Sections Archive

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

Secondary

A Learning Log to alert students to Capitalising across subjects

A useful resource for tutor time to guide reflection and a wide ranging discussion.

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

NB. None of the behaviours above will lead to instant understanding in students nor instant changes of behaviour. You will need to drip them in over time and keep building and refreshing your language of learning.

2. A classroom culture for resourcing learning

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

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

Does my classroom climate encourage Capitalising?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage capitalising.

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

1. What is… good Resourcing Learning (Capitalising / Imitating)?

What do we mean by Capitalising on resources ?

Capitalising on resources means being on the lookout for strategies, materials, resources and forms of support in the environment that can help you in your current learning or problem- solving. Traditional schooling assumes that intelligence is all in the head. But recent studies show that it is much fairer and more accurate to see good learners as people who are ready and able to make intelligent use of all kinds of things around them – books, phones, social media, e-mail, the internet, and, of course, a range of learning strategies and other people. Everyone needs to be good at finding and using the learning resources available in the world, so it is obviously a good idea to start developing this habit at school.

The forms of assessment we use in schools have a powerful influence on the kinds of learning that students do, and the kinds of teaching their teachers use. If the good learner is essentially the person plus their resources (and their ability to draw on them), our methods of testing should encourage teachers and students to value and practise capitalising. In today’s world, it makes as much sense to sit 15-year-olds down at solitary desks and ask them to display their knowledge and skill as it would to take away Wayne Rooney’s football and tell him to perform.

What does being a good at Capitalising involve?

A well formed Capitalising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Recognise that we learn from many different sources – other people, books, the internet, music, the environment, experience…
Select appropriately from a range of learning strategies;
Keep a purposeful look-out for useful learning aids;
Adapt and adopt the successful habits and values of others into their own learning repertoire;
Make intelligent use of all kinds of things to aid learning;
Use resources in novel ways to solve problems.

Spotting the Capitalisers in your classes

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

7. Move your practice on

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure.

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

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

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. But don’t worry you are not expected to be there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

5. Develop your talk for… Revising

Develop your learning language

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

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

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

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Revising

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

4. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage a Revising frame of mind

In the early stages of building your students’ learning power your role is to; make them aware of the behaviour; talk about it (what, how, why, when, if); celebrate its use; give opportunities to practise it, both in lessons and elsewhere; reflect on it to improve it. This staged start is reflected below…

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

1. Make students aware of Revising

How you make students aware of the words that describe the behaviour and why it is important to use it.

Primary

Explore what it means to revise.

Invite the students to move around a big open space then stop and make the shape you call out.
When they have all made their shape, ask them to look around at each other and then have another go at making the same shape differently.

Do this several times.
Talk about thinking again and changing one’s first idea of how to do something.
Over time get the children to start asking themselves whether they want/need to improve their first go at making the shape -so gaining a sense of an internal ‘good enough’ measure.

Secondary

*Give revising a high profile

Display work in progress

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 learning isn’t about perfection at the first attempt!

Primary

Give revising a special place

The Editor’s Desk

Create an area of the classroom which is dedicated to and celebrates the skills of reviewing and improving.

Set aside a table in the classroom, and equip it as if it were an office – writing equipment, computer, office chair etc.

This is called the ‘Editor’s Desk’, which is set aside for a student to use when they are in editing, drafting, redrafting, correcting or improving mode.

Secondary

*Make monitoring checklists

Construct checklists with students itemising the important things to check before they consider something is finished. Here’s just one example:

2. Exploring the language of Revising

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

*Focus on monitoring: checking as you go along

Secondary

Extend the language of Revising

Collect words that describe what a good reviser does. How else might we talk about Revising?

Relate Revising to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Change tack
Think on your feet
Fine tuning
Back to the drawing board
Keep an open mind

3. Use Revising as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up the revising (Re-thinking) behaviour

Primary

*Optical Illusions

Use Optical Illusions to remind students that once we have seen something from one perspective, it is hard to change our minds and see it / think about it differently.

Secondary

*What do you see here?

Ready students’ minds for adjusting their point of view, changing their mind or revising their ideas.
The technique, illustrated here through the picture of a dog leaping over First World War trenches, can be applied to any image where there is some kind of unexpected juxtaposition of conflicting aspects within the same picture.
The purpose is to draw students into speculating about various parts of the image before revealing the full image. This will necessarily require them to revise and build on their first impressions. The underlying message is that new information often forces us to change our original understandings.

4. Focus on Revising as a learning strategy

Use an appropriate thinking routine to practise the behaviour.

Primary and Secondary

*Visible Thinking Routine

I used to think . . . . . Now I think.

This routine helps students to reflect on how and why their thinking/understanding is changing.

Remind students of the topic you have been working on. Ask them to respond to each of the sentence stems: I used to think…, Now, I think…

Alternatively ask students to write down their views at the beginning of a topic. Invite them to revisit & update their answer during and at the end in light of what has been learned.

Or, at the beginning of a lesson ask students to write down what they understand by a particular term that will be explored in the coming lesson (e.g. Phrase (English); Proof (Maths); Power (Science) etc). At the end of the lesson, ask them to write down what they now understand by the term.

5. An activity to highlight and strengthen Revising

*An activity that enhances content understanding by using the behaviour in question

Per-verse

Use this activity to demonstrate how opinions and hypotheses change and are revised as more information becomes available. Underline the importance of speculative thinking that is unlikely to be right first time.

Groups of three or four. One stanza of a poem to each group. DO NOT REVEAL THE POEM’s TITLE! Explain: The group has to make assumptions about what they are reading based on the limited information they have.

Ask groups to:

Distil what they know so far, and
List the questions to which they need answers.

Next, exchange stanzas with another group

Does the new information answer any questions?
Are there new questions to find out about?
How do the verses fit together — which comes first?

Repeat the process about four times. Run a formative plenary: What do we know so far? Now issue all groups with the complete but cut up poem and ask students to work towards a sequence that makes sense.

Extend understanding of revising by exploring;

How did opinions change as more information became available?
Were group members willing and able to revise their views?
How flexible was people’s thinking?
What is the wider importance of keeping an open mind?

We have found Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath a useful poem to start with. Download it in cut up form here.

Download Poem

6. Reflect on Revising

Primary

Make reflecting on Revising behaviours part of everyday lessons

Learning mats are A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display. Use them during lessons as prompts to promote use. Refer to them at the end of a lesson to assess which were used, which worked and why.

Secondary

Get a handle on excellence

The Rating Wheel describes an expert ‘Reviser’. Use the wheel as a reflection tool for students to consider which skills they know about, which they have used and which might need improvement.

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

NB. None of the suggestions above will lead to instant understanding in students nor instant changes of behaviour. You will need to drip them in over time and keep building and refreshing your language of learning.

2. A classroom culture for Revising

Does my classroom climate encourage Revising?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage revising.

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Story Guide & Story: ‘A Present From The Seaside’

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

1. What is… good Revising?

What do we mean by Revising ?

The word Revising has unfortunate connotations with Revision [for a test]. What is meant here is being prepared to do things differently in light of feedback, to be adaptable, flexible and open to change. A better word might be ‘Refining’, and indeed we use the two words, revising and refining, interchangeably.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does being a good Reviser involve?

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

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

Spotting the Revisers in your classes

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

7. Move your practice on

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure.

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

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

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. But don’t worry, you’re not there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

5. Develop your talk for… Empathy

Develop your learning language

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

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

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

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Empathy

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

(To ensure students do the thinking for themselves)

Talk to nudge

How do you think (s)he feels about what you just said?
What would someone who had a very different set of beliefs than we do feel about it?
Put yourself in his/her shoes – how would you have reacted?
Do you wonder what (s)he really means?
What is (s)he not saying?
What does (s)he believe?
How did that make you feel?
Look at her face and listen to her voice, how do you think she is feeling?
What might have made her feel angry/sad/happy/scared?
Why do you think xxxx is feeling like that?

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

4. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage an Empathetic frame of mind.

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

1. Make students aware of Empathy

How you make students aware of the words that describe the behaviour and why it is important to use it.

Primary

Introduce empathy through story

A Present from the Seaside.

Take time to discuss upsets with groups of children or in whole class sessions. It may seem like these kind of incidents take too much time but handling these appropriately and seeing them as an important learning opportunity can help. Getting the children involved in mediation is also very powerful and worth considering as a whole school initiative.

Secondary

Introduce Empathy through discussion

Get students thinking about and talking about Empathy.

Imagine that the classroom as it is now is being seen by someone or something else — ask students to imagine how a fly would view the room and what is going on in it.

In pairs, draw a fly’s eye cartoon of the classroom over six frames. In making the cartoon think about: –

How would a fly see things differently?
What would be important to the fly that we would ignore?
What would be irrelevant to the fly?
How would the fly feel about the room?

Seeing from another point of view doesn’t just apply to — literally — how they see things but — more importantly — to how they view things and how they feel about things.

What are the dangers of never seeing things from another person’s emotional point of view?

How might we react to the fly — how would this change its behaviour?

Primary

Practical ways to ‘see’ things differently

Construct cardboard spectacles and add a lens of coloured film. These are empathy specs. When a pupil puts them on, they have to ‘see’ the world, problem, person or event, from a different point of view.

Try using different coloured specs for different points of view – ‘Today the blue specs are for land owners, the red specs are for tenant farmers, the green specs are for animals, the yellow specs are for . . . .’

Secondary

Contentious Issues – encourage students to consider different sides of an issue.

Stimulate debate with provocative statements:

‘Experimenting on animals is not an option in a civilised society’
‘This island has room enough for many more people’
‘Live for today since tomorrow is unknown’
‘If cows were more intelligent, would we still eat them?’

2. Explore the language of Empathy

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Explore feelings through colour

Discuss with the children the colour that certain feelings make them think of and then do some ‘Mood Paintings’ using these colours. These kind of associations will help the children build a vocabulary of feelings.

Focus on different emotions in art. Use discussion and role play to extend their vocabulary and increase their understanding.

Create scrapbooks for different feelings. A ‘Happy Book’ is always a good one to start with and children can cut and stick and draw and paint or photograph each other. It’s a calming book to share with the children after an upset.

Secondary

In small groups have students work through the following…

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Choose a situation you’ve heard about in the news and imagine it’s happened to you.
Take your time.
Try to get the feel of how the ‘real people’ might feel.
Discuss both how you think it is for the people concerned AND how you get to know how they feel.
Why do people need to get better at empathising?
What phrases do we use for empathy?
Design a symbol to convey empathy.

3. Use Empathy as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up the need to demonstrate empathy.

Primary

Big Feet

Make two enormous feet out of coloured card or material. Choose two volunteers, each stands on one of the feet. The first talks about a situation or problem from their point of view. The second talks about the same situation / problem from his/her point of view. Then they each move to stand on the other foot and talk about the same situation from the other person’s point of view.

Secondary

Exploring different perspectives

Offer students different pictures, or descriptions, of the same event.

Ask students to build the full picture. This is more effective done in pairs or small groups.

Compare two groups’ views of the same event. Explore how such different views may come about.

As you develop greater understanding of empathising you will need to design learning activities which, by their very nature, will deepen students’ tendency to empathise AND their understanding of the content.

Here is an idea where, by using empathy, students will gain an understanding of the content AND will develop an empathetic habit.

4. Focusing on Empathy as a learning strategy

Draw out the empathy behaviours being used in a thinking routine.

Primary and Secondary

Visible Thinking Routine

The visible thinking routine ‘Step Inside: Perceive, Know, Care about‘ helps students to explore different perspectives and viewpoints as they try to imagine things, events, problems, or issues differently.

Three core questions guide students in this routine:

• What can the person perceive?
• What might the person know about or believe?
• What might the person care about?

The routine asks students to step inside the role of a character or object—from a picture they are looking at, a story they have read, an element in a work of art, an historical event being discussed, and so on—and to imagine themselves inside that point of view. Students are asked to then speak or write from that chosen point of view. This routine works well when you want students to open up their thinking and look at things differently. It can be used as an initial kind of problem-solving brainstorm that open ups a topic, issue, or item. It can also be used to help make abstract concepts, pictures, or events come more to life for students.

For more detail and other Visible Thinking Routines, visit the Visible Thinking website:

Go to Visible Thinking Website

And here is an idea that will help students to understand the empathy processes.

5. An activity to highlight and strengthen Empathy

Design specific activities to highlight and strengthen the behaviour

Balloon Challenge

Building the capacity to identify with others and see things from their emotional point of view.

You are all in a hot air balloon escaping from a contaminated area. Each of you is an expert — a doctor, a market gardener, an electrician, a builder, an accountant, a computer programmer.
BUT, the balloon is falling and one person must jump out if the others are to survive.
Acting in role, each person must make a case and try to convince the other group members as to why they should be allowed to survive.

Coaching Notes

Learning Challenge

DIY Resource

DIY

6. An activity to strengthen looking beyond the obvious

Design specific activities to highlight and strengthen empathy when you often need to look more deeply at how and why others are as they are.

An activity to learn about empathy and curiosity

Build a three-level ‘questioning habit‘

‘ReQuest’ is a structured process for deepening questions.

For example, start with the image above:

On-the-line questions: ask questions about the picture for which the answers can be seen just by looking closely at the picture: ‘How many people are there?’ ‘Who is youngest / oldest?’
Between-the-lines questions: questions whose answers can be inferred by looking at the picture: E.g. ‘What is the relationship between these people?’ ‘How long ago was the photo taken?’ ‘Is it warm or cold?’
Beyond-the-line questions: questions whose answers need to be elicited by making interpretive links from the picture: E.g. ‘Why did they pose for the picture?’ ‘What are they thinking about, hoping for?’ ‘What can they see over the shoulder of the photographer?’

[This image could also be used with the ‘Step inside, Perceive, Know, Care About’ routine above.]

7. Reflect on Empathy

Primary

Make reflecting on Empathy part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

Secondary

Plotting empathetic behaviours

Use this learning log to help students to observer themselves being empathetic through a week. Encourage reflection on their Empathy.

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

NB. None of the suggestions above will lead to instant understanding in students nor instant changes of behaviour. You will need to drip them in over time and keep building and refreshing your language of learning.

2. A classroom culture for empathy

Does my classroom climate encourage Empathy?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage empathy.

The diagram has 4 sections:

Top – strategies you could build into the way you teach to stimulate empathy;
Right – indications of the sort of language you might use to stimulate empathy;
Bottom – ways in which you might celebrate / praise students displaying empathy;
Left – things that you need to enable students to do.

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

Coaching Notes Learning Challenge Resource DIY

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

1. What is… good Empathy?

What do we mean by Empathy ?

An ability to tune in to other people’s feelings or ideas is a core interpersonal skill. Being able to read how another person is feeling involves seeing the world through their eyes and thereby getting an understanding of the other person’s situation. At a more sophisticated level it may mean repressing your own feelings so that you can respond appropriately to another person’s moods. Younger children need first to be able to recognise and talk about their own feelings before they can start to recognise them in others. They are only likely to be able to empathise within their own range of experience or with something that they can begin to imagine. Thus helping younger children to develop the capacity to empathise will involve a lot of work around recognising and understanding their own feelings first. A person with the capacity to empathise is more likely to be able to form positive relationships and interact well with different groups of young people and adults as they play and learn together. Children who approach each other with sensitivity and who take time to listen and consider other points of view will find life and learning easier to manage.Empathy involves being able to see the world through the eyes of others, putting yourself in their shoes. Empathetic learners understand that others may hold different views from themselves and are interested in these alternative views on reality. It is an essential skill in creating and sustaining positive relationships, it is the oil that lubricates all of our relationships.

[The distinction between empathy and sympathy is important. Sympathetic people tend to share their own experiences with others in order to show fellow feeling whereas empathetic people identify with another person’s emotions.]

What does being an empathetic learner involve?

If you have well formed Empathy habit you will be ready, willing, and able to:

be genuinely interested in others and in understanding their point of view, engaging with them with curiosity and respect;
contribute to others’ experiences and learning by seeking to understand issues from their perspective;
seek to understand and value what others are saying; sharing, challenging, supporting and building on ideas;
interact effectively and appropriately in a range of different situations with sensitivity to occasion.

Spot the Empathetic learners in your classes

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

7. Move your practice on

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure.

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

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

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. But don’t worry, you are not expected to be there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

5. Develop your talk for… Planning

Developing your learning language

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

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

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

My learning talk nudges to encourage Planning

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What will your end product look like?
How will you judge the success of what you have done?
Look at what you have done so far – do you need to make any changes?
Are you on track to meet your deadline?
What needs doing? In what order will you tackle it?
Do you have a contingency plan if that does not work?
Keep a weather eye on how it is going.
Are any particular planning tools appropriate here?
Is the goal manageable?
How can you make this plan more efficient?

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

4. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage a Planning frame of mind.

In the early stages of building your students’ learning power your role is to: make them aware of the behaviour; talk about it (what, how, why, when, if); celebrate its use; give opportunities to practise it, both in lessons and elsewhere; reflect on it to improve it. This staged start is reflected below…

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

1. Make students aware of Planning

How you make students aware of the words that describe the behaviour and why it is important to use it.

Primary

Plan a picnic for teddies

Ask children to suggest things that might need doing and record on flip chart using picture prompts. They may well come up with ideas like food, games, music, invitations…
Have different groups to plan each part. Support each group in turn
Discuss what needs doing for one aspect of the picnic and act as their scribe. Summarise their plan back to them when everything is agreed.
Bring everyone back together and share each aspect of the plan.
Ask the children how they think they can work together to get everything ready for the party. Keep referring to the plan.
This is also a very good exercise in collaboration and will offer lots of opportunities for revising as well when things need changing from the original idea.

Secondary

Jumbled up planning

click to enlarge

Can you put these jumbled aspects of planning into a sensible order? Could you use the outcomes to create a planning flowchart with your class to guide future planning?

Primary

Timetables . .

Click to enlarge

Ask the children to think of other things that need a timetable or plan. Start a display table and board of anything the children suggest or collect. You could find some bus and train timetables, a plan of the school and playground or a dinner menu for the term and so on.

Follow a treasure map

Plan a treasure hunt around the school. This could have a seasonal theme or simply be a fun one. Use a small area of the school and make a very simple large scale plan. Attach photographs or drawings to help the children follow the plan. Take them on the treasure hunt in small groups and regularly refer to the Treasure Map as a plan.

Secondary

Structure an extended project

Give students a pack of cards that describe the 10 or so sections in an extended project based on the Driving Question: Where’s the safest place to live? Ask them to sequence the material to make clearest sense. Ask them to give each section a generic heading.

Challenge students to prepare the outline structure for a response to other Driving Questions, for example, ‘Is Planet Earth injury prone?’ ‘Where did the dinosaurs go?’ ‘Why don’t people stay at home?’ ‘Should we choose to end a human life?’ ‘Is the idea of God more trouble than it’s worth?’

Agree with the class the generic headings for an extended piece of work – display it as an aide-memoire in the future.

2. Explore the language of Planning

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Discuss planning

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

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

Secondary

Extend the language of planning

Collect words that tell you how people plan.

click to enlarge

Relate planning to well-known sayings …

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Hit the ground running.
Cross that bridge when you come to it.

3. Use Planning as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up the planning behaviour

Primary

Clapping a pattern

Planning a short rhythm

Sit pupils in a circle. You are going to clap a short rhythm for them, but first of all you are going to plan it.
Think aloud as you plan what you are going to do. Mention “Beginning”, “Middle” and “End”. Then clap the pattern you have planned.
Ask if they want to listen again and then have a go with you. Explain you remember it because you planned.
Pupils to work in pairs to plan a short clapping pattern of their own. Practise with their fingertips on their palms so that they don’t disturb each other too much.
Ask them to perform their rhythm in pairs for everyone to listen to. Some may also like to try to teach it!
The emphasis is on planning what they are going to clap rather than just clapping straight off.
You may want to encourage pupils to make some kind of paper plan with a mark for every clap.

Secondary

‘What will it look like when it’s finished?’

Too often students start a task without giving thought to what it will look like when it has been completed, what a good one will look like. Some find it easier to plan ‘in reverse’ – working backwards from the finished article to where they are now to establish a sensible plan of action.

Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action. Ask students to determine WWILLWIF for themselves in conjunction with others. Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.

As you develop greater understanding of planning you will need to design learning activities which, by their very nature, will deepen students’ ability to plan AND their understanding of the content.

Here is an idea where, by using planning, students will gain an understanding of the content AND will develop a planning habit.

4. Focus on Planning as a learning strategy

Draw out the planning behaviour being used in a thinking routine.

Primary and Secondary

Visible Thinking Routine

How long will it take ?

This routine helps students to anticipate what needs doing and how long it might take. It also encourages them to consider the sequencing of the activity. There are three questions:

What needs to be done ?
What order will you do it in ?
How long do you think it might take ?

The natural place to use this routine is prior to embarking on a piece of extended work in order to slow the impulse to ‘get on with it’ and to encourage a more strategic approach.

And here is an idea that will help students to understand the planning process.

5. An activity to experience and strengthen Planning

Design specific activities to highlight and strengthen the behaviour

The London Game

Your challenge is to plan a two-day visit to London for a group from the school.

Seven events are to be scheduled over two days, and two of the events are already fixed. Creating a plan is not too difficult, but then one of the venues has to close unexpectedly…

How will you need to revise your plan in light of this?

6. Reflect on Planning

Primary

*Make reflecting on planning part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

Secondary

A Learning Log to alert students to Planning across various aspects of their learning lives

A useful resource for tutor time to guide reflection and a wide ranging discussion.

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

NB. None of the suggestions above will lead to instant understanding nor instant changes in student’s behaviour. You will need to drip them in over time and keep building and refreshing your language of learning.

2. A classroom culture for planning

Does my classroom climate encourage Planning?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage planning.

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

1. What is… good Planning?

What do we mean by Planning ?

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

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

Good learners like taking responsibility for planning and organising their learning. They welcome opportunities to decide for themselves when, where, why and how they are going to learn—and to get better at doing so. Research shows, for example, that people who can make a reasonable estimate of how long a task will take are more likely to finish on time, and to do better work.

What does being a good Planner involve?

A well formed Planning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Identify end goals or objectives before considering possible action;
Consider timescales and possible obstacles in drawing up a realistic plan;
Make use of a wide variety of skills and tools to gather ideas and information;
Sequence activity in order to decide what needs to be done;
Think laterally as well as logically so that the task benefits equally from creative and rational thought;
Be open-minded and flexible about how things might happen so that opportunities can be seized and fresh directions taken.

Spotting the Planners in your classes

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

7. Move your practice on

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure.

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

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

What to stop and start

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

5. Develop your talk for… Perseverance

Developing your learning language

Here is a range of things you can say to nudge perseverance. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

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

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

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Perseverance

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What happened when you got stuck before? What did you do to work it out?
Great! You have come through the confused / stuck feeling. What helped you?
It’s when you get stuck that you really start to learn.
How can you avoid that distraction?
Is this goal worth going for?
What do you know? What do you need to know? How might you bridge the gap?
You can’t do it – yet.
Can you explain why you are stuck?
That’s an interesting mistake.
Give it a go and see what happens.

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

4. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to enable students to become more perseverant

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of perseverance…what, when, where, why, if, how they are or could be using it.
Then… explore perseverance a little more through the language of persevering.
Try… strengthening more positive feelings about being stuck, the value of mistakes or the exhilaration of challenge.
Then start… blending the above aspects of perseverance into the way you teach the content. Teach perseverance strategies.
Ensure… students reflect on the success or otherwise of their ‘sticking at it’ efforts.

1. Make students aware of Persevering

How you make students aware of the words that describe the behaviour and why it is important to use it.

Primary

Develop learning heroes

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who exhibits the best features of perseverance. Talk about the character until your pupils become familiar with its attributes. When you have set a group to work on a particular task – numeracy, reading, writing etc., leave this character (actual or picture) on their table as a reminder of ‘there are things you can do when you don’t know what to do’

Secondary

Explore strategies for getting unstuck…

…by looking at the hows of being stuck. Different sorts of stuck call for different strategies:

Develop prompts to nudge students’ self talk:

You have forgotten the next step in a process – what might I try next.
You tried something that didn’t work- what would be an alternative strategy?
You don’t understand the problem/objective/goal – I need to re-read the ‘question’.
The problem is presented differently – what does this remind me of? What did I do then?
You don’t know which remedy to choose – what’s the range of possible strategies I could use?
You can’t find a way out, you are in a blind alley – I’ll retrace my steps back to where I first ‘got lost’.
You don’t know where to find more information – where else might I look?

Primary

Enable students to become aware of levels of challenge

Provide a laminated strip of card and a clothes peg. The card is marked ‘Too Easy’, ‘Hard but not too hard’ and ‘Too difficult’

Students move the peg to indicate the difficulty of the task. Good information for the teacher to judge when and how to intervene. A great opportunity for students to become aware of how they assess their own levels of challenge. Invite students to think up their own ideas about achievement. Here are some examples from children.

An achievement is something;

you can be really proud of
you have never done it before
that you kept trying to do and finally succeeded
you have done something you found difficult
you have worked hard to finish
you have done what teachers tell you is good
Make sure your praise matches these statements.

Secondary

Introduce the Learning Pit to explore the stuck/struggle journey

Use the ‘Learning Pit’ as a means of opening up a conversation around the feelings involved with being stuck, and the journey towards getting unstuck – 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.

2. Explore the language of Persevering

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Develop ‘stuck prompts’ together

Work with students to find useful questions to ask themselves and helpful strategies for them to use when they are stuck.
Ensure that there are plenty of options that come higher on the list than “Ask the teacher”.
Create stuck prompts as reminders around the classroom.
These are, in effect, low-risk, low-investment levers for creating a shift in students’ sense of what is valued, what is normal, and what is the point of their learning — and thus in the quality of their engagement.

Secondary

Extend the language of persevering

What message is the writer trying to convey?

Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists of the ability to stick to one thing ‘til it gets there
Fall seven times, stand up eight
Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did

3. Counter attitudes that limit perseverance; strengthen the positives.

Consider what your students feel about being stuck, facing challenge, and risking failure. Think how you might adjust your language to re-frame their outlook.

Primary and Secondary

Explore the meaning of effort

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

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

Targeted Effort is now seen as a path to mastery. Students need to be aware of a connection between effort and improvement; that the sort of effort being used is causing their improvement. This is why it is important to give effort meaning. Meaning often underpins motivation which in turn drives behaviour.

Model getting unstuck

Model being a learner and show how you work things out, get unstuck, learn from mistakes.

Take on the role of an intelligent novice

Model getting unstuck at a slightly higher, more coherent and informed level than is characteristic of your students

Model your ‘think alouds’

If students freeze when perplexed offer supportive questions NOT answers.

‘What do you do next?’
and ‘Then what do you do next’
and ‘Then what do you do next’

Thus you are encouraging students to take over the job for themselves

Remind students that uncertainty shouldn’t lead to paralysis!

Re-frame Challenge

Give Mistakes a status, a key role in learning

Give mistake quotas. Tell students you expect them to make, say 3 in a lesson. If not, the challenges they are tackling are too easy and they should move to harder ones.

Explore the concept of ‘Good mistakes’ – where the student has misunderstood something thus enabling you and the student to track the issue.

Offer a range of ‘good mistakes’ at the start of a lesson for students to find, explore and correct.

Give time in lessons for students to Trial and Improve something. Discard ‘trial and error’.

4. Focusing on Persevering as a learning strategy

Draw out the persevering behaviour being used in a thinking routine.

Primary and Secondary

Visible Thinking Routine

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

When a student says ‘I’m stuck’, resist the temptation to ask ‘what are you stuck on?’ – you know only too well they will probably reply ‘everything’. Better to explore ‘why’ they are stuck . . . .

Encourage students to identify the cause of their stuckness. Move students from saying “I’m stuck” to ” I’m stuck because…” Naming the problem will often suggest a reasonable next step.

It’s also useful to insist that students can’t call themselves ‘stuck’ unless they have tried to apply at least 1 solution.

And here is an idea that will help students to understand the persevering process.

5. An activity to highlight and strengthen Persevering

Use Origami to help students explore keeping going with a challenge.

A seemingly simple task that frequently leads to frustration and the need to have another go. Some students may do it fairly easily, others will give up, and some will struggle through and achieve, almost to their surprise, the desired outcome. Use the task to explore the feelings around stuck, challenge, potential distractions, and trying to achieve a goal.

Use it as an opportunity to explore further with the group — what makes us give up, what helps us keep going?

Coaching notes

Learning Challenge

6. Reflecting on Persevering

Primary

Make reflecting on persevering part of everyday lessons

Learning Mats

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

Students refer to them during lessons, using them as prompts about the finer aspects of a learning habit that is being stretched.

Secondary

A Perseverance Learning Log

Use learning logs such as this to encourage students to reflect on when they did and didn’t persevere, and what happened as a consequence. Use as the basis of discussion.

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

NB. None of the suggestions above will lead to instant understanding in students nor instant changes in their behaviour. You will need to drip them in over time and keep building and refreshing your language of learning.

2. A classroom culture for Persevering

Does my classroom climate encourage Persevering?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage persevering.

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Story Guide & Story: ‘Hide and Seek’

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

1. What is… good Persevering?

What do we mean by Perseverance?

Attention can be broken when learning gets blocked, but good learners have learnt the knack of maintaining or quickly re-establishing their concentration when they get stuck or frustrated. The quality of stickability or perseverance is essential if you are going to get to the bottom of something that doesn’t turn out as quickly or easily as you had thought, or hoped.

If you get upset and start to think there is something wrong with you as soon as you get stuck, you are not going to be able to maintain engagement.

Instead all your energy will go into trying to avoid the uncomfortable feeling, and this may mean drifting off into a daydream, creating a distraction, or blaming somebody else. A great deal of classroom misbehaviour starts this way. If students were better equipped to cope emotionally with the inevitable difficulty of learning, they would mess about less. There is a range of things that teachers can do to strengthen students’ stickability.

Perseverance is often undermined by two common and erroneous beliefs. The first is that learning ought to be easy. If learners think that they will either understand something straight away, or not at all, then there is simply no point in persisting and struggling. The second is that bright people pick things up easily, so if you have to try it means you’re not very bright. Clearly the idea that effort must be symptomatic of a lack of ability makes persevering an unpleasant experience. Good learners develop perseverance when their parents and teachers avoid conveying these messages, even unwittingly.

What does being a good Perseverer involve?

A well formed Persevering habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Keep going in the face of difficulties;
Enjoy working at the edge of our comfort zone;
Channelling the energy of frustration productively, marshalling positive emotions to succeed;
Understanding that learning is often a slow and uncertain process that requires grit, risk-taking and different ways of working;
Relish working towards ever more challenging goals without fear of ‘failure’.

Spotting the Perseverers in your classes

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

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

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

7. Move your practice on

This section is for those teachers who are undertaking this unit alone and are not part of a Teacher Learning Community structure.

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

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

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. But don’t worry, you’re not there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

5. Develop your talk for… Reasoning

Develop your learning language

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

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

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

Learning-talk nudges to encourage Reasoning

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What assumptions are you making? Are they sound?
Can you think it through in clear steps from start to finish?
How many reasons can we find for that?
Can you spot the false step there? Is the argument water tight?
What evidence can you find to support your case/argument? What’s the counter evidence?
How have you reached that conclusion? What are the implications?
Which thinking tool would help us solve this?
Are you convinced?
One the one hand . . . , but on the other . . .
Why do you think that?

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

4. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage a Reasoning frame of mind.

In the early stages of building your students‘ learning power your role is to; make them aware of the capacity; talk about it (what, how, why, when, if); celebrate its use; give opportunities to practise it, both in lessons and elsewhere; reflect on it to improve it. This staged start is reflected below…

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

1. Make students aware of Reasoning

How you make students aware of the words that describe the behaviour and why it is important to use it.

Primary

Get a feel for thinking logically using Mazes

Have a go at solving some simple mazes with small groups of children. Finding the way through a maze is a fun approach to helping young children with logical thinking.

You could also ask your Y5 or Y6 colleagues to engage their children in planning and designing 3D mazes for the younger children to solve. This would be an excellent open ended design DT project guaranteed to need lots of planning and revising!

You might also be lucky enough to find real mazes near enough for a visit with your class.

Secondary

Draw out reasoning in Strategy Games

Use games that require strategy and logical thinking. From noughts and crosses to chess, from hangman to backgammon, such games help to develop and refine reasoning skills.

Many appear in the form of maths investigations and problems: Frogs; Tower of Hanoi; Nim; Connect 4; etc.

Primary

Explore reasoning through stories

Hide and Seek

Secondary

Code Breaking

Present students with coded messages and require them to work them out using their deductive skills.

Start with simple substitution codes where, for example, each letter is replaced by the one after it in the alphabet. (i.e. b replaces a, c replaces b etc. etc.) Increase difficulty by using more complex ciphers.

2. Explore the language of Reasoning

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Draw out the language of reasoning through jigsaws

Sit at the jigsaw table with groups of children and work on the jigsaws together. Model your reasoning out loud to the children explaining what you did first second, third, etc. so that they begin to understand a methodical, step by step approach. Explain why you put a piece in a certain place and why it couldn’t go elsewhere. Develop conversations around…What can we see? Why does this fit here? What tells you it is right? Does this make sense? and so on.

Secondary

Explore the meaning of reasoning

Collect words that tell you how people learn to Reason.

Relate reasoning to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

On the one hand . . .
One step at a time
It adds up

3. Use Reasoning as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up the Reasoning behaviour

Primary

Sequencing

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.

[Lift the level of challenge by omitting one or two of the pieces, or by including a red herring or two, or by interleaving two sequences that need to be separated before the sequencing can be completed.]

Secondary

Ranking

Offer students pieces of information or ideas or pictures or statements as a set of separate items, usually on cards.

The subject could be: possible causes of global warming; the sayings of a religious leader; discoveries of the last 20 years; the music of Gershwin; causes of WW1; poems of Sylvia Plath; healthy lifestyle indicators; famous people etc.

The criterion for ranking the cards is given or negotiated with students. For example rank the cards in order of;

importance
appeal
relevance
how controversial
any other appropriate criterion.

The point of the activity is to debate the relative merits, place them in rank order according to the chosen criterion, and to be able to explain and justify the ranking based on evidence rather than opinion.

As you develop greater understanding of reasoning you will need to design learning activities which, by their very nature, will deepen students’ tendency to Reason AND their understanding of the content.

4. Focus on Reasoning as a learning strategy

Draw out the reasoning behaviour being used in a thinking routine.

Primary and Secondary

Visible Thinking Routine

What’s happening here?
What makes you say that?

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

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

And here is an idea that will help students to understand the reasoning process.

5. An activity to highlight and strengthen Reasoning

Liepz & Bounz

A jumble of clues to unravel and make sense of. Are there any red herrings? Did we make any assumptions, and were they valid? Did we miss anything vital? Did we ‘get it right’? Can we convince others that our answer is correct?

Use Liepz and Bounz to explore how we have to use our reasoning skills to solve problems.

Coaching Notes DIY Learning Challenge Observation Sheet

6. Reflect on Reasoning

Primary

Make reflecting on Reasoning part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

Secondary

A Learning Log to alert students to Reasoning across various aspects of their learning lives

A useful resource for tutor time to guide reflection and a wide ranging discussion

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

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

Make a note of…

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

NB. None of the suggestions above will lead to instant understanding in students nor instant changes in their behaviour. You will need to drip them in over time and keep building and refreshing your language of learning.

2. A classroom culture for reasoning

Does my classroom climate encourage Reasoning?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage reasoning.

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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