For example…

a) Celebrate growth in learning behaviours…however obvious or ‘everyday’

In this display, group working behaviours are being noticed and celebrated.

Even everyday behaviours such as listening to a partner are being recognised and publicly celebrated by a framed and displayed photograph.

It is in ways such as this that you show the value of positive learning behaviours and keep alerting students to what effective learners do.

b) Watch your learners carefully

Learning observation tools.

Use this or a similar observation tool to reflect on how your students are learning in terms of their Perseverance, Collaboration, Questioning and Revising. Colour in each ‘segment’ of the wheel depending on the extent to which learners are using the skill – use the concentric circles to convey frequency / effectiveness. You will soon get a picture of how your students are as learners.

If you feel your students are capable, engage them in monitoring their own learning behaviours using the same wheel, but this time written as ‘Did I . . ‘ rather than ‘Did they . . . ‘.

Ask yourself the hard question:

For the segments that you are struggling to colour in because your learners don’t currently do this, ask yourself whether you are providing sufficient opportunities for them to practise this behaviour?

For example…

a) Enable learners to monitor their own progress in the key learning behaviours

Use either of these self-evaluation tools to encourage students to think about how they are exercising various aspects of the 4 key learning behaviours – Persevering, Collaborating, Questioning and Revising. The first tool would be more useful for gaining a baseline evaluation of students and for tracking changes during the early stages of development, whereas the second tool is targeted at students with more extensive exposure to the concepts. Simply choose the one that you feel best fits your students.

Use the outcomes to:

• initiate learning conversations with students;
• track changes in perceptions over time by using it more than once;
• monitor the impact of your interventions.

b) Learning stickers and awards to recognise learning

Many schools have set up pupil awards for learning well and/or for being good at spotting when they are using different learning muscles. They use stickers, certificates, a mention in assembly, or tea with the headteacher. Self-awareness and understanding of the detail of the learning process is further developed by asking pupils to articulate what they have done to earn the award.

For example…

a) Make learning goals public

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 example:

• I can take turns in a group.
• I can ignore things that distract me.
• I can keep calm when I get stuck.
• I found a way of getting unstuck.
• I learned to how to improve something after making a mistake.
• I built 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.

b) Celebrate growth in the skill

Schools have found intriguing ways of celebrating and depicting the growth in learning habits. The display shown here is about the growth of questioning skills. Each aspect of the learning behaviour is explained on a leaf and students put a small picture of themselves onto the leaf when they feel they are using this skill effectively. In this way students become aware and conscious of their development and their next step.

For example…

a) Have students work out a hierarchy for their learning goals . . . .

10 statements relating to asking questions drawn from the progression map for questioning. Offer them to students in no particular order.

Ask students to categorise them into 3 groups for a classroom display

1. basic questioning skills
2. developing questioning skills
3. higher level questioning skills

• I ask closed questions to gather factual information.
• I can tell the difference between open and closed questions.
• I ask questions when I want to find something out.
• I am good at finding information on the internet.
• I ask open questions to encourage others to tell me what they think.
• I think about how I am asking questions to make sure I don’t upset anyone.
• I am not afraid of asking questions in class.
• I ask ‘what if . . . ‘ type questions to explore possibilities
• I ask myself if the answer is true and if it tells me what I need to know.
• I can use a book index to help me find information.

Use these categorised lists to:

• display in your classroom
• to ‘set and agree intentions for developing students’ learning behaviours’?
• change each of these statements into an If / Then target?
• create something similar for a different learning behaviour – say for Collaboration? Or for Reasoning?

For more on If /Then targets:

Look in Section 2, Relating for Learning –

Or in this section, 5, Celebrating Learning –

For example…

Effective learning targets – a 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.

a) Create if/then targets for, in this case, collaboration:

For the emerging collaborator, choose from:

• If a friend does not allow me to have my turn → Then I will remind them that is fair that we all have a go.
• If I am working with a partner → Then I will make sure that I say what I think.
• If we are working together → Then I will do what the team needs me to do.
• If we don’t seem to know what to do → Then I will suggest that we need to work out what the task is really about.
• If I have been in a team → Then I will think about how well I contributed.

For the developing collaborator, choose from:

• If I’m losing patience with what someone is saying → Then I will take a deep breath and keep quiet.
• If a group member is not saying anything → Then I will ask them what they want to say.
• If I’m working as a team → Then I will ask to take on a different role from last time.
• If we are deciding what to do → Then I will make certain that what we are suggesting is realistic.
• If others suggest how I might have contributed more effectively → Then I will listen patiently and think carefully about what they have said.

For the good collaborator, choose from:

• If a team member makes a really good comment → Then I will make sure that I congratulate them for it.
• If I hear a good idea → Then I will try to help to improve the idea further.
• If our team is working together → Then I will suggest how I can be of most help to the group.
• If we are making plans → Then I will remind others that we need to decide on the order we intend to do things.
• If we have finished → Then I will remind myself and others to think about how well we worked together.

And for the already sophisticated collaborator, choose from:

• If someone is getting angry → Then I will remind them that we have ways of managing conflict.
• If someone is having trouble saying what they think → Then I will try to help them, even if I do not fully agree with them.
• If our team is deciding roles → Then I will ask to undertake a role that I wish to get better at.
• If we are working together → Then I will suggest that we check to see how things are going.
• If we have finished → Then I will ask how the way we worked helped us to achieve our goals.
• If a job needs doing → Then I will volunteer to do it myself if no one else offers.
• If I think we can do it even better → Then I will try to convince others that we should make some changes.
• If I am in a new team → Then I will do my best to support the team in any way that I can.
• If we have nearly finished → Then I will remind the team to check that we have achieved what we set out to do.
• If we have finished → Then I will ask how we could do it even better next time.

Could you, with your colleagues, develop a similar set of levelled if /then targets for the other behaviours that you are developing?

For example…

a) Differentiate between learning time (zone) and performance time (zone)

This cultural shift is THE essential aspect of friendly classroom cultures. We can do no better than suggest you watch this video by way of explanation.

Set aside some quality time to watch an 11 minute TED Talk by Eduardo Briceno called ‘How to get better at the things you care about’. Prepare to spend time in your own learning zone, and temporarily abandon your performance zone. Consider particularly how you might “create low stakes islands in otherwise high stakes seas” in your own classroom. Ask yourself if your students might benefit from watching this? What would you hope that they might learn? How might it help them to attempt and to relish greater challenge?

b) 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.

c) Recognise the big link between emotional engagement and challenge

Learning is always an emotional business and learning how to manage this is best done ‘on the job’ in the course of learning rather than as a separate stand-alone activity. Emotional engagement is a prerequisite of powerful learning, it’s what gets you interested enough to be willing to put in the effort to get better and see the value of pushing yourself. So lessons aren’t just designed to make use of different kinds of learning behaviours but to give those behaviours a good work-out. Activities are designed to:

• be challenging, where being stuck and confused are regular and fruitful experiences.
• give students the opportunity to ‘learn what to do when they don’t know what to do’ – to work on wild tasks, rather than tame ones, where there’s plenty of scope to get lost and perplexed.

Or, as a 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 it?’ and started thinking ‘have I made it hard enough to stretch them?'”

Try these ideas to support challenge

• Make positive connections between making mistakes and challenge
• Model how to think about and work through challenges
• Create a challenge wall; put up questions, extension tasks, riddles, problems. A go-to place for another challenge when other learning is finished
• Display work that shows students have improved mistakes etc.
• Stimulate using ‘Stingray’ questions…What if...(something they thought they knew from a different angle – What if gravity was twice as strong ?)
• Use the ‘learning pit’ to talk through what to do to overcome/surmount a challenge.

For example…

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

For example…

a) Spot the mistake.

Offer students examples of written work with different numbers of mistakes in them. Challenge students to work in pairs to correctly identify the mistakes in each example. When complete tell pairs if they have found the right number of mistakes but if not don’t discuss which, if any, they have overlooked.

b) Display and celebrate mistakes

Give mistakes high status, a key role in learning:

• Say that you expect pupils 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 pupils to find and discuss.
• Model making mistakes and how you learn from them.

c) 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?

d) Sharing mistakes

Make mistakes useful. Create a ‘Beware board’ in the classroom and invite pupils to share their mistakes on Post-its. Talk about why the mistake was made, what thinking led to the confusion and how it could be avoided in the future. Bringing mistakes into the open and discussing them helps other students to avoid them while recognising their value.

For example…

a) Identifying and celebrating high level learning skills in an ever wider range of behaviours and linking these skills to curriculum progress

The intention here is to celebrate how high level thinking skills are linked to and result in curriculum progress.

The ideas presented here link across all aspects of this module. They:

• encourage teachers to widen their attention beyond the key 4 behaviours to include the cognitive aspects of Reasoning, Imagining and Making Links (see Relating for Learning);
• are framed in the form of ‘nudging learning’ through feedback and expand the classroom’s learning language (see Talking for Learning);
• make explicit links between what has been learned and how it has been learned (see Constructing Learning);
• focus on the school’s progression maps to identify and celebrate higher-level learning behaviours (see Celebrating Learning);
• contribute to making learning visible (which is a facet of all 4).

b) Create some for yourself . . .

Go to the progression charts that are in section 1 of the Reasoning / Imagining / Making Links Stepping Stones and Nutshells modules.

Ask yourself – how have the charts been used to generate these speech bubbles?

Can you match the other speech bubbles to other cells on these charts?

Suppose you were looking to create some celebratory comments relating to the Blue (Responds) rows – what would they be?

For example…

a) 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.

For example…

a) 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.

b) Curiosity corner

Create a Curiosity Corner with magnifying glasses and interesting objects …. shells, coins, dead insects, flowers …… and lots more! Spend a few minutes each day for children to report what new things they have noticed and the questions they have asked themselves about the objects.

c) Display the use of learning behaviours…..in this case Noticing

“We used our Noticing skills to find the different fruits and vegetables Archimboldo used in his portrait”

For example…

a) Questions on display. Make the classroom question friendly.

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

• Pupil-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 pupil work and pictures to provoke questioning.

b) Question walls…exploring question types

At the start of a topic call for and display questions which pupils think might be answered during a topic. Go on to;

• Discuss what sort of questions these are — open, closed, speculative, divergent, clarifying, essential, subsidiary.
• how they might lead to different types of information/reactions/strategies to gather information.
• Draw up and display lists of generic questions to use whenever pupils undertake certain types of task, e.g. scientific investigation.
• Refer to and extend these question groups regularly.

c) Create displays to highlight changes and revisions.

• Collect and display work at different stages of development.
• Use arrows and notes to highlight the changes and their impact. Renew and refer to these frequently to encourage students to review and amend their work.
• Show that you do not expect perfection at the first attempt!

For example…

a) Capture progression in learning behaviours

Hallbankgate Village School have developed ladders for learning behaviours they are focusing on – the ones illustrated relate to aspects of Collaboration and Perseverance.

Beside the ladders, students are writing about themselves and 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.

This shows progression in learning and reflection on the process… in action!

b) Make learning lines public

Rather than displaying progression lines in classrooms, Landau Forte College in Derby display theirs in public circulation areas – strategically placed. Reasoning is near Maths and Science, Collaboration near P/E and Drama, Noticing near Art & Design etc.

Such lines are an alternative way of bringing the growth of learning behaviours to students’ attention? Also, they are an important message about what the school believes to be important.

Take a look around the public circulation areas in your own school – what do they reveal, intentionally or otherwise, about the school’s priorities?

c) Build and display your own learning trajectories – perhaps your students could help?

Get beyond the headline words like ‘Questioning’, and challenge yourself to create progression ladders that go from, for example, ‘Afraid of asking questions, unable to frame questions that get the required information’ to ‘Asks incisive questions with sensitivity to fuel insatiable curiosity’. What are the stepping stones that lie in between, and in broadly what order will they be acquired?

On the right is the perseverance ladder you saw in the Talking for Learning, Creating a language section. All of the learning behaviours will, eventually, need to be unpacked in a similar manner. It is only when you have done this that you (and your students) will fully understand learning and how it grows.

For example…

a) 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.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

For example…

A learning-friendly culture is for living, not for laminating.

Do displays support your desire to build a learning-friendly culture? Beware displays that are jaded, too high on walls, rarely referred to, laminated to lengthen their life, bought in from Twinkle and don’t reflect the underlying culture. Here’s a typical example of a potentially ‘lazy’ display where the sentiments behind the words may not be understood and the classroom organisation may not allow the implications to happen.

BBBBB is a well-known alternative to the more detailed, home grown stuck poster. If BBBBB is to be anything more than a nod to learning power the implicit issues need to be explored and made possible in the classroom. It invites students to:

• use their Brain… what does this mean to the students in practice?
• check in “the Book”… are students allowed to move around to find these resources, and are they readily available?
• look on the (White/Smart)Board…do you always put useful stuff here?
• ask their partner/another student (“Buddy”)…is this allowed and how likely is it to be useful?
• ask the ‘Boss’ (teacher) for help…how available are you throughout a lesson?

Make sure displays mirror culture. Display does not, by itself, change the learning (and teaching) habits in the classroom. A learning-friendly culture is for living, not for laminating.

Build reflection into lessons

A reflective model of learning, like the Active Learning Cycle opposite, is a long-established feature of effective learning experiences. As Mike Hughes comments in Tweak to Transform, “Learning without reflection is like trying to fill a bath without putting the plug in”. And yet, reflection in lessons is frequently neglected for one of two reasons, and sometimes both:

1. Reflection time often comes after the learning has happened – towards the end of the lesson. Hence if the lesson overruns, the reflection time gets squeezed, or indeed is simply lost. Teachers who plan in lesson review points rather than the more traditional ‘plenary’ ensure that reflection is an integral part of their lessons, rather than a bolt-on at the end.
2. Even in lessons with review points, reflection is often done by teachers rather than by learners. Frequently teachers use review points to check understanding, and they do most of the talking and most of the questioning. Too often such intervals are reduced to time for teachers to say (again) what they intended to teach, rather than time for learners to reflect on and explain what they have learned. Reflection should be done by learners, not for learners.

At this stage, reflection will mostly be about what has been learned, the content. Learners may not, at this stage, have sufficient awareness of learning as a process to engage in reflection on the learning process itself.

For example…

a) Plan. Do. Review.

Plan What will it look like when it’s finished?’ (WWILLWIF)

• Set a task — physical, dramatic, written, practical, spoken, visual — that has clear parameters.
• Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action.
• Ask students to determine WWILLWIF for themselves and in conjunction with others.
• Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.

Build WWILLWIF into a list of stuck prompts, as a reminder to think ahead, but also to help students to get unstuck by visualising what the finished article might look like.

With older students, you might consider exploring one of Stephen Covey’s Habits of Highly Effective People – to ‘Begin with the end in Mind’.

Do Visible Thinking Routine. Headlines: a routine for capturing Essence.

• This routine draws on the idea of newspaper-type headlines as a vehicle for summing up and capturing the essence of an event, idea, concept, topic, etc. The routine asks one core question:
• If you were to write a headline for this topic or issue right now that captured the most important aspect that should be remembered, what would that headline be?

Consider following it up with the challenge of writing the first paragraph only of the newspaper article, the one that lays out all of the key information relating to the headline.

Could also be used as a lesson starter to frame students’ minds to be ready to adjust their point of view; to change their mind or ideas.

Teacher talk

Review Build in Lesson review points – so that students reflect for themselves

But lesson review points (or plenaries) 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 have learned and how they have learned it.

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

• three things they have learned today;
• three things they still need to find out;
• three things they hope to do next lesson.

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.

Building in reflection on the learning process itself.

The Meta-Learning Cycle, as illustrated opposite, contains the Active Learning Cycle to reflect on content, and enhances it to include reflection on the learning process itself. It helps learners to become aware of which learning behaviours they are employing / have employed.

At this stage they might be able to simply name the behaviours – they might, for example say they collaborated and persevered. Help them to expand their thinking to explain how they collaborated, or how they persevered.

As they develop understanding of the processes of learning, learners will become able to explain both how they collaborated, for example, and how effectively they collaborated. Conversation will move beyond ‘working together’ and ‘group work’ to include references to resolving disagreements, building consensus, building on the ideas of others, taking on roles etc.

For example

a) Build review points into lessons – so that students reflect for themselves

The simple method of students talking in pairs to distil the content:

• three things they have learned today;
• three things they still need to find out;
• three things they hope to do next lesson.

is lifted to meta-cognitive reflection by the addition of:

• three ways in which we learned today
• one way of learning you want to improve on tomorrow

Select one or two pairs to feed their opinions back to the rest of the class.

Pick up what they think they have learned and how they learned it.

b) How might we tackle this?

A lack of confidence often stems from simply not knowing what to do or how to do it. The task appears overwhelming and otherwise confident individuals become paralysed by the prospect of the task ahead.

At the beginning of a session talk with students about the strategies and things they might use to help them with their learning. Steer talking about how they might tackle this, thinking about strategies that have worked in the past, or speculating on new approaches that might work. It is time spent thinking about tackling the task rather than actually starting to tackle it. It reminds students that they have a range of strategies available and gives confidence that they have the tools for the job in hand.

For example

a) Connect, Extend, Challenge

This routine helps students make connections between new ideas and prior knowledge. It also encourages them to take stock of ongoing questions, puzzles and difficulties as they reflect on what they are learning.

• Connect:
  • How are the ideas and information presented connected to what you already know?
• Extend:
  • What new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?
• Challenge:
  • What is still challenging you or confusing for you to get your mind round? What questions, wondering or puzzles do you now have?

The natural place to use this routine is after students have learned something new. For example: after exploring a work of art, a theory, a method, a piece of evidence. Try it as a reflection during a lesson, after a longer project, or when completing a unit of study. The routine works just as well with the whole class, small groups or individually.

To see this routine on the Visible Thinking Website

Teacher Talk

b) Use a wider range of learning behaviours i.e. Reasoning (sequencing) and task designs to enhance making links

Cut up;

• a cartoon,
• series of pictures of a production process,
• a flow diagram,
• a mathematical proof,
• a story line,
• a musical score,
• a poem,
• a sequence of events, and so on.

Invite students to reassemble the pieces in what they think is a viable order and explain their reasons for this. Model and listen for the language of reasoning to strengthen the process.

For example…

a) Use two types of reflection:

Click to enlarge

The two aspects to reflection –

• reflection In action (or monitoring) undertaken in the hurly-burly of the process of learning,
• reflection On action (or evaluating) a retrospective focusing on what happened, what worked and to how to do it better next time.

Being able to reflect on, refine and review your ideas is a key learning characteristic. Students need to be taught:

• not to wait till they’ve finished before checking how they are getting on;
• to keep making small checks and revisions all the time as they go along …am I on the right track? Is there something I’m missing? (Reflection In action)

• to check what they have done at the end…is this as good as I can make it? (A bit of both depending on whether it needs further adjustments or not)
• and at the end, to think about whether there’s a better way to do it? (Reflection On action)

b) Try enquiry-based learning

Developing curiosity, independence, and transferable research skills is at the heart of ‘enquiry-based learning’ (EBL) 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.’

For example…Students in Years 7, 8 and 9 could experience 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 have combined for a unit called A Question of Sport where students investigate the science and maths of certain sports. They experiment, for example, with the ways tennis would change if ball weight and racquet sizes changed. RE and Humanities come 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.

For example

a) Build ‘What I would do differently next time?’ into learners’ responses to feedback

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.

Teacher talk

b) Have students analysing their own performance

Self-analysis of performance and creation of feedback

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 helpful feedback enables students to do this.

• 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.
• Share assessment criteria with students and require 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.

Teacher talk

For example..

a) Set goals with learning in mind – shift 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?’

b) Dual-focused learning

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.

For example…

a) Flip Goals to get student buy-in.

Setting a goal that the learner has little or no motivation to achieve is unlikely to lead to success. What is needed is learner buy-in to goals.

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 or passing / doing well in a test.

Putting the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

So – a goal (or objective or outcome) 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;

• work with a partner to decide why…….
• use your problem solving skills to work out……
• use your imagination to …
• using your xxx (closed/open/ sifting/) questioning skills, work out/identify…

Where ‘knowing goals’ place the emphasis on the successful acquisition of knowledge or creates a pass/fail scenario, the ‘doing goals’ focus on how – something to do rather than something to know.

More examples;

• With a partner, use your reasoning skills to explain why all prime numbers, with the exception of 2, are odd.
• Use your noticing skills to identify three similarities and three differences between these two images.
• By using what you already know and your imagination to generate ideas, tell the story of the fire of London from the perspective of a young child living in London at the time.

By devising objectives such as these you are paying some attention to how students will be learning as well as what they will be learning.

b) Design tasks to encourage questioning and engagement

Match Them Up

Offer students a set of cards that need to be matched up or linked in some way.

It might be:

• a set of pairs of cards like ‘It has been raining’ and ‘The river is flowing fast’ where the student is challenged to decide whether there Must be a connection between the two events, Could be a connection, or No possible connection;
• a problem to select a substance (metal, clay, wax, salt, ice, …) and a change (freezes, dissolves, melts, burns, …) and decide if the change is Reversible or Irreversible;
• a set of cards that students are required to match into pairs – it could be 5 graphs and 5 equations; 5 characters and 5 attitudes; 5 words and 5 definitions etc.

For example…

a) Introduce Visible Thinking Routines

What are Visible Thinking Routines?

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

To be effective such routines need to be;

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

Find out more: Google ‘Visible thinking routines’

See / Think / Wonder

See Think Wonder is a visible thinking routine that encourages students to;

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

It helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry.

• Use this routine when you want students to think carefully about why something looks the way it does or is the way it is.
• Use at the beginning of a new unit to motivate student interest or try it with an object that connects to a topic during the unit of study.
• Consider using it with an interesting object near the end of a unit to encourage students to further apply their new knowledge and ideas.

The routine works best when a student responds by using the three stems together at the same time, i.e., “I see…, I think…, I wonder …. “ However, you may find that students begin by using one stem at a time, and that you need to scaffold each response with a follow up question for the next stem.
See/Think/Wonder is a David Perkins visible thinking routine, to be found at his visible thinking website.

Variations – try Hear / Think / Wonder and Read / Think / Wonder.

Another VTR:

• What’s happening here?

• What makes you say that?

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.

For example…

a) Offer rich activities to structure whole-class collaboration.

• 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.

b) Find ways to shape the curriculum around learners’ questions.

Question Dice 1

Create (or buy) two dice. One has What/Where/Who/Which/Why/How. The other has Is/Was/Could/Would/Should/Might.

Towards the end of a lesson/module, generate question stems comprising a question word and a verb by rolling the 2 dice. Ask students to create a question about the topic in hand using the question stem as a starting point.

• Which xxxx could….?
• Why was…….?
• What might……?

“Is” will generate answers about the present, “Was/Did” …..about the past, “Can/Could” requires students to explore possibilities, “Would” requires students to consider what is probable, “Will/Should” requires students to predict/hypothesise, “Might” requires students to imagine/speculate.

Use the learners’ questions to frame the next lesson.

c) Consider ‘flipping’ the classroom.

There is much talk of the flipped classroom and of flipped learning. The terms, which are frequently used interchangeably, concern, at a basic level, what would have otherwise been covered in class being covered at home and in advance, while the subsequently freed-up classroom time is used for coaching, consolidation, practice and exploration. That which would have been classwork is done at home by the student. That which would have been homework is covered in class.

One neat addition to flipped learning is to require students not only to undertake the advance learning but also to come to the lesson with at least one question about the material – thereby building the habits of distilling what they do and do not understand and of framing a question that will help them to uncover one thing that they want to find out, or one thing they do not yet understand. It gives the teacher insight into the areas of uncertainty or interest of students and affords the opportunity to shape the classroom time in order to meet their individual interests – the seeds of co-construction, if you like.

For example…

Use the six principles of learning power lesson design

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.

For example…

a) 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.

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;
• to 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.

For example…

a) 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.

b) 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.

For example

a) Lessen scaffolding for learning

All teachers want to develop knowledge, skills and understanding in their students. They design lessons, tasks and activities that will support students to achieve this. Sometimes these are wild and open ended, but more frequently they are carefully structured to ensure the curriculum is ‘covered’ and the ‘right’ knowledge, skills and understandings are at least offered if not acquired. Indeed, it’s the mark of a good teacher that they are able to design lessons that help to achieve this – imagine for a moment a teacher who is incapable of designing such learning experiences!

But herein lies a dilemma. Teachers can design lessons, tasks and activities that scaffold the learning to the extent that the learner is given little room for manoeuvre, placing them effectively in a learning straight-jacket that ensures they follow the path, chosen by the teacher, to success. Despite the fact that they can, the question becomes should they always scaffold the learning so deliberately?

Classrooms are full of overly helpful adults: differentiating a little too much; explaining a little too much; talking a little too much; helping a little too much; intervening a little too often. They work with students who expect: learning to be easy; that their teacher will do the thinking for them; that their job is simply to listen.

While some lessons inevitably fall into this mode, what should the balance be like?

It is the age-old challenge of differentiation – how do we keep the learning in the extended grasp of the learner? Goldilocks difficulty – not too easy, not too hard, just right!

A teacher recently said to us:

“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?'”

What changes could you make in your classroom to make the learning less easy, more stretching?

b) Offer tools to guide problem based learning

A graphic organiser that is much used in primary schools to help pupils 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 pupils 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 pupils to structure a paragraph, the TASC wheel gives a simple way of helping pupils to sequence what they do to undertake an investigation.

c) Create an effort checklist.

Create a prompt checklist of the ways you have introduced that will help focus effort.

For example…

a) Introduce Challenge plans

Encourage students to create their own plans for seeking and engaging with challenge. These plans should include:

• What’s the goal?
• What are the success criteria?
• What is the time frame?
• Gather information about the tasks
• Link new information to what I already know
• Where am I expecting difficulties – blocks and obstacles?
• Are there any dependencies? If this….then that….
• Use the expert knowledge of others to help distil and refine my ideas
• Review where I’ve got to and check my thinking against the original success criteria
• Evaluate emerging outcomes against my expectations
• Amend the plan or goal if necessary
• Hand in on time!

b) De-structure investigations

Turn the planning of investigations in maths to students to do on their own. Just give them heaps of data and have them work in groups to plan their own investigation. Give students a list of ‘learning capacities’ they will need to use and have them identify the ones they did use.

This way of working has shown that students learn more when left to work things out for themselves and learn from their own mistakes.

For example…

a) Engaging in Appreciative Inquiry

“Appreciative inquiry” in which people are invited to;

• inquire into their best experiences
• imagine what might be if more of these occurred
• innovate by identifying how to get more
• implement changes in this cycle.

Its four stages are Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny (Do it). The AI model is normally used by organisations but could also apply to improving team learning. AI assumes that teams have many strengths which can be harnessed to meet new challenges. The trick, therefore, is to for the team to ask themselves;

• ‘What are we most proud of?’
• ‘What do we do best in terms of how we develop our learning?’ ‘
• What is it that we do that most helps to develop ourselves as a powerful team?’
• ‘What is the most empowering team quest we have undertaken recently?’

Rather than problematising issues, AI begins by trying to identify what happens when the team and individuals in it are working really well. This process could involve a series of interviews, the outputs of which are stories, pictures, and key-words describing things that are already going well in the desired direction of travel.

The only rule for such enquiry is that it has to begin by being wholly positive. For some people this is surprisingly difficult; it often tends to be easier to talk about problems than strengths. It’s not that people are forbidden to talk about what is not going well; rather, discussions are framed so that when they do move into more critical mode they do so in a spirit of pride and optimism, having confirmed all the many good things they are already doing. And this can make a huge difference.

After ‘Discover’ you Dream: creating a wish-list of what the team would like to do (with current constraints removed). This frees people’s minds to think more creatively. After these first two stages, the team has an agenda for action and change that isn’t encumbered by the usual excuses for inaction. From here the team moves into familiar territory—Design, a key element of any development work, and Doing that is reflective and optimistic.

Appreciative inquiry could also be applied to any aspect of teachers’ professional practice or to school practice.

For example…

a) Work versus Learning

Teachers have traditionally talked much more about ‘work’ than they have about ‘learning’. One study carried out in London schools in 2002 compared the frequency of use of these two words, and found that ‘work’ was used 98% of the time, and ‘learning’ only 2%.

Research has found that when classroom activity is called learning or ‘play’ groups find the activity more pleasurable than when it’s referred to as ‘work’. Students also become much more locked on to it, their minds wander much less, they are more imaginative, and they learn more from the activity.

Now there is nothing wrong with the word ‘work’ but it doesn’t invite you to get interested in the activity itself. You will be pleasantly surprised at the effect on your students if you talk less about ‘work’ and more about the process of learning itself.

b) Invest toys or puppets with learning habits

Help students to understand the learning behaviours (like Collaborating, Persevering or Questioning) by having toys that are endowed with the behaviours. It may well be that you start with only a few behaviours / soft toys which are added to 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 invested with the characteristics of that learning behaviour. Don’t just work with alliterations like…cat and capitalising. Better to have an Emperor Penguin to represent Interdependence…and why would that be?

c) Use Clip Art icons as an aide-memoire for learning behaviours

You could simply ‘borrow’ these, but much better to get students to design and agree their own as a means of developing a conversation about the meaning of learning and growing your own learning language.

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

For example…

a) Extend talk about learning behaviours… turn fictional characters into learning heroes

click to enlarge

A popular way to extend familiarity with learning behaviours is to consider the learning behaviours of well-known fictional characters. Look at characters from children’s books through the lens of learning power – which learning powers does the cat possess in Room on the Broom or the fox in Fantastic Mr Fox and so forth.

b) Extend understanding of learning behaviours…link them to understanding famous characters.

Help 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.

For example…

a) Deepen the language of progression.

A key consideration of learning power is how the dispositions grow and how students become more skilled over time. In terms of the 4 key learning behaviours, teachers’ language may, at first, be restricted to encouraging learners to ‘stick at it’ or to ‘work in a group’ or ‘ask more questions’ or ‘think about what you have learned’. Learners’ understanding will inevitably suffer from these limitations.

Using the progression charts to talk about and explore learning enriches the learning language.

In increasing students’ disposition to persevere…what was previously ‘stick at it’ becomes:

• What might you do to get unstuck?
• You could use the stuck poster for an idea
• What is putting you off? How might you deal with this?
• What are you looking to achieve?
• If it is not difficult, you are practising what you can already do!
• That is an interesting mistake.
• What might you do to avoid that mistake in future?
• How are you going to make sure you get this done?
• This is tricky, but I can see you are enjoying the struggle.

The same, of course, would happen using similar trajectories for the other key behaviours. Take a look at the progression charts for questioning, collaboration and revising in the Putting xxx into Learning modules. Think about how the progression steps will provoke the broadening and deepening of your learning language. Work together to figure out how you could create and enrich your understanding of these behaviours by creating a language for how you talk about them. How would you use these trajectories to deepen your students’ understanding and enrich their learning language?

It’s also worth thinking about using the ideas and phrases in the progression charts to:

• enrich your reports to parents;
• support target setting;
• enhance academic mentoring;
• refine intended learning outcomes.

For example…

a) 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 pupils 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 pupils 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 case
• 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.

b) Turn pessimistic to optimistic student talk.

Words like ‘never’ and ‘always’ can be damaging to learners. When students say ‘I can never understand what my teacher is going on about’, or ‘Maths is always too hard for me’, it suggests a pessimistic view of learning that’s unlikely to cultivate persistence, and if it goes on it assumes the status of something that is permanent and unalterable. If ‘always’ or ‘never’ become sentences to fail for ever they breed a kind of learned helplessness. Keep a look out for such perceptions and help students to re-frame them.

Dialogue in which learners explain things to each other enhances understanding. As learners become more adept in talking themselves through problems and contexts, their “outer speech” develops, and so does their “inner speech”, giving greater power of self-direction.

For example…

a) Nudging statements

Teachers who have become confident with BLP almost always find that the kind of language they use is different from what it was before. Their classroom talk is all focused on the process and the experience of learning itself. During an activity, as teachers go around helping students and checking on their progress, they quite easily start using more of the kinds of prompts and questions that are shown overleaf. They have, in effect, started to speak ‘Learnish’!

Nudging connecting

• What does that remind you of?
• What do you know that might help?
• What would be a good analogy for that?

Nudging self-evaluation

• Tell me about that
• What are you not so pleased with?
• How would you do it differently next time?
• What would even better look like?

Nudging self awareness?

• Does this way of working play to your strengths?
• How could you organise yourself to help you learn better?
• What learning behaviours would it help you to strengthen?

b) 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?

For example…

a) 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.

b) Students looking for learning.

As you introduce a learning behaviour encourage students to notice when they use it and to briefly record what they have done—imagined something, used a good question, managed a distraction and so on —on a sticky note which they stick on a Learning Tree wall display.

Be on a constant look-out for the behaviours you have been explaining, encouraging and enabling, which students too capture through photographs or on sticky notes and add to the Learning Tree. This ‘looking for learning’ is further enhanced by ‘learning detectives’: two children who are assigned this role each day and who look for good learning behaviours in others and again add them to the Learning Tree. At the end of the day the Learning Tree offers a rich source of information to reflect on, explain, and reinforce through a whole-class learning power discussion.

For example…

a) Use display to record key learning

Set aside an area of display where students are asked to share any strategies or ‘top tips’ that they have found particularly helpful in their own learning. For those offering the ‘top tip’, it is a distilling activity, but the resulting gallery of ‘top tips’ invites students to adopt the successful strategies of others.

This will also support the skills of noticing, collaborating, and distilling.

Teacher talk

• Who has a top tip to add to the board today?
• What made you think of that way of doing it?
• Well done, you worked this out for yourself.
• Can you try to do this without that tool? Can you work it out in your head?
• What else might be helpful?

b) How will you find that out?

This routine helps students to take stock of what they need to find out and to consider the strategies they might use to achieve it. It encourages metacognitive thinking about which learning strategy is most likely to lead to success. The routine has two questions:

• What do you need to know / understand ?
• Which strategy is most likely to be successful ?

The natural place to use this routine is when students are beginning to understand what they need to find out but before they make a choice from a range of learning strategies.

Teacher Talk

• What do you need to know about this?
• Is that important?
• What sort of things might you need to find out?
• So how/where will you look for ideas?
• What are the options?
• Which will be quicker?
• Where are you likely to find more detail?
• Do you need detail at this stage?

To distil and communicate new learning

• You could ask yourself why this makes sense/looks right/sounds right to you.
• You could ask yourself whether this will make sense/look right/sound right to others. And whether that matters.
• If you had to sum this up, what would you say?
• Could you distil/refine these ideas any further?

For example…

a) 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?’

For example

a) Begin to share outcomes with a wider audience

To move beyond peer assessment towards whole group assessment:

Set this up with plenty of notice and make it clear to students that their work will be seen by an audience.

Agree with students a valid set of success criteria for their work. This could then be used to drive and sustain their progress through the unit. Include opportunities to draft/edit/improve

Use Kind, Specific, Helpful critique for feedback (as in Ron Berger’s Austin’s Butterfly – see below)

The audiences could be:

• another teacher.
• a visitor.
• members of SLT willing to come and witness the ‘performance’.
• all the school.
  • ‘performance’ becomes a ‘pop-up’ learning exhibition somewhere in the school.
  • students create and include QR code links to their displays and invite Kind, Specific, Helpful comments from all who see them.
  • students show their learning in silence to each other and provides KSH feedback on sticky-notes. Feedback is collated and acted on in silence.

b) 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.

c) Use talk like this to engage learners in meta-cognitive talk:

To maintain motivation when the going is tough

• How could you use what you sorted out in your head last week to help you now?
• I can see that you are really enjoying wrestling with . . .
• What are you doing to keep yourself going?
• I used to……..and found it really helpful for getting me through the tricky patches
• What’s your secret of keeping going on this?
• Is this working for you? Do you ever get downhearted? And then what do you do?
• Believe in yourself and what you are doing.

For example…

a) Linking learning to life

Use articles such as these (Science Daily) to develop conversations about learning. Explore it as a subject of vital and ongoing research and interest.

Distracted Learning a Big Problem, Golden Opportunity for Educators, Students

b) Find professional articles for discussion with both colleagues and students

c) Find or make inspirational quotes about learning

For example…

a) Develop rights and responsibilities

Work in pairs and 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. What else might be important and why?

b) Talk to learn purposefully with others

• Who will you choose to work / learn with on this?
• Do their skills complement yours?
• Who else might you need to involve?

For example…

a) Point out learning behaviours being used.

In written feedback

Examples of written feedback that name the types of learning behaviours being used. Using the learning language enables you to be more precise about the sort of learning effort a student has used. Beneficially this means that you notice more precisely how students are learning.

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Here, Miss Delaney tells Thomas he is a brilliant imitator. She has noticed that he successfully used his Imitation ‘muscle’ to draw like Van Gogh. She is making him aware of this, and praising him for it.

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And here, feedback helps Matthew to understand how his ‘super reasoning skills’ helped to assure success. The teacher is intentionally linking these learning behaviours and curricular success.

b) Point out learning behaviours being used.

In Oral feedback

Looking out for learning behaviour, noticing students doing it, talking about it and nudging them forward is the name of the game.

For example, if you were wanting to help students to evaluate progress towards a goal, you might use phrases like:

• Do you think that’s coming along well?
• Have you checked your emerging outcome against your original goals?
• Are you still on track?
• What would make you change tack?
• Did you have to amend your goals part way through? Why was that?
• What are you going to do about . . . . . ?
• Do you think there’s anything you could have done better, differently?
• How might you get better at that? What would be a better/alternative way of doing it?
• Are you satisfied with how it is going?

But what prompts/nudges would you use in relation the effectiveness of a team? Or to the quality of the questions being generated? Or the extent to which the work was sufficiently challenging?

Ask – To what extent would you need to ‘plan’ your informal oral feedback?

For example…

a) Encouraging feedback to support the use of learning behaviours

Supportive marking comments

If developing learning is to be as important as successfully acquiring knowledge and skills, your feedback needs to reflect this.

Task related feedback might include:

• Does this answer meet the success criteria?
• Is this right?
• Could you elaborate on this answer?
• What aspect of your response to this assignment are you pleased with/unhappy about?
• What other information do you need to meet the criteria?
• What’s the sticking point in this task?

Feedback to support the process of learning might include:

• What strategies are you using?
• Are there more efficient strategies you could use?
• What other Qs could you ask about this task?
• Do you grasp the concept underpinning this task?
• Have you done anything similar to this before?

Feedback to support Self-regulation might include:

• • How could you reflect on these answers?
  • What happened when you …?
  • How can you account for …?
  • What learning goals have you achieved?
  • How have your ideas changed?
  • What aspect of this work could you now teach to others?
  • What would be the best way of checking your work?

b) Talk to access appropriate expertise

• Where will you look for the information you need?
• You could check your ideas out with….
• If xx thinks differently about this what will you do?
• Would you stick with your ideas, shift them a bit or switch to their ideas? How confident are you about this?
• If you ask lots of other knowledgeable people/go to other sources and they are all a bit different how will you reconcile that?
• Who is best placed to help you?
• How will you use xxx’s ideas in future?

For example…

a) 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 you are playing a longer game here. 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.

b)Talk to regulate their own learning

• When do you find it best to take a moment to review what you have done and how you have done it?
• Give yourself some ‘think time’ if you feel you need it
• Play to your strengths

For example…

a) Use feedback to link learning behaviours to curriculum success.

What you feel is sufficiently important to give written feedback on speaks volumes about what you believe is important. Does your feedback adequately reflect your commitment to building better learners?

b) Talk to evaluate progress towards the goal

• Do you think that’s coming along well?
• Have you checked your emerging outcome against your original goals?
• Are you still on track?
• What would make you change track?
• Did you have to amend your goals part way through? Why was that?
• What are you going to do about . . . . . ?
• Do you think there’s anything you could have done better, differently?
• How might you get better at that? What would be a better/alternative way of doing it?
• Are you satisfied with how it is going?

For example…

a) Have students monitor their own learning climate.

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.

For example…

a) Think Pair Share

The basic building block of collaboration is pair work. Through brief and focused conversations, peers get the opportunity to voice their thoughts and start a dialogue about them. TPS is a well-known strategy for ensuring that students build up to learning in a team. One way of using this might be to; Pose a question or problem, give pupils 1 minute to think individually about their own personal response; give 2 minutes in pairs to compare their first reactions with a partner; give fours 3 minutes to share their views in a group. Use as a simple strategy to prepare pupils for working together in teams. As an alternative, try Think/Link/Together which achieves the same outcomes. Think Link Together [pdf]

b) A Visible Thinking Routine – Think, Puzzle, Explore – A routine that sets the stage for deeper, independent inquiry.

At the outset of a topic, ask these three questions:

1. What do you think you know about this topic?

2. What questions or puzzles do you have?

3. How can you explore this topic?

The first helps students to connect with prior knowledge, allowing you to understand what they do and do not already know/understand. This aspect alone helps us to shape the upcoming learning to their existing understandings and so they are making an input in to curriculum design.

The second invites curiosity and begins to identify lines of enquiry that they might wish to pursue. Their questions, not ours!

The third (which you may choose to delay until questions 1 and 2 have been sorted) offers them the opportunity to make decisions about what they want to explore and how they want to explore it.

For example…

a) Put ‘If-then’ planning into action in your classroom to build habits quickly

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”.

b) Build in opportunities for students to self-check their work

Monitoring checklists

Construct checklists with students itemising the important things to check before they consider something is finished. Students should use such checklists as they work through something, and again as a final check before they submit work for assessment.

How we relate to standards of excellence, quality, and correctness is key. It is about developing a sense of standards; a view of what’s good, bad or indifferent. Initially students accept what they are told by teachers about what something needs to look like, be like, feel like. But with support and encouragement students are able to begin to think for themselves about what makes something good and eventually determine their own standards.

For example…

a) 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?

For example…

a) 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?

For example…

a) Talk to nudge improvement in the skill: self-recovery from ‘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 pupils are learning when they are doing the explaining.

b) Coaching approaches and talk

1. Model the visible thinking routine….What do I know? What do I need to know? What techniques do I have for bridging the gap? This helps students to develop their own internal dialogue for combating stuckness.
2. Encourage students to identify the cause of their stuckness. Move students from saying “I’m stuck” to ” I’m stuck because…” Naming the problem will often suggest a reasonable next step.
3. Ask pupils how they might check their answers or why they think they are right or wrong. Have them work with each other on this to encourage a learning community rather than just teacher-pupil dialogues. Coaches are effective listeners and ask questions to open dialogue without it sounding like an interrogation.

For example,,,

a) Expand your coaching skills

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?”

Give thought to when you have to tell, and when you can afford to coach. The critical factor is whether the learner has sufficient skill and understanding to find out for themselves. If they have, coaching will work and at the same time shifts responsibility towards the learner. If they do not, then a more teacher-led, mentoring or even telling approach may be called for.

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

The Learning Pit: from struggle to success

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/

For example…

a) Reflection tool

Learning Mat… 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.

For example…

a) 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.

For example…

a) Students as coaches

Use the familiar ‘Skill: Will’ matrix to help students develop ways of reflecting on their own performance. Using the matrix (see below), 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.

For example…

a) Model ‘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.

For example…

a) 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 face 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.

b) More ways of showing yourself as a learner

What are you modelling to your students about being a good learner? Ask yourself:

• ‘How much do I “learn aloud”—externalise my own exploratory thinking—in front of the students?’
• ‘How do I react when things do not go according to plan?’
• ‘To what extent do I reveal to the students the thinking that went into organising a lesson one way rather than another?’
• ‘How do I respond to questions I can’t answer—am I thrown by them?’
• ‘How much could I reveal about my own learning projects—with all their ups and downs?’

A BLP teacher’s job is as much to demonstrate the habits and inclinations of the good learner as it is to be knowledgeable and in control. Traditionally it has been the teacher’s role to demonstrate mastery of the subject, and to be able to answer any questions which the students may throw out. Teachers still tend to worry that they will lose respect from the students if they don’t ‘know their stuff’ through and through.

But the professionalism of the BLP teacher must allow them to show students what it is to be a confident ‘finder-outer’ as well as a ‘knower’.

For example…

a) Show yourself as a good planner

Students learn much 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?

For example…

a) Enable students to describe and explain their thinking

Get into the habit of asking students to tell their partner what they are thinking and, whenever possible, to explain why they are thinking it. The role of the partner is to probe with ‘why’ type questions to move the response from description to explanation. The routine encourages students to talk about what they are thinking, thereby surfacing that which is frequently sub-conscious.

Teacher talk

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

b) A Visible Thinking Routine . .

sometimes used by teachers to help students to structure a short paragraph that identifies and describes a point the learner wishes to make; offers evidence to support it; and explains why they have used it.

Teacher talk

• Are you convinced?
• Is the evidence convincing?
• You explained that really well.
• Why do you think that happened?
• Why do you think this?

For example…

a) Show yourself as a practising subject specialist

Your students spend much of their time watching you teach a subject… be it Maths, or Science, or History or . . . . But when do they get to see teachers being Mathematicians, or Scientists, or Historians, practising their subject specialism rather than purveying it; wrestling with it rather than effortlessly talking about it; making mistakes and working at the edge of their comfort zone rather than repeating things that were mastered long ago? Inspire your students to become mathematicians, or scientists, or historians, by finding occasions when you can model this in real time;

• learn alongside students
• demonstrate the attitudes of a lifelong learner
• make mistakes
• talk through pros and cons of various actions
• work at the edge of your comfort zone.

We have come across science teachers who always have an experiment of their own on the go; English teachers who write poetry alongside their students; Artists who undertake the same activities as their classes; Mathematicians who are publicly exploring taxing problems together etc. Can you find opportunities to model yourself not as a subject teacher, but as a lifelong student of your subject?