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.

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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.

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Learning is about making connections – you will 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.

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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’.

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Use the interactive grid below to navigate this section. Clicking on any of the cells with blue text takes you to one of the 16 sections – 4 learning behaviours, each with 4 categories.

For each of the 4 foundational learning behaviours you will find 4 categories:

• Some visible thinking routines to activate each behaviour;
• Some activities to strengthen each behaviour;
• Some strategies for checking how each behaviour is developing;
• And a complete lesson designed to activate each behaviour.

Explore over 100 ideas that help you to blend learning behaviours into lesson design.

This meeting explores the activities that you can use to blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

• Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 3, sections 3A, B and C, that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
• Share your responses to your reading in Unit 3, section 3D.
• Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3D.

Types of Activities

All teachers design activities to help their students to access and understand the content of the lesson. These activities lie at the heart of lesson planning, linking what is to be learned with how it will be learned. While it is impossible to list all such activities, is it possible to discern some different types of activities, to identify some overarching categories or groups of activities?

Here we try to suggest a hierarchy of activity types, going from ‘Listening’, through to ‘Discovery’. This progression of activities: demands more of students; activates a wider/richer range of learning behaviours; and is underpinned by a shift of responsibility from the teacher towards the learner.

As you read through this section, think of the activities that you plan for your students and ask yourself which activity types you tend to favour. Also consider how you might adapt/tweak your usual activity types to offer students greater responsibility for their own learning.

The characteristics of a ‘Listening’ type activity are that:

• the outcomes, success criteria and content known to the teacher;
• students learn by listening to teacher exposition.

Essentially a relatively passive experience for learners unless the teacher overlays an activity that requires students to do more than simply listen. Nonetheless the fact that the activity is rooted in the exposition of ‘an expert’ (this ‘expert’ could be the teacher, or a U tube clip, or some other source of ‘expertise’) means that levels of learner independence are limited and the classroom culture is heavily teacher-focused.

This is not necessarily a bad thing – there are occasions when teachers must tell students ‘stuff’, and this is particularly the case when students would have no way of discovering the information for themselves. Used sparingly and only when necessary it is a valuable tool in the teacher’s arsenal, but used excessively or when not necessary it reduces students to being spectators rather than participators.

The characteristics of a ‘Practising’ type activity are that:

• the outcome, success criteria and content are known to learners;
• students engage in rehearsal or reinforcement or retrieval of content/skill.

Strategies might include: Past papers; Practice tests; Multiple choice tests; Quizzes; Writing an essay; Answering a spoken question; Testing yourself on your notes / flash cards; Creating (and answering) your own questions; Testing others and/or being tested by others.

Used for consolidation rather than new learning, ‘Practising’ is about helping students to struggle to recall something. When we struggle to remember something, it primes our brain to remember it more easily the next time we look. The brain gets the message that this memory must be important because we are looking for it. The more times we try and retrieve something, the stronger the memory gets. But it is the struggle that is important. If we reteach content instead of getting students to try and retrieve stuff they’ve probably forgotten, the memory does not get strengthened in the same way. It seems kinder but actually does students no favours.

The retrieval effect is stronger if we allow a bit of forgetting to happen before getting students to retrieve. Memories get stronger once retrieved if we have had time to forget them – bizarre as that sounds. Hence the need to spread such activities out into future lessons, spaced learning as it is sometimes called.

The characteristics of a ‘Manipulating’ type activity are that:

• students are given all of the information to work with;
• students have to manipulate the information by organising / sorting / ranking / sequencing.

Students begin ‘Manipulating’ type activities having been given all of the necessary information, usually broken up into smaller pieces. The task is to make sense of these pieces and to re-build the whole. Re-building may require students to: sequence the information (a story or poem or historical events etc.); rank the information using some agreed criteria (Ranking); sort any information with an underlying pattern that can be discerned or created (Mushrooms – see ‘Activities to strengthen Revising’ in section 3d for detail on this activity).

For more ideas, there are a number of ‘Manipulating’ type activities in The Teachers’ Toolkit (by Paul Ginnis), including ‘Ranking’.

The characteristics of an ‘Assembling’ type activity are that:

• the information is given but is hidden / obscured;
• students have to sort the information, judge its relevance, and make sense of it for themselves.

Like ‘Manipulating’ in some ways, ‘Assembling’ differs in that although all the information is provided, it is obscured and students need to make judgements about its importance / relevance. It is this need for a critical appraisal of the information provided that sets ‘Assembling’ apart from ‘Manipulating’.

Consider the example given opposite – building a credible account from a range of sometimes conflicting eye witness statements. Remove all of the conflicting or possibly biased statements and the task is reduced to synthesising similar statements into a credible account. No need to think critically about the statements, just create a summary. The effect is to reduce an ‘Assembling’ type task into a ‘Manipulating’ task.

‘Murder Hunt’ (see below) is an ‘Assembling’ activity because students need to identify and eliminate all of the irrelevant information and red herrings. Remove the irrelevant information in advance and it becomes a ‘Manipulating’ activity, organising the relevant clues without the need to think critically about their relevance.

Likewise, a ‘Manipulating’ activity can be turned into an ‘Assembling’ activity with a few tweaks. In its ‘Manipulating’ format, Tin Tin is little more than a jigsaw puzzle. But – adding a couple of pieces from a similar but different Tin Tin cartoon, or even removing a couple of key pieces and inviting students to create their own replacements, introduces the need for a more critical, ‘Assembling’ type approach.

For more ideas, there are a number of ‘Assembling’ type activities in The Teachers’ Toolkit (by Paul Ginnis), including ‘Murder Hunt’.

The characteristics of an ‘Enquiry’ type activity are that:

• the outcome is known, success criteria are known, content is known, but the method is unknown;
• students determine their method for themselves.

The ‘Rock Salt’ activity was planned by a teacher in Glasgow who was exploring how he could give more control to his students. Read more about it and the impact it had on both himself and his students in the toggle below.

The characteristics of a ‘Discovery’ type activity are that:

• the outcomes are unknown, the success criteria are unknown, the content is unknown, or at most loosely defined;
• students determine their own intended outcomes, success criteria, content and method for themselves.

Designing ‘wild tasks’.

Much of the time, classrooms are structured to ‘deliver’ the curriculum. Tasks are carefully designed by teachers to ensure that every child gets their pre-determined dose of curriculum content, content that can be assessed so that progress can be evidenced. But what if we occasionally design tasks that are ‘wild’, that have no pre-determined outcomes, that give learners free rein to explore areas of their own interest?

Begin by asking students to identify questions to which they would like to know the answer – as one school calls them, ‘big awe and wonder questions’. You may choose to sift them so that everyone chooses from a range of questions that the class consider of greatest interest rather than allow complete freedom of choice. Students then design and undertake their own enquiry into their preferred area of interest as a home learning project. Agreed, you could not operate like this all of the time (or could you??!!), but once in a while? What could possibly go wrong? What might the benefits be?

Take a look at a unit of work you have taught recently or are about to. Use this task type wheel to try and estimate how much use you make of these different types of tasks.

What might the ideal pattern look like for a unit of work for different subjects?

If your results show mainly listening and practising how might you start thinking more widely? Take a look at the selection of teaching activities shown in section 3D.

So far you have been developing your practice to ensure that your classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly. This meeting begins the process of how you can construct curriculum plans that blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

• Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 2, classroom culture that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
• Share your responses to your reading in Unit 3, sections 3A, 3B and 3C and…
• Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3A/B and C.

Planning schemes or units of work has become more complicated over the last few years of the ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum. Time must now be given to the ideas of interleaving, retrieval practice and meta-cognition to name but three. With all this to accommodate in a crowded curriculum one can be forgiven for thinking there can’t possibly be room for more. How and where can we give room to building learners learning power?

In sections 3B3 to 3B5 we tackle schemes of work

In sections 3B6 to 3B10 we tackle lesson planning

Many schools have adopted the interesting planning sequence shown on this diagram. Firstly the block of time (say 6 weeks or 12 weeks) is broken into three types of purpose;

Connecting to (or Finding) content using an open ended challenge to find out what students know already

Stretching.. ways of delivering content using all sorts of activities but which stretch the students’ learning behaviours (see section 3C)

Transfer… which is an open ended task used to see if students can apply what they have learned.

So the broad sequence of a scheme of work consists of …

• a connecting activity to start it off
• a block of time using both connecting and stretching activities to build knowledge
• a transfer activity somewhere in the middle to see how things are going
• the addition of trips or visits to enhance the learning activities
• another block of time for stretching activities
• ending with an open ended transfer activity to evaluate, knowledge, skills, concepts

The stages of planning, with learning behaviours added in, goes like this;

1. Scope the content…what has to be covered?…what do we need to teach?
2. Scope broad curriculum learning goals…what do students need to learn, be able to do?
3. Incorporate interleaving and retrieval practice…how can we ensure students’ learning is sound?
4. Add broad brush learning behaviours suggested by learning goals…which learning behaviours fit best, where?
5. Add learning activities…what types of activities, using these behaviours, will challenge students?
6. NOW Move into lesson planning (see3B6 below)
7. Develop learning goals linked to learning behaviours
8. Include learning activities (increasingly open-ended)
9. Deepen learning behaviours to the level of the progression charts
10. Routinely include reflection

So that students strengthen as independent, self-regulated learners and so learn how to manage a knowledge rich curriculum.

Take a look at the plan alongside. Notice first that the columns, each relating to a period of time (e.g. a lesson, or 2 lesson block or an afternoon) have been divided into the Connect, Stretch, Transfer phases. This gives you an idea of what type of learning activities you might be looking for in those slots.

Areas of content are carefully structured into the time slots and then divided into content to be taught and content for retrieval practice (content to be checked). Hence content on Circulation is taught in slot 4 and then recalled again in slots 5,6,7 and assessed in slot 8. Finally circulation is the subject of a Transfer task in slot 10 which means an open ended task that will show whether students can apply what they have learned. This sort of pattern is replicated for some other content areas across the unit.

Retrieval practice

Retrieval practice is a strategy in which bringing information to mind enhances and boosts learning. Deliberately recalling information forces us to pull our knowledge “out” and examine what we know.

Most importantly, any retrieval practice exercises should always be low stakes – they are not graded.

A later iteration of the unit plan shows slight changes in checking learning with more emphasis being given to assessment in slot 5 and 8. But the big addition here is the addition of learning behaviours. Although not evident in this paperwork the learning behaviours to be used have emerged from the learning goals for each slot. Teachers asked themselves ‘if we want students to achieve xxx what sort of learning behaviour(s) will they need to use to really understand this content?’. Note that at this stage all we know is the name of the learning behaviour to be used but not how it will be used.

As you may have noticed from section 3A we are now at stage 4 planning. We need to move into planning for each session to move into stage 5 planning.

Fundamental 1: Ask just one more question

The diagram alongside shows the questions teachers need to ask themselves when designing learning activities;

1. What do students need to understand about/from this content? i.e. the learning outcomes or goals

2. Using which learning behaviour? i.e. which behaviour would be the most useful/valuable

3. By doing what? What sort/type of learning activity fits best here?

You are used to asking questions 1 and 3 but question 2 is new; it forces you to think about which learning behaviour would be the most appropriate.

Fundamental 2: Design increasingly open-ended activities

to engage, to stretch and to challenge. Try not to over-scaffold the learning, making sure the inherent difficulties in the learning are not avoided or diluted by an overly-helpful teacher. The activities you offer should stretch and challenge both content understanding and learning behaviours.

Fundamental 3: Routinely build in reflection

on content and reflection on learning behaviours into lessons. Review points, rather than the formulaic plenary, should focus students on what they have learned and how they have learned it. Try to ensure reflection is undertaken by students for themselves, not by you on their behalf.

Link goals and activity

Evidence shows that goals that relate to doing something or researching something, or creating something . . . are better motivators than goals that relate to knowing something. Hence, in putting a lesson together the 3 key questions are;

• what is to be learned? (goals)
• by students using which learning behaviour (s)?
• by doing what sort of activity?

Put the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

A goal relating to ‘understanding xxxxx’ or ‘knowing yyyyy’ is less likely to motivate a learner to make the effort than a goal that starts with some indication of the sort of ‘effort’ or way of doing something. For lessons where you are engaging students’ questioning habits, set the lesson off with goals that start by picking out the questioning skills they will need to use to complete the task effectively. For example;

• using your xxx (closed/open/sifting) questioning skills work out/identify…
• Use 5 closed questions to see what you can discover about…..using xxx resource
• use at least 5 open questions and xxx resource to find out why…….
• using no more than 10 ‘what if’ questions, see if, together, you can improve this account of…
• work out your questioning strategy to work out the truth about…

Section 3C explores different activity types, and considers how these activity types trigger and require varying levels of learner independence. From highly teacher-focused activities that demand little more than attentive listening of the learner, through to ‘Finding’ type activities that depend on both high levels of learner independence and that learners are capable of accessing the content with minimal direct instruction, the activities that teachers choose are critical to the success of their lessons.

To select appropriately challenging activities you, the teacher, need to have a good understanding of the content matter and where the tricky bits are likely to lie, and also a deep understanding of your learners’ current understandings and levels of independence. The holy grail is to select learning activities that make accessing the content both demanding and achievable.

As one teacher said to us recently, “I became a better teacher the day I stopped thinking ‘have I made it easy enough for them to understand?’ and started thinking ‘have I made it hard enough to stretch them?'”

The greatest mistake that teachers can make when selecting activities is to depend too heavily on the types of activities that sit well with their preferred teaching style – variety is key, so that the chosen activities are well-matched to learners and offer the full range of activity types over a series of lessons.

Go to section 3C for more detail on activity types.

The first of the 3 fundamentals of lesson design in section 3B6 above, is that all lessons have a dual purpose:

1. The content dimension, with material to be mastered
2. The ‘epistemic’ dimension, with some learning skills and habits being exercised.

Itemising these ‘learning skills and habits’ at the unit planning stage is likely to be at the ‘broad brush’ level, whereas planning at the level of individual lessons requires greater precision. While it may be sufficient to identify ‘Collaboration’ as a learning behaviour in the unit plan, once teachers are planning at the level of the individual lesson, simply saying ‘and today we will need to use our collaboration skills’ is not overly helpful. Students need to be aware of which particular collaboration skills are required.

In other words, the unit plan may mention a learning skill like ‘collaboration’, but the lesson plan will identify specific learning skills drawn from the collaboration progression chart.

Read more about planning that infuses learning behaviours into lessons in section 3A.

In the last few years teachers have come to know and understand much about meta-cognition and self-regulation.

Metacognition…is about monitoring and controlling your thought processes.

Self-regulation…is about monitoring and controlling your feelings and behaviours.

The two come together in Self-regulated learning…the application of metacognition and self-regulation to learning.

These approaches, which have always been at the heart of developing learning power, aim to help students think about their own learning more explicitly, often by teaching them specific strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluating their learning.

The resource alongside, which may sit on a table or be displayed on the classroom wall, is designed to enable students to reflect on their use of their collaborative learning behaviours in a lesson or over a day.

In the catalogue of activities in 3D you’ll find several similar useful tools to aid meta-cognition.

See Unit 2 Classroom Culture, section 2D, to see how schools might:

• Share an overview of the learning behaviours to be used in a week (in Perseverance, Receives to Responds).
• Display Schemes of work and related learning behaviours on classroom walls (in Revising, Responds to Values).

Traditionally curriculum planning has identified what is going to be taught, how it is going to be taught, and how success is going to be assessed. Such planning has traditionally been wholly content and teaching related, with no reference to the learning behaviours necessary for accessing the content.

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

Here’s an outline of the whole transitional journey.

Planning at this simplistic level describes what is to be taught, and in what order. The content is defined and sequenced. There’s little reference to how the curriculum might be delivered or how it might be assessed, and certainly no reference to the learning behaviours necessary for success.

In terms of the teachers’ palette diagram:

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility for learning lies exclusively with the teacher, talk is about content, lessons are constructed to ‘deliver’ the curriculum according to individual teacher’s preferred delivery styles, performance is celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…students are there to be taught what they need to know, students don’t think about or know how they learn, learning is about knowing stuff and getting it right.

Adding the ‘how’ of delivery to the content to be delivered serves to guide teaching and maybe define the activities that will be undertaken. This level of planning ensures greater consistency of delivery across different teaching groups, but is still teaching-focused.

In terms of classroom culture, this level of planning creates a teacher-focused classroom, and depending on the nature of the planned activities, some limited elements of the learner-focused classroom.

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility still lies exclusively with the teacher, talk is still about content, lessons are constructed to ‘deliver’ the curriculum, but delivery is less dependent on individual teacher’s preferred delivery styles and activities are planned / agreed in advance of delivery, successful content acquisition is celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learning is still focused on content, learners have no awareness of the learning behaviours they are exercising, learning activities are becoming more consistent and engaging.

Linking subjects and learning behaviours can be seen as a step-change in terms of curriculum planning.

At this level, consideration is given in advance to how students will need to be as learners in order to access the prescribed content.

Mostly this is at the level of identifying the key learning behaviours necessary for or activated by different subjects. For example, Mathematics frequently requires students to employ their reasoning and their pattern seeking skills, but some maths topics may also require attentive noticing, or critical curiosity etc. Other subjects will have a different blend of learning behaviours that they exercise on a regular basis.

Still at an early stage, planning now links content with learning behaviours, but at a fairly simplistic level. Subject planning is beginning to include ‘go-to’ learning behaviours, but at least these behaviours are being identified in advance and as such it is now possible to alert students to the learning behaviours that they are expected to employ – it fosters the beginning of dual-focused teaching (sometimes called split-screen teaching), in which both the content to be studied and the learning behaviours to be employed can be built into lesson planning.

Learning is brought out of the shadows and made visible, to both students and teachers.

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility is beginning to shift towards the learner, talk is predominantly about content, but learning behaviours are beginning to figure in classroom discourse, lessons are constructed to help students to understand how they will be learning the content and learning behaviours are built into lesson objectives. There is a growing recognition that lessons have twin intentions – to learn content and to exercise specific learning behaviours. Successful learning behaviours are discussed and celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learners are becoming aware of the learning behaviours they are expected to exercise and are coming to understand that there is more to learning than just ‘knowing stuff’. They are beginning to be able to talk about the process of learning, although in relatively simple terms at this stage. Their role is changing as they begin to understand that success is dependent on their learning behaviours.

Linking learning behaviours to delivery strategies takes planning beyond linking learning behaviours to the content that is to be delivered. It recognises that the way that the content is delivered also activates / requires learning behaviours that could / should be identified, planned for and made visible in advance.

Consider a Science curriculum that involves, at some stage, students undertaking a practical experiment.

The skills required to observe the teacher conduct the experiment and then faithfully recreate the experiment as an individual requires skills of observation, listening, attention to detail, following a prescribed plan etc.

Contrast that with the skills required when the teacher puts students into small groups and challenges them to work together to plan how to do the experiment, to identify and gather the resources needed, to conduct the experiment, and to reflect together on how they could have planned it more efficiently.

Same experiment – with different learning behaviours stimulated by how the teacher chooses to organise the activity.

At this phase, the learning behaviours identified will be drawn from a framework like the Supple Learning Mind.

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility is becoming increasingly shared, teachers are expecting more of learners, direct teaching is diminishing, and teachers increasingly see their role as a learning coach, guiding both content acquisition and understanding of learning, talk is a balance between what is being learned and how it is being learned, and the learning language is becoming ever more sophisticated, lesson construction is dual-focused and makes both the content to be learned and the learning behaviours to be employed visible to learners. A wide range of learning behaviours are noticed, discussed and celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learners have sensed a shift of focus, away from ‘being taught’, towards taking responsibility for their own learning, they are increasingly aware of their learning strengths and relative weaknesses, they are coming to understand the learning process and themselves as learners, and understand that learning about learning is at least as important as ‘knowing stuff’.

The holy grail of curriculum planning is: carefully sequenced content related planning that ensures that students’ understanding of their growth as a learner is of equal importance as their progressive understanding of the content matter.

Consider the example of the science planning in 3A5, above. The second strategy included ‘working together’ [or Collaboration as we would call it in terms of the Supple Learning Mind].

But we have a much more elaborated understanding of ‘Collaboration’ through the collaboration progression chart. Depending on the collaboration skill levels of learners, ‘working together’ might become ‘listen carefully to others and share your own ideas’ or ‘contribute to creating and agreeing a realistic team plan’ etc.

At this depth of planning, both the content specific learning behaviours and the activity specific learning behaviours are differentiated by reference to learning behaviours drawn from the relevant progression trajectories.

In terms of making learning visible, planning has moved beyond ‘today you will need your reasoning skills’ to ‘today you will need to able explain your thinking to neighbour and offer evidence to support your thinking’. We have moved beyond simply naming the skill to identifying a particular aspect of the learning behaviour.

Where 3A5, above, was a little blunt-edged, here references to learning behaviours are specific and differentiated to support learner progress.

Outcomes for teaching… learning is a shared responsibility, and has become a shared endeavour between teachers and learners. Teachers make learning and how to get better at learning visible to learners – through talk, feedback and display. Teachers ensure that the curriculum is constructed so that it stretches both content and learning behaviours. Teachers value the growth of learning behaviours equally alongside progress and attainment. The growth in a wide range of learning behaviours is noticed, discussed and celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learners have taken control their own development as learners. They have a deep understanding of, and can talk fluently about, the process of learning. They are aware of their learning strengths and which aspects of learning behaviours they are seeking to improve, and understand how improving as a learner supports and strengthens their progress and attainment.

The table below is made up of four columns of;

Four foundational learning habits;

• perseverance, questioning, collaboration, revising.

And four rows of;

Four stages of developing students’ learning attitudes;

• Lacks to Receives (grey to purple)
• Receives to Responds (purple to blue)
• Responds to Values (blue to green)
• Values to Organises (green to yellow)

Within each cell you will find ‘how-to’ ideas;

organised into three aspects of teaching;

• relating, talking, celebrating

Clicking on any one of the sixteen light green cells will take you into the corresponding package. The pattern of these activities is consistent across all sixteen packages, so you will quickly become familiar with the approach.

NB. The ‘Constructing’ aspect of the Teachers’ Palette has a section all of its own…Unit 3, ‘Constructing learning’.

So far you have been developing your understanding of learning power and your students’ learning behaviours. Here you begin to create action plans for developing your practice in order to make your classroom increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

• Share your responses to your reading thus far in Unit 2, and…
• Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on your exploration of section 2D in light of what you have already learned about your students’ learning behaviours in Unit 1.

So far you have been developing your practice to ensure that your classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

• Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans, relating to classroom culture, that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
• Share your responses to your further reading in Unit 2, section 2D and…
• Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the catalogue of ideas in section 2D.

Celebrating learning

Celebrating and valuing learning is about making learning the object of attention. The values of learning bubble up and show themselves in what you attend to, what you recognise, what you praise, what you display and celebrate. In learning friendly classrooms failure, mistakes, being stuck and effort are re-framed so that learners come to view these old adversaries as valuable, interesting and essential. Furthermore, in the learning friendly classroom the development and growth of learning behaviours themselves is given attention, praise and recognition.

Aspect 1: Growing Learning habits – finding ways to notice, track, record and celebrate learning behaviour growth. It implies that teachers and learners have a good understanding of themselves as learners and of what ‘getting better’ at learning looks and feels like. In the same way that attainment is routinely tracked, recorded and celebrated, so is learning itself.

• Ask yourself:
  • Are students in our school becoming increasingly skilful as learners during their time with us?
  • What evidence do we have for this?

Aspect 2: Re-defining failure – turning the lens around: mistakes become learning opportunities; difficulty is when learning happens; struggle is to be expected; asking questions shows curiosity, not a lack of intelligence; effort not just talent is what leads to success. It is about ensuring that hard won gains over the difficult are preferable to effortless success over the easy.

• Ask yourself:
  • How do I treat ‘stuck’, ‘mistakes’ and praise in my classroom?
  • How much have we re-defined failure?

Aspect 3: Displaying values – the process of learning (as opposed to the finished outcomes of learning) are on display. Annotated work in progress, first attempts, revisions, failed lines of enquiry, leading, of course, to the finished article. What we choose to display tells students a lot about what we truly believe: displaying/praising only the finished article suggests that whatever we might say, we are more interested in the outcome than the process. In such ways are the underlying values of the classroom revealed to learners.

• Ask yourself:
  • What does the display in my classroom reveal about my priorities and my commitment to keeping the process of learning in the foreground?

Talking for learning

Talking for learning – making learning the object of conversation: the sort of language content and style to enhance learning. The way we express ourselves in the classroom creates a powerful linguistic environment that teaches young people the best of what we know about learning. The language of learning helps students to discuss, understand, and become conscious of using their learning behaviours.

You could consider:

• Aspect 1 Nudging the process. Turn each of the learning behaviours into sets of casual prompts or nudges to move students along in learning.

• Aspect 2 Encouraging reflective self-talk. Encourage your students to pay attention to how they are learning, to slow down and notice steps they are using along the way.

• Aspect 3 Offering feedback. Angle your feedback prompts at three levels…about the task, about the process, about self-regulation Notice that all the prompts ask rather than tell. [Read more in ‘feedback talk’ below].

Relating for learning

Relating for learning – making learning a shared responsibility: the changing roles and responsibilities of teachers and learners, where learning becomes a shared responsibility. Students are given more responsibility for their own learning, the role of the teacher changes from ‘the sage on the stage’ to ‘the guide by your side’; the role of the student moves from ‘passenger’ to ‘crew’ and ultimately ‘pilots of their own learning’.

You could consider:

• Devolving responsibility – by shifting the emphasis towards learners taking increasing responsibility for their own development. It includes a shift towards students asking more of the questions, monitoring their own learning, doing more of the work, making more choices, pursuing their own lines of enquiry.
• Using a coaching approach – by moving away from ‘telling’ whenever possible. It is one of the hardest of balancing acts: knowing when you can coach and when you have to tell requires the teacher to have a deep understanding of both the subject matter and the learner.
• Modelling the learning process – by showing ways in which you, too, are a learner. It’s a shift away from teachers being ‘all-knowing subject specialists’ to displaying uncertainty, to sharing their own learning stories, to learning ‘aloud’, to learning alongside your students.

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 3.4.1 to 3.4.5 and then collect the data. Then work through 3.4.6 to 3.4.8 to help you to synthesise your views in readiness for sharing these views with colleagues including senior leaders.

In the last section you considered a couple of students in your class using the Learning Chart. It’s now time to give the same consideration to all the students in your class. As you start colouring in, keep an eye out for any emerging patterns;

• for areas of learning strength
• for areas of learning weakness
• for fallow areas
• for significant variations for some students or groups of students.
• for things that just make you feel uneasy

Ask yourself – ‘What questions are bubbling up in my mind?’ as you work through your class one by one. You’ll find yourself beginning to form some tentative hypotheses about your students’ learning behaviours.

Download and print sufficient charts – one for each student in your group. You’ll need to think carefully about each student in relation to each of their 12 learning behaviours. Colour in the behaviours that you think are secure. By secure, we mean that these are behaviours that the student consistently exhibits in a range of different circumstances. BUT if they use a behaviour in, say, maths but not in other subject areas you cannot count it as secure. You might find it easier later if you use different colours for say, boys and girls etc.

Things to consider in gathering the data:

• can / will I involve TA’s and other staff in order to gain other perspective(s)?
• if so will we do it together or at different times
• might I need to discuss these students with their previous or other teachers?
• am I confident about what is ‘a secure behaviour’? How frequently, and in how many different circumstances, do I need to see a behaviour to consider it ‘secure’?

When completed the learning behaviour profiles for each of your students will look something like the one to the right – some cells identified as ‘this is a secure skill / behaviour’ with others left blank. (Here the ‘secure’ cells are coloured pink).

Ultimately you need to be able to answer the question:

What is this profile telling me about this student?

Explore each student profile and ask yourself:

• Which behaviours appear relatively weaker/stronger? Well developed, hardly started?
• Which behaviours appear to explain why this student is successful / unsuccessful, effective/ineffective?
• Which is the weakest domain for this student (emotional, cognitive, social, strategic)?
• How might I help this student to help themselves to become a more effective learner?

Now that you have had a close look at each individual student you will have noticed several things, more of an inkling really, that seem to be showing up across the group. So before getting into a rigorous class analysis it will be useful to let your mind go into that receptive kind of imagination that’s a bit like daydreaming. Let the problem slip to the back of your mind and let your mind play with ideas and images about your class of students and their learning behaviours.

Play with what you have recorded and wonder:

• are there any patterns that I’m picking up
• what if I just think about girls and boys?
• are there really any significant differences?
• what if I just imagine summer borns?
• do they seem disadvantaged?
• which column has scored lowest on most charts?
• which colour (phase) is the most prevalent across the class?
• what are my overall thoughts about the learning characteristics of the class?

In the next section we will help you build on this reverie and make a close interrogation of the patterns.

Having been through the important stage of reverie it’s now time to take a hard look and jot a few things down. First, you’ll need to interrogate your data through the lens of different groups of students. It might be an idea to take your pile of charts and divide them firstly into girls and boys, then into high and low attainers (however you designate that label), then isolate, separately, groups like Pupil Premium. EAL, SEND, G&T, (if you still use this), and other groups that may have significance in your area.

Ultimately you need to be able to answer the question:

Can I discern any patterns across groups of learning profiles?

Ask yourself:

• What questions would I want to ask myself about each of these groups?
• What do I suspect might be happening?
• What are the learning behaviours of successful learners that appear lacking in less successful learners?
• Is there a phase of learning behaviour that seems to help students make confident moves forward?

You might be thinking:

• How do my higher attaining learners differ from my lower attaining learners?
  • i.e. do they score higher in the columns? Is the range of higher scoring columns different in the 2 groups?
• How do my boys’ learning behaviours seem to differ from my girls’?
  • use the same ways of looking as above.
• Do my pupil premium learners’ behaviours differ from other students?
  • if so how? Is this more about progress in learning behaviours or using a different range of learning behaviours?
• Move on to look at other groups if you are interested or think they may be relevant in your school
• Do my EAL learners’ behaviours differ from others?
• Do my SEND learners’ behaviours differ from others?
• Do my G&T learners’ behaviours differ from others?
• Are there any ethnicity related differences?
• Do my summer-born learners differ from older learners?
• Or you may want to explore another pattern that you suspect might be relevant to your class.

Whatever your area of interest, shuffle the profiles and look for common features in one group of profiles that are different from the other group of profiles.

The second way you will find interesting to interrogate your data is through the lens of different learning domains, i.e. emotional, cognitive, social and strategic, and their learning behaviours. Ultimately you want to be able to answer the question:

Can I discern any patterns across groups of learning behaviours?

Some big questions:

• Which of the learning domains (emotional, cognitive, social and strategic) seems consistently low across most groups of students?
• Which of the learning domains (emotional, cognitive, social and strategic) seems consistently high?
• Which learning behaviour overall, across all groups, comes out weakest?
• What do I suspect might be happening?
• What are the learning behaviours of successful learners that appear lacking in less successful learners?

Further interesting questions might include:

• Which learning domain is strong in higher attaining learners
• How does this differ in lower attaining learners?
• Which learning domain do my boys seem to be strong in?
• Is there a different pattern of learning domain strength in my girls?
• Is there a different pattern of learning domain strength in my pupil premium learners?
• Is there a different pattern of learning domain strength in my EAL/SEND/G&T learners?
• Are there any ethnicity related differences?
• How do my summer-born learners differ from older learners in term of stronger or weaker domains of learning?
• Or explore any other pattern that you suspect might be relevant to your class.

Whatever your area of interest, shuffle the profiles and look for common features in one group of profiles that are different from the other group of profiles.

See the toggle boxes below which take a closer look at the four domains of learning. Each contains just one practical idea you might use to helping student move on.

Having spent an interesting hour or so looking at your students’ learning charts it would be well worth your while to try and capture some of your main findings. You will have discovered far more than you can capture in your short term memory so a quick synthesising exercise would be well worthwhile.

Summarise your findings about:

• What you noticed about the individual learning profiles of your students? E.g. Which phase of behaviours appear to be more / less secure across the board? Which learning behaviour is the least well developed across the whole class?
• What you have learned about groups of students. E.g. boys/girls, pupil premium, and others. Have you noticed any significant differences that merit further investigation? E.g. the differences in types and phases of learning behaviours used by high and low achieving students?

Share with colleagues, find out more and become totally intrigued. Ask yourself:

• What are the main similarities between your impressions of student learning behaviours and those of your colleagues?
• Ditto the main differences?
• Are others sensing the same issues for groups of students as you are?
• Are students becoming better learners as they move through the school? E.g. are the phases of growth used by Yr 6 students higher than Yr 3?
• What questions does this raise for you?
• These are just a few questions to set you off. As you get going, your data and interest will stimulate an almost never ending stream of them.
• See opposite for an example Learning Development summary document just to start you off.

Take your completed Summary to the team meeting so that you can share your impressions with colleagues.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

• Agree ground rules for this and following Learning Team meetings;
• Discuss your responses to your reading in Unit 1, section 1A, the Warp and Weft of Learning (the guiding frameworks of the approach)
• Discuss your findings and reactions arising from Unit 1 sections, 1B to 1E.( developing your students’ learning profiles)

NB. As this is the first such meeting the agenda below is unique in the Learning Team meeting series.

• 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 seven 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 development shown in the rows. These levels of development 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 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 phase, and moving well into the blue phase for many 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 of 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 we have moved beyond seeing learning as a performance to it being an interesting process going on in our brains, we 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 taken shape 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 track, 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’.

From there to here

An enthusiasm for ‘better learning’ has motivated teachers for a long time. In attempts to help students learn more or learn better, teachers tried to understand learning styles, multiple intelligences, and the like. In attempts to help students improve their organisation of knowledge or the effectiveness of their memory, teachers used tools like mind maps, mnemonics, and other study skills. These approaches laid the ground for a deeper, more permanent set of approaches, whose aim is to get beyond learning more, or learning better, to helping students to help themselves become better learners.

“I can’t think of anything more worth learning than learning to learn. It’s like having money in the bank at compound interest” David Perkins. Project Zero, Harvard University

Research in the learning sciences shows that learning is itself a learnable craft; that we can all get better at learning. This means that schools, teachers and parents can enable young people to help themselves to develop as better, more effective learners.

Skills and techniques aren’t enough. Students must not only possess the requisite capabilities; they must be ready, willing and able to use them when the time is right.

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.

Schools today need to be educating not just for exam results but for a life of learning. To thrive in the twenty-first century, it is not enough to leave school with a clutch of examination certificates. Students need to have learnt how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self-disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.

‘Students throughout the world need now to reach higher levels of achievement, not only to find fulfilling work but also to empower themselves to thrive in an increasingly complex world’
– Dylan Wiliam

• Employment requires being able to enhance and transfer knowledge and to operate collaboratively.
• The capacity to learn and adapt needs to be lifelong because change is a permanent state, and the pace of change is moving more rapidly.
• And more recently we now have the rise and rise of AI to cope with, making it all the more important for students to be aware of its downsides and relentlessly seek for truth.

• 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?

The next section will help you make a start on addressing these questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What questions am I now asking myself?

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

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

Traditionally curriculum planning has identified what is going to be taught, how it is going to be taught, and how success is going to be assessed. Such planning has traditionally been wholly content and teaching related, with no reference to the learning behaviours necessary for accessing the content.

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

Here’s an outline of the whole transitional journey.

Planning at this simplistic level describes what is to be taught, and in what order. The content is defined and sequenced. There’s little reference to how the curriculum might be delivered or how it might be assessed, and certainly no reference to the learning behaviours necessary for success.

In terms of the teachers’ palette diagram:

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility for learning lies exclusively with the teacher, talk is about content, lessons are constructed to ‘deliver’ the curriculum according to individual teacher’s preferred delivery styles, performance is celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…students are there to be taught what they need to know, students don’t think about or know how they learn, learning is about knowing stuff and getting it right.

Adding the ‘how’ of delivery to the content to be delivered serves to guide teaching and maybe define the activities that will be undertaken. This level of planning ensures greater consistency of delivery across different teaching groups, but is still teaching-focused.

In terms of classroom culture, this level of planning creates a teacher-focused classroom, and depending on the nature of the planned activities, some limited elements of the learner-focused classroom.

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility still lies exclusively with the teacher, talk is still about content, lessons are constructed to ‘deliver’ the curriculum, but delivery is less dependent on individual teacher’s preferred delivery styles and activities are planned / agreed in advance of delivery, successful content acquisition is celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learning is still focused on content, learners have no awareness of the learning behaviours they are exercising, learning activities are becoming more consistent and engaging.

Linking subjects and learning behaviours can be seen as a step-change in terms of curriculum planning.

At this level, consideration is given in advance to how students will need to be as learners in order to access the prescribed content.

Mostly this is at the level of identifying the key learning behaviours necessary for or activated by different subjects. For example, Mathematics frequently requires students to employ their reasoning and their pattern seeking skills, but some maths topics may also require attentive noticing, or critical curiosity etc. Other subjects will have a different blend of learning behaviours that they exercise on a regular basis.

Still at an early stage, planning now links content with learning behaviours, but at a fairly simplistic level. Subject planning is beginning to include ‘go-to’ learning behaviours, but at least these behaviours are being identified in advance and as such it is now possible to alert students to the learning behaviours that they are expected to employ – it fosters the beginning of dual-focused teaching (sometimes called split-screen teaching), in which both the content to be studied and the learning behaviours to be employed can be built into lesson planning.

Learning is brought out of the shadows and made visible, to both students and teachers.

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility is beginning to shift towards the learner, talk is predominantly about content, but learning behaviours are beginning to figure in classroom discourse, lessons are constructed to help students to understand how they will be learning the content and learning behaviours are built into lesson objectives. There is a growing recognition that lessons have twin intentions – to learn content and to exercise specific learning behaviours. Successful learning behaviours are discussed and celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learners are becoming aware of the learning behaviours they are expected to exercise and are coming to understand that there is more to learning than just ‘knowing stuff’. They are beginning to be able to talk about the process of learning, although in relatively simple terms at this stage. Their role is changing as they begin to understand that success is dependent on their learning behaviours.

Linking learning behaviours to delivery strategies takes planning beyond linking learning behaviours to the content that is to be delivered. It recognises that the way that the content is delivered also activates / requires learning behaviours that could / should be identified, planned for and made visible in advance.

Consider a Science curriculum that involves, at some stage, students undertaking a practical experiment.

The skills required to observe the teacher conduct the experiment and then faithfully recreate the experiment as an individual requires skills of observation, listening, attention to detail, following a prescribed plan etc.

Contrast that with the skills required when the teacher puts students into small groups and challenges them to work together to plan how to do the experiment, to identify and gather the resources needed, to conduct the experiment, and to reflect together on how they could have planned it more efficiently.

Same experiment – with different learning behaviours stimulated by how the teacher chooses to organise the activity.

At this phase, the learning behaviours identified will be drawn from a framework like the Supple Learning Mind.

Outcomes for teaching…responsibility is becoming increasingly shared, teachers are expecting more of learners, direct teaching is diminishing, and teachers increasingly see their role as a learning coach, guiding both content acquisition and understanding of learning, talk is a balance between what is being learned and how it is being learned, and the learning language is becoming ever more sophisticated, lesson construction is dual-focused and makes both the content to be learned and the learning behaviours to be employed visible to learners. A wide range of learning behaviours are noticed, discussed and celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learners have sensed a shift of focus, away from ‘being taught’, towards taking responsibility for their own learning, they are increasingly aware of their learning strengths and relative weaknesses, they are coming to understand the learning process and themselves as learners, and understand that learning about learning is at least as important as ‘knowing stuff’.

The holy grail of curriculum planning is: carefully sequenced content related planning that ensures that students’ understanding of their growth as a learner is of equal importance as their progressive understanding of the content matter.

Consider the example of the science planning in 3A5, above. The second strategy included ‘working together’ [or Collaboration as we would call it in terms of the Supple Learning Mind].

But we have a much more elaborated understanding of ‘Collaboration’ through the collaboration progression chart. Depending on the collaboration skill levels of learners, ‘working together’ might become ‘listen carefully to others and share your own ideas’ or ‘contribute to creating and agreeing a realistic team plan’ etc.

At this depth of planning, both the content specific learning behaviours and the activity specific learning behaviours are differentiated by reference to learning behaviours drawn from the relevant progression trajectories.

In terms of making learning visible, planning has moved beyond ‘today you will need your reasoning skills’ to ‘today you will need to able explain your thinking to neighbour and offer evidence to support your thinking’. We have moved beyond simply naming the skill to identifying a particular aspect of the learning behaviour.

Where 3A5, above, was a little blunt-edged, here references to learning behaviours are specific and differentiated to support learner progress.

Outcomes for teaching… learning is a shared responsibility, and has become a shared endeavour between teachers and learners. Teachers make learning and how to get better at learning visible to learners – through talk, feedback and display. Teachers ensure that the curriculum is constructed so that it stretches both content and learning behaviours. Teachers value the growth of learning behaviours equally alongside progress and attainment. The growth in a wide range of learning behaviours is noticed, discussed and celebrated.

Outcomes for learning…learners have taken control their own development as learners. They have a deep understanding of, and can talk fluently about, the process of learning. They are aware of their learning strengths and which aspects of learning behaviours they are seeking to improve, and understand how improving as a learner supports and strengthens their progress and attainment.