Interpret individual student profiles

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?

Learning profiles were explored in Phase 1, Playing the Learning Power Game v7, Unit 1, Section 1E4.

Give mistakes high status, a key role in learning

• Say that you expect students to make, for example, 3 in a lesson. If they haven’t made the quota of mistakes they are to ask for harder work
• Make a ‘Mistakes of the Week’ display.
• 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.

The idea of how students react to mistakes was introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game and is explored further in the Perseverance module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Stuck Posters.

Work with students to find useful questions for them to ask themselves and helpful strategies which they might take when they are stuck. Ensure that there are plenty of options that come higher on the list than “Ask the teacher”. Create displays as reminders.

Here is an example generated by a year 7 class.

So called Stuck posters or prompts come in various shapes and sizes, but essentially they are simply home-made lists of what students can try when they get stuck with their learning.

To begin with, the teacher trains the students to make use of this information by greeting every request for prompting with; ‘Have you looked at the poster?’ After a while, looking at the poster becomes routine, and eventually, when the habit of self-unsticking becomes second nature, even the poster becomes redundant. It does not take long, in such a classroom, before ‘Ask the teacher’ becomes a last-ditch strategy, to be engaged only when all else has failed.

The idea of the Stuck Poster is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Spot whether the key features remain alive and well in your learning culture.

• Stuck Prompts now developed by students and displayed around the classroom
• Active use of The Learning Pit
• During lessons students post up their problems and other students suggest solutions
• You encourage students to think about why they are stuck
• You praise the effort, not the ‘ability
• You praise the process not the outcome;
• You praise in specifics of learning behaviours, not generalities;
• Work in progress is displayed
• You’ve explored the meaning of effort
• You display new learning that comes from mistakes
• You show students how to free up working memory
• You differentiate between learning and performance zones

These ideas were introduced in Phase 1 Playing the Learning Power Game v7, Unit 3 Constructing Learning, Section 3D, Activity Catalogue, Perseverance Checkers.

From ‘I’m stuck ‘ To ‘I’m stuck because …‘

Make your classroom question friendly.

Create question walls in the classroom to illustrate and prompt questioning. Display, for example:

• Student-posted questions about current topics that need resolution.
• ‘The Question of The Day’.
• Different types and purposes of questions.
• Questioning routines that the class have defined.
• A lexicon of questions for use when exploring and enquiring.
• A list of questions for use to get started, or unstuck.
• Annotated student work and pictures to provoke questioning.

Give each student a coloured piece of A4 paper on the classroom wall. Attach an envelope to the paper containing a piece of card cut up into five pieces. Each piece of card has a student generated ‘learning how’ goal. For examples:

• I can take turns in a group.
• I can explain why I think something.
• I can listen carefully to what others are saying.
• I can take my time to notice details.
• I can look for patterns.
• I can think ahead and plan what I should do next.
• I can ignore things that distract me.
• I can keep calm when I get stuck.
• I can look for a way of getting unstuck.
• I can improve something after making a mistake.
• I can build on other people’s ideas.

When a student achieves a stated behaviour the card is taken out of the envelope and stuck to their piece of paper. The aim is to have all five pieces of card making up a completed jigsaw on the wall in a given time. e.g. a fortnight.

This is an example of public recognition being given to learning behaviour goals.

The idea of building a display showing students’ learning targets is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

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.

What we notice and what we talk about matters. Students are ever-alert to the underlying culture of the classroom – ‘does this teacher really want me to make mistakes, or is she more interested in me getting it right?’

What’s more, you can say you want them to make mistakes as often as you like, but if your reward systems are tilted towards ‘correct’ answers, they will readily sense the inconsistency.

How do you / will you show your sustained commitment to students making mistakes and learning from them?

The idea of a challenge wall is explored in the Perseverance module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

Understanding their own progression

A village school in Cumbria has developed pictorial ladders for the learning behaviours they are focusing on – the ones illustrated relate to aspects of Collaboration and Perseverance.

Beside the ladders, students are expected to write about themselves and how they know where they are now. They are:

• self-assessing;
• explaining which of the skills they believe they use a lot;
• offering evidence for when and how they did it.

Hence this piece of wall isn’t just about showing progression in learning, it’s more about reflecting on the process and coming to understand themselves as learners…in action!

The idea of creating your own progression trajectories is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

A Visible Teaching Routine

• What’s happening here?

• What makes you say that?

This is one of many visible thinking routines to be found on the visible thinking website

The first question in this routine is flexible: it is useful when looking at objects such as works of art or historical artefacts, but it can also be used to explore a poem, make scientific observations and hypotheses, or investigate more conceptual ideas (i.e. democracy).
The first question invites students to describe what they notice, see or know, but it is the supplementary question (What makes you say that?) that requires them to build explanations. It promotes evidence-based reasoning and when the students share their interpretations it encourages them to understand alternatives and multiple perspectives.

This visible thinking routine is explored in the Reasoning module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Identify high level learning capacities in the learning grids

Frame in the form of ‘nudging learning’ statements and use through giving feedback and expand the classroom’s learning language.

Higher level Reasoning skills include:

• creating sound arguments backed by evidence;
• balancing differing possibilities;
• using ‘if . . . then . . . ‘ type reasoning;
• detecting flaws in logic.

Higher level Imagining skills include:

• visualising the future to enhance performance;
• breaking the ‘rules’ to achieve novel outcomes;
• being willing and prepared to follow one’s intuition;
• disregarding conventional wisdom.

Higher level Link Making skills include:

• keeping an open mind;
• seeing connections between different disciplines;
• using analogies make links between new and older learning;
• applying ‘school learning’ to real world problems.

The idea of creating celebratory feedback for higher order learning behaviours is introduced in the Making Links module, section 2, iv) Moving beyond Green.

Make coupling content and process public

Every classroom in Cadland Primary school has two walls dedicated to current curriculum plans, one for maths and one for literacy. The purpose of these displays is to show the journey of the current a unit of work. They show;

• what the objectives are;
• what the success criteria look like;
• what the stages of the process consist of;
• what is being learned at each stage;
• prompts about the new things being learned;
• what the end result might look like.

These visual journeys are talked about and added to as the class progresses through the unit content. Learning behaviours are added to each point in the plan. Now students are not only aware of what they are learning about but the learning behaviours they are using to help them get to grips with the content.

The broad brush descriptions of the learning behaviours being used is a powerful, visual coupling of content and process; the what with the how of learning.

The first photograph shows the learning behaviours they are using as they move through the unit. The second photograph shows a reflection on the learning behaviours used and what this accomplished.

The idea of creating displays that link content and learning behaviours is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

Effective learning targets – a quick reminder

Advice about ‘making more effort’ or ‘asking more questions in class’ are almost never effective because they are ill-defined and beg more questions than answers – how much more effort? what kind of effort? / how many more questions? what type of questions?

If we want students to grow their learning behaviours 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. It is the bit that reminds you about the target.

‘Thens’ are what you will do about something, the action you will take.

The idea of using if-then targets is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

The language of ownership and community

How are you most likely to describe your usual classroom?

1. My classroom?
2. Our classroom?
3. Their classroom?

And does it make any difference?

In his book, ‘Creating Cultures of Thinking’, Ron Ritchhart argues that the pronouns we use, like my/your/our and 1/you/we/us, betray our deep-seated views and belief systems. Most of us are completely oblivious to how we talk in terms of the pronouns we use, but our choices, he argues, convey a powerful if hidden message to students.

Consider for a moment the teacher who asks:

What are you noticing?

Contrast that with essentially the same question:

What are we noticing?

Likewise the phrases ‘your success criteria’ or ‘the success criteria’ are very similar to, but subtly different from, ‘our success criteria’

Will marginal shifts in language like this make a significant difference on their own? Almost certainly not, Ritchhart argues. But if we are serious about beginning to share responsibility with students we need to make sure that our language reflects that commitment rather than, unintentionally, undermining it.

You have already made changes to your classroom culture and how it is displayed through your engagement with the phase 1 module Playing the Learning Power Game and you are now looking at Stage 5 in phase 2. Display in your classroom should have developed significantly over this period to reflect the many changes to classroom culture you have made.

But, take a little time to check that display in your classroom adequately reflects and supports these cultural shifts.

Download the Display Amble, and find a bit of quiet time in your classroom to take a hard look at display – is it keeping up with the cultural changes you have made?

For each of the 16 statements about classroom display, rate your own classroom displays using the following scale:

1 = Display in my classroom is nothing like this

2 = Display in my classroom is a bit like this

3 = Display in my classroom is a lot like this

4 = This accurately describes display in my classroom

You should be seeing lots of 3s and 4s as your displays have matured over time. But are there any 2s or 1s that might need a little attention?

What might you need to do about this?

It is through the learning activities teachers plan that learning behaviours get a workout. The role of learning activities is to enable your students to access and wrestle with information and ideas; to help them use and understand something; to ensure their effectiveness as a learner. The ‘right’ activity helps to make new concepts more concrete. The ‘right’ activity provides insights into new ideas and subject matter. The ‘right’ activities need to be carefully chosen and, critically, linked to the learning goal.

Selecting activities

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?

Shifting the way you plan.

Think through lesson planning a bit differently:

• the learning behaviours that could be useful for getting to grips with the content;
• how the design of activities /tasks will best stimulate these behaviours;
• how learners could be made more aware of these behaviours;
• how learners could be enabled to reflect on and evaluate their use of these behaviours.

In planning terms, you have made a shift from thinking;

• From ‘what do I have to teach and how am I going to teach it?’
• To ‘what do students need to learn, how will they best learn it, and how am I going to orchestrate that learning?’

Your lessons are constructed to help students 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.

Learners are just 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’.

These ideas, introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game, are developed further in Section 3 (Big questions to ask about lesson design) of all of the phase 2 modules.

Start lessons with a grapple task

A good grapple problem is challenging. It’s something that the students might have an idea about but might entail something they haven’t come across or done before. A good grapple task centres on learning that is just beyond the students’ reach/experience. They give students a chance to wrestle with the problem before they have been taught methods for tackling it. They are allowed to solve it in any way they want and in doing so they are discovering their own approaches and exposing their own tricky bits.

You could blend grapple tasks with Think Pair Share…giving time to think by themselves, share ideas with a partner before discussing it more widely. By using grapple tasks you are getting the students to:

• build resilience;
• develop problem solving skills;
• enhance collaboration and listening;
• cultivate ‘having a go’;
• lessen fear of mistakes.

Don’t forget to discuss which strategies were used, which were successful/effective and why.

Grapple Tasks first appear in Playing the Learning Power Game and are also in the Perseverance module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Build in lesson review points – so that students reflect for themselves

The problem with lesson review points (or plenaries) is that they are often teacher-led. Too often they are a recap of what the teacher wanted students to learn – little more than a restating of the learning intentions and a quick check of student understanding. Necessary, maybe, but not the opportunity for students to reflect for themselves on what they are learning, have learned or how they are/ have learned it.

Try the simple method of students talking in pairs to distil:

• three things we have learned so far;
• three things we still need to find out;
• three things we hope to do next.

Select one or two pairs to feed their opinions back to the rest of the class. Steer students to explain what they think they have learned rather than to hear what you think you have taught them. Gradually add in questions about the learning behaviours they have been using;

• three ways we are learning
• the most useful learning behaviour so far
• a useful learning behaviour we might need to try

You are beginning to give students a richer language in which to couch their reflective thinking.

This was first introduced in Unit 3, Section 3B of Playing the Learning Power Game, and in phase 2 in the Meta Learning module, section 2, i) Moving from Blue to Green.

Organise activities to require more learning behaviours.

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.

These ideas around curriculum planning were introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game (Unit 3, section 3A5)

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 their effort 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. 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.

Give students an idea of what effort looks like in practice.

• Demonstrating a task which you expect them to complete later in the lesson.
• Explain what you are doing, in terms of effort, as you go along.
• Your commentary might include:
  • referring to success criteria to plan and direct your actions
  • using an unsticking strategy when you come across something tricky
  • looking for feedback from the class on your efforts, and adjusting your course in the face of that feedback
  • reminding yourself to refocus when a distraction comes along.

Effort is explored in the Perseverance module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Getting to grips with metacognition

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. Notice that the statements on the resource are adapted from similar ones in the progression grids.

This learning mat is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

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.

But now we have a much more elaborated understanding of, for example, ‘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.

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.

These ideas around curriculum planning were introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game.

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, it is possible to discern some different types of activities, to identify some overarching categories or groups of activities.

Our list of activity types run from highly teacher-focused activities at the bottom that demand little more than attentive listening from the learner, through to ‘Finding’ type activities at the top that depend on both high levels of learner independence where learners are capable of accessing the content with minimal direct instruction. The activities that you choose will be critical to how students will learn how to learn and their love of learning itself.

These activity types were introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game.

Use the Visible Thinking Routine:

I used to think . . . . . Now I think. This routine helps students to reflect on how and why their thinking/understanding is changing. Remind students of the topic you have been working on. Ask them to respond to each of the sentence stems: I used to think…, Now, I think… Alternatively ask students to write down their views at the beginning of a topic. Invite them to revisit & update their answer during and at the end in light of what has been learned. Or, at the beginning of a lesson ask students to write down what they understand by a particular term that will be explored in the coming lesson (e.g. Phrase (English); Proof (Maths); Power (Science) etc). At the end of the lesson, ask them to write down what they now understand by the term.

The visible thinking routine ‘I used to think’ is introduced in the Revising module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

Offer tools to help guide problem based learning

A graphic organiser that is much used in primary schools to help students to plan their approach to an investigation or problem. The TASC wheel, derived from Thinking Actively in a Social Context, is a framework that helps develop thinking and problem-solving skills. With TASC, learners can think through a problem to the best outcome – and understand why it’s the best outcome.

TASC will guide students through the stages of thinking and problem-solving in an organised way, starting at one o’clock working clockwise. If you have a complex or wide-ranging problem you want to tackle, it offers a means of organising and synthesising a range of ideas.

Much like PEE (Point / Evidence / Explain) that helps students to structure a paragraph, the TASC wheel gives a simple way of helping them to sequence what they do to undertake an investigation.

The TASC wheel was introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game and appears in phase 2 in the Planning module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

A science teacher described one of the enquiries thus:

“I’ve got my kids to do the experiment where they make salt from rock salt for years. Thus far I would tell them all they need to know to be successful, demonstrate the experiment to the whole class, and then ask them to repeat the experiment exactly as I had done it. It gave me control, took care of safety issues, and was as boring as it can get! Why, if you have just seen someone else do the experiment, would anyone be motivated to repeat it for themselves?

I explored my rationale for teaching in this way, and realised that, control aside, I believed that it enabled me to ‘deliver the course’, to ‘make sure’ they all had the revision notes they need, and to ‘convince myself’ that I had taught it well so that they simply must have learned it well. On reflection, this strategy was failing on all counts. Either I would have to re-double my efforts and ‘teach’ even more/better, or maybe there was another way . . . .

With trepidation, I went in with a lump of rock salt and a bowl of salt, and set them the challenge ‘I want you to find out how to make this (salt) from that (rock salt)’. I then sat down, refused to answer any further questions or offer guidance – and it was agony for someone so used to being the font of information in the classroom!

(I admit to making a couple of interventions relating to the safe use of Bunsen burners, but that aside I just let them get on with it.)

What a revelation! They all devised ways to make salt; they discovered the science behind it; they needed minimal external control; and I got a bit of a rest.

The students reported increased enjoyment levels, I reported reduced stress levels, and tests revealed a deeper scientific understanding than was previously the case.

My kids are challenging and frequently disruptive, so much so that mainstream schooling cannot handle them. How amazing that I gained more control and they achieved deeper learning when I stopped teaching for control and started letting them learn.

I realised that these kids need challenge and engagement, not control and instruction. I was afraid this change of approach would slow content learning down, but I was wrong. The learning was deeper and faster because they had done it for themselves, rather than observed it through the eyes of a science teacher. My kids were being scientists, not learning science.”

These activity types were introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game.

Try Jigsaw groups to scaffold content and build interdependence

• Jigsaw methodology is used in all phases of education and importantly builds a climate of interdependence in the classroom, as each person’s activity is necessary for their colleagues to be able to learn.
• The Jigsaw idea is to divide an area of enquiry into different sections, each one of which is allocated to a sub-group of the class (Aronson and Patnoe, 1997).
• There are two phases to jigsaw groups:
  • Phase I, the sub-groups become temporary experts in their section of the project by researching what is needed. i.e. Red group with students A,B,C,D, work on one subset of the project. Blue group with students A,B,C,D, work on another subset of the project and so on
  • Phase II a new set of groups is then put together, each new group made up from ‘experts’ from each subset of the project i.e. all the A’s in a group. All the B’s etc.
  • Now the big picture of the project focus is created – students begin to create a grasp of the whole picture through each of their own efforts and understandings.
• Invite students to reflect on their learning to:
  • compare intended with actual outcomes
  • evaluate their metacognitive strategies…what helped us to collaborate when? how did we handle disagreement?
  • analyse and draw causal relationships
  • pull together meanings
  • apply their learning to new situations
  • gain personal insights and learn from all their experiences.

Jigsaw grouping was introduced in Playing the Learning Power Game and also appears in the Collaboration module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

One: Make the learning process visible

Students need to be very clear about the learning habits and processes which they are using. Teachers seek to make every aspect of the learning process as visible as possible through the language they use and through the words and images they display on the walls.

Two: Combine the ‘what’ and the ‘how’

Learning activities are designed to combine the dual objectives of ‘what’ will be learned and ‘how’ it will be learned. Students come to know that the content they are studying is a way of giving their minds a useful workout.

Three: Ensure emotional engagement

Teachers design lessons that intrigue their students. Students will not put in the effort to stretch their learning ‘muscles’ unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. Emotional engagement is a prerequisite for learning that stretches and develops students’ powers of learning.

Four: Nurture handling uncertainty

What is engaging tends to be what is challenging. If education is a preparation for a learning life, students have to be helped to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty. Hence teachers create challenging tasks that stretch learning ‘muscles’.

Five: Build learning relationships

Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and students need to learn how to move around in the social space of learning to best effect. Teachers enable their students to become interdependent learners who know how to handle themselves in collaborative groups.

Six: Develop reflection and responsibility

Students learn how to manage and organise their learning by being given increasingly demanding opportunities to do so. Teachers encourage their students to take charge of their own learning, planning what they do, distilling meaning from it, and revising it accordingly.

Download and use the Poles Apart diagram to ask yourself where you think you are now in relation to these six principles.

Enquiry-based learning

Developing curiosity, independence, and transferable research skills is at the heart of ‘enquiry-based learning’. This intent can be explained as:

‘committed to creating a challenging environment where innovation and flexibility are celebrated. An approach to learning that focuses on student enquiry provides both teachers and students with an opportunity to think outside the normal confines of the curriculum. Teachers are encouraged to work collaboratively to break free from content-driven curriculum planning, and to focus on the skills that they would like their learners to develop.’

Here are some examples from schools we have worked with, where students in KS2/3 experienced several weeks each term when different curriculum areas come together to provide investigative work designed to generate a spirit of enquiry and experimentation.

The humanities come together for an eight-week block to explore issues of migration under the driving question: Why don’t people stay at home? Science, PE and Mathematics combined for a unit called A Question of Sport where students investigate the science and maths of certain sports. They experimented, for example, with the ways tennis would change if ball weight and racquet sizes changed. RE and Humanities came together to consider a wide range of disastrous events—a tsunami, the Holocaust, the crucifixion, and explore the question: Does every cloud have a silver lining? After two weeks of research, groups present their findings to their peers, parents and teachers.

These and other similar ideas are explored in chapter 6 of The Learning Powered School.

The idea of Enquiry-based learning is also introduced in the Questioning module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

Have students analyse their own performance.

In order to reach the goals of progressing in their learning – be it content or process – students must be able to self-regulate their own learning. Providing feedback that enables students to do this includes;

• Share assessment criteria with students and ask them to assess/comment on the (imperfect) solutions you provide. Invite them to produce improvements based on their own feedback.(as a class exercise)
• Share assessment criteria with students and invite them to assess/comment on their own work, and amend it if necessary, before submitting it.
• Ensure that your written comments are framed as questions to which your students are required to respond. “What do you think you need to do to make this section more convincing?” is preferable to “This section needs more explanation”, as it moves responsibility to the learner to identify what more needs to be done.

Insist that when students respond to your feedback they indicate what they will do differently next time. Get students into the habit of acting on feedback rather than merely reading it. ‘What they will do differently next time’ is their self-generated target for development.

These ideas are explored in the Revising module, section 2, iv) Moving beyond Green.

Make learning behaviours memorable.

Toys

Help younger students to understand the names of learning behaviours (like Collaborating, Persevering or Questioning) by having toys that are endowed with the behaviours. It may well be that you start with one or two soft toys and add to them over time.

The toys help students make ready links between the behaviour and the toys. However, these will work even better if the toy…animal, bird, fish etc… is, in nature, actually invested with the characteristics of that learning behaviour. Don’t just work with alliterations like…cat and capitalising. Better to ask yourself or the students which creature seems to be, for example, perseverant or seems to be collaborative and use those suggestions to represent the idea of a learning capacity..

Clip Art icons

You could simply ‘borrow’ these, but much better to involve students in designing and agreeing their own as a means of developing a conversation about the meaning of learning and growing their own learning language.

Having agreed a set of icons, helps students think about how they could use them to remind themselves of how they need to be / are learning.

The idea of using Animals / puppets / icons to scaffold students’ thinking is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Couple seeing and talking about behaviours.

Keep an eye on the learning behaviours that your students are using, and take the opportunity to talk to them about it. Hard to plan for, because it is ‘in the moment’ opportunism, and easy to forget in the hurly burly of the busy classroom. Even if learners do not, as yet, fully understand the key learning behaviours of Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising, they will exhibit these behaviours, even if they are not conscious of doing so. Use these opportunities to slow the classroom down and open up a short discussion about the successful behaviour that you have spotted. Such interludes have a number of benefits:

• It signals to learners the teacher’s interest in learning behaviours.
• It alerts learners to the behaviours that they already command.
• It begins to explore the complexity of the 4 key behaviours.
• It encourages students to observe and learn from the successful habits of others.
• It opens up opportunities for meta cognitive talk.

By the way you express yourself you create a potent milieu that teachers students what kinds of learning are valued ’round here’, what their role is with respect to knowledge and what aspects of learning are worth paying attention to.

The idea of teachers looking for learning is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Develop rights and responsibilities

Have students work in pairs or small groups to suggest a charter of matching rights and responsibilities or ground rules for collaboration. If everyone has a right to have their voice heard, everyone also has a responsibility to listen attentively to others and wait until they have finished speaking. This provokes interesting discussions, builds understanding and conveys the importance of learning behaviours.

The idea of students deciding ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ is introduced in the Collaboration module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Link learning behaviours to understanding famous characters.

Schools have found it useful to enable students to make links between familiar famous characters and the learning behaviours that they may have possessed.

The famous character might be a prominent sporting hero, someone from TV, a politician, a character being studied in a novel, a well-known person from History. . .

The point is to help students to understand how the learning behaviours are linked and contribute to the success of the chosen character.

In one school Father Christmas was attributed with Planning, Perseverance, Revising and Capitalising; while Winston Churchill helped win WW2 by Reasoning, Making Links, Capitalising, Imagining, Planning and Questioning. This approach to history proved highly popular. Seeing things from someone else’s perspective enabled them to develop a real understanding of what it means to use your imagination.

Learning Power Heroes. Read more about Learning Heroes in this book. But hurry, fewer than 100 left!

Discuss planning

Design a planning sheet to use with the children when you are planning an activity with them. You might include these and other headings:

• What are we trying to achieve? (agreed goal, outcome)
• How will we know we have been successful? (success criteria)
• What do we need to do? (actions, jobs)
• What will help us? (resources)
• What might be a problem? (traps, obstacles)
• What will we do about it? (What- if or contingency plans)
• Who will do what? (roles) [Simplify according to age range.]

The idea of developing a planning sheet is introduced in the Planning module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

The questions in the panel alongside illustrate the kinds of things that teachers can encourage students to pay attention to. Instead of skipping quickly to ‘the right answer’ they are asked to slow down and notice and appraise strategies and steps they are using along the way. This helps students become more reflective and thoughtful about their own learning. They are being encouraged to explore and compare different strategies for making progress. This helps them become more flexible and resourceful in the face of difficulty, and get into the habit of looking for alternative ways of proceeding if their first tack turns out not to work. They are being encouraged to develop the habit of thinking for themselves about what helpful knowledge or strategies they might already possess that could help them out in this situation, and thus to become more independent and resourceful.

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. Let’s take these two aspects of meta-learning in turn.

There is a wealth of research which shows that good learners know a lot about learning.

They possess a vocabulary for talking about the process of learning itself, and are able to articulate how learning works.

Good readers, even quite young ones, are often able tell you half-a-dozen things they can do when they come across an unfamiliar word: they sound it out, break it down into bits, re-read the previous sentence, read on to see if the meaning becomes clear, look at the picture and think about it, and so on. And so, more generally, for good learners. The more able they are to talk about their learning, the more likely they are to be able to apply their knowledge to new domains too: meta-learning increases generalisation.

And good learners also need an accurate sense of themselves as learners. Being a good learner means being able to take your own strengths and weaknesses into account as you are weighing up a learning challenge, or deciding on a course of ‘professional development.’

The skills and dispositions of meta-learning can be cultivated simply by a teacher’s persistent use of questions such as ‘How did you go about finding that out?’ or ‘How would you go about teaching that to other people?’

This idea is introduced in the Phase 2 Meta Learning module, section 1.

Using learning power scrapbooks

to build self-awareness and capture behaviours. Here students record their thoughts, feelings, and progress about learning. Some schools use the more formalised learning log pages from TLO’s on-line Transition Activity Bank. Different pages prompt students to notice themselves using a learning behaviour over the course of a week—at school, at home, and elsewhere—and to note briefly what they did. For example, for Making Links they might note; ‘When I built on the knowledge I already had’, ‘When I used an analogy to better understand something’, ‘When I met something new and asked myself how is this the same, and how is it different from things I already know?’

The idea of using learning journals is expanded on in the Revising module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Encouraging feedback to support the use of learning behaviours

The idea of using Task, Process and Self-Regulation levels of feedback is explored in the Perseverance module, section 2, iv) Moving beyond Green.

Using ‘Could be’ language

The importance of using ‘Could-Be’ language is well researched. It encourages more genuine engagement with what is being taught; how students will question and solve problems more readily if knowledge is presented as provisional. It’s about shifting the tone to more tentative, less cut and dried. The opposite is ‘Is’ language which positions the learner as knowledge consumers where their job is to try and understand and remember. ‘Could be’ language immediately invites students to be more thoughtful, critical or imaginative about what they are hearing or reading.
For more on using ‘could be’ language, see page 69-71 in The Learning Powered School.

Could be language includes phrase like;

• In most cases
• may on occasion
• wide variety
• could be
• probably
• possibly
• most often
• there are other ways
• one of which
• some people think that…

If you say definitively that something is the case, students take it literally and try to remember it. But if you say, of the same thing, that it could be the case, they become more engaged, more thoughtful, more imaginative, and more critical. That ‘could be’ invites students to become more active, inquisitive members of the knowledge-checking, knowledge-developing community, rather than to see themselves as merely doing their best to understand and remember something that is already cut and dried.

The illustration alongside shows an example of how textbook knowledge, which is often presented as cut-and-dried, brook-no-questions language, can be softened and made more conditional, tentative, or open in a variety of simple ways.

The idea of using ‘Could Be’ languaage is introduced in the Imagining module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Engage students giving feedback that is kind, specific and helpful

Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence

Build a culture of critique

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

• Kind
• Specific
• Helpful

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

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

Search for Austin’s Butterfly to discover more detailed analysis of the Models of Excellence approach.

The idea of using peer feedback is introduced in the Revising module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

Harness the power of 3 stars and a wish

The well-known Assessment for Learning technique of 3 stars and a wish is frequently used by teachers to fashion their feedback to learners, but here we are suggesting that learners use it themselves to structure feedback to each other. The strategy fits well with feedback that is Kind, Specific and Helpful as considered in ‘Austin’s Butterfly’.

But here you are playing a longer game. While in the early stages students give and receive feedback from their peers, you are really laying the foundations of students acting as their own ‘critical friend’, judging their own efforts (3 stars) and considering what more needs to be done (a wish). It is a shift of responsibility towards the learner to evaluate their efforts against the agreed success criteria and, eventually, against their own self-imposed standards.

This use of 3 Stars and a Wish was introduced in the Talking for Learning section of Playing the Learning Power Game.

Take the conversation to another level . . . .

Thus far students have been reflecting on whether and / or how frequently they have been using various learning behaviours. Use this Rating Wheel to get them reflecting on how well they have used these behaviours.

Challenge students to explain why they believe they have used the behaviour effectively. How could you use their answers to build definitions of effective learning behaviours?

Teacher talk

• Which learning behaviours have you had occasion to use today/this week?
• Which have you used most often?
• I notice you have completely coloured in the reasoning segment. So what does that mean? What does good reasoning mean to you?
• Which one of the learning behaviours do you want to improve and learn to do better?

A simple Rating Wheel to encourage students to consider how they have been learning is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

The Rating Wheel to encourage students to consider how well they have been learning is introduced in the Meta Learning module, section 2, iv) Moving beyond Green.

Meet with colleagues to consider on-line materials and which to make use of.

Consider what you have each been trying out over the last month or so and what else you want to experiment with.

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

• how the ideas would suit your students as learners
• which are realistic both for you and your students
• how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture and the students view of themselves as learners
• which ideas are front runners and why?

Use the decision making pentagon for deciding what you might try. Note down a couple of:

• things you want to start doing
• things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
• things you want to keep doing
• things you want to do more often
• things you want to do less

Help students become aware of their own learning.

Use laminated card and a clothes peg. Print on Absorbed – Distracted or Too Easy – Too Hard or Stuck – Doing Fine? Interested – Bored etc. Laminate and provide a peg. Have students use them during lessons to help them monitor and become more conscious of their feelings about learning. This is just a small beginning in devolving the responsibility for learning towards the learners.

This idea is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Nudging improvement in the skill: self-recovery from being ‘stuck’

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 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.

The advantage of asking questions over telling is that you are in a better position to monitor how students are learning when they are doing the explaining.

The idea of Support to Continue is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Modelling ‘how to’

Whatever the subject, modelling ‘how to’ is given added value when linked to the learning behaviours that make for successful performance. Take on the role of an intelligent novice and model performance at a slightly higher, more coherent and informed level than is characteristic of your students. Model your ‘think alouds’.

Try the following steps for whatever skill you are modelling;

• introduce the skill e.g. how to find something in an index;
• explain the skill, explaining why the information is important;
• model the skill, showing how you do it;
• review what you have done, ask students to tell you what you did;
• reflect on the use of the skill, where else the skill can be applied.

The idea of modelling ‘how to’ is explored in the Relating for Learning section of ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’.

Introduce a broader range of learning behaviours. For example, Listening:

Good listener prompts

Invite students make suggestions about good listening:

• Pay attention. Focus on the person and what is being said
• Don’t get distracted by other things around you
• Show you’re listening by saying uh-huh or nodding your head
• Keep quiet while the other person’s talking
• Wait to ask a question or give comments that show others that you care about what they’re saying.

Make these into a public display and refer to them often. This is an example from a group of 9 year olds.

Teacher Talk

• What have we learned about how to listen well from our listening challenges?
• What do we need to remember to do to be a good listener?
• What about looking at each other…
• How might we show we are listening?
• …and so on

The idea of students creating listening prompts is introduced in the Listening module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

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

Use the ‘Learning Pit’ as a means of opening up a conversation around the feelings involved when struggling with learning, and the journey to overcoming 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/

The idea of the learning pit is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Modelling uncertain thinking

The attitudes, values and interests that you display in the classroom, knowingly or not, constitute arguably the most powerful medium through which the messages of learning rub off on students. To encourage students to engage in the effort necessary in rising to challenge, you need to externalise your exploratory thinking; thinking through a problem out loud:

• demonstrate the habit and inclinations of a good learner
  • What’s this problem about?
  • Have I seen/done one like this before?
  • What am I trying to achieve?
  • How will I know when I have achieved what I need to do?
  • So, how might I set about it?
• talk about the challenges you have faced and how you overcome them
  • What happens if I do xxx or yyy?
  • Does that work?
  • Why not?
  • What else could I try?
  • OK that seems to work so what’s the next step?
• show that you too have to put in effort to be successful
  • I’ve re-done that bit a couple of times but it’s still not looking as good/sound/right as I think it should.
  • What else could I try?
  • Ahh! that’s looking/feeling/behaving better now.
  • I think that’s going to work
• show interest in the mistakes you make
  • Oh! what’s happened here?
  • Why doesn’t that work?
  • That’s interesting. I’ll need to remember that for next time.
  • but that mistake has got me thinking about…..

At this stage modelling moves up a notch from showing how to do something correctly to explaining how you are thinking through the problem in order to get it right.

Modelling being stuck is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Putting ‘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. ‘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’.

Research findings

Research on motivation and goals from Harvard University shows how our brains work to achieve our goals. Basically it says that goals need to be very clear and our brain ignores a goal if it’s unclear about what to do. Brains act on goals only when what to do is clear. So, goals like ‘Lose weight’ or ‘Exercise more often‘ or even ‘I want to feel ok about being stuck‘ are too nebulous. They beg the question ‘how’ or ‘what do I do?’

The how to ‘If-then’ planning

When setting a goal 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__] So a goal about losing weight, your brain would need to know much more about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of losing weight. An If-then statement or goal might be ‘If I get the pudding menu, then I’ll ask for coffee’.

This may sound a bit cumbersome to start with but research suggests far more goals are achieved by using ‘if-then’ planning. 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”.

If/Then planning is introduced in the Perseverance module, section 2, ii) Moving from Purple to Blue.

Learning Mats… a simple tool to encourage students to become more self-aware of how they are using a learning habit. An A3 or A4 laminated sheet kept on tables or used as part of a wall display. Shows various aspects of a learning habit.

Students:

• refer to them during lessons;
• use them as prompts;
• use them as self-assessment tools;
• use them as reflection tools;
• join in meta-cognitive talk.

Teachers can use them as an audit tool to support their planning. i.e. which of the skills are implied in the lesson plan and therefore how will they be surfaced in what you draw attention to and how you orchestrate the lesson.

Learning Mats appear in all modules, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green. The one illustrated here is in the Imagining module.

Show yourself as a good planner

Students learn by imitating others and so will learn much from absorbing your own planning skills.

Try setting up a challenge that requires students to create a plan of action and join in the group as a learner, without taking over or leading the activity;

During the challenge try to act out some of these positive learning behaviours:

• organising what needs to be done in what order – what must we do? what must we do first? second?;
• deciding success criteria – how will we know if our plan is working?;
• thinking about how long it will take – how long do we think this will take us?;
• agreeing milestones and how the plan will be monitored – when will we stop to see how things are going?;
• deciding who will be doing what – who will take the lead on this?;
• looking out for possible sticking points / obstacles – what might get in the way?;
• keeping an eye to ensure the emerging plan meets the original objectives – are we still on track?

These ideas are introduced in the Planning module, sections 1 and 2. Start here for more about Planning and how it develops.

Designing ‘wild tasks’.

What if we occasionally designed 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’.
• 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.

Not for every day AND remember that you can’t start this sort of discovery task until students are equipped with sufficient goal setting, planning and revising habits.

Here’s a classical word problem that could act as a way into Wild Tasks. Why not have one a week and let students become intrigued.

The broken egg problem.

A farmer is taking her eggs to the market when her cart hits a pothole. The cart tips over and every egg is broken. For insurance purposes she needs to know how many eggs she had. Unfortunately she doesn’t know, but remembers something from various ways she tried packing the eggs. When she put the eggs in groups of two, three, four, five and six, there was one egg left over, but when she put them in groups of seven they ended up in complete groups with no eggs left over.

What can the farmer figure out from this information about the number of eggs she had? Is there more than one answer?

The idea of linking open-ended tasks with the Questionn Formulation Technique is explored in the Reasoning module, section 2, iv) Moving beyond Green.

Train students as learning coaches

You are already a skilful coach, but the next step is to train your students to coach each other, using the same techniques that you use. Peer coaching is a beginning, but ideally you are seeking to help students, in the long term, to be able to coach themselves.

Teach your students to coach each other. Coaching is basically a structured conversation where one person, the coach, helps the other person, the coachee, to find out their own answers. The coach asks questions and listens but does not offer suggestions.

The GROW structure is widely used —

• set the Goal..“What is it that you want to do?”
• find out the Reality…“What’s it like at the moment?”
• think of Options…“What might you do to improve?”
• commit to the Way forward… “So what are you going to do and when are you going to do it?”

Try organising speed coaching between students lasting 10 minutes each way – it can be really effective.

This, and further ideas, can be found in the Revising module, section 2, iii) Moving from Blue to Green.

First steps in helping students to model their thinking.

Get into the habit of asking students to tell their partner what they are thinking and, whenever possible, to describe and explain why they are thinking it.

The role of the partner is to get their partner to model their thinking, and to probe this thinking with ‘why’ type questions. The right ‘probe’ questions will move the response from being a description to being an explanation. The routine encourages students to explore and talk about what they are thinking, thereby surfacing that which is frequently sub-conscious. The more you become conscious of what you think and/or do the stronger and more routine it will become.

Encourage this process with ‘why’ questions such as;

• Can you describe this …?
• Why has it got a….?
• Why does it look like that?
• Why is it made of…?

Helping learners to move from Describing to Explaining is introduced in the Reasoning module, section 2, i) Moving from Grey to Purple.

Designing tasks to encourage independence.

In order to help learners to become increasingly independent and self-sufficient, you’ll need to design tasks that, over time, afford learners opportunities to do more for themselves as the teaching scaffold is slowly reduced.

In the early stages, tasks may be highly structured with the whole class following a path pre-determined by the teacher. As the amount of teacher direction reduces, you may still set the agenda and provide the necessary resources to answer the questions that they set, but how the questions are to be tackled is beginning to shift towards the learner-controlled enquiry. At the level of guided enquiry, you will still identify the topic / area of study, but learners decide how to tackle it. And at the level of free, independent enquiry, learners determine the area of study and how they wish to pursue it.

Ask yourself the hard questions:

• Which type(s) of enquiry are evident in your classroom?
• How could you begin to gradually shift task design away from Structured Enquiry and towards Free Enquiry?
• Think about the oldest students in your school – which level of Enquiry might they be capable of working at? How will you plan, at whole-school level, to achieve this?

This, and other linked ideas, appear in the Capitalising/Resourcing module, section 2, iv) Moving Beyond Green.

Students as coaches

Use the ‘Skill: Will’ matrix to help students develop ways of reflecting on their own performance. Using the matrix helps students judge their levels of accomplishment and motivation in any area of the curriculum or indeed life beyond school. Students can support or coach each other to complete the grid objectively and then identify for themselves small steps to create the desired movement. Each of the quadrants requires a different coaching approach.

• Direct – set short-term goals, structure learning tasks and monitor progress closely.
• Inspire – re-kindle interest, set short term actions and accentuate positives.
• Guide – envision the future when skill levels are raised, secure appropriate learning opportunities and provide reflective feedback.
• Delegate – encourage experimentation and further challenges to maintain interest.

See extracts below from pages 106 and 107 in The Learning Powered School.

Learning about the craft of teaching.

Research shows that after the first couple of years working in a profession, performance usually plateaus. This has been shown to be true in teaching, general medicine, nursing and other fields, and it happens because once we think we have become good enough, adequate, then we stop spending time in the learning zone. We focus all our time on just doing our job, performing, which turns out not to be a great way to improve. But the people who continue to spend time in the learning zone do continue to always improve.

Ask yourself the hard questions:

• Am I as good a teacher as I want / hope to be?
• Do I spend sufficient time in my own professional learning zone?
• How effectively do I model to my own students that I am still learning about the craft of the classroom?
• How do I create, for my professional self, low-stakes islands in otherwise high stakes seas?

The Ted Talk, How to get better at the things you care about, was introduced in phase 1 Playing the Learning Power Game, is mentioned in the Celebrating section of this module, and is explored in depth in the phase 2 Listening module, section 3. In all cases it was in relation to supporting students to understand the difference between their learning and performance zones.

Listen again, but this time through the lens of your own development as a teacher. After all – if teachers are not keen on lifelong learning, why should our students buy into the idea?