Differentiate between learning and performing

The Learning Zone

Begin by watching (or reading) the Ted Talk by Eduardo Briceno (see below for downloads).

The challenges of being in the performance zone are very different from the challenges of being in the learning zone. What is effective in each zone is limiting in the other.

If your students perceive school to be a performance zone, they will likely be risk averse and keen to show off what they can already do. Their challenge is in recalling and executing what they have learned. Flawless execution.

If they see school as a learning zone, they will be much more inclined to rise to the challenge, to take risks, to break new ground. Their challenge is in being sufficiently brave to show vulnerability, to make mistakes and to learn from them. Deliberate practice.

Find ways to introduce and explore these ideas with your students, to reassure them that the real challenge is to learn so that they may perform even better, rather than to recall and perform in order to impress.

Re-frame challenge: explore learning how to overcome a struggle

The Learning Pit: from struggle to success.

A mental model to help students understand that learning should be challenging and that ‘getting out of the pit’ is their responsibility.

Use the ‘Learning Pit’ as a means of opening up a conversation around the feelings involved with being stuck, and the journey to overcoming difficulty – the struggle. It is essential that students know:

• that the ‘pit’ is only one staging post on the learning journey
• they can get out by using ‘stuck strategies’ and tools

It is also worth noting that the pit is not necessarily inevitable for all students in all learning – some will fly over the pit in some topics or curriculum areas.

The ability to cope with and overcome difficulty and challenge is a key aspect to becoming a successful learner.

James Nottingham introduced the idea of the Learning Pit as a way to explain that struggling is part of learning and that if we are to understand something we need to struggle with it first. Students move from unconsciously incompetent (an emotionally ‘safe’ area before learning), to consciously incompetent (the emotionally tricky “pit”), to consciously competent (the far side, after the learning has happened).

Find out more by visiting:

https://www.learningpit.org/

Roy Leighton uses a similar concept, which he refers to as the ‘Learning Line’, as part of his ‘Butterfly model’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr-aG2bvAcg

Talk to explore handling uncertainty and taking on more challenge.

Use phrases like:

• Finding it hard is the most interesting place to be. It’s where real learning begins.
• Mistakes can be the signposts to success
• How will you feel when you finish that?
• What can you learn from that little mistake?
• You look as though you are really enjoying puzzling over that

Keeping going with challenging material

To extend the ‘support to continue’ approach, try using phrases like:

• What have you already tried? What else might work?
• Why is this proving difficult? What is it that you can’t do?
• What did you do last time?
• I wonder what you did to move on?

Plan to ensure students make mistakes

Start some lessons with something like:

• ‘In this lesson I expect you to make a couple of mistakes’.
• ‘If you get half-way through and haven’t made mistakes move to more challenging activities.’
• ‘When you make a mistake make a note and try to explain to yourself why you made the mistake at that point.’
• ‘Later in the lesson we will spend a few minutes reflecting on what we learned from being stuck and decide which strategy worked best’.

The explicit message is that students need to expect being stuck during the lesson. The implicit message is that mistakes are a good thing – something you want to see. Using this technique regularly means students come to accept that making mistakes as a natural part of learning. It begins to build their curiosity about what they can learn from them.

Enable students to select their own levels of challenge

Provide tasks that are designed to offer low, medium and high challenge (or cool, spicy, hot.) Allow students to decide on the level of challenge that they wish to undertake, and use it as an opportunity to encourage them to aim high.

• Use the Nando’s Peri-ometer as a visual aid to support the ranking of tasks by level of challenge, and allow students to select the level of challenge that they wish to undertake.

Make clear thinking a regular part of lessons

Use Visible Thinking Routines

See Think Wonder is a Visible Thinking Routine that encourages students to:

• notice attentively and make careful observations (See),
• make thoughtful interpretations; what they are noticing; make links to what they know; distil the important bits (Think)
• ask a question about what has been noticed (Wonder).

This routine helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry.
Use it when you want students to think carefully about why something looks the way it does or is the way it is. It’s useful at the beginning of a new unit to motivate student interest or try it with an object that connects to a topic during the unit of study.
The routine works best when a student responds by using the three stems together at the same time, i.e., “I see…, I think…, I wonder ...

Variations – Hear / Think / Wonder, or Read / Think / Wonder, or Feel /Think / Wonder . . . . .

Use short reminders to encourage self-reliance.

Display prominently in classrooms

These routines put responsibility on students to do things for themselves before asking the teacher for help.

C3B4Me can be used in conjunction with the stuck posters displayed in the classroom. Students should try three strategies from their stuck posters before seeking help from the teacher.

Another alternative to the stuck poster, BBBBB invites students to:

• use their Brain
• check in “the Book” (or other resources). This implies that students are allowed to get out of their seats to find these resources, and that those resources are available.
• look on the (White/Smart)Board
• ask their partner/friend/another student (“Buddy”)
• before finally turning to the ‘Boss’ (teacher) for help.

Monitor challenge in action

Strips of laminated card and a peg can put pupils in charge of their learning a little more. Labelled ‘Easy learning’, ‘Challenging learning’ and ‘Too hard’ on one side, pupils use them to let you know whether you are meeting their learning needs or if they could do with more extension or support. It is powerful when learners realise that challenge is an essential element of their learning; that finishing easy tasks quickly does not signal cleverness but indicates time-filling rather than real learning.

Make use of this type of resource routine in your classroom. It helps shift the responsibility for learning to the learner.

For the teacher, it provides valuable, instant feedback. For the child who is on ‘easy learning’, prepare to inject more challenge; for the child on ‘challenging learning’, prepare to intervene if it becomes too difficult; for the child on ‘too hard’, explore whether that is really the case or whether a pointer in the right direction might bring it back to ‘challenging learning’.

Grow an appetite for challenge

Help students to change their talk about challenge

• From ‘Challenge’ to ‘Interesting challenge’.
• From ‘It’s hard’ to ‘It’s tricky’.
• ‘Tricky learning builds my brain.’
• From ‘I can’t do it’ to ‘I can’t do it yet’.
• ‘I don’t know how to’ becomes ‘I’m learning how to’.

Encourage students to become familiar with, and learn to love, challenge.

Use phrases like:

• I wonder what this is all about?
• How might you do this?
• This is exercising your brain really well.
• Is your brain feeling tired?
• Take a little break and come back to it later
• What is particularly tricky about this
• Don’t let that put you off?
• Have another go.
• What might help you?

Model tackling difficulty

Show students how you personally tackle things you find difficult, and what strategies you have for doing so, by demonstrating a piece of tricky learning. The idea is that sharing these experiences encourages students to imitate your approaches.

One of the first ways of surfacing learning – putting it on show – is to focus on how you are modelling being a good learner to students. Modelling is all the ways in which teachers demonstrate how they are a learner too; a confident finder-outer, a confident trier-outer.

• Take your students behind the scenes of learning and share with them some of the uncertain thinking of learning.
• Learning aloud is a good place to start: take students through how you would work out a problem. Modelling the thought processes (including emotional) that learners go through is important because a lot of the skill of learning only manifests itself in the inner world of the learner.
• Expose the thinking, feeling and decision making of a learner-in-action to help students actually see and hear how learning works.

Create a challenge wall

Make the Challenge wall the focal point for your challenge culture. Make sure you add and refer to it frequently. For example:

• Invite students to post up the most challenging questions they can think of. Allocate time to discuss them. The wall becomes a challenging talking point;
• Cover the wall with challenges. questions, extension tasks, riddles, puzzles etc. These could be used by students who have finished their tasks early. Alternatively, set aside lesson time to for the whole class to discuss a challenge they select;
• Display students’ work which shows mistakes they have learned from. This would include problems which students have persisted with or work that has been revised and edited to improve it.

Link challenge and mistakes positively

Think of mistakes as the hallmark of challenge. If students are making them the work is probably at a level at the edge of what they can do. To promote a culture of challenge you need to build positive connections in students’ minds between mistakes and challenge. Why?

1. Because you need to minimise any perception that mistakes are a signal to give up
2. Because we want students to see mistakes for what they are: opportunities to learn

Students need to see mistakes as opportunities to work out what has gone wrong and therefore, what could be done differently next time. Draw connections by:

• praising making mistakes and learning from them
• asking students to tell you about mistakes they have made and what they learned from these
• talking about times in your life when you faced challenges and made mistakes
• creating a system through which students can gauge the level of challenge they feel they are working under, based on how many mistakes they are making and how difficult they are finding the work. This gives them a reference point for quantifying challenge
• model how to think about challenges. Narrate what actually happens, emotionally and intellectually while you are taking on the challenge
• create a checklist of steps to go through for embracing challenge. (see The Learning Pit for one idea).

Reframe challenge

Make mistakes useful. Create a ‘Beware board’ in the classroom and invite students to share their mistakes on Post-its. Talk about why the mistake was made, what thinking led to any confusion and how it could be avoided in the future.

Bringing mistakes into the open and discussing them helps other students to avoid them as well as recognising their value.

Reflect on challenge after the event

Draw a thermometer on the wall, with a scale from overstretched to low or coasting. Work with the class to describe the various levels. High might read:

• “I took the step to try something just a bit harder than before.
• I worked on it until I could do it and understood it clearly”

and Overstretched might be

• “This was a few steps too far … next time I will chose a more manageable task.”

Talk to children about the degree to which they have felt stretched and ask them to move photos of themselves up and down the scale. Use it to stimulate discussion about sticking with tasks and understanding when it is not wise to do so.

This activity helps students understand risk and challenge. It is worth routinising this until students get the measure of it.

Use ‘big questions’ to stimulate and explore absorption

If humans did not exist, what would happen to the earth?

Pose questions that are difficult to answer, encourage speculation, or call for finding new information. Better still, use your students’ own ‘big questions’. Seize opportunities to learn alongside them, using ‘could be’ and ‘I wonder if . . . ‘ language.

Explore how absorbed students felt when undertaking the task and, importantly, how they might increase their engagement when questions / topics do not immediately seem appealing.

Plan for targeted effort

Expect students to plan for their targeted effort. When devising project plans with students, ask them to come up with;

• Their own idea for what they want to focus on.
• What that will mean they are looking out for (monitoring) as they undertake the work.
• What they will focus on when revising in their work.

For example, a Y7 student might decide to focus on using capital letters at the beginning of sentences and full stops at the end when writing a passage. When they read their work through at the end, they would focus their effort on the same criterion – are there any sentences that still need capital letters / full stops? And possibly ask themselves ‘I wonder how/why I missed that one?’

Or a Y10 student might aim to focus their effort in science on coming up with a really tight method for an experiment. They would monitor how things are going and whether they need to adjust anything. This will also provide the focus for the conclusion section of the process, as they can suggest refinements to their original method to gain more meaningful results in future experiments.

It’s all about where the effort needs to be focused. One bit at a time.

Encourage students to become more aware of distractions and how they might deal with them.

Use phrases like:

• What might put you off?
• What might get in your way?
• Do you sometimes distract others?
• How might they feel when you do that?
• What could you do to avoid being distracted?
• Where are you now on our distractions scale?
• How well have you managed your distractions today?

Attract interest and attention using intriguing pictures

Not just a fascinating picture that should grab your students’ attention and interest but also the warm up for an English lesson. Students are asked to decode the illustrations into well know phrases or sayings

Take a closer look and work out which sayings you can find.

Intrigue students with ‘wild tasks’

Celebrate and expand the language of learning

Banish all thought of distractions and look out for students who are thoroughly and happily involved with their learning. Expand the range of words that could be use to describe this fascinating, if sometimes troublesome, activity.

Introduce ideas about working memory

Working memory is what we use for processing information in real-time. It is particularly exercised when we are learning new things, performing tasks, cogitating, questioning and so forth. Your students are using it all the time during lessons. But working memory is limited to about 7 items at a time – any more than that and the brain starts to freeze up, and engagement drops. We sometimes say ‘I don’t have the head space for that’. Students will need to know when they are reaching capacity, and how to cope when they do.

Ways to free up thinking space

Fortunately, freeing up working memory is relatively simple.

• jotting things down as notes,
• talking through a process out loud,
• creating a mind map
• making a set of lists to group disparate pieces of information into larger lumps
• splitting a task down into smaller tasks

are all good techniques for giving the brain more thinking space.

Learn more about working memory from The Centre for Working Memory and Learning at the University of York

Three strategies for refocusing effort: nudging not telling

Model it: for the student who is well and truly stuck, or who has taken a path that leads to a dead-end and is withdrawing from learning, try modelling the process for them. Narrate as you go, highlighting the thinking processes you are using, what you plan to do next, how you are getting yourself unstuck, and so on.

Nudge it: For students who are more resilient to becoming stuck or encountering difficulty, try using gentle nudges to get them out of the mud. “Can you think of something we did earlier that might help you?” “How have you tackled this sort of problem before?” “Would the instructions help you here?” This is far from a full-blown model of what to do, but rather prompting to a way back in to the learning.

Give clues: Some students will enjoy the added brain tease of a clue to nudge them in the right direction. “I think Newton had the right idea here…what about you?” “Perhaps it is a bit like hibernation…?” “Chapter 4 has some interesting things to say on this”

Each of these techniques provides progressively less scaffolding for the student – you will need to gauge which technique to use for each student – fragile learners who struggle with being stuck will not appreciate clue giving as it will only compound their stuckness! Similarly, students who are able to deal with being stuck well on their own will not be sufficiently stretched by the modelling approach. You are differentiating your nudging.

Effort focusing questions:

• What strategies will keep you going here?
• What are the things you can do to keep yourself on track?
• Can you show me what really good effort looks like?
• What could you look at to see if you are on the right lines?
• When did you target your effort effectively?
• What could you focus on next?
• If you had to pick one thing to focus your effort on, what would it be?

Blend managing distractions seamlessly into a lesson.

At a school in Gloucestershire teachers extended the usual idea of classroom distractions (losing focus) and used the same idea to look out for red herrings/distracting or irrelevant information in texts.

A literacy lesson revolved around a writing activity. The stimulus was a video clip of Gavin Henson, the Welsh fly-half, taking a successful kick in a famous rugby match. This stimulated a deep discussion about managing distraction and how this was possible in such a public setting. What had Gavin got to do to make sure the kick was successful?

The students were then invited to write a short piece for a newspaper using the information shown alongside. They were asked to be aware of what they thought to be the key pieces of information. But of course irrelevant information was also included.

There were 3 layered targets for this piece of writing which different groups of students understood had to be incorporated into the writing.

The following task was to consider what advice Gavin Henson would offer a learner about managing distraction. This again led to a very profitable discussion which was then captured in writing.

Throughout the lesson students recorded their thoughts about managing distractions in the environment using the format on the right.

Needless to say this teacher is Welsh and a passionate Rugby supporter!

Target effort in self-assessment

A refinement of Austin’s butterfly.

Ask your students to copy a picture of a teapot (or something relevant to current learning) as best they can in 10 minutes.

• At the end of the allotted time ask them to swap pictures with a partner.
• Now provide students with a list of criteria against which to review the picture they have been given, but require them to select and focus their review against only one of the criteria.
• The list, in this case, might include: handle, spout, pattern, outline, lid.
• Stress that the feedback must be helpful enough to enable their partner to improve their drawing.This keeps feedback tight, focused and meaningful. It also helps students move on from potentially vague and ambiguous feedback.

Scaffold tasks to focus effort

Looking 10 x 2

Give students 30 seconds to look at a picture relevant to your topic.

Ask them to list ten things they noticed about the picture.

Repeat the process, seeing if they can list 10 more things about the picture.

This process can be repeated until no new ideas come forth.

Focusing effort on attentive noticing guards against distraction.

Building memory

Encourage and celebrate self-testing

Some things just have to be remembered, but it’s important to celebrate and praise the use of self-testing just as much as right answers.

Regular low stakes tests or quizzes tap into the effect that trying to remember something helps us with the long-term memory for that material. Quick questions on the board, quizzes, self-tests.

If students have drawn mindmaps, get them to try redrawing them from memory. If using flashcards, make sure they are testing themselves by jotting down their contents from memory, rather than simply looking at them (recognition vs recall). Students often mistake familiarity with material for the ability to recall it.

You can help students form more accurate judgements of learning by encouraging a delay between studying and self-testing.

Switch the thinking from managing distraction to feeling absorbed and attentive.

Develop a Raptometer

Make a scale on the classroom wall to indicate degrees of absorption.

Students monitor their absorption levels against the scale according to how absorbed they perceive themselves to be. The scale, negotiated with students, might begin with ‘Disengaged’, through ‘Engaged with enthusiasm’ ending with ‘Engrossed and lost in learning’.

Use as a prompt for discussion about:

• how students became absorbed at different stages of a lesson;
• what the characteristics of absorption are;
• what it feels like to be absorbed;
• how to be more absorbed in the flow and how to avoid distractions.

Build motivation to concentrate

Use ‘If-then’ statements to strengthen focusing effort

‘If-then’ planning can help to make effort your classroom more specific and focused

‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. In this case focusing effort it’s useful to list all the sorts of places this is needed.
‘Thens’ are what you will do about something; the action you will take. In this case the ways of focusing effort as introduced in #1 above.

The how of ‘If-then’ planning and a relevant example:

When setting a goal, for example ‘make more effort’, you need to specify not only what you will do but also where and when you will do it.

If (or when) [___situation__], then I will do [___behaviour__]
An If-then statement linked to the ‘make more effort’ goal might be
‘If I lose focus at the start of a task, then I’ll look at the success criteria to give me direction ‘.

This may sound a bit cumbersome to start with but research suggests far more goals are achieved by using ‘if-then’ statements. And the clever bit is that this builds self-talk at the same time. You do what you are telling yourself to do.
The ‘if-then’ plan succeeds because the situation and the action become linked in the mind. The brain recognises the situation as an opportunity to advance the goal. When the situation is detected action is initiated automatically. “If-then’ plans become “instant habits”.

Build up students’ understanding of distractions by using phrases like:

• How did you keep going?
• What could we do when we feel we are losing focus?
• What sorts of things distract you most?
• When are friends a distraction – or a source of inspiration?
• What sorts of learning environment might be appropriate for different types of learning?
• What internal distractions might we have? (tiredness, emotions, hunger, failure).
• How could you let us know if we are distracting you?
• You’re doing well with avoiding that distraction.

Vary the nature of your support

Often written feedback on managing distractions

By devolving responsibility for learning to pupils our job as teachers becomes one of coaching them to build their own learning habits. Habits take time to form and stick and so the type of support you offer needs to be maintained for quite a while. Open the toggle box and read Lemar’s story. It serves to reinforce the need for more encouragement and reinforcement than a single written comment if behaviours are to mature into habits.

Ensure students know what effort means

Explore the meaning of effort

Effort is a word that teachers use frequently, but what does it mean? How might students decode this and begin to do it purposefully?

• Explore what is meant by ‘effort’ with your students, and discuss with them the ways in which they might apply it.
• Encourage them to come up with a definition of effort and specific examples of what it might look like in the classroom – for example by;
  • trying different strategies to solve a problem,
  • using a Visible Thinking Routine (VTR)
  • aiming to achieve challenging goals, or
  • using different un-sticking techniques when something is tricky.
  • paying attention to whoever is speaking

Targeted Effort is now seen as a path to mastery. Students need to be aware of a connection between effort and improvement; that the sort of effort being used is causing their improvement. This is why it is important to give effort meaning. Meaning often underpins motivation which in turn drives behaviour.
Targeted effort is effort that has direction and purpose; something is focusing their mind. It is underpinned by clear guidance and the specific goal to be achieved.
What you are doing here is giving effort a size and direction. What students need to understand is that their effort has a size and a purpose.

Focus their attention

Blend attentive noticing into lessons

Use sets of interesting pictures together with cards with a viewing window cut into them. Students place the viewing frame over the picture in seeking a range of different features. E.g. something red, made of xx, something denoting happiness, something which suggests what might happen next. It’s a good idea to move from looking firstly for concrete features before moving on to abstract features. You could:

• use a poem. Use the viewer to find the stanza that is most descriptive, that makes them happy, that uses the best simile…
• or use a geometrical image. Use the viewer to find corresponding angles, perpendicular lines, a reflex angle…
• or an image of the water cycle. Use the viewer to find where water vapour is rising, where water is moving downwards, where it would be best to site a farm, a village, a wind turbine…

Make reflecting on managing distractions part of everyday lessons

Here is a very practical example of how you might develop the emotional climate of the classroom and make it managing distractions friendly.

Learning mats are A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Use distractions positively

Sometimes when we are stuck, becoming distracted is our brain’s way of saying “I need to take a break”. Often, moving away from the problem at hand and doing something different for a while, or simply gazing out of the window, can help new ideas bubble to the surface, it gives the subconscious time to work on a problem that has previously seemed uncrackable.

Consider having a quiet break-out area for students to use when they need a break, but make sure it isn’t being used too frequently or improperly!

Use ‘gazing out of the window’ positively.

When you see a student doing this ask them ‘What’s bubbling up in your mind? What new ideas are you imagining?’ rather than referring negatively to an apparent loss of focus or concentration.

Display students’ self-monitoring of distraction

• A learning powered primary school captured student’s own assessment of managing distractions each week
• They have developed a 5 point scale describing different levels of distraction
• Each student crafted a personal logo, known only to them and the teacher. Each week they would stick their logo on the level of distraction they estimated they had achieved across the week.
• These assessments were recorded by school and set against progress data
• Perhaps not surprisingly strong positive correlations were found…being able to manage distractions better positively correlates with increases in progress! Now there’s a surprise.

Exploring what it feels like

AIM To enable students to recognise;

• What distractions are
• What it feels like when being distracted
• A range of distractions
• What distracts them.

Set up the Learning Challenge

• Pair up students — Student A, Student B.
• A to describe a complicated process, e.g. tying a shoelace or tie.
• B to try to distract by –
  • butting in –
  • looking bored –
  • looking elsewhere –
  • talking about how they would do it –
  • and so on 2 minutes.
• Swap roles.

Plenary Discussion Explore:

• What happened?
• How were you distracted?
• What did being distracted feel like?
• How could you avoid or manage the distractions better?

Record Distractions

• As a whole group, or in pairs, construct a list of things that distract people: – in the classroom – at home.
• Prompt: Distractions may not be outside us, but in our heads …
• Compare the lists. Draw out interesting / mundane distractions.
  • (Could be done using Post-its as a scan and focus exercise.)

Introduce the idea of distraction

Quick ways to introduce managing distraction

Here are a couple of ideas for introducing the idea of distractions to students in the transition years. They need not be used in the ‘worksheet’ format of course! If these don’t suit there are plenty of other ideas later in this section.

Here’s a fuller explanation of distraction if you need one. It might be useful for deeper discussion and analysis with students.

It is the beginnings of getting students to realise that distraction is something that they can and should control.

Build awareness of distractions

Encourage students to become more aware of distractions and how they might deal with them. Use phrases like:

• What might put you off?
• What might get in your way?
• Do you sometimes distract others?
• How might they feel when you do that?
• What could you do to avoid being distracted?
• Where are you now on our distractions scale?
• How well have you managed your distractions today?

Explore keeping themselves on track

Break States.

Change the mental and physical state of the class by using music, quick games (Fizz-Buzz, Simon Says), guided relaxation,  change of partner/desk/lighting, breathing exercises, or a refreshment break. Such activities refresh and relax pupils, enabling a greater degree of focus afterwards. Discuss their impact on concentration and how students could use them in other contexts to keep themselves on track with their learning.

It’s important that students understand learning as a process rather than an event, and that being distracted is a inevitable part of that process. Mostly distraction takes us away from learning but sometimes purposeful distraction can be a helpful addition to the learning process.

Break states are a positive distraction.

Enable students to self-monitoring their distractions

Am I a ☆☆☆ manager?

Work with students to describe different degrees of the ability to manage distractions.For example:

A 3-star manager might

• always keep focused on what s/he is learning
• support other learners by helping them to manage their distractions

Use language appropriate for the age of the students.

Comment on behaviour in order to recognise and value the management of distractions.

Ask students to help each other with ideas about how to earn more stars as distraction managers.

Promote a learning environment

Enable students to control their learning space

Being concerned with classroom layout in dealing with distraction may seem strange bedfellows, but if we think of distraction in the wider context of managing the learning environment it begins to make more sense.

Just have a look around your classroom and ask yourself:

• Does it feel a calm place to be?
• Are there different habitats within the classroom? e.g. A quiet thinking place, a reading place?
• Is the layout quickly adaptable?
• What about the walls? Do they celebrate the classroom values? Too busy/congested?
• Are learning resources accessible by students? Do they know where things are? Can they get what they need, when they need it?
• Do you expect students always to sit at tables? Are there any other work spaces?
• Is it a distracting environment? Does it aid quiet reflection?
• To what extent is the environment their’s to manage?

Classrooms that feel like homely places to be, where there’s freedom of movement, a choice of learning spaces a sense of calm and where students feel they belong all seem to help concentration levels, lessen stress and focus effort.

Promote deeper ways of looking at being stuck

In this phase we are not talking about modelling getting unstuck on a problem where you may simply have forgotten a step. Nor is this process driven primarily by subject knowledge. Here the analysis is about what you might ask yourself when you are in a major stuck problem and need to rethink what you are doing in order to restart, tweak, or give up.

Encourage exploration of the following 10 points:

1. Can I explain to myself what’s really going on here?
2. Am I keeping to the original intention?
3. Have I read and understood the question/problem properly?
4. Am I applying the right principles? Have I got roughly the right ideas?
5. Does anything stand out as simply wrong?
6. Have I forgotten something obvious?
7. Have I veered off course? Am I down a rabbit hole?
8. Am I making this too complicated? or too simple? Do I need to go back to basics?
9. What would a distilled list of key stages or points look like?
10. Is this worth continuing with in this way? Why/why not? What could I do instead?

Promote acting wisely in a tough situation

Five steps

Here the analysis of finding a way out of being in a major stuck crisis is put into a series of considered calming steps. You may still have to restart, tweak or abort your project but hopefully after careful rather than chaotic thought.

Two big questions to answer:

• What’s actually going on here?
• What should I do?

Five steps to getting unstuck

Entering, Exploring, Acting, Refining, Letting Go.

1. Entering or starting- do nothing, pause, be willing to look afresh, allow the situation to reveal itself.
2. Exploring – slow down, look at the challenge/ difficulties with genuine curiosity. Think about the problem in different ways, See list in #1 above. e.g.
   1. split the problem into parts, try pro and con analyses
   2. take a step back and look at the bigger picture, look for patterns, influences. root causes.
   3. use gut instinct -‘ there’s something off here ‘
   4. read the signs – ask ‘have I been here before?’, ‘what do I recognise from previously?’
   5. let things brew for a while before moving from broad openness (observation) to determined action.
3. Acting “Not-knowing” changes to knowing; confidence in committing to a course of action. Put your considered new ideas/plan into action.
4. Refining – work with the initial feedback you are getting as a result of your action to deepen the effectiveness of what you have done. Keep to your intention but look for genuinely useful feedback to refine your new course of action.
5. Letting Go. Don’t keep replaying your action decisions. Time to say ‘That’s done, what’s next?’

Help students to analyse risks and strategies for ‘high-level’ work. Ask:

• Which of your many strategies might you use here?
• I’m sure that you can sort that out for yourself.
• Have you thought about the pros and cons of this way of working?
• What will you lose if you tried it this way?
• Have you done enough trial and improvement before starting?
• What did you learn from each of your attempts?
• Your risk analysis paid off there.

Build high level learning inclinations

Build flexibility into a learning focused curriculum

The ability to undertake the type of analysis of being stuck shown by the 10 points in the first item above, relies on a broad range of high level inclinations. The way students have encountered the curriculum will have influenced the growth of these inclinations.

Check your curriculum/lesson plans for opportunities for students to:

• self-monitor how things are going, keeping an eye on the goal;
• expect the unexpected, requiring 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 they are doing with a critical eye;
• strive to be the best they can be;
• make sure things are on track and make improvements along the way.

So at a less abstract level, students need to learn how to deal with change, emotionally and practically. With an inflexible frame of mind they are unlikely to recognise the need to change their ideas or the way they do something. These behaviours are closely aligned with meta-cognition and self-regulation.

Avoid demotivation

Embrace the hard bits through a rhythm of learning

It’s the hard parts in learning that can cause demotivation in students. Good work on the hard parts is a structural challenge for teaching as well as learning. You’ll need to build in versions of ongoing assessment but assessment that is not concerned with marks /grades or evaluating the how of learning. This is assessment designed to feed into the learning process and make the learning stronger. It’s possible to organise the rhythm of learning so that it embraces:

• deliberate practice;
• assessment focused on understanding;
• peer and self-assessment;
• communicative feedback.

Anticipate where the sticking points in the content are likely to be, the troublesome knowledge, and then ask:

• what standard ritual ways of thinking might get in the way?
• what do students know already that they might not have linked to this topic/knowledge/task?
• what is getting in the way of them thinking differently about this content to be able to assimilate it?
• what might they need to unlearn in order to relearn this content?
• which aspect(s) of the content is conceptually difficult

Stimulate thinking patterns

Offer prompts to support thinking

The more you can display and use public prompts that underlie the learning process the quicker students will incorporate them into their thinking patterns. This sort of display could be tailored to meet specific subject/curriculum requirements across a school

Make reflection on being stuck and getting unstuck a student responsibility

Reflection, because all too often it is rushed and at the end of the lesson, rarely has the desired impact. More frequently it is a re-cap by the teacher of what they wanted their students to know, a re-statement of the intended learning outcomes. Less frequently is it an opportunity for students to reflect on what they have learned. Remember – reflection should be done by, not to, students.

But – students reflecting on how they have been learning is even rarer than students reflecting on what they have learned.

Build in quality reflection time that focuses on:

• what it feels like when you are stuck;
• what it feels like when you get unstuck;
• why you got stuck in the first place, the mistakes you made and why you made them;
• the things that you did to get unstuck, strategies that you could share with others.

Explore resilience playfully

Offer a challenge

The purpose of this challenge is to help students appreciate:

• How their feelings can influence how long or how much they attend to a problem;
• That noticing possibilities generates solutions.

Set up a challenge with pairs of students. Give each pair one challenge sheet. Offer the challenge “There are nine little pigs in a field. By drawing two squares how can you give each pig its own pen?” Give 5 minutes to complete.

Use coaching questions to help. Use “could be” or “might be” language.

• “How differently can we draw the squares?”
• “Can we draw squares outside the box?” [This is a distraction for them to manage!]

Whole Group Plenary

• Model tackling the puzzle and coming to the answer.
• What helped you to solve the problem? – What did it feel like to be stuck? –
• What did you feel when you saw the puzzle? – Is there a link between people who had positive feelings towards the puzzle and those who solved it?
• Did both partners feel the same about the puzzle? – If not, did the positive person try to help or interest the negative person and vice versa?
• How did you set about and proceed with the problem?
• Run through the meaning of resilience, and move on to related activities.

Generate curiosity about being stuck by saying;

• Give it a go, you can always try another approach if that doesn’t work.
• What could you do if it goes wrong?
• Where will you seek help from?
• Is this sufficiently challenging for you?
• How are you planning to go about it?
• Do you have any fall-back plans?
• I wonder why that happened?

Make thinking routine

Build thinking routines into lessons

Try the Visible Thinking Routine:

• What do I know?
• What do I need to know?
• What techniques do I have for bridging the gap?

This helps students to develop their own internal dialogue for combating stuck-ness.

What are Visible Thinking Routines?

VTRs are, as they say, simple routines that apply across a wide range of subjects and contexts, and which require students to think in a variety of different ways, that are used so regularly by teachers that they become woven into the fabric of the classroom culture and progressively hard-wired into the thinking practices of students. These are ways in which different ways of thinking can become routine in classrooms. They become part of the learning culture.

To be effective such routines need to be:

• Direct, guide, support, encourage thinking;
• Short, memorable, few steps;
• Used over and over again;
• Useful in a variety of contexts;
• Facilitate connections, generating ideas, using knowledge.

Find out more: Visible Thinking Routines

Continue to generate curiosity about being stuck

Couple content and process: build trial and improvement into lessons.

• Trial and Improvement; promote the idea that being stuck is okay. If students know we expect them to try things out, make slip-ups and have another go, their perception of being stuck is likely to turn to curiosity. Weave trial and improvement into lessons by, for example: –
  • Include a trial and improvement success criterion when asking students to complete an activity or create a piece of work. For example: I want to see evidence that you have tried and improved at least a couple of different layouts before settling on…
  • Include a designated focused trial and improvement time in lessons; time to test out ideas. Use scrap paper, mini whiteboards or rough books. Include opportunities for discussion to encourage editing, refining and clarifying of thinking
• Mark the working out that students do. Extend this common in maths idea across the curriculum.

Introduce and model different types of being stuck

In this phase it may be useful to identify and model several forms of being stuck. What sort of stuck is it? Do different sorts of being stuck call for different strategies?

Seven types of stuck:

1. Forgotten the next step in a process?
2. Tried something that didn’t work?
3. Don’t understand the problem/objective/goal?
4. The problem is presented differently?
5. Don’t know which possible remedy to choose?
6. Can’t find a way out. In a blind alley?
7. Don’t know where to find more information?

You could turn any one of these questions into an ‘If, then’ statement:

1. If I have forgotten the next step in a process, then I’ll…

We leave it to you to discover other ways of being stuck with your students and to model your way out of them.

Encourage students to identify the cause of their stuckness. Move students from saying “I’m stuck” to ” I’m stuck because…” Naming the problem will often suggest a reasonable next step.
It’s also useful at this stage to insist that students can’t call themselves ‘stuck’ unless they have tried to apply at least 1 solution.

It is the beginnings of them realising that it is not enough to just say ‘I’m stuck’!

Make getting unstuck collaborative

Who wants to be a Millionaire?

Use the ideas from the television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Refer to these prompts as students’ ‘lifelines’ which, just like ‘Phone a friend’ or ‘Ask the audience’, they can use when they are stuck or unsure. At the end of lessons, the class can review who used which lifelines, how many times, and which were the most popular or successful.
The class can make up its own rules, like ‘You have to have used “Read the prompts” and “Ask a friend” before you can use “Ask the teacher”.’ ‘You can have three designated friends (or learning buddies), but you can’t use any one of them more than twice in any lesson.’
An idea to use now and again throughout the year.

Grow the ability to deal with being stuck

Develop self-reliance in getting unstuck

• Can you tell me why you are stuck?
• What are you finding tricky?
• What do you intend to do next?
• Who might be able to help you?
• What did you do last time this happened?
• Does it remind you of something that you did well in the past?

Develop self reliance

Support to continue: questions not answers

If students freeze when they are stuck, offer supportive questions not answers. A basic support to continue is ‘What do you do next?’, and when this has been answered or done ask the question again, and then again

Support to continue’ prompts are seen as helpful by students. You are encouraging them to take over the job themselves and reminding them that uncertainty shouldn’t lead to paralysis. It’s about weaning students off depending on you and activating their positive self-talk about learning.

Treat getting stuck as ordinary

Plan to get students stuck

Start some lessons with something like:

• ‘In this lesson I want to make sure that you do get stuck’.
• ‘When you get stuck take a look at the unsticking prompts on your table to see if these help you to get unstuck’.
• ‘Later we will spend a few minutes talking about what we learned from being stuck and decide which unsticking idea worked best.’

The explicit message is that students need to expect being stuck during any lesson. The implicit message is that being stuck is a good thing – something you want to see. Using this technique regularly means students come to accept being stuck as a natural part of learning. It begins to build their curiosity about the why and possible patterns to stuckness.

Continue to give mistakes high status

Display and celebrate mistakes

Give mistakes high status, a key role in learning by:

• Telling students you expect them to make, for example, 3 in a lesson.
• Require those students who haven’t made the quota of mistakes to move on to harder work.
• Make a ‘Mistakes of the Week’ display. Pick out common mistakes and talk about them.
• Identify ‘Good’ mistakes – as misconceptions and discuss them.
• Offer a range of examples of good mistakes as lesson starters for students to find and discuss.
• Model making mistakes and how you learn from them.

Make stuck solutions more specific and personal

Put ‘If-then’ planning into action

If we want students to change their behaviour we need to help them to think much more closely about the ‘hows’ and the ‘whats’.

Motivation research proposes an effective solution to this called ‘if-then’ planning.

‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. In the case getting unstuck it’s useful to list all the sorts of places this tends happen

‘Thens’ are what you will do about something; the action you will take. Brainstorm a list of the ‘what we might do in response to the Ifs’.

See a deeper explanation of this technique In Distraction, Receives to Responds.

Make perseverance understandable

Show and discuss animation

It’s hard to shift responsibility for something to others when they have no idea what it’s all about. This, and other short amusing videos proved to be useful triggers for starting a conversation about important learning habits.

This 1 minute animation illustrates an aspect of Perseverance. It’s a fun way to begin approaching important and tricky issues of learning habits. Use it to talk about trying other ways to achieve what you want to do.

We know of some groups and schools that have made their own animations which explore different aspects of Resilience such as dealing with challenge and ‘Going for gold’.

Make being stuck acceptable, normal and interesting

Create stuck prompts in all shapes and sizes

These might include:

• Quick reminder sheets on group tables
• A special Stuck Table with plenty of resources
• Stuck Prompts
• Containers ( e.g. wellies) holding laminated reminders of things to do. Spots=numeracy. Stripes=literacy
• Stuck Walls with multiple displays of Stuck Posters, ‘stuck-of-the-week’, the Learning Pit and so forth.
• During lessons students post up stuck problems and other students suggest solutions (see below)
• Ensure students are involved in creating stuck prompts.

Grow the ability to deal with being stuck

Prompt meaningful discussions

Encourage students to become more interested in difficulty and develop strategies to deal with stuckness. Use phrases like:

• Have a go yourself. I think you can do this.
• Which of your friends might you ask?
• Have you looked at the stuck prompts?
• Well done for sticking at it by yourself.
• What have you already tried? What else might work?
• Which ideas on the stuck prompts might work here?
• There are some good ideas on the learning wall you could try.

• Try this type of shifting-mindset language:

  • Being stuck is a good place to be.
  • Getting stuck means your brain is working hard on something new.
  • When you learn new things your brain gets bigger.
  • If you don’t get stuck you’re probably not learning anything new
  • Getting stuck is good for you.
  • It’s not too hard, it’s just a bit tricky right now.
  • When you say you can’t do this, just add ‘yet’
  • Being stuck means you are about to discover something new

Give being stuck a status

Start some lessons with something like:

• In this lesson I want to make sure that you do get stuck.
• When you get stuck take a look at the unsticking prompts on your table to see if these help you to get unstuck.
• Later we will spend a few minutes talking about what we learned from being stuck and decide which unsticking idea worked best.

The explicit message is that students need to expect being stuck during any lesson. The implicit message is that being stuck is a good thing – something you want to see. Using this technique regularly means students come to accept being stuck as a natural part of learning. It begins to build their curiosity about the why they get stuck. What you are doing is giving stuck a status.

Emphasise being stuck as normal

Model getting unstuck 

Show students how you personally get stuck, and what strategies you have for getting unstuck, by demonstrating a piece of tricky learning. The idea is that sharing these experiences encourages students to imitate getting unstuck.

One of the first ways of surfacing learning, putting it on show, is to focus on how you are modelling being a good learner to students. Modelling is effectively you demonstrating how you are a learner too; a confident finder-outer.

• Take your students behind the scenes of learning and share with them some of the uncertain thinking of learning.
• Learning aloud is a good place to start: take students through how you would work out a problem. Modelling the thought processes (including emotional) that learners go through is important because a lot of the skill of learning only manifests itself in the inner world of the learner.
• Expose the thinking, feeling and decision making of a learner-in-action to help students actually see and hear how learning works.

Begin learning from reflection

Reflect on dealing with being stuck

Make reflection on being stuck part of the daily or lesson routine. This display from Miriam Lord primary school in Bradford shows a range of discussion cards which the teacher uses with specific groups of students during or at the end of a day.

The questions include;

Today I have learned….

Today I have tried to…

My biggest success today has been….

What will you tell your family when they ask ‘What did you do at school today’?

The most important thing I have learned today.

Has something inspired you today?

What other sorts of questions would you include in such a selection for your classroom? Something about asking good questions or how they got themselves unstuck would be useful. This exercise makes a good start on introducing meta-cognitive behaviours more generally.

Celebrate learning as a process

Display work in progress

As part of this learning culture it’s a good idea to display early drafts of work which show where students got stuck. Encourage students to write on a separate note how they got unstuck, and display the note with the work.

It’s important that students understand learning as a process rather than an event, and that stuckness is a prominent part of that process. From scribbled notes to final copy can be a long and eventful journey. Learning routines along the way include capturing rough ideas, adding to them, trying again, trying another way, re-thinking, refining and completing. Such routines lead students to see that it’s not about everything being perfect or easy from the start.

Key points:

• • A goal without the will is wishful thinking
  • The will without the goal means rapidly fading interest
  • Performance related goals are less likely to engage and motivate than learning related goals

How our orientation to goals influences our determination to persevere.

This trajectory concerns goals; having goals can have an impact on our resilience. Let’s face it, if you haven’t got a goal, or at least an interest in something, you are not likely to stick at it and channel your emotion positively to get it done. In the beginning students have little sense of goals or purpose, they are just doing something. But this can be turned into being able to imagine what something might look like. Later students can be helped to understand what a ‘do-able’ goal is and how to turn goals set by the teacher into a goal that they want to achieve – to make it their goal. A wanted goal is something you put effort into. Later phases in this development include being able to put your goals into a wider context, to realise that being able to do X or Y isn’t just about the here and now but has wider implications for life. This will certainly come into play when choosing subject options, for example, in later years. Do students go for something they like, enjoy and find easy or do they chose some options on the basis of their relevance to their future career? It’s a hard and grown up sort of decision to make. This orientation to goals all turns on how we design our own goals, blend these with the goals of others, and then pursue them with tenacity and independence.

So there is a lifetime of possible development captured here. In a learning friendly classroom culture learning habits have a better chance of improving because teachers can make specific interventions, to bring about improvements, that are purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The questions in the quiz ask you to gauge how your students react to setting and achieving goals now,

It asks about your students’ orientation to goals. Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Goals column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students’ to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. Your students evidently have a wide range of skills and dispositions, and in the absence of any phase of development that appears more frequent than others, it is unclear where to make a start.

To focus on the upper phases of development would do nothing for those students still in the Lacks/Receives phases. Likewise starting with the lower phases would do little for those students who already have well developed strategies for working towards goals.

Given that there is no self-evident starting point, we would recommend making a start with addressing the Lacks to Receives phase circled in red, moving on to the Receives to Responds phase, circled in blue, when possible.

Why? Your students in the Values and Organises phases are already accomplished learners and are very likely on a trajectory for achieving highly whether or not you intervene to move them even further on. Whereas students most at risk of under-achievement most likely lie in the Lacks and Receives phases. Sort that in the first instance, and look to stretch the Values/Organises students later when time allows.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to think ahead of action.

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about what they are hoping to do/achieve.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities that require advance planning and goal setting.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about thinking ahead to ensure success.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how learning focus friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to working towards goals.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to work constructively towards goals?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

• your classroom culture has an immense effect on students’ learning attitudes and dispositions
• your goal is to cultivate learning so that students are minded to believe that their effort will pay off
• offer students ways to talk about and shape the effort they need to make
• unpack what ‘effort ‘ means

The Challenge trajectory is about how we relate to challenge: are we more excited by the prospect of triumphing over challenge, or more afraid of failing when faced with difficulty? Challenge needs to be included here with Perseverance because there is little need to persevere with easy, familiar activities. Students need to be challenged even for us to discover how or whether or not they persevere at all. So the growth of ways to cope with challenge helps to cement Perseverance too. Here they learn to enjoy a challenge and recognise the satisfaction of triumphing over difficulty. The phases include practical ideas like recognising risks, sorting out what the challenge is fundamentally about, and using tools to plan and avoid obstacles.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable and are sensitive to cultures

The key to improvement lies with teachers making specific interventions; purposeful rather than their being left to chance.

The Questions in the quiz ask you to gauge how your students react to challenge now,

Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Challenge column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students’ to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The overwhelming majority of students are in the Values phase. They are already comfortable at rising to challenge and skilful at planning to overcome challenge.

Since your class appears to have very similar starting point in terms of their attitude to rising to challenge, it is sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Values to Organises cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves relish challenge’.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that some students may be more secure at the Values phase than others. It might still be wise to check out the teaching ideas behind the Responds to Values cell, the one circled in blue, ‘Help students help themselves take risks and change plans’. A period of consolidation at this phase might be a great starting point for the whole class to move forward together.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to enjoy rising to challenges.

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about overcoming difficulty and how it is a natural part of learning.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to stretch learners.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about rising to challenge.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how learning focus friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to rising to challenge.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to rise to challenge?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

When you use this learning behaviour, you …

• are aware of possible sources of distraction
• purposefully try to minimise distractions
• know what conditions help you to learn
• settle back to learning quickly after an interruption

The Managing Distraction trajectory is about how we manage our learning environment; the extent to which we can manage our own learning climate, ignore or manage distractions, regain focus if lost. Since much of students’ learning takes place in a classroom, they need to be able to manage and take advantage of that environment. They learn to understand just what distracts them from learning and why distractions can be both a help and a hindrance. How they need to learn to overcome the hard slog of practice and use their environment to help. How the learning environment can include all sorts of negativity from others and how they might overcome these disruptive emotions. The learning environment itself has many facets that can trip up and stall learning.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable.

The key to improvement lies with teachers making specific interventions, purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you about how your students might react to or deal with Managing Distractions

Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Managing Distraction column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students’ to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The majority of students are in the Responds phase, although quite a few are still in the Lacks and Receives phases.

It might seem sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Responds to Values cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves manage their learning environment’. That would be an appropriate starting point for many of your learners.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that a significant number of learners are still in the Lacks and Receives phases. These are likely to be the students who struggle to maintain focus and are most at risk of under-achievement.

It follows that you should also look for teaching ideas for these students – behind the Lacks to Receives cell and the Receives to Responds cell, the ones circled in blue. You might even decide that it is wise to start by attempting to narrow the learning gaps with the ‘blue cell’ ideas before even embarking on the ‘red cell’ ideas.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to take responsibility for maintaining focus

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about distraction and effort.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to ensure greater focus.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about distraction and effort.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how learning focus friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to managing distractions.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to manage distractions?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

• Re-think being stuck as:
  • an interesting place to be;
  • being on the brink of learning;
  • almost, but not quite understanding something new or different.
• Think positively to:
  • Channel the energy of frustration productively;
  • marshal positive emotions to succeed.

Progression in Stuck

Progression in Stuck is all about how we react when we get stuck; the strategies we have for overcoming it; being brave about not knowing something; how we cope with making mistakes; how we benefit from feedback about mistakes or being stuck; how we can come to appreciate mistakes, become curious about them and learn from them. There’s a long and winding road buried in the statements in this column and the role of the teacher is to ensure students make a significant start on this positive journey.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable. Habits need cultivating.

So there is a lifetime of possible development captured here. In a learning friendly classroom culture learning behaviours have a better chance of improving because teachers can make specific interventions to bring about improvements. The development is purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The Questions ask you to gauge how your students react to being stuck now,

It asks about how your students might react to or deal with being stuck. Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Stuck column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The majority of students are in the Receives phase. They have moved past having a negative mindset (i.e. in the Lacks phase), but have yet to reach the Responds phase.

It might seem sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Receives to Responds cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves understand why they are stuck’. That would be an appropriate starting point for the majority of your learners.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that a significant number of learners are still in the Lacks phase. They need help to catch up with the majority of their peers.

It follows that you should also look for teaching ideas for these students – behind the Lacks to Receives cell, the one circled in blue, ‘Help students overcome fear and become comfortable about being stuck’.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to take responsibility for overcoming being stuck

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about mistakes and being stuck.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to ensure students are learning at the edge of their comfort zone.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about being stuck and making mistakes.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how stuck-friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to dealing with being stuck.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to deal with being stuck?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

• Re-think being stuck as:
  • an interesting place to be;
  • being on the brink of learning;
  • almost, but not quite understanding something new or different.
• Think positively to:
  • Channel the energy of frustration productively;
  • marshal positive emotions to succeed.

Progression in Stuck

Progression in Stuck is all about how we react when we get stuck; the strategies we have for overcoming it; being brave about not knowing something; how we cope with making mistakes; how we benefit from feedback about mistakes or being stuck; how we can come to appreciate mistakes, become curious about them and learn from them. There’s a long and winding road buried in the statements in this column and the role of the teacher is to ensure students make a significant start on this positive journey.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable. Habits need cultivating.

So there is a lifetime of possible development captured here. In a learning friendly classroom culture learning behaviours have a better chance of improving because teachers can make specific interventions to bring about improvements. The development is purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The Questions ask you to gauge how your students react to being stuck now,

It asks about how your students might react to or deal with being stuck. Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Stuck column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The majority of students are in the Receives phase. They have moved past having a negative mindset (i.e. in the Lacks phase), but have yet to reach the Responds phase.

It might seem sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Receives to Responds cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves understand why they are stuck’. That would be an appropriate starting point for the majority of your learners.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that a significant number of learners are still in the Lacks phase. They need help to catch up with the majority of their peers.

It follows that you should also look for teaching ideas for these students – behind the Lacks to Receives cell, the one circled in blue, ‘Help students overcome fear and become comfortable about being stuck’.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to take responsibility for overcoming being stuck

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about mistakes and being stuck.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to ensure students are learning at the edge of their comfort zone.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about being stuck and making mistakes.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how stuck-friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to dealing with being stuck.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to deal with being stuck?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

• Re-think being stuck as:
  • an interesting place to be;
  • being on the brink of learning;
  • almost, but not quite understanding something new or different.
• Think positively to:
  • Channel the energy of frustration productively;
  • marshal positive emotions to succeed.

Progression in Stuck

Progression in Stuck is all about how we react when we get stuck; the strategies we have for overcoming it; being brave about not knowing something; how we cope with making mistakes; how we benefit from feedback about mistakes or being stuck; how we can come to appreciate mistakes, become curious about them and learn from them. There’s a long and winding road buried in the statements in this column and the role of the teacher is to ensure students make a significant start on this positive journey.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable. Habits need cultivating.

So there is a lifetime of possible development captured here. In a learning friendly classroom culture learning behaviours have a better chance of improving because teachers can make specific interventions to bring about improvements. The development is purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The Questions ask you to gauge how your students react to being stuck now,

It asks about how your students might react to or deal with being stuck. Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Stuck column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The majority of students are in the Receives phase. They have moved past having a negative mindset (i.e. in the Lacks phase), but have yet to reach the Responds phase.

It might seem sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Receives to Responds cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves understand why they are stuck’. That would be an appropriate starting point for the majority of your learners.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that a significant number of learners are still in the Lacks phase. They need help to catch up with the majority of their peers.

It follows that you should also look for teaching ideas for these students – behind the Lacks to Receives cell, the one circled in blue, ‘Help students overcome fear and become comfortable about being stuck’.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to take responsibility for overcoming being stuck

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about mistakes and being stuck.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to ensure students are learning at the edge of their comfort zone.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about being stuck and making mistakes.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how stuck-friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to dealing with being stuck.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to deal with being stuck?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

• Re-think being stuck as:
  • an interesting place to be;
  • being on the brink of learning;
  • almost, but not quite understanding something new or different.
• Think positively to:
  • Channel the energy of frustration productively;
  • marshal positive emotions to succeed.

Progression in Stuck

Progression in Stuck is all about how we react when we get stuck; the strategies we have for overcoming it; being brave about not knowing something; how we cope with making mistakes; how we benefit from feedback about mistakes or being stuck; how we can come to appreciate mistakes, become curious about them and learn from them. There’s a long and winding road buried in the statements in this column and the role of the teacher is to ensure students make a significant start on this positive journey.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable. Habits need cultivating.

So there is a lifetime of possible development captured here. In a learning friendly classroom culture learning behaviours have a better chance of improving because teachers can make specific interventions to bring about improvements. The development is purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The Questions ask you to gauge how your students react to being stuck now,

It asks about how your students might react to or deal with being stuck. Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Stuck column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The majority of students are in the Receives phase. They have moved past having a negative mindset (i.e. in the Lacks phase), but have yet to reach the Responds phase.

It might seem sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Receives to Responds cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves understand why they are stuck’. That would be an appropriate starting point for the majority of your learners.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that a significant number of learners are still in the Lacks phase. They need help to catch up with the majority of their peers.

It follows that you should also look for teaching ideas for these students – behind the Lacks to Receives cell, the one circled in blue, ‘Help students overcome fear and become comfortable about being stuck’.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to take responsibility for overcoming being stuck

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about mistakes and being stuck.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to ensure students are learning at the edge of their comfort zone.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about being stuck and making mistakes.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how stuck-friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to dealing with being stuck.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to deal with being stuck?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

Key points:

• Re-think being stuck as:
  • an interesting place to be;
  • being on the brink of learning;
  • almost, but not quite understanding something new or different.
• Think positively to:
  • Channel the energy of frustration productively;
  • marshal positive emotions to succeed.

Progression in Stuck

Progression in Stuck is all about how we react when we get stuck; the strategies we have for overcoming it; being brave about not knowing something; how we cope with making mistakes; how we benefit from feedback about mistakes or being stuck; how we can come to appreciate mistakes, become curious about them and learn from them. There’s a long and winding road buried in the statements in this column and the role of the teacher is to ensure students make a significant start on this positive journey.

This growth pattern of progression phases should be seen as a long term journey. Some phases can take some people years to work through. Some phases may never be worked through since none of the phases are inevitable. Habits need cultivating.

So there is a lifetime of possible development captured here. In a learning friendly classroom culture learning behaviours have a better chance of improving because teachers can make specific interventions to bring about improvements. The development is purposeful rather than being left to chance.

The Questions ask you to gauge how your students react to being stuck now,

It asks about how your students might react to or deal with being stuck. Look at each question carefully and think about:

• the proportion of your students the statement applies to;
• Don’t worry about the outliers…those who are very different to the statement in one direction or another;
• Concentrate on the average range of students;
• Estimate (roughly) how many of your students the statement describes.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

The Stuck column organises the interventions and routines you might use into phases of development:

• from ‘lacks’ to ‘receives’, grey to purple, from ‘can’t or won’t ‘to ‘show me, tell me’
• from ‘receives’ to ‘responds, purple to blue, from ‘show me or tell me’ to ‘I’ll try’
• from ‘responds’ to ‘values, blue to green, from ‘I’ll try’ to ‘I see why’
• from ‘values’ to ‘organises’, green to yellow, from ‘I see why’ to ‘I’ll make sure’.

that will help to nudge your students’ learning forward from their perceived starting points.

Remember…

..this isn’t something you do only once! What you are trying to do is not just re-energise students after a very disrupted period of education but to strengthen their learning resilience throughout their education. Hence, as most of your students reach, say, ‘purple’ phase – ie they will do it, but you have to tell them – that should signal to you to move to the next phase blue, where their confidence has grown so that they try things for themselves, and so on. The magic phase is of course green, from which, very often, there is no return; no slipping back. But, you can keep returning to this resource for years to come as you help your students to build their resilience.

Deciding where to start . . .

Suppose the outcomes of the quiz are like the graph opposite. The majority of students are in the Receives phase. They have moved past having a negative mindset (i.e. in the Lacks phase), but have yet to reach the Responds phase.

It might seem sensible to begin looking for teaching ideas behind the Receives to Responds cell – the one circled in red, ‘Help students help themselves understand why they are stuck’. That would be an appropriate starting point for the majority of your learners.

But . . . do not neglect the fact that a significant number of learners are still in the Lacks phase. They need help to catch up with the majority of their peers.

It follows that you should also look for teaching ideas for these students – behind the Lacks to Receives cell, the one circled in blue, ‘Help students overcome fear and become comfortable about being stuck’.

1. How you relate to your students; gradually sharing more of the responsibility for learning with them. In this case, how you encourage them to take responsibility for overcoming being stuck

2. How you talk about learning; the sort of language content and style you use to enhance and explain learning. In this case how you talk about mistakes and being stuck.

3. How you construct learning activities; the tasks and classroom routines you use to build positive learning habits. In this case how you design activities to ensure students are learning at the edge of their comfort zone.

4. What you celebrate about learning; what you prize, recognise, display; the outward signs of beliefs about learning. In this case what you praise, value and display about being stuck and making mistakes.

The Culture Quiz (opposite) helps you to gauge how stuck-friendly your classroom culture appears to be now in these four areas.

The Questions in the Quiz ask you to reflect on your existing classroom culture in relation to dealing with being stuck.

Look at each question carefully and think about whether your classroom culture is currently closer to statement A or statement B.

PRESS the button, take the live quiz and receive automated feedback.

What to stop and start

Does your feedback offer any pointers as to how you might need to tweak your classroom culture to pave the way for helping your students to deal with being stuck?

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Have a think about what you might do…

To the right are a few 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.

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Check against school values

It might first be reassuring to consider the ‘Re-energising’ resource itself to make sure it fits with the school’s values. School values can be gleaned from a school’s vision and/or mission statements, from their goals or anticipated outcomes or even current targets.

One reason for taking on ‘Re-energising‘ is to address dwindling levels of engagement in students and for teachers to:

• equip students with the strategies to keep going when the going gets tough;
• enable students to manage their own learning environment and avoid competing distractions;
• ensure that students come to relish tackling work that they find challenging;
• encourage students to pursue their learning goals with tenacity.

The key here is to ask:

• Do the points above chime with our school values? Is this how we view a teacher’s role?
• How will using the ‘Re-energising‘ resource positively influence or strengthen our values and organisational health?
• How might we emphasise these points when we introduce the resource to staff?

The ‘Re-energising‘ strategy

The ‘Re-energising’ online resource can be accessed by any member of staff at any time of day and such personal exploration should be encouraged. But simply relying on individuals to take a look and try a few of the ideas now and then will have little effect on classrooms or students. Leaders will need to organise how this rich source of practical information might best be utilised as a central resource so that it affects classroom cultures, develops teachers’ teaching habits and strengthens students’ learning habits. As such it’s surely worth a plan!

The detail of any such strategy will of course be different for every school but here we offer the key questions that will need ironing out in order to build the strategy:

• Style issues…how will we use our cooperative management style to ensure success across the school?
  • by promoting; dialogue, experimentation and self-monitoring.
• Structure issues…who will lead the change strategy and what accountability may be needed in the system?
  • by agreeing role responsibilities, introducing ‘Re-energising‘ to staff, managing the monitoring system.
• Systems issues…. what changes are needed in school systems to accommodate the change strategy?
  • by considering directed time, adjusting meeting patterns and agendas to support the change strategy.
• Skills issues…. how can we assess what our students’ resilience and teachers’ classroom cultures are like now?
  • by discovering baselines for students’ resilience, baselines for learning cultures, to shape the use of the resource.
• Staff issues… what’s the best way to organise the development of staff across the school using a common resource?
  • by considering small scale enquiries, professional learning teams, coaching partnerships.

What sort of leadership / management style will be needed to support the ‘Re-energising‘ resource?

All school leaders establish their own leadership style in the hope of matching or shaping the school’s values. The beliefs and values lying at the heart of ‘Re-energising‘ is a cooperative style of teaching where the teacher’s role is to help students to help themselves become better learners.

Hence leadership styles that are more likely to sustain the school in using ‘Re-energising’ are low in directives and high in a supportive style. Our experience across many schools over many years suggests change management of this sort works best when leaders:

• Create a dialogue about learning across the school;
• Enable staff to experiment with the ideas without fear of failure;
• Encourage and support teachers to self-monitor their experiments and their impact on students.

In a school this includes:

• who will lead the change strategy and what accountability may be needed in the system?
• agreeing role responsibilities, introducing ‘Re-energising‘ to staff, managing the monitoring system.

Structural tweaks to accommodate ‘Re-energising’

All schools have a leadership and management structure with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Many have someone who holds a responsibility for ‘teaching and learning’, or maybe even ‘learning and teaching’, but few schools have a leadership role that focuses on the planning for and delivery of interventions to improve students’ learning behaviours.

Ask yourself:

• Who is best placed to take the lead on ‘Re-energising‘?
• Will you add it to someone’s existing responsibilities?
• Could this be a role for an untested mover and shaker?
• What information will they need to run the change strategy effectively?

And for whoever you decide to lead on this:

• How will you make time available for ongoing monitoring and the sharing of best practice?

System tweaks to accommodate ‘Re-energising’.

Schools can do anything they want. But they can’t do everything they want!

If a school wishes to introduce ‘Re-energising’ and for it not to become an additional workload issue for staff, some adjustments may well be necessary.

Schools have standard ways of operating on a day to day, week to week, term to term, even on a year to year basis – a ‘usual’ way of organising the school day, a weekly meeting cycle, a termly curriculum plan, a yearly reporting structure, a directed time budget that changes little year on year etc.

These ‘standard’ ways of operating, the ‘way we do things around here’, may, or may not, be helpful in terms of ‘Re-energising‘.

One of the problems is that while schools are adept at taking on new ideas, they are sometimes poor at moving on from earlier ones. Systems that were designed for one purpose are ‘tweaked’ (or not!) to accommodate changing times.

It’s worth giving time to think about whether your existing systems, your ways of organising the learning year, need adjustment to give ‘Re-energising‘ the best chance of successful implementation.

Skills issues in relation to ‘Re-energising‘.

There are 2 considerations:

Student learning behaviours / skills: How can we establish a measure of our students’ current learning behaviours to act as a baseline against which to evaluate the impact of ‘Re-energising‘?

Teaching behaviours / classroom cultures: How do we view our existing classroom cultures, and how might they need to adapt in light of ‘Re-energising’?

These are important because:

1. your evaluation of student learning behaviours may well guide your decisions about the order in which you tackle the 4 sections of ‘Re-energising’;
2. your evaluation of classroom cultures will yield insight into those areas of the school where integrating learning behaviours will most readily take root, and those classrooms that may well struggle to blend learning behaviours into everyday practice.

Use the 8 quizzes in the following toggle box (4 relating to students and 4 for classroom culture) to explore these 2 considerations further.

Staff development opportunities to generate ‘Re-energising’.

The ‘Re-energising‘ online resource can of course be accessed by any member of staff at any time of day and such personal exploration should be encouraged; teachers’ habits as learners become part of the picture. However, rather than simply relying on staff to look at and act on ‘Re-energising’ school leaders have to organise how this rich, practical source of information might best be utilised as a professional development resource; answering the questions ‘what’ has to be learned and ‘how’ it might be learned?

In any school there will be enthusiasts, early adopters, cautious observers (waiting to be reassured or convinced), and maybe a few who actively resist changing their ways. You may need to work with different groups in different ways for a while. It’s important to see using ‘Re-energising’ as a process of gradual, cumulative culture change across the whole school that might take several terms to really embed.

One or more of following types of professional development could be built into the CPD programmes of your school. The more you activate professional development opportunities to affect change, the more the school will become a culture of enquiry. Useful types of CPD include:

• Teacher learning communities, or as we refer to them, Professional Learning Teams;
• Coaching partnerships;
• Small-scale learning enquiries;
• Classroom observations and personal review;
• Learning walks.

Your strategic managing change plan will need to explain which of the various alternative staff development routes will be utilised to support ‘Re-energising’.

The growth charts you used in the last section have the power to reveal interesting and vital information about students’ learning. They are suitable for use with any class or a sub-group of students.

Work through the sections called ‘Understand your students as learners’ (4.1) and ‘Interpreting the information for your class’ (4.2) to help you to synthesise your views in readiness for sharing these views with colleagues.

. . . . if later this year or next year the learning profiles that you created for all the students in your class/ group could show similar strengthening and growth to the one illustrated alongside.

The profiles you have created can now act as the baseline measure against which you can assess the growth in students’ learning behaviours.

• Remember these simple single columns can’t show all the nuances of these behaviours so there will be some improvements that don’t show up here
• Remember too, 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’

Comparing  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. But it will also be important to ask yourself:

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

Like it or not, as a teacher you’re an influential habit former. The way you orchestrate and guide learning influences the ways  young people perform and behave. As such, you’ll need to be mindful of how you help students to form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

Ask yourself whether your teaching habits are helping students’ learning habits? What might you 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.

5.3  The warp and weft of Learning Power…

.. is a tapestry of activities on the part of both teachers and students. The warp of Learning Power is made up of the learning behaviours we want students to develop. And these are being developed and woven together by the weft of all the different methods that teachers have at their disposal: the language they use and the explicit attention they pay to the ‘how’ of learning; the activities they make available, and the way they are framed for the students; and the aspects of learning power that they model in a dozen different ways, throughout the school day. To begin with, it is useful to focus on the strands. But soon the overall design begins to appear in the tapestry.

You’ve discovered lots of interesting, and previously unknown, details about your students as learners; the warp of learning. Armed with this unique information it’s now worth you turning your attention to the weft; how best to craft your classroom culture and learning activities to strengthen and grow students’ learning habits.

The course has 9 sections:

1. An exploration of and transition to learning power
2. Classroom relationships
3. Talking about learning power
4. Celebrating learning power
5. Designing learning powered lessons
6. A closer look at students’ learning
7. Broadening the range of learning behaviours – A catalogue of ideas
8. Impacts on teaching and on learning
9. Where now: what next?

• what it hopes to enable leaders, teachers and learners to do (in the yellow boxes)
• what outcomes such changes could make to classrooms cultures and curriculum delivery (in blue boxes)
• the anticipated outcomes for leaders, teachers and learners (in green boxes)

• discover and understand what ‘good learners’ tend to be like
• look at yourself through a learning behaviour lens
• tentatively consider the learning behaviours of a couple of students
• remind yourself of how learning behaviours progress

Perhaps the best way of really getting to grips with the growth of learning power is to take a personal look at yourself as a learner and the learning behaviours you tend to use. What might your learning profile look like; where are your strengths, what are the behaviours you find tricky; which would you like to improve.

Having got the idea we then invite you to look at just a couple of your students; a low and a high attaining student. This should give you a glimpse of what it is that makes the difference in how students approach and achieve in learning

Being an effective learner isn’t something that switches on on good days and off on bad days; it grows and builds when it’s nurtured and supported. Furthermore, being a learning powered learner involves gaining control of a range of linked dispositions and skills and emotions.

Over the last ten years we’ve tried to capture the essence of that growth and make it useful for teachers and learners. Take a look at the progression chart alongside. Here you can see all 12 key learning behaviours together.

Each of the 12 learning behaviours are briefly described at one of 5 levels of proficiency shown in the rows. These levels of proficiency grow and flourish when they are cultivated by teachers in learning friendly classrooms and supported by families.

Download the chart and take a closer look at it. You’ve probably never considered yourself, let alone any students, in this way before. Take your time just absorbing what you see. Don’t think too hard about the progression levels at this stage, but rather try to absorb the nature of the descriptions of across learning behaviours and the different areas of learning.

To get a better sense of these learning behaviours and their growth use the chart to think about yourself as a learner. Start slowly. Refer to the learning behaviour descriptions and progression notes in section 2 for help. Now just think:

• where would I place myself on each of these 12 trajectories?
• do I understand the statements well enough to answer? Which ones will I need to check?
• can I really say that this/that statement is secure? Does it actually describe what I do most of the time, or does it describe something I can do but tend not to? (what I do do, rather than what I can do).
• have I ever thought about myself like this before?
• would my partner / colleagues see me in the same way?
• colour in your secure statements on The Learning Behaviour Chart. This becomes your Learning Behaviour Profile. Now ask…
  • which learning domain is the strongest? (emotional, cognitive, social, strategic)
  • which learning domain is the weakest?
  • which particular learning behaviour is strong or weak?
  • am I substantially lower or higher in some? Which?
  • are there any surprises or disappointments?
  • what questions is this raising for me?
  • where would I like to improve?
  • what may have shaped my current learning characteristics?

When you think you understand the progression charts well enough try using them to consider a couple of students.

• Think of two students you know fairly well, but whose attainment differs.
• Download two learning behaviour charts (describing 12 learning behaviours) and indicate which descriptors seem best to describe each student’s current secure behaviours.
• Come back to them after a day or so and check them again to convince yourself that you’ve identified the most appropriate descriptors.
• It might be useful to have a word with a colleague who also knows the student well, especially if you’re uncertain about your answers.

Pink… a relatively weak learner, still negative aspects of learning (perseverance, imagining, meta learning) and elsewhere in need of adult support (ie they are broadly just into the purple phase);

Blue…illustrates a well-rounded learner, secure at the purple and blue phases, and moving into the green phase for some behaviours. This might be typical of a well-rounded, high attaining learner who is disposed to behave in learning-positive ways. Do not expect to see much beyond the green phase, as the uppermost 2 phases require levels of maturity and independence rarely accessed by younger learners.]

Ask yourself:

• what do these profiles tell me about these students as learners?
• do the students appear to do things differently?
• do any of the columns seem to show use of later phases growth for the higher achieving student?
• which learning behaviours appear to make the higher attaining student more successful?
• does any learning domain (emotional, cognitive, social, strategic) dominate for either student?
• which learning behaviours appear to need boosting most for either student?

Now that educators have moved beyond seeing learning as a performance to it being an interesting process going on in our brains, let’s turn towards the growth of this supple learning mind. The whole point of building learning powers is to do just that, to build the learning behaviours, not simply to name them. The diagram alongside – Learning: Poles Apart – offers an outline view of this 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.

Our understanding of what the journey might look like in practice has emerged and flowered over the past seven years. The stages of the journey are ‘borrowed’ from Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain of learning and summarised opposite. It is this scaling of the learning dispositions that will help you make sense of the journey as you document, and influence, your learners’ progress over time.

To help schools make the collection of learning data more manageable we have selected 12 of the original 17 characteristics for you to take a closer look at over time. In this section you can find out more about these fascinating learning characteristics and how they grow under the influence of a learning friendly environment. Understanding more about them will increase your confidence to collect valid data about how these characteristics are growing in your students.

Attention can be broken when learning gets blocked, but good learners have learnt the knack of maintaining or quickly re-establishing their concentration when they get stuck or frustrated. Perseverance is often undermined by two common and erroneous beliefs. Firstly that learning ought to be easy. If learners think that they will either understand something straight away, or not at all, then there is simply no point in persisting and struggling. Secondly that bright people pick things up easily, so if you have to try it means you’re not very bright. Clearly the idea that effort must be symptomatic of a lack of ability makes persevering an unpleasant experience. Good learners develop perseverance when their parents and teachers avoid conveying these messages, even unwittingly. Perseverance is about:

Keeping going in the face of difficulties; channelling the energy of frustration productively; knowing what a slow and uncertain process learning often is.

Noticing involves being ready, willing, and able to: be attentive to details and subtleties in seeking to understand things; seek underlying patterns patiently, understanding that connections may take time to emerge; actively use all the senses to gather information to build understanding of the world around; gain a clear sense of the ‘what’ of something before considering the ‘why’ and ‘how’; recognise that learning is often complex and difficult and takes time and effort to accomplish. So students need to learn how to focus their attention; to look patiently beyond the obvious to see detail and subtlety; to be able to identify the relative importance of what they are observing; to develop the ability to see detail in the context of the bigger picture; and to develop the ability to explain, hypothesise about and explore what is being noticed. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing noticing moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘look carefully’.

Effective questioners are motivated and not afraid to ask questions about the past, the present and to explore the future. They have an extensive range of question types and techniques at their disposal, which they use with discernment and sensitivity to occasion. A well-formed questioning habit involves being ready, willing and able to; not take things at face value; be less likely to accept answers uncritically; ask questions of oneself as well as of others; get under the surface of things; be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity; not be afraid of the ‘don’t know’ state of mind; be playful, yet systematic and analytical; be socially aware of the impact that questions may have on others; challenge others’ thinking; understand and use different types of question for different purposes; recognise that revealing their own uncertainties helps them learn.

Making links between different things comprises not only the ability to see or make relationships but also the inclination to look for them. Trying to hook up new experiences with what you already know is what some people call ‘making meaning’. New ideas become meaningful to the extent that we can incorporate them within our own mental webs of associations and significances. Good learners get pleasure from seeing how things fit together. They are interested in the big picture, and how new learning expands it. They experience them through the ‘ah ha’ experience of seeing a connection between two previously isolated concepts, or the satisfaction of seeing the connection between an abstract idea and a ‘hands-on’ concrete experience. It’s how you make sense of the world. To be a good link maker you need to keep stimulating your brain and enriching your experiences because through active learning you quite literally ‘build’ your own mind. At the heart of all this is your attitude to knowledge; whether it is bound up in rules and ‘is-language’, or whether you see knowledge as provisional, ever building and changing.

A well formed Reasoning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to: resist jumping to conclusions; seek justifiable evidence to shape sound, well-honed arguments; scrutinise your assumptions; seek evidence and counter evidence, look for false steps and carefully draw conclusions; remain suspicious, doubting and self-doubting in order to avoid unwarranted certainty; convey your logical thinking clearly, through dialogue, symbols, analogies, prose and pictures. So, at a less abstract level, students need to learn the inclination to resist impulsive responses; to respond logically and thoughtfully; to apply logic by explaining, justifying and, ultimately, proving what they think; to utilise a range of reasoning tools; and to develop strategies for presenting their reasoning to others persuasively.

Imagining is an important way of thinking but one that seems to be afforded too few opportunities in classrooms. Imagination isn’t just a cute faculty that children use to weave fantasies: it is one of the most effective tools in the learner’s toolbox. Scientists, designers and executives need a powerful imagination just as much as painters and novelists.There are two kinds of imagination: active and receptive. In active imagination, you deliberately create a scenario to run in your mind’s eye. Sports people use this kind of mental rehearsal and experiments have shown it to be very effective at improving their level of skill. The second kind of imagination is more receptive, like daydreaming: letting a problem slip to the back of your mind, and then just sliding into a kind of semi-awake reverie, where the mind plays with ideas and images without much control on your part

A well formed Imagining habit involves being ready, willing, and able to: use the mind as a theatre in which to play out ideas and possible actions experimentally; use a rich variety of visual, aural and sensory experiences to trigger creative and lateral thinking: explore possibilities speculatively, saying ‘What might …’, ‘What could …’ and ‘What if …?’ rather than being constrained by what is; retain a childlike playfulness when confronted with challenges and difficulties; be aware of intended outcomes whilst adopting a flexible approach to realising goals; rehearse actions in the mind before performing them in reality.

Effective resource users learn with the help of many different sources – other people, books, the internet, music, the environment, experience…and making intelligent use of all kinds of strategies and things to aid learning. In the early stages, it means selecting and making the best use of known strategies and classroom resources but this swiftly moves on to embracing a much wider and varied range of possibilities. This involves being able to seek novel ways of solving problems by exploiting the potential of known strategies and what is around them including things they may never have thought of as a resource.

Hearing and listening are different. Whereas hearing is a automatic and effortless process when sound waves strike the ear drum and cause vibrations in the brain, listening is about the brain giving those sounds meaning. It’s unnatural, and it requires effort. There’s all sorts of faulty listening. Sometimes we fake it or pretend to listen; sometimes we only respond to the remarks we are interested in and reject the rest. Sometimes we listen defensively and take innocent remarks as personal attacks. Or, we listen to collect information to use to attack the speaker, or we avoid particular topics, or we listen insensitively and can’t look beyond the words for other meanings, or we turn the conversation to ourselves. So, listening is indeed hard and requires effort. To be a good listener you need to be able to listen for information, listen to judge the quality of the information and listen empathetically to build a relationship and help solve a problem. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing Listening moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘do good listening’ or ‘now listen carefully’.

Effective collaborators are adept at learning with and from others. They help to:

• shape the ideas of the team
• decide what needs to be done
• contribute to getting the job done
• keep an eye on how things are going
• improve team performance through reflection.

A well-formed collaboration habit includes being ready willing and able to: work effectively with others towards agreed, common goals, acting flexibly in response to circumstances; adopt different roles and responsibilities in pursuit of agreed goals and the well-being of the team; hold and express opinions coherently, compromising and adapting when appropriate; seek to understand what others are saying; sharing, challenging, supporting and building on ideas.

Planning, is the ability to take a strategic overview of your learning, and make sensible decisions. It means:

• taking stock of the problem and the parameters within which you must work
• assessing the available resources, both inner and outer, and deciding which you think are going to be needed
• making an estimate of the time the learning will take, and the competing priorities that may have to be delayed or sacrificed
• imagining a route-map for the learning
• anticipating hurdles or problems that may arise along the way.

Good learners like taking responsibility for planning and organising their learning. They welcome opportunities to decide for themselves when, where, why and how they are going to learn—and to get better at doing so. Research shows, for example, that people who can make a reasonable estimate of how long a task will take are more likely to finish on time, and to do better work.Training the process of thinking ahead often starts simply by asking students to find the resources they will need to carry out a task. But planning your own learning is a sophisticated task. It involves a personal, silent assessment of your learning skills (‘What can I feasibly achieve? What am I capable of doing? What resources would bolster my chances of success?’) The more timid, less confident or lower achieving students may find such planning a daunting prospect. Introducing and requiring students to work learning out for themselves will take time and careful planning on the part the teacher.

A well formed Refining 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.

So students need to learn how to deal with change, emotionally and practically. With an inflexible frame of mind they are unlikely to recognise the need to change their ideas or the way they do something. They also need to know what ‘good’ looks like; how to keep an eye on how things are going and the willingness to evaluate how things went against external standards. Growing revising moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘have another go’.

Meta-learning involves drawing out of your learning experience a more general, explicit understanding of the process of learning, and specific knowledge about yourself as a learner. Becoming a meta-learner is about being able to assess the effectiveness of your own learning process and regulate it for greater success. It has several strands; how you become and stay motivated and plan your learning, how you build and organise your ideas; how you learn with and from others; how you manage your learning environment and how you monitor your learning process itself in order to improve. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing meta-learning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think about your learning’.

• What sort of learning character do my learners have?
• What sort of learning characteristics do my more successful learners have?
• Which characteristics or behaviours do my struggling learners have?
• Which learning behaviour contributes to the success of most of my learners?
• Which learning behaviour is used less than any of the others?
• How do the answers to these, and similar questions, apply to me, my teaching and the curriculum?

Before you start making use of the learning behaviour charts that can address these questions you’ll find it helpful to take a quick look at the background of learning domains and learning behaviours or powers. It’s an approach to learning that looks at the building blocks of learning, what they are, the part they play and why they matter. Read on to find out about the basic learning behaviour framework, known as the Supple Learning Mind, the importance of learning dispositions and where all these ideas have come from and why they matter.

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.

Underlying this approach is a recognition that learning how to learn involves more than skills, it involves students’ attitudes, values, interests and beliefs as well. It’s about helping students to help themselves to be disposed to persist, to question and be curious, to collaborate harmoniously and to be open to new ideas.