In broad terms the teachers’ role becomes one of surfacing the learning; making it public; making it visible to the learner; making pupils aware of their learning behaviours, thoughts and feelings. In so doing the strategic emphasis of the classroom shifts;

• from performance ⟹ learning.
• from content ⟹ process.
• from teaching ⟹ coaching

And in order to make these strategic shifts there are four inter-related aspects of teacher behaviour to work on. The precise details of the four aspects will be different for every teacher in every school.

1. Relating for learning is about:

• Learning becoming a shared responsibility
• Pupils being given more responsibility for their own learning
• The teacher becoming the learning coach; enabling pupils to find their own ways to improve
• Collaborative activity that helps pupils to see each other as resources for learning
• Pupils being given choices about what and how to learn
• Pupils talking more, adults talking less
• Teachers modelling being a learner
• Processes promoting, enabling and supporting the best of what we know about learning.

2. Talking for learning is about:

• Learning, rather than performance, becoming the object of conversation
• The gradual introduction of a learning language helping pupils to become conscious of using their learning behaviours
• Using and extending the language; adding breadth and depth to how teachers and learners talk about, understand and improve learning.
• Pupils being encouraged to notice things about how they are learning, talking about the learning process and becoming a meta-learner.

The language of learning revolves around a set of high value psychological characteristics to develop a supple learning mind. These include emotional, cognitive, social and strategic characteristics. These characteristics are unpacked in Section 2.

3. Constructing learning is about:

• Learning, rather than performance, being made the object of learning.
• Reflecting on learning and reviewing learning being built into the learning model used in the classroom
• Learning activities being designed to stretch and challenge – by having a dual focus to explore content and stretch pupils’ ability to use their learning behaviours.
• Teachers making conscious choices about which habits/learning behaviours to introduce and stretch and how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging.
• A third dimension being added to teaching: 1. Subject matter, 2. Assessment 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn.

4. Celebrating learning is about:

• Learning, rather than performance, being made the object of attention
• The underlying values about learning becoming visible through what is recognised, praised, displayed. For example:-
  • Being stuck being recognised as an interesting – not shameful – place to be.
  • Mistakes being recognised as invaluable in learning.
  • Effort being unpacked to show how it is channelled.
  • Good questions being as important as good answers.
• Using learning behaviours more often and more skilfully being nudged and recognised
• So the growth of learning habits is being attended to closely.

• Download the deeper Learning Culture Tool 2.
• Look carefully at the Culture Tool 2 in relation to your school.
• Ring the MEANS statements that describe aspects of the school culture that you think are secure.
• Underline those statements that would most benefit your pupils now.

The thinking and research of Chris Watkins, Guy Claxton and others have influenced the models and diagrams above. We  have distilled this into the new Teachers’ Palette. The Teachers’ Palette depicts an action packed framework of the types of actions teachers need to take in order to create the conditions necessary for learning behaviours to be habituated.

 Those of you who have read and absorbed the original book Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton will notice the palette has now turned green. Thinking has moved on since Building Learning Power was introduced in 2002, many schools have become more performance focused, curriculums have become overloaded and with more difficult content, teachers have been put under greater administrative strain and so forth. Hence the green palette takes on the uncomfortable truth that classrooms, in many schools, have become more teacher focused and pupils are being given less responsibility for their learning. The journey to learning centred classrooms now has more hurdles to overcome  

Modules 3.2 to 3.5 explore each of these cultural aspects in turn, suggesting first steps on the journey towards building better learners.

It’s not:

• a short-term, quick fix for classroom practice
• about little tweaks to the how of teaching
• about having pupils just saying “I can’t do this yet”
• about pupils just being able to say ‘collaboration’ or ‘resilience’ without knowing what and how and when
• pupils ‘doing’ learning power
• about teachers knowing a bit more about learning
• about pupils simply knowing the names of learning behaviours
• just about what happens in classrooms (see Section 5 for detail)
• simply offering pupils harder learning activities
• something we can do in a year
• an initiative

It is about:

• pupils developing long term learning habits to stand them in good stead for a complex world
• young people becoming better learners (independent, self-regulating, flexible)
• learners having the skills to flourish in uncertain times
• a way of educating which has learning at its heart
• classrooms becoming learning labs; schools becoming learning organisations
• classroom cultures becoming learning-friendly
• teachers using a forensic and precise understanding of learning in order to grow supple learning minds
• teachers becoming learning coaches
• a shift that will take most schools about 3 years
• a bigger game of education

Culture: all those little habits, routines and practices that implicitly convey ‘what we believe and value around here’. Classrooms are the places where, hour by hour, pupils experience the values and practices that are embodied in the school, rather than just the ones that are espoused.

Culture is about the micro-climate: what teachers do and say; what they notice and commend, or don’t; what kind of role model of learning they offer; how they design and present activities to build learning behaviours. Some classroom cultures are just more learning friendly than others.

Research by Chris Watkins back in 2004 suggested three types of classroom learning cultures, some more learning friendly than others.

• Teacher centred; overriding emphasis on what the teacher is doing or saying.
  • Learning = being taught.
  • Pupils are passengers
  • Pupils have an impoverished view of their learning ability.
• Learner centred; pupils take a more active role in deciding what to do.
  • The learning is making meaning.
  • Pupils are crew
  • Pupils collaborate and discuss learning
• Learning centred; pupils learn about learning itself.
  • Pupils use a language of learning.
  • Become conscious of the learning process and the learning habits they command.
  • Pupils are pilots of their learning

Hence there are often two strategic shifts to make in the journey from Teacher centred to Learning centred cultures. Teacher centred cultures may well achieve good results but only Learning centred cultures achieve good results PLUS curious, creative, self-regulating, independent learners.

Learning shift

The Culture Tool 1 gives more detail about each of the classroom cultures.

Take a look at the resource and think about the school’s learning culture against the indicators in each panel.

• Reflect on the culture of each classroom
• Highlight all aspects of culture that are a regular feature in each classroom
• What are the similarities and differences between phases, year groups, individual classes?
• What is this telling you?

Classrooms provide rich learning environments for teachers as well as students. Watching teaching and learning and exploring the experience afterwards is a highly effective tool for developing the craft of teaching. As continuing professional development takes its rightful place at the heart of school improvement, enthusiasm for classroom observation as a supportive developmental process is being rekindled.

There are perhaps three broad purposes for classroom observation:

• to help to stimulate and initiate new practice (observation AS development)
• to develop current practice (observation FOR development)
• to assure standards of practice (observation OF development) associated with performance management.

Pathways to Classroom Observation

For the purposes of developing better learners the feel and format of classroom observation should be firmly rooted in:

• observation AS development, where the focus is on discovery.e.g. how to develop good coaching habits, how students are using collaborative habits, how problem solving is being developed.
• observation FOR development, where the focus is on improvement e.g. are students learning effectively from group work, are students questioning skills effective, are our approaches to problem solving proving effective? 

Looking at classrooms through the lens of learning behaviours rather than teaching behaviours.

Classrooms are where the school conducts its core activity of building learning behaviours. It is where all of our values, policies and procedures are made real and communicated to learners, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. It is where all of our intentions become reality, or not.

A shift in focus

In Successful Futures the focus is on learners and how teachers nurture the use and development learning behaviours. Thus the focus of observation turns firstly towards learners learning and how this process is being stimulated and supported by the teacher. This shift in focus will succeed if, and only if, leaders are able to stimulate and support professional conversations about how students are learning and, later, how the design of the curriculum might further support learning behaviours.

Your approach to observing in classrooms … ‘can be a fixed-mindset message that says: You have permanent traits and I’m judging them. Or it can be a growth-mindset message that says: You are a developing person and I am interested in your development.”
― Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology Of Success

The observation strategy suggested here is based on that simple premise.

 Looking for learning behaviours that students are being enabled to exercise

In the early stages of looking for learning the discovery question becomes: ‘Which learning behaviours are students being enabled to exercise?’ And the subsidiary discovery question, ‘How are we going to find out?’

Traditional observation tools focusing on the teacher’s behaviour won’t  provide the evidence needed. The observation tool below is focused purely on learning behaviours and invites observers to record which they see/notice/recognise being used. This tool helps teachers to become more aware of learning behaviours and where/when they are used.

(The ‘learning behaviours’ on the wheel are the 17 learning behaviours from the Supple Learning Mind, changed into questions. Hence ‘Perseverance’ becomes ‘Did they stick at it when it is difficult?’)

How to use it:

• Spend around 20/30 minutes in a classroom,
• Towards the end shade in the sector of the wheel to show the extent to which learning behaviours were a positive aspect of this lesson
  •  For example. If planning was very strong feature of the lesson, shade all/most of the planning sector.
  • If planning was only used a little, shade only the inner bit of the sector.
  • If students have not been required to do any planning, simply leave the sector blank.
• Repeat for all of the sectors.

The final ‘picture’ shows which behaviours were (and were not) exercised.

On its own, one of these completed wheels tells us little of the bigger picture. It is a useful document on which to base a discussion with the teacher…which behaviours were used (or were planned into the lesson), why they were used, to what purpose, whether there were missed opportunities for nurturing learning dispositions and so on…. but beyond that it has minimal meaning. It’s a tool to sharpen skills in the observation of learning.

However, once several have been completed clear patterns begin to emerge. They will show which behaviours are getting regular exposure, which less so. This information will, later, give rise to interesting discussions about the balance of learning behaviours in lesson or across the curriculum and how to foreground the ones gaining less exposure.

Unlike anywhere else we know of, the Welsh government has recognised the amount of change involved in implementing Successful Futures and has developed an all-Wales model of schools as learning organisations. ‘Schools in Wales as Learning Organisations’ sets out a framework with seven dimensions:

• developing and sharing a vision centred on the learning of all students
• creating and supporting continuous learning opportunities for all staff
• promoting team learning and collaboration among all staff
• establishing a culture of inquiry, innovation and exploration
• embedding systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning
• learning with and from the external environment and larger learning system
• modelling and growing learning leadership

So as your school takes on becoming a learning organisation you will come to see the school as a learning system and see how the seven dimensions  interact and affect each other. This accurate and continual self-reflection will give you a real picture of developing both staff and students as powerful learners.

Organisations, just like people, exist in a society that is constantly changing. In order to thrive, the school and its leaders must constantly adapt and change. Schools with a determination to flourish in an environment of change adopt a learning philosophy – they have come to be known as ‘learning organisations’.

Learning organisations are characterised by their ability to: 

• understand the environment in which they operate 
• anticipate the future
• appreciate their capabilities 
• learn from practice, experience and data 
• use their learning to plan and guide change

Schools that adopt the characteristics of learning organisations may truly become ‘learning schools’ where everyone within them is a learner. Such schools are organised as learning systems: they are rich in data and use evaluative activity to inform and guide change. There is a focus on student learning, but staff collaborate and learn too. Staff learning is facilitated and harnessed to bring about development, with the headteacher as the leading learner.

The learning school goes well beyond securing extensive professional development. It is concerned to:

• generate and apply individual and team learning 
• learn from and through internal systems and processes 
• interact with and learn from external sources 
• contribute to and learn from other schools and training systems 
• support the development of a lifelong learning culture

In addition the learning school recognises that it has a past, a present and a future and that it has the power to determine and achieve that future. Strategic planning acts as the focus for organisational learning and helps create a culture of enquiry, reflection, innovation and achievement. 

As a school you have undertaken to develop your students as:

• emotionally intelligent learners;
• who are cognitively skilled;
• socially adept;
• and aware of themselves as growing learners (meta-learners);

in order to realise the core purposes of Successful Futures.

However, this is unlikely to happen unless teachers themselves adopt these qualities; modelling and using the behaviours they wish to instil in their students.

Similarly, teachers will find it difficult to do this unless, the school, as an organisation, does itself display these qualities. Thus in adopting a focus on learning the school will need to act in ways that:

• ensures its own improvement as an organisation;
• ensures its teachers grow as confident, interdependent, risk taking professionals, who in turn..
• guide students to become self-regulating learners. It’s a cascade effect.

As John Hattie says in Visible Learning for Teachers:

“The remarkable feature of the evidence is that the greatest effects on student learning occur when teachers become learners of their own teaching, and when students become their own teachers”

A school that is emotionally engaged, cognitively skilled, socially adept and strategically responsible exhibits a range of positive learning behaviours, much like the ones they are seeking to develop in learners. Here’s how it works:

How well does this describe your school? What might you need to do differently?

This review tool will cause you to ask difficult questions, help you evaluate the learning culture of your school taking account of the evidence you have for this. Download a copy and use it to explore just where you are now.

The questions, some of which you will be familiar with, have been worded and organised to reflect;  emotional engagement; cognitive skill; social adeptness;  strategic responsibility;  much like the range of learning behaviours the school is seeking to develop in its learners:

The journey to becoming a learning school is complex and many schools have found it helpful to seek a framework to support their development as a learning organisation. The Learning Quality Framework [LQF] offers a set of staged descriptions of the development of a school seeking to become a school that learns. The LQF captures the essence of what a learning school does to ensure that all of its people become better learners.

The LQF is organised under twelve principles which are concerned with different aspects of a school’s culture, such as the school’s vision for learning, how leaders lead learning, how classroom practice works, how assessment and the curriculum are designed in order to build learning habits, and how the school acts on its own learning. In other words many of the issues that have been explored in sections of this resource.

LQF serves three useful functions:

As a diagnostic instrument, the LQF enables a school to assess where it is now on its learning journey. By matching current practice against the twelve LQF principles, schools can assess where they have reached thus far and so identify areas of development.

As a formative instrument, the LQF provides a school with a clear set of guidelines for planning their way forward. From an audit of ‘what is’, which the framework provides, the school can develop a strategic overview of next steps.

As a summative instrument, it gives schools an external view of their progress through an external assessment and the award of a LQF quality mark. Developing a culture in which real world learning thrives is not an insignificant job, so stages along the way are worth recognising and celebrating. A school’s progress can be publicly validated and accredited by The Learning Organisation (TLO), as and when it feels ready to seek accreditation.

There are three key facets to the progression of learning behaviours: 

• the frequency with which the behaviour is used (how often)
• the range of contexts in which it is used (range of different wheres)
• and the skilfulness with which it is employed (how effective)

The frequency with which the learning behaviour is used: Is about noticing how often students use the behaviour and then intentionally planning activities that will give more opportunities to extend that frequency. 

The range of contexts within which it is used: Is about noticing where/when students use the learning behaviour and helping them to see how the behaviour used in one context can be applied to different one. 

The skilfulness of the habit: Is about noticing how well students are using the learning behaviour, for example the quality of the questions they are asking. To be able to do this there’s a need for a trajectory of skilfulness, and this is why skilfulness is the most complex of the three dimensions to track. However, once mapped, it helps; students to set targets; self and peer assessment; teachers to design appropriate tasks; curriculum planning and more.

Our Progression Chart for perseverance offers a way to understand and map the complex journey from, for example, the ready giver-upper to the highly tenacious student in pursuit of goals.

This and similar charts are written for teachers rather than students and the statements are too broad to be individually tracked. However, these statements could be used in student reports or broken down into a couple of ‘can do’ statements. Importantly, the statements serve to broaden our understanding of the learning behaviour and enrich the language of learning. This helps teachers to talk more meaningfully about perseverance and to offer parents a more professional answer to their valid question about progress in perseverance. 

Take a broad look at your school’s learners through the lens of this map of perseverance:

• Outliers aside, where are the majority of your youngest learners?
• Outliers aside, where are the majority of your oldest learners?
• Do your students become increasingly perseverant as they pass through your school?
• Can you speculate on why this happens?
• Would plotting this progression be useful?
  • to teachers
  • to students
  • to parents
• How realistic would it be to have most of your students reaching at least the Value/Green phase?
• How might you use the chart to help you sort out the evidence you need to collect to show such progression robustly?

Having students  use a learning behaviour is one thing, but enabling students to use it more frequently, more skilfully and in a wider range of contexts, is what will make the four purposes of Successful Futures successful. Evidence teachers could collect in order to make these kinds of judgements include:

• what students think of themselves as learners
• what teachers observe of students as learners
• what other people perceive of students as learners.

Naturally, as you gain a clearer record of your students’ growth as learners (as opposed to knowers), you have a rich evidence base from which to report more extensively to parents about both their attainment levels and how they are developing as a learner.

Schools find it useful to start documenting progression in students’ learning behaviours because it:

• motivates and encourages students to put in the effort to continue improving their learning behaviours;
• gives students feedback on their learning behaviour progress so that they can decide which learning behaviours they might target in the next period;
• encourages teachers to recognise that their efforts to improve learning behaviours are being effective;
• gives teachers information about individual students or classes to enable them to discuss and guide learning development more precisely and helpfully;
• validates the progress made by students in terms of conventional attainment measures.

Leadership is about creating a sense of purpose and direction’ –Sir Michael Bichard

For school leaders, creating Successful Futures is about leading innovation – not through great fanfare or grand gestures, but through many and various marginal gains. So it involves a series of leadership approaches that include: creating a dialogue; supporting a culture of enquiry; keeping the learning on track. It’s about slowly creating a community that thrives on investigation and enquiry.

Creating this new curriculum involves every Welsh school becoming a learning organisation;  ‘where everyone continually expands their capacity to create the results they truly desire‘

Research shows that the development and use of a shared vision is a common feature of successful organisations.  Visions have been described as ‘an expression of a desirable direction and future challenging state for the school’. They articulate the way forward and are more than a restatement of aims and values; beyond a short, punchy, expressive statement. It’s helpful to think in terms of a broader framework which is visionary in the sense of forward-looking but which captures all the overarching ideas that will guide the work of the school into the future – a visionary guiding framework:

• to guide future decisions about all aspects of the school
• to provide a reference point for the school
• to provide a sense of higher purpose beyond the routine 
• to provide the focus and energy for learning
• to inspire and redirect change
• to create consistency of purpose towards improvement
• to create a sense of identity
• to characterise the school to its community and articulate the values of the school.

The visionary guiding framework acts as a magnet that draws staff and stakeholders together to understand and achieve a common purpose. While the common purpose of all schools is achieving Successful Futures, the visionary guiding framework will be unique to the school; it expresses its ambitions and ways of achieving them within its social, economic and geographical context.

Take time to develop your own school’s  vision of how you will make the challenges of Successful Futures a reality in your school. 

You may find Chapter 1, Vision, in ‘The Learning Powered School‘ useful in forming your narrative.

Driving your commitment to build Successful Futures.

Few teachers would argue against the core purposes of Successful Futures. Who could mount a serious argument against building, for example, learners’ ambition and capability? But believing in it, and doing something about it, are different things.

Some may argue that the fact that their students already achieve good grades must indicate that they are already building their Successful Futures and that they don’t need to change, even if others do! Some may be initiative weary. Some may want to do it, but don’t know how. Some may have the best of intentions, but lose sight of these in the day to day pressures of the classroom.

It follows that as a leader you will need to make sure that you frequently, visibly and genuinely express your commitment through both your actions and through the dialogues you create. 

And as this innovation goes along the big lessons for senior leaders are:

1. Keep close to the developments.
2. Keep it high profile in school, visit classrooms regularly.
3. Talk with teachers about how they are weaving the ideas into their lessons.
4. Focus on the kinds of learning processes teachers are routinely asking students to use.
5. Identify where the new practice is really taking hold or is faltering.

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

The following types of professional development opportunities could be built into the Continuing Professional Development programmes of your school.  The more of these professional development opportunities are used strategically to affect change, the more the school becomes a culture of enquiry.

• Learning reviews
• Teacher learning communities or Professional Learning Teams
• Coaching partnerships
• Small-scale learning enquiries
• Appreciative enquiry
• Classroom observation and personal review
• Visiting and sharing with other schools

 Teachers’ habits as learners have to become part of the picture; how they go about changing as well as those changes they are aiming to bring about. In other words, staff learning has to undergo the same sort of shifts as students’ learning. So the school has to think of professional development in terms of ‘what’ has to be learned and ‘how’ it might be learned.

Professional Learning Teams serve to deepen and sustain dialogue and empower staff to experiment and create their own solutions. Such teams meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of an approach, try out new things and reflect on and share data from their experiments with each other. As a consequence, a spirit of openness and enquiry increasingly pervades the school.

It’s the development of staff through Professional Learning Teams that will prove to be the engine of change.

Working in this culture of trust and openness, teachers and teaching assistants will become increasingly confident to experiment and take risks. But this is no free-for-all: the quality of learning in classrooms and around the school will need to be kept under regular review.

It’s important that teachers get used to being observed regularly, and come to trust that such observation is in the spirit of learning support for them, and not a process of judgement or appraisal. Staff need to see classroom observation  as part of a dynamic, reflective and development process across all levels of the school. As the new culture consolidates, people will get used to watching out for and recording changes both in their practice and in students’ learning behaviours, motivation and achievement.

See section 6 for more ideas on classroom observation.

As part of the innovation to bring Successful Futures into being you will need to keep an eye on and recognise progression students make in their learning behaviours. When leaders and teachers recognise, point out and praise such progression it:

• motivates and encourages students to put in the effort to continue improving their learning behaviours
• gives students feedback on their learning behaviour progress so that they can decide which ‘learning muscles’ they are going to put effort into next
• encourages teachers themselves to realise that their efforts to improve learning behaviours are being effective
• gives teachers information about individual students or classes that will enable them, the teachers, to discuss and guide learning development more precisely and helpfully
• validates the progress made by students in terms of conventional attainment measures.

In other words you will be quietly watching to see whether and how students’ learning dispositions are shaping up. You can be assured that learning habits won’t suddenly appear from nowhere at the end of their school life: you will  have been building them up slowly throughout their time in your school.

 ‘Culture’ concerns the details of the micro-climate that teachers create in their classrooms.

• What they do and say
• What they notice and commend and what they don’t
• What kind of role model of a learner they offer: all these are of the essence.

And what really matters is how they design and present activities so that, over the course of a term or a year, their students are cumulatively getting a really good all-round mental work-out. All the learning bits of their brains are being stretched and strengthened, one by one and all together.

The framework for developing  learning friendly classrooms is known as the Teachers’ Palette. This combines the types of teacher actions that create the conditions necessary for students’ learning behaviours to become shaped and habituated. Schools that successfully build learning behaviours have found that there are four key cultural shifts that combine to create the seedbed for building better learners – the relationships in the classroom; the ways in which learning is talked about; how learning itself becomes the object of learning; how learning is noticed and celebrated. 

Moving to more learning-friendly cultures is a big shift in thinking and action. Establishing learning-friendliness comes from four shifts in teacher practice:

• a shift in relationships
• a shift in the language
• a shift in how learning is constructed 
• a shift in what is celebrated, what is seen to matter.

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

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

3. Constructing for learning: developing activities and classroom routines that feed learning habits, where learning becomes the object of learning. Learning activities are designed to stretch and challenge by having a dual focus – to explore content and stretch students’ use of their learning behaviours. There is a strong underpinning of not just ‘doing’ learning but reviewing and reflecting on the process in order to make meaning and apply it elsewhere.

4. Celebrating learning: clarifying the outward signs of the values that underpin the culture, making learning the object of attention. In this shift failure has been redefined; being stuck is seen as interesting and mistakes valuable. Effort, questions and taking risks and the growth of learning habits are recognised, attended to, acknowledged and praised. These serve to make visible the underlying values of the learning environment.

This uncovering of learning ensures students discover, use, understand and grow their learning habits. 

The shifts lead teachers to ask how can I:

• build a classroom culture that ensures that responsibility for learning is shared with and to some degree devolved to learners?
• create opportunities to discuss the learning process using the language of learning?
• construct activities that develop positive learning behaviours and help learners to acquire the necessary content?
• build learners’ commitment to becoming better learners through what is valued and recognised?

Because learning-centred teachers have a particularly rich conception of learning and the habits that underpin it, they are able to design nudges and activities that target quite specific aspects of learning behaviours. Teaching for learning becomes more detailed and forensic.

• Download the deeper Learning Culture Tool.
• Look carefully at the issues raised in relation to your school.
• Ring the MEANS statements that describe aspects of the school’s classroom cultures that you think are secure.
• Ring the ENDS statements that you think are secure.
• Underline those statements that would most benefit your students now, the statements that you would most like to ring but can’t at the moment.

Ask the hard questions

• How many of these MEANS are in use in classrooms?
• How many ENDS are secure?
• How much is learning externalised or surfaced?
• What’s the balance between telling and coaching in classrooms?
• Do students have a language with which to talk about their learning?
• What proportion of tasks would you estimate to be rich and challenging?

Why talk about culture

The original research behind the idea of Learning Power made clear that learning dispositions aren’t fixed at birth, that learning is a learnable craft, and that the learning environment can have a constructive or destructive influence on a person’s energy for and approach to learning. Classroom cultures, therefore, come into play. Cultures have the power to grow or diminish students’ inclinations and abilities to learn.

Therefore…

developing learners for a successful future is about creating a culture in classrooms – and the school more widely – that will systematically cultivate habits and attitudes that will stand students in good stead for a complex world.

Culture: all those little habits, routines and practices that implicitly convey ‘what we believe and value around here’. Classrooms are the places where, hour by hour, students experience the values and practices that are embodied in the school, rather than just the ones that are espoused.

Culture is about the micro-climate: what teachers do and say; what they notice and commend, or don’t; what kind of role model of learning they offer; how they design and present activities to build learning behaviours. Some classroom cultures are just more learning friendly than others.

Research by Chris Watkins from XXX back in 2004 suggested three types of classroom learning cultures, some more learning friendly than others.

• Teacher centred; has an overriding emphasis on what the teacher is doing or saying.
  • Learning = being taught.
  • Students are passengers
  • Students have an impoverished view of their learning ability
  • The emphasis is on acquiring knowledge
• Learner centred; students take a more active role in deciding what to do.
  • The learning is making meaning.
  • Students are crew
  • Students collaborate and discuss learning
  • The emphasis is on understanding
• Learning centred; students learn about learning itself.
  • Students use a language of learning.
  • Become conscious of the learning process and the learning habits they command.
  • Students are pilots of their learning
  • The emphasis is on self-regulation, becoming meta-learners for a learning life

Hence there are often two strategic shifts to make in the journey from Teacher centred to Learning centred cultures. Teacher centred cultures may well achieve good results but only Learning centred cultures achieve good results PLUS ambitious and capable, enterprising and creative, ethical and informed, healthy and confident learners.

Learning shift

The Culture Tool describes in greater detail the features of teacher centred, learner centred and learning centred classrooms.

Take a look at it and think about the school’s learning culture against the indicators in each panel.

• Reflect on the culture of each classroom
• Highlight all aspects of culture that are a regular feature in each classroom
• What are the similarities and differences between phases, year groups, individual classes?
• What is this telling you about your school’s learning culture?

The four purposes referred to above are the now familiar pillars of the new curriculum for Wales… to develop children and young people as:

ambitious, capable learners, ready to learn throughout their lives; enterprising, creative contributors, ready to play a full part in life and work; ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world; healthy, confident individuals, ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society.“

There’s a temptation to view these four life enhancing learning behaviours exclusively as outcomes; something to hope for as the end result of the new curriculum. While the new curriculum in Wales is designed to achieve such results, developing them will cause schools to infuse them all the way through the curriculum and across years of education.

In other words the whole curriculum, both in its content, design and delivery, will be dedicated to achieving these wider outcomes for young people. Through new programmes of study and experiences, (PoSE) a set of wider skills and a re-think of assessment, ‘what’ is taught and learned and ‘how’ it is taught and learned should constantly enrich students’ sense of being a learner.

Behind the headlines

So, as the new curriculum prepares students ‘ not just for a life of tests but for the tests of life‘ the purpose of education moves beyond the accumulation of knowledge to shaping what a student can become as a person.

To make such outcomes more compelling and understandable the four purposes are expanded using words and phrases such as:

• resilience
• perseverance
• making connections
• play different team roles
• use evidence
• face and overcome challenge
• manage risk
• develop empathy

Such words begin to tell us what sort of learners your school will be creating. This means helping students build up the mental, emotional and social resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexity. Students have to learn how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self-disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.

These are descriptors of what are known as learning dispositions, or powers or habits. Taken together they add up to a learning character. Your learning dispositions determine your inclination or tendency for change; they direct those behaviours that influence and underpin your performance throughout life. Making the purposes of Successful Futures successful will rely on paying attention to developing students’ learning dispositions; firing up their energy or appetite for changing, growing and learning . It’s about concentrating on the ‘how’ of learning – on bringing the learning process itself out of the shadows.

Selling the idea that learning is learnable

It’s an erroneous idea that an individual’s ability is fixed at birth, we now know that the brain is like a muscle in that its intelligence grows with exercise. We also know that intelligence is ‘the sum total of ‘habits of mind’ and that habits can be changed. When learners and their teachers are convinced of these facts it causes a major shift in self belief and the possibilities of education

Helping all young people to understand that learning is learnable, to make them aware of the learning behaviours they command, gives them greater enthusiasm and power for engaging with the potential highs and lows of learning.

When learners become aware of their learning behaviours through structured opportunities to improve it, they become:

• more reflective and aware of themselves as learners
• more confident and motivated to learn
• more willing and able to take responsibility by ‘owning’ their learning for themselves
• more intentional in their learning
• keener to carry on learning as they move beyond school
• more likely to realise their potential and gain grades that were previously regarded as beyond them
• more confident socially and able to learn with, and from, one another
• more able to manage transitions and take change in their stride throughout their lives.

Big questions: some answers

1. It’s easy for schools to come across lists of learning habits — you might even make up your own! But is there a cluster of learning dispositions that are particularly appropriate for 21st century learners; helping them to deal with an increasingly complex world?
2. Similarly, teaching ideas to improve student performance abound, but do these teaching ideas develop the valuable, necessary learning habits?

What schools are in search of is a researched collection of learning habits coupled with sound classroom activities and advice about how to nurture and build lifelong learning habits.

Background to an approach that works

Research undertaken by Bristol University, as part of a project into lifelong learning, identified critical dimensions of what is now known as Learning Power; dimensions of learning that can create a step-change in individual, team, and indeed organisational performance.

Furthermore the research found that the power to learn changes over time in response to the qualities of learning environments. As environmental circumstances change, they can have either a constructive or a destructive influence on a person’s power to learn. Informed interventions can significantly enhance personal confidence and performance.

The Building Learning Power approach developed from this original research. It’s an approach which is focused on developing learning habits through appropriate classroom cultures and which schools and teachers could profitably use to deliver the Successful Futures promise.The emergent powerful learners develop skills in monitoring and reviewing their learning, they pay attention to the diversity of practices that can be effective for learning more thoroughly, and become self-regulating, meta-cognitive learners.

The Supple Learning Mind; framework of high value learning behaviours. 

The first framework of Building Learning Power is The Supple Learning Mind. This captures the key psychological characteristics that are judged to be of the highest value in helping students to learn and thrive in a complex world. The framework embraces each of the domains of learning and these are shown in its four parts:

• The Emotional domain of learning (sometimes described as Resilience)
• The Cognitive domain of learning (sometimes described as Resourcefulness)
• The Social domain of learning (sometimes described as Reciprocity)
• The Strategic domain of learning (sometimes described as Reflectiveness)

This learning framework shows that learning isn’t just about having a good memory; it includes how we feel, how we think, how we learn with and from others and how we manage the process of learning. It shows that learning is a complex process. Moreover it provides a language that helps teachers to think about how they cultivate each of the learning behaviours and helps students to gain a better personalised understanding of how they learn content.

Each domain clusters together the high value learning behaviours that best make that domain work well. For example the emotional domain is made up of the learning behaviours of perseverance, managing distractions, absorption and noticing.

 The cognitive domain is made up of behaviours like questioning, link making, imagination, reasoning and capitalising.  The social domain is made up of behaviours like interdependence, collaboration, listening and empathy, and imitation. Finally the strategic domain encompasses planning, revising, distilling and meta-learning.

Ambitious, capable learners; enterprising, creative contributors; ethical, informed citizens; healthy, confident individuals.

Sometimes these ambitious purposes sound too grand and vague to get a practical handle on but the behaviours in the learning power framework can help to underpin and clarify. Being Capable, Creative, Informed, Confident, for example all require good questioning skills. Being ambitious, enterprising, ethical and healthy all draw on the ability to draw on multiple perspectives and see the world from other people’s eyes (empathy). In this way the same learning habit can contribute to several ‘high order’ competencies’.

By the same token each wider skill is itself a composite. Take the wider skill of Creativity and innovation. Research suggests that becoming a creative thinker involves being able to notice details and patterns, taking risks, questioning and playing, learning by imitating others, revising your ideas, and imagining possibilities. Each of these is treated in the Supple Learning Mind framework (see above) as a separate learning behaviour, each of which is capable of being stretched and strengthened. Thus learning dispositions make explicit and coachable the very foundations of those qualities of mind the new curriculum for Wales is trying to secure. They form the very roots of learning, enabling students to develop wider skills throughout the programmes of study and experience and the flowering of the four purposes.