behaviours.

At the end of the six months take a look back at your plan.

Look closely at what you have changed about your way of working.

Look back at your Action Plan and any notes you made. Think about:

• Things you started doing that you hadn’t done previously
• Things that you stopped doing in order to improve the habit.
• Things you did more often and less often in order to hone the habit.
• Things you were already doing and kept on doing because they were on the right track.

Now using the three baskets, offer an overall assessment of the changes you have made. Identify:

• things that worked really well. The ones you feel most satisfied with.
• things that worked okay but need a bit of finessing.
• things that didn’t seem to work and you quietly stopped doing them.

Which coloured row best describes your XXXX skills?

You met this progression chart in the previous section.

Take time to think about how you behave across a range of school subjects and activities outside school. Be honest with yourself – which coloured row best describes your current XXXX skills?

Why do this?

• Because only you know yourself well enough to judge this, although of course you could seek advice from a friend or your teacher if you find that helpful.
• And secondly, where you are now should determine what you do next.

For example, if you think that the Purple row best describes you, then your immediate target should be to consider advice to move into the Blue row.

Look below for ideas to help you to move one level up from your current secure ‘row’.

Growing as a ReviserXXXX

It may be tempting to think that either you do, or you do not, use your XXXX habits – that either you are inflexible and reluctant to change, or that you are flexible and open to change. This could not be further from the truth!

The reality is that there are lots of little steps, skills and attitudes that lie between these two extremes.

In this section, we explore the shifts that gradually transform you into becoming a flexible and adaptable learner.

A XXXX progression chart

The chart alongside outlines a possible trajectory of the growth of a good XXXX habit. It moves from being the learner at the bottom who is unaware of XXXX, to the highly aware and XXXX savvy learner at the top. Between the two lies a progression that can be mapped and described. The statements in the diagram hint at the journey from novice ReviserXXXX to an expert ReviserXXXX.

The chart offers glimpses of how XXXX may grow across three columns.

Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development.

Column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may change and grow over time.

Column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Column 1 charts 6 phases of development, going from Grey at the bottom, through to Orange at the top. These phases describe the journey from ‘I can’t / I won’t’ at the bottom, through to ‘I can’t not do this’ at the top. These phases are not inevitable or automatic; they don’t just happen.

Column 2 puts flesh on these phase bones, and identifies what the developing skills and behaviours look like as learners become increasing effective RevisersXXXX.

Column 3 is a really important one. It alerts you to how your attitudes and self-talk change as your XXXX skills develop and grow. Interestingly it’s your own feelings, inclinations and desires that drive the development of any of your learning behaviours. If you don’t care about it it’s unlikely to improve.

Looking closely at grey

In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, you are not aware of doing things well or differently, you just do things. You’re not too bothered about outcomes and you’re not interested in revisiting something in order to change or improve it. You very much just do your own thing and you’re not aware of external standards or expectations. You may be reluctant, or even afraid, of changing the ways that you do things. But don’t think of this as a negative start. Most learners start like this before making a start on their journey of learning how to learn.

Looking closely at purple

In the Receives (purple) phase, you are beginning to make checks on how you are doing against given criteria when you are prompted to do so. Your teachers are kick starting your Revising learning journey. You can talk about what you did and sometimes how you did it. You rely on your teachers or parents to tell you that what you have done is valuable or worthwhile. You have learned to accept and act on your teacher’s advice to have a second go at something and/or to pause and check how things are going. You have to go through this phase before moving on to the next.

Looking closely at blue

In the Responds (blue) phase you have overcome any fear of mistakes and you’re more able and willing to monitor what you are doing. You’re beginning to develop what you mean by ‘good’ and to understand why given standards are important. You enjoy  supportive feedback and you talk about how you could improve with support. You are increasingly willing and able to check how things are going even if your teacher doesn’t tell you to do so. You are becoming inclined to make your own changes to improve your work.

Looking closely at green

In the Values (green) phase, you understand the importance of keeping a close eye on progress in order to achieve high-quality outcomes that meet your goals. You see the point in making changes to reach a goal or external standard. You understand the need to learn from previous experiences and realise that learning is actually all about changing your understandings; not just knowing stuff. So now you look at what you are doing with a more critical or demanding eye and have realised that being like this this is really good for you. Your positive attitudes to improving are helping you to achieve more and improve.

Looking beyond green

In the Organises (yellow) phase revising has become a skilful habit; where revising itself raises more questions than answers. Yes, you keep progress under review but now you question the original goal of the activity. You  look for higher standards and may well move to a more productive strategy or a different goal. You now use critical feedback positively and you’re keen to look back on what and how you achieved what you did in order to learn from the experience.

In the Embodies (orange) phase, you make ongoing checks, amends and rethinking, in order to meet you own, often more exacting, standards of achievement. Now you don’t need the validation of others (marks, grades, exams, quality feedback) because your own critical sense of standards acts as your barometer. You adapt readily to changing circumstances and always reflect on what and how you have done something with the explicit intention of doing it better, more efficiently / differently in the future. In this final Orange phase you simply can’t help but do it in all aspects of your learning. This way of behaving has become part of your learning character.

Revising – Making improvements

There’s more to Revising than you might have thought and it’s not about revising for an exam! A well formed Revising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

• self-monitor how things are going and keeping an eye on the goal
• expecting the unexpected
• being willing to re-shape, re-order, re-form plans to take account of new circumstances
• remain alive to new, unforeseen opportunities and ideas
• look at what you are doing with a critical eye
• strive to be the best you can be
• make sure things are on track and
• make improvements along the way.

It’s all about being adaptable, flexible and open to change.

Being ready, willing and able

Revising is about the way we work on something to improve it. Whether it be icing a cake, solving a tricky maths problem or creating a well-crafted essay, all require effort, retries and determination to satisfy ourselves that the result pleases us. How we tackle such a job isn’t just a case of monitoring as we go along or reviewing the result: it will be influenced by other qualities. Our attitude to change, whether we have a sense of quality and what sort of validation we need. The growth chart in section 2 intertwines these important contributors to our growth in the habit of Revising.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick think about your revising habits at this stage. Use the chart alongside, take it with you into lessons and make a note of whether and how often you display these characteristics.

Take the outcomes of this little questionnaire into account when you tackle section 2.

Your teachers will:

• encourage you to change the way you are doing things if necessary
• help you to view change as a natural part of learning
• want you to view making corrections as an opportunity to improve
• focus their feedback on what you need to do to improve, rather than simply praising what you got right
• offer you checklists that help you to keep an eye on how your work is progressing
• create opportunities for you to stop and to consider how things are going

Revising – Making improvements

There’s more to Revising than you might have thought and it’s not about revising for an exam! A well formed Revising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

• self-monitor how things are going and keeping an eye on the goal
• expecting the unexpected
• being willing to re-shape, re-order, re-form plans to take account of new circumstances
• remain alive to new, unforeseen opportunities and ideas
• look at what you are doing with a critical eye
• strive to be the best you can be
• make sure things are on track and
• make improvements along the way.

It’s all about being adaptable, flexible and open to change.

Being ready, willing and able

Revising is about the way we work on something to improve it. Whether it be icing a cake, solving a tricky maths problem or creating a well-crafted essay, all require effort, retries and determination to satisfy ourselves that the result pleases us. How we tackle such a job isn’t just a case of monitoring as we go along or reviewing the result: it will be influenced by other qualities. Our attitude to change, whether we have a sense of quality and what sort of validation we need. The growth chart in section 2 intertwines these important contributors to our growth in the habit of Revising.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick think about your revising habits at this stage. Use the chart alongside, take it with you into lessons and make a note of whether and how often you display these characteristics.

Take the outcomes of this little questionnaire into account when you tackle section 2.

Your teachers will:

• encourage you to change the way you are doing things if necessary
• help you to view change as a natural part of learning
• want you to view making corrections as an opportunity to improve
• focus their feedback on what you need to do to improve, rather than simply praising what you got right
• offer you checklists that help you to keep an eye on how your work is progressing
• create opportunities for you to stop and to consider how things are going

In this section you will find:

• descriptions of a broader set of modules that make up the next phase of the programme;
• brief explanations of why and how the next phase of the programme enables students to become better learners.

2a. Phase 2 goes broader and deeper:

Having made a start on the foundational four learning behaviours, Perseverance, Collaboration, Questioning, Revising, and taken a swift venture into 8 more learning behaviours via the section 6 Catalogue of ideas, your students will now be ready and willing to engage more constructively in their learning. Securing this essential first step of students being ready and willing the next step expands all their emotional, social, cognitive and strategic behaviours, to enhance their supple learning mind and add the all-important able. Learners will broaden their learning repertoire to build a complete learning toolkit, and consequently teachers will broaden the range of behaviours that they surface in lessons.

1b. Phase 2 goes deeper and wider:

At the heart of The Professional Learning Power Game lies a deeper concept of progression in learning behaviours. How do you get better at the 12 key learning behaviours? What does ‘getting better’ look like when fleshed out a bit? How does each aspect of progression in each learning behaviour grow over time? It is the focus on a broader sense of progression for the wider group of learning behaviours that makes this next phase in the programme so fascinating and worthwhile.

Understanding this will enable you to change the narrative from, for example, ‘Do my students Persevere?’ to ‘How well do my students Persevere?’ to ‘In which aspect of perseverance?’ Knowing this helps you to plan for the growth of students’ learning behaviours and the language of learning becomes much more specific and helpful.

In turn 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 both broaden and deepen.

Ask yourself – how does this progression chart expand your own understanding of Perseverance and how it grows?

1c. Take a look at the depth of content in a module in phase 2

Putting Perseverance into Learning

To give you a flavour of a module in the next phase, take quick look the one that addresses perseverance, a learning behaviour you have already started nudging. This module takes the development of perseverance wider and deeper with an emphasis on progression and learning language.

The module is designed to guide you through a process of building the habit of Perseverance in your students. Sections 1 – 4 consider:

1. Perseverance and how it develops. Unpick how it develops over time and use the full, extended Progression Chart to plot where your students are now.
2. Taking Perseverance deeper into classroom culture. A huge range of ideas and talk to deepen and strengthen the disposition to Persevere across all ages.
3. Blending perseverance with content. How to blend content and process so that opportunities to persevere are embedded in every lesson.
4. Team reflection and planning. Share the impact of your experiments with colleagues and plan what you need to do next.

All other phase two modules are similarly structured.

1d. Phase 2 covers a wide range of learning behaviours

‘The Professional Learning Power Game’ . . . consists of twelve online modules that offer progression charts, activities linked with teacher talk, and frameworks to help design dual focused lessons. They provide a deeper, richer look at learning so that teachers:

• gain a better sense of how to steer students growth as learners;
• use a richer language of learning effectively;
• design a curriculum to promote growth in learning behaviours;
• develop their confidence and skill as learning coaches.

The twelve online modules can be used in whatever way the school sees fit. The modules offer easy to access information about one learning behaviour, suggestions for developing classrooms cultures and lots of ideas to try out. Thus teachers are armed with material to support their efforts to apply a more forensic approach to learning.

1e. Phase 2 stays faithful to…

A blended learning approach:

‘The Professional Learning Power Game‘ continues as a blend of online content modules, supportive professional learning teams, and exploratory small-scale classroom enquiries. Hence the ways of working established in phase 1 are continued in phase 2. Teams and the content of what each team is attending to may change, but the rhythm of development remains consistent.

Building classroom learning cultures:

‘The Professional Learning Power Game‘ seeks to build on the culture shift started in phase 1. The Teachers’ Palette continues to underpin the content and thrust of teacher development and classroom culture. The intent in phase 2 is to make practice ever more sophisticated, extended and embedded.

Here you will find:

• a reflection tool to help you consider how your classroom culture has developed and how your students have responded;
• a reflection tool to help you to consider how your students’ learning behaviours may have changed;
• a reflection piece inviting you to evaluate the impact of the changes you have made on progress and attainment.

• In which of the 4 aspects of classroom culture have I made most progress?
• Of which changes am I most proud?
• Which changes appear to have had the greatest impact a) on you, b) on your class(es)?
• How would I describe the impact of my changes in classroom culture on my students? Try to write a short paragraph that describes the changes you have made and the impact that these changes have had on your students.
• Are there any aspects where I have made less progress than I might have hoped? What has held me back? What was tricky and why?

• Remember these single columns can’t show all the nuances of these behaviours so there may be some improvements that don’t show up here
• Remember, what you are looking for are changes in attitude and a subsequent improvement in skill
  • moving from ‘can’t/won’t to ‘show me/tell me’
  • from ‘show me/tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
  • from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• Similarly, the steps shown are quite substantial and one step up the chart indicates a significant shift.

Comparing these updated profiles with the ones that you did at the outset will give you an indication of the extent to which their learning behaviours have developed. It might even be a good time to talk with these students to gather their views. Ask yourself:

• To what extent have my students’ learning behaviours improved because of the interventions I have made?

• Are my students making greater progress than I would have expected without the interventions I have made?

Putting it all together . .

Write a short report focusing on:

• what you were hoping to achieve – your intent;
• the strategies you chose to implement;
• the outcomes of your interventions – your impact.

Your report, coupled with those of other teachers, will provide compelling evidence of your collective efforts.

Learn with colleagues by;

• kicking around ideas from the online content,
• unpacking it’s meaning when it’s unclear,
• considering what’s do-able and appropriate for your students
• making plans for what and how you might incorporate the ideas into your practice
• sharing and unpacking what you have tried in the classroom
• relating your triumphs and tribulations
• supporting colleagues through their changes in practice
• reflecting on what you hope you might do, or have done, differently

The format of the agenda below is based on research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame. Teacher learning communities are the engines of teacher development.

• the 12 learning behaviour progression tables;
• each interlinked with specific teaching ideas to enable that progression;
• and shorthand diagrams that summarise how this all plays out in classroom cultures.

Learn with colleagues by;

• kicking around ideas from the online content,
• unpacking it’s meaning when it’s unclear,
• considering what’s do-able and appropriate for your students
• making plans for what and how you might incorporate the ideas into your practice
• sharing and unpacking what you have tried in the classroom
• relating your triumphs and tribulations
• supporting colleagues through their changes in practice
• reflecting on what you hope you might do, or have done, differently

The format of the agenda below is based on research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame. Teacher learning communities are the engines of teacher development.

• an exploration of three aspects of progression – frequency, scope and skilfulness
• a re-evaluation of the security of your original:
  • perseverance profiles
  • questioning profiles
  • collaboration profiles
  • revising profiles
• and an examination of the difference your shifts in classroom practice have made to students’ attitudes

1a. Getting better = using it more frequently The first dimension and easiest to activate, is frequency/how often. The distinction between skill and habit is important – skills are what you can do, whereas habits are what you do do. A skill that is only rarely employed, or only employed when adult-directed, is at best embryonic. Initially the aim is to activate the skill more frequently through direct intervention with a view to reducing the level of intervention as the skill becomes stronger through more frequent use. The target is to develop the skill into a habit that the student employs frequently, without support, as and when the need arises.

• given what I know now about progression, do any of my earlier judgements need amending?

2a. Growing Perseverance

From the readily distracted and easily defeated, through to the tenacious, determined problem solver, becoming better at perseverance requires students to develop their:

• coping strategies;
• ability to manage their own learning environment;
• appetite for challenge;
• ability to work towards longer term goals;
• and most importantly, their inclination to deploy abilities as and when they are needed.

This single, much distilled column for perseverance tries to capture the facets of the behaviour shown above. So take a closer overall look at your class profiles you completed a while ago and ask yourself whether you’ve noticed any changes since you started working on perseverance. For example students:

• grey… giving up less, being less distracted, needing less support
• purple… giving attention to something; becoming aware, not avoiding or rejecting it; being alert to
• blue… going beyond merely attending to actively attending; complying; taking more responsibility for and enjoyment in initiating action
• green… accepting the worth of something; preferring something; being committed to the value of something
• beyond green… organising themselves to persevere more often

The three column resource opposite offers you:

• a column showing the growth statements you are trying to re-assess;
• a column offering questions you might ask that would give you greater clarity about the behaviour;
• a column showing the criteria describing what being secure means.

Use it to reconsider, say, the upper purple phase for perseverance (They know it’s OK to find things hard and so they are beginning to tackle more challenging tasks). Consider the questions column, ask yourself whether the students would be able to answer these convincingly and thereby show/convince you that they meet the success criteria. Furthermore, ask yourself:

• Do these questions and secure criteria enrich my understanding of what any of the phase statements mean?
• Should I use these questions and secure criteria to re-evaluate my previous impressions of my students’ perseverance in learning?

2b. Growing Questioning

From the accepting, credulous and uncritical, through to the intensely curious and healthily sceptical, becoming better at questioning requires students to develop their:

• inclination to show interest in and ask about what is around them;
• ability to ask closed questions to find required information, and open questions to explore possibilities;
• search skills that enable them to find out for themselves;
• ability to ask questions with sensitivity;
• and most importantly, their inclination to deploy these abilities as and when they are needed.

This single, much distilled column for questioning tries to capture the facets of the behaviour shown above. So take a closer look at your class profiles and ask yourself whether you’ve noticed students:

• grey…needing less support for asking a question
• purple… giving attention to the answers as well as the questions themselves
• blue… taking more responsibility for asking deeper or more generative questions
• green… being committed to the value of asking questions
• beyond green… organising themselves to question more deeply and with sensitivity

Furthermore, ask yourself:

• Do these questions and secure criteria enrich my understanding of what any of the phase statements mean?
• Should I use these questions and secure criteria to re-evaluate my previous impressions of my students’ questioning behaviours?

2c. Growing Collaboration

From the isolated, socially awkward, self-centred and inward looking, through to the generous, networked team player with a sophisticated range of social skills, becoming better at collaborating requires students to develop their:

• social interaction skills;
• inclination to contribute their ideas to others and build shared understandings;
• ability to contribute constructively and flexibly to group work;
• team planning skills;
• inclination to reflect on how the team is functioning and how it might function better in future;
• and most importantly, their inclination to deploy these abilities as and when they are needed.

This single, much distilled column for collaboration tries to capture the facets of the behaviour shown above. So take a closer look at your class profiles and ask yourself whether you’ve noticed students:

• grey…accepting help to interact more effectively with other students
• purple… giving attention to improving team planning skills
• blue… taking more responsibility for trying out more team roles
• green… recognising that it’s worth reflecting on how the team is working
• beyond green… organising themselves in various ways to collaborate more often

Furthermore, ask yourself:

• Do these questions and secure criteria enrich my understanding of what any of the phase statements mean?
• Should I use these questions and secure criteria to re-evaluate my previous impressions of my students’ collaborative behaviours?

2d. Growing Revising

From the rigid thinker who fails to learn from experience and repeats previous mistakes, through to the flexible, reflective thinker who takes responsibility for their own improvements, becoming better at revising requires students to develop their:

• willingness to change;
• understanding of what constitutes high standards and the desire to meet them;
• inclination to monitor learning as it is happening and to evaluate it after it has happened;
• and most importantly, their inclination to deploy these abilities as and when they are needed.

This single, much distilled column for revising tries to capture the facets of the behaviour shown above. So take a closer look at your class profiles and ask yourself whether you’ve noticed:

• grey…students showing any willingness to change a bit or need less support
• purple… giving more attention to the standard of their work or monitoring what they’re doing
• blue… taking more responsibility for and enjoyment in initiating action
• green… students always accepting that it’s always worth evaluating their own work
• beyond green… organising themselves to achieve high standards more often

Furthermore, ask yourself:

• Do these questions and secure criteria enrich my understanding of what any of the phase statements mean?
• Should I use these questions and secure criteria to re-evaluate my previous impressions of my students’ revising/refining learning behaviours?

All these charts are really useful resources! Look through them before your next learning team meeting.

Will leave this to you to convert into your pattern for these

Something here re purpose/intentions of the meeting. When it should take place etc

Worth saying that this meeting looks back on their lesson design experiments resulting from Unit 3 work and then picks up on the ‘is it working?’ stuff from Unit 4 section 1.

There are 2 considerations at this meeting.

Concrete..do we need to do anything with the class profiles at this stage?

How have these deeper ideas re progression made you think differently about classroom practice? Plan should reflect more determination about what to look out for

In unit 2 we looked at three aspects of the framework known as the Teachers’ Palette…relating, talking and celebrating. Now we come to a focal point in that framework, Constructing, where classroom culture meets curriculum culture. What can teachers do with a given curriculum to ensure it is ‘taught’ in a way that will enhance and strengthen students’ learning behaviours?

This unit is about direct teaching, curriculum design and planning lessons. It’s about how you as a teacher handle the day to day, hour by hour stuff that will enable your students to understand themselves as learners. It’s about looking at the curriculum in general and thinking about how to infuse learning behaviours into it. It’s about thinking and planning schemes of work or day to day lessons to ensure students consciously use and improve their learning behaviours. It’s about making learning power come alive across the curriculum.

Absorbing learning habits into the whole curriculum

The level of detail in curriculum plans varies in part due to the time-frame of the plan. A yearly plan for a subject or year group will necessarily be more broad-brush than a medium term plan for a unit of work, which in turn will be less detailed than an individual lesson plan. All such plans identify what is to be taught, and most will indicate how it will be taught and assessed, but fewer identify and plan for the learning behaviours that students will require to access this content, nor for the development of those learning behaviours.

In section 3A we consider the transition from content-only planning through to curriculum planning that integrates progression in content with progression in learning behaviours.

Absorbing learning habits into units of work and lessons

In this section we look at how you might plan a unit of work and then just one lesson to ensure learning behaviours are firmly embedded. In fact without the use of learning behaviours the plan would be unsuccessful. What are the stages of filling in blank unit plans like the one shown here? What are the must haves and top tips to planning a worthwhile lesson? We offer tips, formats and examples to get you going.

Absorbing learning-rich activities into lessons

Activities come in all shapes and sizes – some are highly structured by the teacher, while others encourage learners to engage in independent enquiry; some are brief events in a part of a lesson, while others may extend over a period of days or weeks. No activity type is particularly ‘better’ than any other as each serves a different purpose and requires/activates different levels of learner independence. As with most things, variety is key and planning should range across all activity types over a period of time/unit of work.

In section 3C we explore different types of learning activities and the learning behaviours that they stimulate.

Absorbing the foundational four learning behaviours into lessons

Here we offer you a unique catalogue to explore. It has over 100 ideas that you might blend into your lesson designs.

These ideas are organised into 4 categories for each of the 4 foundational learning behaviours. The 4 categories are:

• Visible Thinking Routines – Some visible thinking routines to activate each of these learning behaviours;
• Classroom Activities – Some activities to strengthen each of these learning behaviours;
• Monitoring Strategies – Some strategies for checking how each of these learning behaviours are developing;
• Exemplar Lessons – A lesson plan that integrates each of the four learning behaviours into a complete lesson.

It’s your must-have pick and mix. Expect to come back to it frequently.

In this section you will find:

• an opportunity to briefly reflect on what has been achieved across the school by taking on the blended learning programme ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’;
• descriptions of a broader set of modules that make up the next phase of the programme;
• brief explanations of why and how the next phase enables students to become better learners.

Your story so far. Get a feel for…

How classroom culture is shifting:

• learner dependency is being challenged, responsibilities for learning are being shared;
• talk about learning as a process is increasing;
• lessons are increasingly designed with learning behaviours in mind;
• classrooms are beginning to celebrate learning over performance, effort over attainment.

How teachers are developing through:

• a blended learning programme;
• accessing practical content online;
• the support of a Professional Learning Community;
• undertaking small-scale classroom enquiries.

How students’ learning dispositions are changing – becoming increasingly aware of:

• the need to take a more active role in their own learning;
• learning as a process that they can talk about, understand and control;
• the learning behaviours they have at their command.

How the school itself is changing – beginning to find ways to function as a learning organisation where:

• its vision for learning is taking shape
• it is beginning to take control of and create its own learning destiny;
• it is learning its own way forward.

All these add up to quite an achievement in just one year! The foundations are in place and the learning territory is prepared. The benefits of this great start will provide the momentum and human capital to refine and enhance your culture of learning.

2a. Phase 2 goes broader:

Having made a start on the foundational four learning behaviours, Perseverance, Collaboration, Questioning, Revising, students will now be ready and willing to engage more constructively in their learning. Securing this essential first step of students being ready and willing the next step expands all their emotional, social, cognitive and strategic behaviours, to enhance their supple learning mind and adding the all-important able. Learners will broaden their learning repertoire to build a complete learning toolkit, and consequently teachers will broaden the range of behaviours that they surface in lessons.

2b. Phase 2 goes both wider and deeper:

At the heart of The Professional Learning Power Game lies an even richer concept of progression in learning behaviours. What are the different facets of each of the learning behaviours and how do you get better at persevering, questioning, collaborating and revising? What does getting better look like? How does progression in learning behaviours grow over time? It is this focus that sets the deeper game apart.

Understanding this progression enables teachers to change the narrative from, for example, ‘Do my students Persevere?’ to ‘How well do my students Persevere?’. This enables teachers to plan for the growth of student learning behaviours and the language of learning becomes more specific and more helpful.

In turn 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 develop.

[Take time to explore the progression chart for Perseverance (opposite). It considers how 5 facets of Perseverance (Dealing with stuck; Managing the learning environment; Self talk; Dealing with challenge; Goal orientation) interface with 6 phases of development (From ‘Lacks’ through to ‘Embodies’).]

Ask yourself – how does this progression chart expand your own understanding of Perseverance and how it grows?

2c. Take a look at the depth of content in a module in phase 2

Putting Perseverance into Learning

To give you a flavour of a ‘deeper game’ module, take quick look at one that addresses perseverance, which you have already started. It takes the development of perseverance wider and deeper with an emphasis on progression and learning language.

The module is designed to guide you through a process of building the habit of Perseverance in your students. Sections 1 – 4 consider:

1. Perseverance and how it develops. Unpick how it develops over time and use the full Progression Chart to plot where your students are now.
2. Taking Perseverance deeper into classroom culture. A huge range of ideas and talk to deepen and strengthen the disposition to Persevere across all ages.
3. Blending perseverance with content. How to blend content and process so that opportunities to persevere are embedded in every lesson.
4. Team reflection and planning. Share the impact of your experiments with colleagues and plan what you need to do next.

All other Phase 2 modules are similarly structured.

2d. Phase 2 covers a broader range of learning behaviours

‘The Professional Learning Power Game’ . . . consists of twelve online modules that offer progression charts, activities linked with teacher talk, and frameworks to help design dual focused lessons. They provide a deeper, richer look at learning so that teachers:

• have a better sense of how to steer students growth as learners;
• use a richer language of learning effectively;
• design a curriculum to promote growth in learning behaviours;
• develop their confidence and skill as learning coaches.

The twelve online modules can be used in whatever way the school sees fit. The modules offer easy to access information about one learning behaviour, suggestions for developing classrooms cultures and lots of ideas to try out. Thus teachers are armed with material to support their efforts to apply a more forensic approach to learning.

2e. Phase 2 stays faithful to…

A blended learning approach:

‘The Professional Learning Power Game‘ continues as a blend of online content modules, supportive professional learning teams, and exploratory small-scale classroom enquiries. Hence the ways of working established in phase 1 are continued in phase 2. You may well change the teams and the content of what each team is attending to, but the rhythm of development remains consistent.

Building classroom learning cultures:

‘The Professional Learning Power Game‘ seeks to build on the culture shift in phase 1. The Teachers’ Palette continues to underpin the content and thrust of teacher development and classroom culture. The intent in phase 2 is to make practice ever more sophisticated, extended and embedded.

Leadership that works

Leadership is more than a technical matter or a personality approach. Vision, stimulating dialogue, creating a culture of enquiry, and keeping an eye on what’s working are all involved here.

Learning from many school leaders who have successfully led the learning power approach, emphasises;

• the need for a school vision for learning
• the building of dialogue to maintain momentum
• the creation of a culture of enquiry
• the need to keep monitoring development in classrooms
• keeping track of the development of students

These issues will shape our afternoon agenda.

What the coaching session aims to achieve

This 2 hour session aims to alert the senior team to the issues and challenges of leading and managing a learning power approach into the school. It concentrates on the challenges of developing classroom practice, planning the blended programme and in particular exploring how Professional Learning Teams work. There are resources to help the team take a closer look at classroom cultures and a clear picture of the three phases involved in creating a learning powered school

2a The Resource Book

This Resource Book contains all the slides and paper resources for the session. Please ensure each member of the team has a copy of the Resource book.

Some of the pages offer monitoring tools for use at a later date. These can be printed as and when needed.

• The feel of this session is more like a friendly, stimulating chat. It helps if the group can all sit around one table in a quiet, friendly space but with access to a screen.
• It would be useful to look out and bring along some or all of the following;
  • latest versions of the school’s Vision and Mission
  • evidence of surveys of classroom cultures
  • the school’s Intent, Implementation and Impact statements
  • any surveys of classroom practice

A whole school strategy. Where are you now?

The honeycomb diagram pictured here distills changes in students, teachers and the school itself. If appropriate it may help the team to quickly assess where they are now on this strategic journey.

What are you trying to achieve?

We’ll take time to consider your own vision for building powerful real-world learners and what it might mean to use a broader range of outcomes as shown in the Culture 2 tool.

Our learning culture

The 2 culture tools that were given time in the morning session are briefly revisited to give leaders an opportunity to analyse their implications more deeply and discuss what this may mean for the school.

Year 1 emphasis

• Vision for learning
• Professional learning teams
• Attention to 4 key learning behaviours
• Learning language established
• Classrooms become more learning friendly
• Learning behaviour data collected and acted on

Professional Learning Teams

… operate in a spirit of enquiry. Developing learning power becomes a quest to find out more, to consider what needs to change, to wonder what might work, to track what happens and to refine practice. It’s a process in which teachers investigate their teaching so as to help their students to investigate their learning. In effect teachers become researchers of their own practice.

We’ll discuss setting up Professional Learning Teams

• online units are available 24/7 for several years
• monthly meetings?
• use of the discipline of the tight agenda in the online units
• taking an interest in staff learning enquiry plans
• requesting feedback on how learning enquiry results are going
• discussing and agreeing which ideas (from the online material) should become policy across the school

Here the focus is on how Professional Learning Team agendas work, the nature of designing enquiry questions and the content of teachers’ learning plans.

Organising a calendar rhythm

Many schools have adopted a calendar rhythm such as…Week 1 of a month – staff read and digest the agreed section of the online course. Week 2 of a month – staff attend the learning team meeting. Weeks 2, 3 and 4 – staff carry out classroom enquiry plans. This iterative process continues to deepen teachers’ understanding and practice of learning power across 3 or more years depending on the size and complexity of the school.

A checklist of leadership jobs

Here we give time to discuss a ‘checklist’ of things that will help to ensure the learning power approach to teaching and learning will prove successful. Our research over 20 yrs has shown the list becomes what might be termed the ‘checklist of success’.

Supporting the learning journey

• Share your commitment to a long term cultural change
• Set up an enquiry culture
• Keep close to developments
• Keep it high profile
• Monitor development. Talk with teachers about how how they are weaving ideas into their lessons
• Track pupil progression in learning. 
• Identify where/why this ‘mental exercise regime’ is taking hold or faltering.

We may consider:

• a classroom observation tool to look for use of learning behaviours
• a reflection tool to help you consider how classroom cultures are developing and how students have responded
• a reflection tool to help you consider how students’ learning behaviours may have changed

The classroom observation tool used in the training with staff has many uses and could become a staple for the next year and more.

The 4 teacher development charts for Relating, Talking, Celebrating and Constructing considered, here combined as one teacher progression chart could be discussed as a tool to discover/mull over progress in classroom culture. Used at intervals through the year will identify the changes made in classroom cultures and how students have responded over time.

Learning profiles for students can now act as the baseline measure against which teachers can assess the impact they have had on their students’ learning behaviours.

This section offers information about the half day introductory training for staff. It includes:

• the learning objectives of the session
• the resources that will need to be printed
• the nature of the activities to be undertaken

The nature of the introductory training

The half-day (4 hour) session is designed to introduce staff to the three big frameworks that underpin the ideas of Learning Power, namely, the Supple Learning Mind (learning habits), the Progression of those habits and the Teachers’ Palette (classroom culture). The session looks at what they are, why they are important and how they work together to develop students as learners.

The session knits together interesting, knowledge based, inputs with engaging interactive activities that serve to reinforce new ideas by applying them to the practical reality of the classroom.

From the start staff are encouraged to contribute their own learning habits to ensure the session is a rich learning opportunity for everyone.

The Resource Book is made available as PDFs (colour) for the school to print for staff. It contains most of the PPt slides used in the presentations, the group activities and session tasks. Please ensure that every member of staff has a copy of the Resource Book at the beginning of the morning session…but not before!

• We would be grateful if you would print the Tin Tin pictures below
  • cut to form 23 separate pictures.
  • make up one complete set of pictures per 6 participants.
  • put sets into envelopes or small plastic bags for safe keeping.

Activity 1 (25 Mins including discussion on solutions and patterns of habits used) involves staff looking at comic book pictures, considering clues and putting them into an order to make a credible story line. This task is about staff applying their own learning habits to reason and imagine a solution. Each group of 7 teachers will require a complete pack of 23 pictures.

Activity 2. (2 mins x 4 plus whole group discussion)

This activity aims to help staff to become more aware of their pupils as learners; to think about their tendencies, dispositions and habits and muse on positive and negative characteristics. Participants are invited to;

• Think about the learning behaviours associated with the emotional, cognitive, social and strategic domains of learning
• Puzzle over what it means to be without these learning behaviours, how not having them gets in the way of learning
• Explore and record the names of students who appear to use or don’t use each behaviour

Activity 3

This activity has three stages;

1. Participants asked to look at themselves as a learner across 12 learning behaviours at 5 levels of competence.
2. Using page 12 in the resource book estimate the level of just four behaviours for their own class
3. This discussion is widen to include all participants exploring whether students are improving their learning behaviours as they go through the school.

It is anticipated that this interesting and possibly unique discussion will help staff begin to get to the heart of the ‘what’ of building students’ learning power.

Activity 4 Learning culture tool 1(10 mins including whole group discussion)

This activity sees a shift in focus from children’s learning behaviours to classroom cultures. It highlights 3 different learning cultures and emphasises the teachers’ and students’ role in each one. Participants are invited to;

• Highlight all aspects of culture that are a regular feature in their classroom.
• Chat to their neighbour
• Ask what is this telling you?
  • Similarities / differences
  • Surprises
  • Delights
  • Shortfalls

Activity 5 Learning culture tool 2 (10 mins including whole group discussion)

This activity centres on the research of Chris Watkins (London Institute of Education). The diagram emphasises the outcomes or ends schools might aspire to in the 21st century, and the means/ways teachers need to use to ensure these outcomes. Participants are invited to;

• Discuss together;
  • What they understand by each of the ‘Ends` statements
  • Do they want their students to be like this? Why?
  • Do they become more like this as they pass through the school? How do they know?
  • How do these Ends chime with the school’s values/vision?

Activity 6 (3 mins x 4, plus whole group discussion)

This activity is interspersed with a presentation that offers numerous examples of how schools have introduced learning behaviours. After a presentation showing several practical ideas for using the ideas of the Teachers’ Palette participants are invited to think about;

• What do they do now
• Which of the ideas they might try
• Whether they foresee any pitfalls
• Anything suggested in the presentation that would work better if applied to the whole school rather than tried in individual classes.

Activity 7 (10 mins  whole group discussion)

This activity is designed to give staff an opportunity to consider the effectiveness of the session against three criteria;

• the extent to which they liked/agreed with the content…what was particularly likeable and why?
• the extent to which they are likely to use the ideas…which gained most traction?
• the extent to which they disagreed/disliked the content…what was particularly disliked and why?

If this task is undertaken in groups it would help if a member of staff was assigned to distil the feedback/findings and report back on behalf of each group.

In this section you will find:

Tools that senior leaders might use to ‘look for learning’.

1. Monitoring the ‘Big Ambition’
2. Observing learning
3. Looking at the physical environment

A shift in focus

School leaders generally have responsibility for monitoring and evaluating what’s happening in classrooms. Traditionally this has meant looking at lessons in terms of the quality of the teaching and the whole exercise has moved to one of managing performance rather than developing practice. What is being suggested here is observing classroom practice becomes part of a dynamic, reflective and development process across all levels of the school. As the new culture consolidates, your role will become one of helping people get used to watching out for and recording changes both in their practice and in their students’ learning behaviours.

Our way of understanding classroom observation is that it has three broad purposes:

• to help to stimulate and initiate new practice (observation AS development)
• to develop current practice (observation FOR development)
• to assure standards of practice (observation OF development) associated with performance management.

For the purposes of developing better learners the feel and format of classroom observation should be firmly rooted in the AS and FOR development.

1b How are we doing with the ‘Big Ambition’?

Try using this observation tool to focus on the 4 key student learning behaviours and the 4 aspects of classroom culture. Each of the 16 prompts refers to one of the central 16 yellow cells in the Big Picture diagram (above).

Be flexible with how you gather information – answers to some of the 16 questions will be directly observed in the lesson / classroom; others may require a quick chat with a few students or a look in some books; while others might need to be confirmed with the teacher.

At the end of your observation, simply record the amount of evidence for each of the 16. Is there little or no evidence; some evidence; or lots of evidence?

Use it as a conversation starter with the teacher.

Alternatively, sit down with the teacher, discuss, and fill it in together.

[Reassure teachers that you are not expecting to see evidence for all of these aspects in a single lesson – indeed a few aspects done well is probably better than many of them done superficially. Observations are a snapshot in time. Beware of making sweeping judgements based on one observation – an aspect that is absent during the observed lesson may well be evident in the following lesson that is not being observed!]

1c Evaluating the monitoring data

Having collected lots of observations using the ‘Looking for Learning’ sheet above, how might you look for patterns; identify areas of good practice; identify differences between age groups / subjects; check for progress over time?

Any single one of the completed observation sheets gives little insight into what is happening in classrooms. But pooling a significant number of observations will yield rich data that can be interrogated to produce evidence of how the Intent of the Big Ambition is being Implemented in classrooms and the Impact it is having on learners.

Ask yourself – if you are not going to use data like this to evidence the Intent / Implement / Impact of your efforts to build learning friendly classrooms, what will you use?

There are 3 resources to download:

• The Demo Data spreadsheet simply illustrates how the data might be recorded / organised;
• The Master spreadsheet is for you to record the outcomes of your own observations and to generate an analysis of what you have observed;
• The file ‘How to manage data‘ offers some practical advice on how to record the data and how it might be generated and interrogated.

A new way of looking for learning

Classroom observation has a chequered history – too often judgemental, too infrequently developmental, too much about teaching and too little about learning.

Try using this observation tool to focus on student learning behaviours.

At the end of your observation, simply colour in each segment of the wheel in relation to how much each learning behaviour was in evidence. You will end up with something like this:

Alternatively, sit down with the teacher and colour it in together.

Use it as a conversation starter with the teacher.

Over time, look over a number of completed ones to get a feel for which behaviours are getting regular exercise, and which ones less so.

[IMPORTANT: It might well be worth completing some of these ‘wheels’ early in the school’s engagement with  ‘Playing the Learning Power game’, to achieve a baseline measure of where the learners were before the impact of teaching changes begins to take effect. Keep and, most importantly, date these observations for comparison with others you might make towards the end of this first phase of building powerful learners.]

Monitoring classroom display

Classroom display is frequently focused on the ‘what’ of learning – key facts about the subject content, things to be recalled etc. Less frequently does display focus on the ‘how’ of learning. This is potentially a problem as what the teacher chooses to display speaks volumes about what they truly believe to be important. In other words, learning-friendly messages do not thrive in classrooms with content-focused display.

Look out for display evidencing the four aspects of a learning friendly classroom:

• devolving responsibility towards the learner: students’ questions and their explanations about getting unstuck
• enriching their learning talk and understanding: teacher feedback mentioning the use of a behaviour and displays that help students ‘hook on’ to the learning vocabulary
• constructing learning activities: learning behaviours to be used and reflecting on learning together
• celebrating the growth of learning dispositions: learning ladders showing students growth in learning; motivational prompts related to the ‘how’ of learning.

Now take a look at the download of the Learning Amble and use it to focus your reflection on the range of displays in your school. What do they reflect about learning values in the school and where does the focus of change need to be?

In this section you will find:

a consideration of the sort of school leadership that will most likely be effective in embedding the approach to create real-life learners. It’s more than a technical matter or personality approach. Vision, stimulating dialogue, creating a culture of enquiry, and keeping an eye on what’s working are all involved here.

Learning from many school leaders who have successfully led the learning power approach, emphasises;

• the need for a school vision for learning
• the building of dialogue to maintain momentum
• the creation of a culture of enquiry
• the need to keep monitoring development in classrooms
• keeping track of the development of pupils

Clarity about ‘moral purpose’ is really important in leading a learning-powered school because it’s not merely about creating more efficient learning and improved exam results. The goal here is to broaden the scope of education.

Think about why you want to work on building powerful learners: is it about a wider scope for education and/or is it driven, in the first place, by a concern about pupil dependency and/or lack of resilience?

Take time to develop your own vision of building powerful real-world learners. Turn your vision into a narrative that will engage and inspire staff, who are after all, going to make that vision a reality.

The key difference between schools where developing the learning process has been successful and those where it has fizzled out is understanding it as:

• whole-school culture change;
• something that will take several years to implement and sustain;
• not a quick fix to raise results;
• a struggle for some teachers.

Schools where the approach has been successful focus professional development on growing staff confidence and expertise to develop learning behaviours, usually by creating Professional Learning Communities. This serves to deepen and sustain the dialogue and empower staff to experiment and create their own solutions. A spirit of openness and enquiry increasingly pervades the school.

In the spirit of building powerful learners teachers don’t just ‘learn how to do the approach’ they learn about it, critique it, customise and develop it through this radical rethink in Professional Development practice. This involves regular opportunities to share experiments, successes, failures, doubts and ideas, and then go back to the classroom and have another go.

It’s the development of staff through the blended learning programme that will be the engine of change.

As you move further into the innovation you will need to:

• keep talking about a vision for learning;
• maintain interest and development of this vision of learning through in-school enquiry-led professional development.

Working in this culture of trust and openness, teachers and teaching assistants will become increasingly confident to experiment and take risks. But this is no free-for-all: the quality of learning in classrooms and around the school needs to be kept under regular review.

Listen to the headteacher of a primary school in Devon and what her friendly monitoring visits to classrooms uncovered as teachers made shifts in their classroom practice.

See section 5 for further information on monitoring development.

There are several reasons why schools find it useful to start documenting progression in students’ learning behaviours. They find that it:

• motivates and encourages students to put in the effort to continue improving their learning behaviours;
• gives students feedback on their learning behaviour progress so that they can decide which ‘learning muscles’ they are going to put effort into next;
• encourages teachers to realise that their efforts to improve learning behaviours are being effective;
• gives teachers information about individual students or classes that will enable them, the teachers, to discuss and guide learning development more precisely and helpfully;
• validates the progress made by students in terms of conventional attainment measures.

See section 5 for further information.

Building powerful learners is a serious innovation that takes time and as such can be staged through several phases. Below you will find the essence of each phase and what tends to happen at:

• the school leadership level;
• staff and classroom practice level;
• pupil understanding and use level.

The three levels work in concert, each influencing the other.

Building the learning habits of students involves amending / changing / growing / adapting the teaching habits of staff. It’s not just about teachers knowing a new teaching technique, or buffing up on content knowledge, it is about managing the classroom differently. That’s much harder and involves changes to;

• what teachers know – their knowledge about learning
• what they believe – their feelings or attitudes about learning and schooling
• what they can do – their skills in enabling learning
• what they actually do – putting it all into practice

So changing how teachers teach is a delicate, complex process……...that’s why it’s hard! And the hardest thing isn’t getting new ideas into teachers’ heads. It’s getting the old ones out……. it takes time and effort.

It takes time, practice and support to undo old habits and become graceful at new ones……that’s why we have developed a blended learning programme  based on how adults learn. It combines researched classroom approaches with an adaptation of the well-known professional development approach – Teacher Learning Communities- infused with enquiry methods and coaching approaches to learning.

1.The first aspect of the blended programme is the online course Playing the ‘junior’ Learning Power game. This provides the content for introducing the approach into classrooms. Different facets and levels of the approach are grouped into digestible pieces (sections) to help teachers take them on board.

2. The second aspect of the blended programme couples the online content with the PD approach of Professional Learning Team sessions. These offer the best way of supporting and delivering changes in teachers’ classroom practice.

3. The third aspect of the blended programme is a learning enquiry element where teachers try out, monitor and evaluate ideas found in the online course. Such enquiries ensure teachers progress their own learning in a spirit of discovery and adventure.

All three components of the blended learning programme (we’ve purposefully tried not to use the groan worthy word ‘journey’ here) is infused with a coaching approach to learning.

Playing the Learning Power game introduces the ideas of learning power and homes in on 4 foundational learning dispositions that encourage students to be disposed to Persevere, to Question critically, to Collaborate effectively and to Revise their thinking.

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 acknowledge students’ learning power.

The 6 areas of content are designed to;

• to give teachers an idea of the sort of practice they are aiming for
• highlight the foremost ideas of each area of content
• offer a selection of practical ideas to start things off
• offer a sound support system for redesigning practice

Making it manageable

Teachers are given access to this online course so that they can access it whenever they wish and choose their own time to become familiar with the content. It will remain accessible for at least a couple of years.

Use of the course is organised such that staff are asked to concentrate on one section each month. They can still access the whole course whenever they wish but dealing with just one section a month avoids overload or confusion. Any one section is likely to take teachers a good hour to read, digest, relate to their classroom practice and consider which ideas might be appropriate for their students.

When approaching ‘Playing the ‘junior’ Learning Power game.’ just read through a whole section fairly rapidly to get a flow of the content. On this first run through it’s best to ignore the toggle boxes; they open up to give more detail than needed at this point – and can be returned to later. It’s worth spending time on the two key models of the approach on the first read through.

Changing working practices is hard and delicate work. Research shows it works best when you can meet in a safe professional environment in which to explore and plan how you could change, and then share and probe the triumphs, tribulations and outcomes of the classroom experiments. Research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame, describes such teams as:

• a small group of teachers who meet together regularly
• to deepen their understanding of an approach,
• to commit to trying out new things,
• to reflect on and share their experiments with each other.

Teacher learning communities are the engines of teacher development.

See section 3.b for more detail.

Professional Learning Teams (our term for TLCs) are a built-in and essential feature of this blended learning programme. We strongly recommend that teams of 6 to 8 teachers be formed and enabled to meet monthly for the duration of the whole journey. This monthly meeting is the key-stone that holds the rhythm of the blended learning programme together.

Meetings need to last about 75 minutes to give time for teachers to consider the content of the online course, plan how they might use this in their teaching and, share and analyse their classroom enquiries with each other.

The diagram alongside shows how the monthly team meetings follow on from the online course and lead on to classroom enquiries.

Many schools have adopted a calendar rhythm such as…Week 1 of a month – staff read and digest the agreed section of the online course. Week 2 of a month – staff attend the learning team meeting. Weeks 2, 3 and 4 – staff carry out classroom enquiry plans. This iterative process continues to deepen teachers’ understanding and practice of learning power across 2 to 3 years depending on the size and complexity of the school.

Professional Learning Teams operate in the spirit of enquiry or some might say action research. There’s a quest to find out more, to consider what needs to change, to wonder what might work, to track what happens and to refine practice. It’s a process in which teachers investigate teaching and learning so as to improve their own and their students’ learning. In effect teachers become researchers of their own practice. They develop new knowledge about their classroom, they become more reflective teachers, they broaden their teaching repertoire. Importantly researching their own teaching puts them in charge of how they teach; becoming very aware of the links between how they teach and how students learn and achieve.

Researching action is the process that quietly underlies the whole learning programme. It may first be triggered by content in ‘Playing the ‘junior’ Learning Power game causing teachers to;

• Consider how things are now
• Envisage how you want things to be

Teachers take these issues, ideas, desires with them to the Professional Learning Team session(s) where they;

• Construct an enquiry question and
• discuss and write an Action Plan

In their classrooms;

• Take action to do things differently and
• Monitor their actions and students’ responses – collect data, record and interpret data

At the next team meeting teachers

• Share and reflect on their interpretation with others and learning together
• Plan to reframe their action in an Action Plan that takes account of new ideas from the course

As teachers work through many iterations of the cycle they refine their practice to become learning power practitioners.

It’s important to keep in mind the whole purpose of why the school and its teachers are all doing this. Basically it’s to benefit students by building their learning habits, so as to improve their real life chances and enable them to contribute more effectively to society. So the sort of results being considered here is how students are changing as learners; are they more aware of themselves as learners; are they improving their disposition to question, to change their minds, to work productively with others and to keep going when the going gets tough?

Even in the six or so months of this first phase of the blended learning programme teachers have reported improved attitudes to learning with students no longer dominated by a focus on attainment. For example students;

• Are better focused on their learning strengths and areas for development. NOT comparing themselves to the “golden” child who attains the highest scores.
• Take control of their learning – identifying ways they can help themselves without relying on adult support.
• Take risks and reflect on the tasks presented rather than charging in and just wanting to finish first.
• Set their own targets and identify their own success criteria for learning. The children are better at personalising them to their own needs.
• Push their challenge level up and then persevere rather than “playing safe.”
• Have greater respect for all learning habits. Understand what others can offer them rather than it being dominated by attainment perception.

A coaching approach to learning is infused and adopted in all the aspects of the blended learning programme; in the online content course; in how the Professional Learning Teams operate; in the learning enquiries that teachers explore in their classrooms. And as new approaches to learning settle in this coaching approach pervades every classroom culture.

When we are curious we are genuinely interested in learning. Curiosity lies at the heart of coaching, hence coaches are effective listeners and ask questions to open dialogue without it sounding like an interrogation. Coaching aims to enable people to see what they are doing more clearly and discover their own ways to improve. A coaching approach:

• helps people to explore their challenges, problems and goals
• provides an objective view of peoples’ actions to enable them to see things as as they really are
• enhances motivation and raises self-esteem
• builds curiosity and encourages learning

Above all, coaches resist offering solutions. Offering solutions does little to secure learning as people haven’t been allowed to confront and engage with the problem and find their way forward.

In this section you will find:

Explorations into Learning Power to help you, as senior leaders, feel confident;

• to discuss the basic ideas with staff and governors
• about what the approach is and is not
• to discuss and share the background to Learning Power where required

Ask yourself:

• What’s the basic premise of building powerful learners?
• Why is it important?
• How can it be done?

Ask yourself:

• What’s the essence of the two basic models of Learning Power?
• How do we get better at learning?
• Which learning habits make a difference?
• How can teachers help this process?
• What changes might we need to make in the classroom?

What’s behind the idea?

This powerpoint and associated resources can be used to introduce colleagues or wider teaching staff to the key ideas behind Learning Power.

This slide deck could be used:

• just as it is to introduce the ideas to staff;
• to help structure a learning conversation amongst/in teams;
• added into the school’s own strategic presentation to ensure staff gain a holistic picture.

Brief explanatory notes can be found under each slide. Fuller supporting information and resources are offered as downloads in ‘Additional Resources’.

What’s in the presentation?

These 19 slides  aim to help teachers explore the nature of commonly held beliefs about learning and offer evidence to show that learning is a learnable craft that needs to be nurtured so that young people are developed as 21st century learners. These slides simply open the questions.

 Discussion points might include:

• What do we know about learning?
• Is it possible to get better at learning?
• If we spend time on learning to learn will results suffer?
• Do students become better learners as they mature?
• If we develop growth mindsets is the problem sorted?

In total it’s likely to take around 60 / 75 minutes to work through this with your staff – and we do urge you to include classroom support staff in this.

It could be used on a training day, or in team meetings, or in any other way that works for your school.

1 An overview of this strategic resource:

This resource takes a leadership perspective on developing students’ learning power and is designed to offer you, as senior leaders, a view of the strategic concerns that will arise when the school takes on ‘Playing the Learning Power game‘. 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

These issues are considered over 8 sections

1. Overviews – this section.
2. Key messages of learning power distilled.
3. The Blended Learning Programme – key messages.
4. Leadership strategies to secure Learning Power.
5. Resources to support keeping track of progress.
6. In school introductory training: all staff.
7. In school introductory coaching: leadership team.
8. Consideration of the next steps on the journey.

The teachers’ course contains 9 sections:

1. Two starting points for building better learners
2. Shifting the culture of classroom relationships
3. Shifting the culture of talking about learning
4. Shifting the culture of celebrating learning
5. Shifting the design of learning powered lessons
6. A closer look at students’ learning
7. Broadening the range of learning behaviours; a catalogue of ideas
8. Impacts on cultures and learners
9. Where now: what next?

This chart shows the big ambition of the course and distils what it’s all about.

• the yellow boxes capture what leaders, teachers and learners will need to do in:
  • recognising the role of learning behaviours;
  • beginning to shift classroom cultures to strengthen 4 key learning behaviours;
  • beginning to shift how the curriculum is delivered in order to build 4 key learning behaviours;
  • beginning to expand the number of learning behaviours consciously being used by students;
• the blue boxes capture the outcomes such changes could make to classrooms cultures and curriculum delivery.
• the green boxes capture the anticipated outcomes for leaders, teachers and learners.

The vertical and horizontal axes of the grid

The vertical axis to the left shows the 4 main aims or thrusts of the course. These four components involve:

• The formative work of finding out about your students’ learning behaviours. You may have already done this using the module Finding Learning Power;
• The practical work of shifting classroom culture to better accommodate learning behaviours, using 4 foundational behaviours to get you started;
• The practical work of purposefully blending the use of learning behaviours into lesson design, again focusing on just four foundational behaviours;
• The blended work of gradually adding more of the original charted learning behaviours into the mix.

The horizontal axis across the top shows the 3 main groups of players in the game and what they will need to do to make it all work.

The central 12 cells

These cells serve 2 purposes. Firstly:

• The text in each cell gives an indication of who needs to do what, in very broad terms, at each stage of this journey;
• When looked at vertically down the page, they map out the 4 stages of the first part of the learning power journey;
• When looked at horizontally across the page, they show the players in the game and how what they do needs to interact. 

The cells to the bottom and to the right

The green cells across the bottom give an outline of how the school’s players will have developed by the time you have finished this first stage course. The blue cells to the far right give an indication of the anticipated outcomes for each part of the journey from; discovering students learning behaviours, to shifts in classroom cultures to support their growth, to early shifts in lesson design accommodating learning behaviours, to the beginning of using a much broader range of learning behaviours across the curriculum

.. is a tapestry of activities on the part of both you and learners. The warp of Learning Power is made up of the learning behaviours you want students to develop. And these are being developed and woven together by the weft of all the different methods that you, as a teacher, have at your disposal: the language you use and the explicit attention you pay to the ‘how’ of learning; the activities you make available, and the way these are framed for students; and the aspects of learning power that you model in a dozen different ways, throughout the school day.

Learning Power has been described as the raw ‘building blocks’ of learning; not abilities, not styles, but the actual components of learning itself; the raw energy of learning. Through a systematic programme of research over several years, and with the co-operation of thousands of research participants, researchers at Bristol University turned this ‘learning power’ inside-out until finally it was broken down into the four domains of learning and seventeen identifiable learning capacities; key psychological characteristics that were and are judged to be of the highest value in helping students to learn and thrive in a complex world. These learning behaviours are inherent in us all, not fixed at birth, or when we leave school: they can be developed by everyone regardless of ‘ability’, social background, or age. There are no limits to extending our learning power.

It may come as a surprise but, as a teacher, you’re an influential habit former. The way you orchestrate and guide learning influences the ways young people perform and behave. This means you’ll need to be mindful of how you help students to form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

You might like to ask yourself whether your teaching habits are helping students’ learning habits and what you might need to adapt and change?

Habits form through use and practice (deliberate or otherwise!). But desirable habits will survive and flourish better if students are aware of them, realise their value and strive to improve them.

You can build young people’s learning power by helping them to expand their own learning capacities. This involves the ways in which you relate to students, talk to students, organise your classroom, and design activities, as well as what you notice and celebrate about learning.

Look in the toggle box for an overview of the features of the teachers’ palette.

Unit 2 of the programme unpicks three areas of the palette; relating, talking and celebrating, and offers classroom approaches for you to try.

Unit 3 of the programme unpicks the design of activities and offers approaches for you to try.

Having spent a while exploring the 2 models that underpin learning power – the supple learning mind and the teachers’ palette – take time to capture your thoughts before moving on to section 1B.

Summarise your thoughts about the Supple Learning Mind and about the Teachers’ Palette. Ask yourself:

How are these two models connected to what I already know?

How has this extended my thinking about learning behaviours and about classroom culture?

What questions am I now asking myself?

See opposite for an example Learning Development summary document just to start you off.

Take your completed Summary to the team meeting at the end of Unit 1 so that you can recall and share your first impressions with colleagues.

a) Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

• Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
• Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
• Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
• Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
• Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students strengthen their learning habits. It takes most teachers between 2 or 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself  because small steps often prove to be big levers for change.

b) First develop your coaching language

Below you’ll find a range of things you could say to nudge revising. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging your students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

• imitate you;
• start to think in this way;
• become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the ideas pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly these will go on inside their heads. As your work on revising gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

c) Teacher talk – as a learning coach

10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

1. Good learners are flexible – they watch how they are doing and change things as they go
2. Are there other ways you might do it?
3. What can you learn from this mistake?
4. Ask yourself: ‘Am I happy with what I have achieved?’
5. Think about your success criteria as you go along. Check that you are still on track to meet them.
6. Ask yourself from time to time: Is this going ok?
7. It’s OK to amend your plan and approach it differently.
8. How can you improve this?
9. How will you do it differently next time?
10. How will you act on this feedback?

d) Have a think

• Which of these revising nudges might you start using?
• In which particular lessons would such nudging be most useful?
• How will most of your students respond to such nudges?
• Will this way of engaging be more popular with girls or boys?
• What other nudging ideas might you add to the list?

Make a note of…

• Students’ reactions to the nudges.
• Ideas about why this might be.
• Ways in which you could further encourage students to imitate this metacognitive self-talk.
• Any positive or negative impact of these revising behaviours.

e) What to start and stop

Here are a few more ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully. Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas

f) What do you think?

• Which of the ideas appealed to you most?
• Can you see ways of incorporating these into your subject/class routines?
• Which would make the biggest difference to your students?
• Which would make your life easier?

Make a note of…

• Ideas that you want to try and the impact you hope they will have on your teaching and on your students.

a) Ideas to encourage a Revising frame of mind

In the early stages of building your students’ learning power your role is to:

• make them aware of the behaviour
• talk about it (what, how, why, when, if)
• celebrate its use
• give opportunities to practise it, both in lessons and elsewhere
• reflect on it to improve it.

b) Use a staged start for using Revising…

1. Firstly... make students aware of the use and importance of revising…what, when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
2. Then… explore revising a little more through the language of revising
3. Try... using revising as a lesson starter to tune students into using it
4. Then start... blending revising into the way you teach the content. Use specific revising strategies to deepen content understanding.
5. Ensure... students reflect on the success or otherwise of their revising activities.

Younger students

Younger students

Younger students

Younger students

Younger students

Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence

Build a culture of critique

Plan formal critique sessions, where students may show a piece of work, explaining their ideas and what they were trying to achieve. Students are then encouraged to critique the work, but using the rules that it must be:

• Kind
• Specific
• Helpful

Students should be encouraged to phrase their critique as questions e.g. ‘Have you thought about…..?’  As a result of this feedback from their peers, students improve their work over time.  This is demonstrated brilliantly, by this short video.

Just watch, be amazed and try similar approaches with your students.

c) What do you think?

• Can you see a use for any of the suggested activities?
• Have you raised awareness of revising / refining with your students?
• Does your class have an agreed set of good revising / refining behaviours?
• Which two ideas from above do you want to try out?
• How long will you keep them going before you decide whether they have worked or not?

Make a note of…

• What happens in your classroom in response to any of the above ideas.
• How students’ behaviour changes over about 3 weeks of becoming more familiar and talking about the behaviour.
• How your behaviour in the classroom changes as you use these ideas over time.

b) Many ways to introduce learning habits

There are of course many ways to introduce the habit of Revising but here are five culture shifts to think about and get you started.

Ask yourself – how might you:

• Harness display to illustrate that first attempts are rarely the finished article
• Ensure that students act on your feedback and do things differently next time
• Encourage students to monitor how things are going, and change tack if necessary
• Encourage students to evaluate the extent to which they have met the required standards
• Deliberately create situations that require a change of mind.

See section 4t for practical classroom practice suggestions.

a) Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Revising is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are inflexible and rule-bound in every circumstance, and equally few are reflective and adaptable in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these two extremes. The diagram alongside – Learning: Poles Apart – offers an outline view of the whole journey; building students’ emotional learning habits; building their cognitive/thinking habits; building their social learning habits and their ability to manage the process of their learning. The reluctant learner on the left and the learning powered learner on the right show the beginnings and ends of a long, exciting, but far from inevitable, learning journey.

b) Stages of growth in Revising

The chart alongside offers a glimpse of how Revising may grow, given the opportunity and encouragement. It is this scaling of the learning disposition that will help you make sense of the journey as you, and students, track, and influence, learners’ progress over time.

Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development.

Column 2 describes how the behaviours may look if they are enabled to grow over time,

Column 3 captures the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

c) What are the stages of growth based on?

We’ve borrowed ideas from Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Objectives of the Affective Domain to generate a very condensed version of the five main phases of growth, namely:

 1 ‘Lacks’ (grey) We have added this level where the behaviour is weak and the response is negative. This might translate into “I can’t or I won’t” in student self talk

2. Receiving. (purple)..which involves giving attention to something; becoming aware, not avoiding or rejecting it; being alert to something. This might translate to “Show me or Tell me” in student self talk

3. Responding. (blue)…which involves going beyond merely attending to actively attending; complying; taking more responsibility for and enjoyment in initiating action.This might translate to “I’ll try” in student self talk

4. Valuing. (green)..which involves accepting the worth of something; preferring something; being committed to the value of something.This might translate to “I see why” in student self talk

5. Organisation.(yellow)..which involves adding to, formulating and organising their values into how they live their life.This might translate to “I make sure” in student self talk

6. Embodies. (Characterisation in the original)(orange)…which involves behaving consistently in accordance with their values, living what they stand for.This might translate to “I can’t not do this” in student self talk

d) Where are your classes in relation to their levels of Revising?

Level detail

In the ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are not necessarily aware of doing things well or differently. Once they get going on something they may change it but more for the joy of just doing it. Outcomes may be rushed or lack finesse, but once completed there may be little interest in revisiting it or in any comments they are offered. External standards of what things might or should look/be like are not yet a feature of their world.

In the Receives (purple) phase, students begin to make checks on how they are doing against given criteria when prompted. They can talk about what they did and sometimes how. They rely on their teachers or parents to validate what they do/have done. So there’s a reliance on others to validate what they are doing.

In the Responds (blue) phase students have overcome a fear of mistakes and are more able and willing to monitor what they are doing. They begin to develop the idea of ‘good’ themselves and to understand why given standards are important. They respond positively to supportive feedback and talk reflectively about how they could improve with encouragement. They are now taking far more responsibility for their learning.

In the Values (green) phase, students understand the importance of keeping a close eye on progress in order to achieve high-quality outcomes that meet their goals. They see the point in making changes in the light of the original goal or external standard or internal feedback. They understand the need to learn from previous experiences and realise that learning is all about changing understandings; not just knowing stuff. In so doing they widen the scope of external validation. Once in the green phase they have taken responsibility for what they are doing because the recognise it as a ‘win’ for them.

In the Organises (yellow) phase revising has become a skilful habit; where revising itself raises more questions than answers. Yes, progress is kept under review but now students are bold enough question the original goal of the activity. They look more widely for validation and may well change to a more productive strategy or a different goal. They use critical feedback positively and are keen to look back on what and how they achieved, what they did in order to learn from the experience. They organise themselves to be like this. Revising has become a habit.

In the Embodies (orange) phase, students make ongoing checks and amends, and major rethinking, in order to meet their own, often more exacting, standards of achievement. Now they tend not to need the validation of others (marks, grades, exams, quality feedback) because their own critical sense of standards acts as their barometer. They adapt readily to changing circumstances and always reflect on what and how they have done something with the explicit intention of doing it better, more efficiently / differently in the future. Revising has become part of the character, they can’t not do it.

a) A learning classroom culture

Building students’ learning behaviours is about creating a culture in your classrooms – that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable your students to learn confidently and face difficulty calmly and creatively. By a ‘culture’ we mean all the little habits, routines and practices that implicitly convey ‘what we believe and value round here’.

So ‘culture’ concerns the details of the micro-climate that you create in your classrooms. What you do and say, what you notice and commend and what you don’t, what kind of role model of a learner you offer – all these are of the essence. The micro-climate of a classroom can inadvertently stifle, or specifically enhance, the very behaviours you are seeking to promote.

b) What sort of culture are you trying to create?

Bringing learning to the fore is to let students do more of it; to become more active in the learning process. Becoming more active learners involves offering them more opportunities to decide what to do, being given a chance to talk more and actively learn by reviewing their own experience. As students are given more responsibility for their own learning the role of the teacher changes from ‘the sage on the stage’ to ‘the guide by your side’.

What you are doing is developing students as meta-learners who become able to understand and grow themselves as learners.

c) Looking more closely at classroom culture

There are four specific ways in which teachers can create the classroom culture to build learning habits;

• strategies you could build into the way you teach to stimulate revising
• the sort of language you might use to stimulate revising
• ways in which you might celebrate / praise students’ use of revising
• actions you need to enable students to undertake to build their revising habits

d) A graphic summary

Here we’ve sketched a diagram to identify the prominent features of a classroom culture that’s geared towards growing students’ Revising habits.

The 4 sections of the diagram are:

• Top – strategies you could build into the way you teach to stimulate revising;
• Right – indications of the sort of language you might use to stimulate revising;
• Bottom – ways in which you might celebrate / praise students’ use of revising;
• Left – actions that you need to enable students to undertake.

Apply your own attentive noticing skills and consider whether you already use any of these features and which you fancy trying.

In the panels below you will find brief explanations of some of the more unusual terms in the diagram.

d1) Strategies to build into the way you teach

Strategies at the top of the diagram… build into the way you teach to stimulate revising

1. Embed frequent review points encouraging students to view re-thinking as a part of learning
2. Give students opportunities to assess their own work against given / their own success criteria
3. Use VTR ‘I used to think’ . . to legitimise changes of mind
4. Deliberately create situations that require a change of mind
5. Encourage learners to monitor how things are going eg. Traffic lights

Visible Thinking Routines (VTR) are easily remembered routines that can be applied in wide range of circumstances. The routine ‘I used to think . . . But now I think’ is explored further in section 5 of this resource. To see more VTRs, go to the VTR website.

‘Traffic Lights’ is a classic AfL strategy – Green = it is fine, Amber = ok-ish, Red = it is going badly. Use it to encourage students to keep an eye on how things are progressing.

d2) The sort of language to stimulate revising

Strategies on the right of the diagram… to show the sort of language you might use to stimulate revising

1. Encourage phrases such as ‘ Do I think this activity is coming along well?
2. Focus feedback on what is needed to improve
3. Use ‘Could be’ language to stimulate learners to consider other possibilities / standpoints

Learning power is activated by the use of more tentative, could be kinds of language. Specifically, if you say definitively that something is the case, students frequently take it literally and try to remember it. But if you say, of the same thing, that it could be the case, they become more engaged, more thoughtful, more imaginative, and more critical. That ‘could be’ invites students to consider what else it could be, to consider alternatives.

d3) Ways of celebrating revising

Strategies at the bottom of the diagram… ways in which you might celebrate the use of revising.

1. Reward students for making improvements on their previous efforts using the ‘Editor’s Desk’
2. Display a good balance of completed work and annotated ‘work in progress’
3. Explore and celebrate different and alternative ways of doing things
4. Display annotated outcomes from different, successive stages of the learning process.

The ‘Editor’s Desk‘ is an area of the classroom that is reserved for re-crafting and making further improvements – not for ‘doing corrections!

The idea of displaying ‘work in progress’, annotated to illustrate the changes as the work is refined and improved, is in stark contrast to displaying the ‘finished article’. The former emphasises the processes involved in creating a good piece of work, whereas the latter focuses solely on the final product.

Both are explored further in section 5 of this resource.

d4) Actions you need to enable in students

Strategies on the left of the diagram…actions that you need to enable in students to boost revising.

1. View ‘corrections’ as an opportunity to improve further
2. Change tack if necessary
3. View change as a natural part of learning

By ‘change tack’, we mean being prepared to adopt a different approach when things are not going as well as expected. It requires students to monitor what they are doing as they go along, keep an eye on the end goal, and be sufficiently flexible to re-think a strategy that is not working.

e) What do you think?

• Which of the ‘build’ ideas (top) are already features of your teaching?
• Which of the ‘talk’ prompts (right) do you regularly use when talking about revising?
• Which of the ‘celebrate’ ideas (bottom) are already in evidence your classroom?
• Which of the ‘enable’ behaviours (left) are you intentionally enabling in your classroom?

Make a note of…

• Any ideas that look as if they might help your students to become better at revising.
• An idea that you want to start doing.
• An idea that interests you, but you are uncertain what it means or how you might do it.