Sections Archive

Bite 2

Putting all of the grids together

The Key Features of this section:

Applications beyond the classroom

The Key Features of this section:

Applications in the classroom

The Key Features of this section:

Getting the grids ready for classroom use

The Key Features of this section:

Section

Section 4: Team reflection and planning

Team Reflection and Planning

Session agenda

Sharing your colouring-in activities (15 mins)
Re-capping the on-line materials (15 mins)
Deciding what’s to be done (15 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Evaluating the meeting process (5 mins)

Sharing your colouring-in activities

1. Sharing your colouring-in activities (15 mins)

Take each of the 4 dimensions in turn. Share:

where you think your classroom culture is currently;
- look for similarities and differences;
- speculate on why these might be so;
where your learners are, how they are responding to your classroom culture;
- discuss any gaps between perceived classroom culture and outcomes for learners;
- speculate on why these might be so;
how big a culture shift is being anticipated;
how you might engage student voice in gaining further insight.

Re-capping online materials

2. Recapping on-line materials: What did we think of the materials? (15 mins)

Thoughts about:

Ideas for beginning the shift to a learning-friendly culture ….activities and routines;
Ideas we can use immediately;
Ideas that will take time to embed;
Things we can start doing in order to create the conditions for this;
Things we will need to stop doing in order to create the conditions for this.

Planning strategic changes in practice

3. Planning strategic change: What do we all need to do? (15 mins)

Decide

Which ideas should we all adopt as whole school strategies?
How the progression towards a learning culture might be built across the school. ie which of the four aspects of culture (Relating, Talking, Constructing, Celebrating) need most attention at whole school level?

Personal action planning

4. Personal action planning: What am I going to do? (20 mins)

Consider

How you want to strengthen your classroom culture to become more learning-friendly?
What you are going to do to bring this about?
Develop an enquiry question.

Think of it like this:

If I do XXXX will it improve/develop/enhance YYYY?

This is the crunch question. Your classroom culture is unlikely to change unless you change!

Capture your learning enquiry as a question

DEVELOPING-AN-ENQUIRY-QUESTION-CULTURE.PDF.

Put an enquiry plan together

PERSONAL-ACTION-PLAN-CULTURE.PDF

Things you might want to look out for that result from your classroom experiments, depending on where you choose to focus your efforts:

any changes in learner behaviours, particularly . . . .
greater inclination to take responsibility for their own development;
reduced reliance on teacher support;
becoming better able to discuss the process of learning;
becoming increasingly aware of how they are learning;
willingness to reflect on the learning process;
greater self-belief and confidence;
understanding of how they might improve as a learner.
and any others you may have observed…

Evaluate team session

5. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? ( 5 mins )

Did we achieve our objectives?
Are we comfortable with what we are trying to achieve?
Any concerns at this point?
Next meeting date and time.

Section 3: Ideas to practise in the classroom

The Key Ideas in this Section:

How do I make my classroom increasingly learning-friendly?

This section seeks to offer teaching ideas that nudge classroom culture to become increasingly learning-friendly.

It enables you to choose from a range of differentiated teaching ideas suitable for implementing into your existing classroom culture.

This section identifies teaching ideas to use at each phase of classroom culture development.

But – make sure that you start at the section most closely related to where you have assessed your classroom culture:

If your evaluations in section 2 suggest that your classroom is predominantly teacher centred, if much of your colouring-in was in the Grey phase, start with Moving from Grey to Purple;
If you have made a start on shifting the culture by trialling a few ideas, if most of your colouring-in was Purple, start with Moving from Purple to Blue;
If you have made a good start and your classroom is already becoming learner focused, if most of your colouring-in was Blue, start with Moving from Blue to Green;
If you are well on the way to building a learning-friendly classroom culture, if most of your colouring-in was Green (or higher), start with Moving beyond Green.

And finally, two words of warning. . . . .

Firstly: Classroom cultures are not changed by doing something once or twice, or even occasionally. Culture is determined by how we are, what we always do – not an isolated event, rather gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.
Secondly: All of the ideas suggested in these sections have to be woven into your day to day practice if they are to have impact. Not only do you need to do some new things to shift the culture, you may also have to stop doing some of the old things.

Below low some ideas to seed the sub sections Delete when used

Demonstrate fallibility, react with confident uncertainty to show that you too are still learning	Enable students to explore their own lines of enquiry and to create meaning for themselves	Adopt a coaching approach to help students to find their own way through difficulties
Set a learning challenge without knowing the answer and join in the investigation	Create opportunities for students find/uncover/process information for themselves	Help students to believe that, with effort, they can do more than they think they can
Say ‘I don’t know’ without being defensive	Build in opportunities for greater student involvement, choice and ownership	Stand back and say less in order to let the learning happen

Modelling learning	Devolving responsibility	Coaching approaches

Create opportunities for students to explore and reflect on the process of learning and how it can be further refined	Use language drawn from the progression map to enable students to understand how they are improving as learners	Use differentiated, supportive comments to nudge progression in both content and learning behaviours.
Enable students to understand the learning process and how it improves.	Make talking about learning a regular feature of classroom talk and reflection	Set and monitor targets for how students might improve as learners.
Talk informally to students about learning and how it works	Use the school’s learning language to explain learning.	Ensure that oral and written comments about content are well-balanced by comments about learning

Exploring learning as a process	Sharing the language of learning	Nudging learning forward

Build in opportunities for learners to reflect on what they have learned, how and how well they have learned it, and how they might apply this learning elsewhere	Orchestrate activities to ensure progression in both content acquisition and in learning habit development.	Offer rich, challenging and open-ended activities that intentionally develop content understanding and stretch learning behaviours
Create frequent opportunities for reflection to secure new learning and to help students to understand themselves as learners.	Plan learning activities using the map of progression to ensure that learning habits are stretched rather than exercised.	Ensure that activities are sufficiently challenging to secure engagement and keep students near to the edge of their comfort zone
Ensure that review points are a regular feature of lessons	Ensure students are aware of the twin-focused intentions of activities in terms of both content and learning objectives	Create opportunities for students to get stuck

Encourage reflection	Linking learning and content	Offer rich, challenging activities

Understand how individual students learn and what they need to improve, and intervene to secure such improvements.	Enable students to regard mistakes as valuable opportunities for reflection and learning.	Create interactive displays that help students to understand how improving learning behaviours can support and enhance the acquisition of content.
Intervene in order to enable students to exercise and grow specific learning behaviours.	Allow students to ‘fail in safety’	Ensure that display celebrates both the processes of learning / work in progress and the outcomes of learning / final versions in equal measure.
Celebrate any developments in a student’s personal best as a learner	Treat mistakes and being stuck as sites of interest.	Remind students to use public learning prompts.

Growing learning habits	Re-defining failure	Learning on display

Section 2: How learning-friendly is my classroom culture?

The Key Ideas in this Section:

How are outcomes for learners affected by classroom culture?

This section seeks to explore linking the progression grids from Section 1 with the resulting ‘outcomes for learners’.

It enables you to answer two complementary questions:

If my classroom culture is . . . . , then what will my learners be like?

If I want my learners to be . . . . then what will my classroom culture need to be?

Building on the progression grids from section 1 – adding in the outcomes for learners.

Each cultural dimension has ‘ends’ or ‘outcomes for learners’ – the outcomes we plan to achieve for learners. These intended outcomes also have a progression trajectory that is the consequence of progression in the 12 aspects of classroom culture. Progression in terms of outcomes for learners may well lag behind the changes in classroom culture as learners need time to perceive and act on these cultural changes. In this section of the module, we link progression in classroom culture with progression in learner behaviours and invite you to look at your classroom through this lens.

Work through each of the 4 dimensions (below) in turn.

Relationships in the learning-friendly classroom

Open Me

Relationships in the learning-friendly classroom

You have already seen the three columns of the Relating grid in section 1. Here we add the associated student learning behaviours. You can find a b&w copy in your Learning Diary.

Add in download / view in full screen option

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Colour in the cells in the first 3 columns that best describe your classroom culture as you currently see it.
Colour in the cell in the 4th column that best describes your students’ current learning behaviours.
Are student learning behaviours broadly in line with perceived classroom culture? If not, why might that be?
Then (using a second colour) . . .
Identify the cell in the 4th column that best describes how you would like your learners to be, your aspiration for them as learners. Colour in this cell and the whole row containing it.
The gap between this and your current classroom culture is the cultural shift you hope to make.
Where might you start?

Talk about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

Open Me

Talk about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

You have already seen the three columns of the Talking grid in section 1. Here we add the associated student learning behaviours. You can find a b&w copy in your Learning Diary.

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Repeat the colouring-in activity as you did for the Relating grid.

Learning about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

Open Me

Learning about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

You have already seen the three columns of the Constructing grid in section 1. Here we add the associated student learning behaviours. You can find a b&w copy in your Learning Diary.

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Repeat the colouring-in activity as you did for the Relating grid.

Celebrating and growing learning in the learning-friendly classroom

Open Me

Celebrating and growing learning in the learning-friendly classroom

You have already seen the three columns of the Celebrating grid in section 1. Here we add the associated student learning behaviours. You can find a b&w copy in your Learning Diary.

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Repeat the colouring-in activity as you did for the Relating grid.

Preparation for the Learning Team meeting

Where is my classroom culture now?

You have already done the colouring-in activities on the 4 progression grids and have a sense of where you believe your classroom culture is and the extent to which your students are perceiving and responding to it. Take these to the Learning Team meeting.

Additionally, give some thought to how you might gather evidence that your evaluations are accurate. For example:

Any gap between where you assess classroom culture and how they are responding to it can be explained in one of three ways:
- your assessment of classroom culture is overly optimistic;
- your assessment is accurate but they have not yet had time to assimilate and respond to the changes you have made / are making;
- or your assessment of their learning behaviours is overly pessimistic;
- (or a combination of the above).
Ask yourself how you might explore this further:
- how might you gather some data?
- who might you ask?
- what might you ask?
- how might you engage student voice?

Please take the results of these tasks and thoughts with you to the Professional Learning Team session shown in Section 4

Section 1: Learning-friendly classroom cultures and how they develop

The Key Ideas in this Section:

Classroom cultures and how they grow

This section seeks to support teachers to understand the progression from teacher centred to learning-friendly classroom cultures.

Sections 1a), 1b) are reminders of the culture module that you have done previously. Skip these, or skim read them, if you wish.

Section 1c), 1d) and 1e) are the important (new) sections where we explore progression and classroom culture.

1a) What do we mean by classroom culture?

Building Learning Power is about creating a culture in classrooms – and in the school more widely – that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable young people to face difficulty calmly, confidently and creatively. By a ‘culture’ we mean all the little habits, routines and practices that implicitly convey ‘what we believe and value round here’. The medium of a school is its most powerful message, and the most important messages are conveyed to students in classrooms. 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.

As Ron Ritchhart observes in ‘Creating Cultures of Thinking’:

The culture of the classroom teaches. It not only sets the tone for learning but also determines what gets learned. The messages sent through the culture of the classroom communicate to students what it means to think and learn well. These messages are a curriculum in themselves, teaching students how to learn and ways of thinking.

So ‘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.

So what does a culture shift mean? What sort of classroom cultures are there and which one do we need if students are going to understand and improve themselves as learners?

Moving towards a culture that is ripe for students to learn about learning can take a while. Research undertaken by Chris Watkins, at the London Institute of Education, suggests three different types of classroom culture: teacher centred culture; learner centred culture; and learning centred culture.

As you read on, think of these descriptions as stages in a journey you may need to travel.

If you need a reminder about teacher, learner and learning centred cultures, click here

Teacher centred classrooms

Firstly, many classrooms could be thought of as teacher centred. Here the overriding emphasis is on what the teacher is doing or saying. Learners have little to do but listen and be told what to do. In these classrooms students can see themselves as isolated, passive and dependent on the teacher for the acquisition of knowledge. Here the conception of learning is “learning = being taught”. The teacher and teaching are dominant. Students have what’s been called a ‘thin’ description of their own learning and they have an impoverished view of their own role in learning.

Learner centred classrooms

The learner centred classroom is where students take a more active part in deciding what to do. The purpose is seen as the learner making meaning. So ‘content’ is not just stuff to be taught but for connecting to previous knowledge, extending understanding and helping learners to see things in new ways. Here there will be more collaborative learning where students have dialogues about what they are learning and create meaning together. There will also be more learner-driven learning where learners might have a role in the agenda through questioning or organising an enquiry and evaluating the products.

Learning centred classrooms

It’s only when many of the learner centred dimensions are present to some extent that it becomes realistic to add another – that of learning about learning itself. Learners collaborating, taking a role in learning, using questions to drive learning and so forth give a firm platform on which to build powerful learners. Now we can add a language about learning for students and teachers alike, and practise meta-learning. Through such practices students come to see themselves as learners, develop stories about their experiences, understand the learning behaviours they are using and develop and propose improvements. They are able consciously to grow their learning habits.

1b) What do we mean by a learning-friendly classroom culture?

These two models, both of which you have met elsewhere, illustrate the nature of the learning-friendly classroom. Culture tool 2 shows the 4 big dimensions of a learning-friendly classroom culture, the 12 ‘means’ or ‘aspects’ (to the LHS), and the outcomes we intend for learners (RHS). The Teachers’ Palette summarises those same 4 dimensions and 12 aspects.

The 4 Shifts in classroom culture

Shifts in Relating

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

Shifts in Talking

Talking for learning: the sort of language content and style to enhance learning, making learning 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 learning. The language of learning helps students to discuss, understand, and become conscious of using their learning behaviours.

Shifts in Constructing

Constructing learning: activities and classroom routines feed learning habits and learning becomes the object of learning. Learning challenging activities are designed to enable students to understand both the content and the process of learning. They do this 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 (transfer).

Shifts in Celebrating

Celebrating learning: the outward signs of the values that underpin the culture, making learning the object of attention. In this dimension common notions of classroom learning are flipped or re-defined – being stuck is seen as interesting and mistakes valuable. Effort, questioning and taking risks are recognised, attended to, acknowledged and praised. These and the recognition of the development of learning habits serve to make visible and public the underlying values of the learning friendly environment.

And the shift in the teacher’s role

The teacher’s role becomes one of surfacing learning; to make learning public; to train some of the tricky bits; to talk about it; to recognise and celebrate it as it happens; to nudge it along, assisting students to grow their learning capacities; and to design activity to stretch a wide range of learning habits. This uncovering of learning ensures students discover, use, understand and grow their learning habits. There is a shift in emphasis from performance to learning, from content to process, from teaching to coaching

1c) What does building a learning-friendly culture involve?

A learning friendly culture

Learning Friendly Cultures

Cast your eye over the ‘big picture’ of a learning friendly culture above. There are four big dimensions:

Relating for learning;
Talking for learning;
Constructing learning;
Celebrating learning.

Each dimension has three ‘Means’ or ‘Aspects’ – the inputs that teachers can make to create a learning-friendly classroom culture. In this section we explore progression in these three 12 aspects as the classroom culture moves from teacher focused, to learner focused, and finally to learning focused.

Rather than try to capture this progression on one (very large) grid, we have chosen to offer 4 progression grids, one for each of the 4 cultural dimensions, and these are explored in section 1d) below.

Each dimension has ‘ends’ or ‘outcomes for learners’ – the outcomes we plan to achieve for learners. These intended outcomes also have a progression trajectory that is the consequence of progression in the 12 aspects of classroom culture. Progression in terms of outcomes for learners may well lag behind the changes in classroom culture as learners need time to perceive and act on these cultural changes. In section 2 of this module, we link progression in classroom culture with progression in learner behaviours and invite you to look at your classroom through this lens.

1d) Unpicking these aspects: what contributes to a learning-friendly classroom culture?

The grid columns are things that might combine to create a learning-friendly classroom culture.

Overview
1) Relating for Learning
2) Talking for Learning
3) Learning about learning
4) Celebrating learning and its growth

Overview of the grids

Open each of the 4 tabs in turn to explore:

The cultural dimension;
The key features of the cultural shift;
The three aspects of the cultural shift;
How the classroom culture might evolve in each of aspect of the dimension.

culture-tool-2_shifting-the-culture_v7_cutup-1

The key idea

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

In some classrooms, responsibility rests almost exclusively with the teacher. The teacher decides the what and how of learning, and does most of the questioning. The main focus is on student performance. Most tasks are undertaken individually. The teacher assumes responsibility for assessment and adopts a ‘fount of knowledge’ role. In such classrooms, students believe and accept that responsibility for learning lies with the teacher and become increasingly dependent on their teachers.

But does it have to be like this? What if learners are enabled to take responsibility for their own learning? How would classroom culture change?

The key features of this cultural shift are:

Responsibility for learning is gradually devolved to the students
Students are given more of a stake in the process of their own learning
The teacher becomes the learning coach; enabling students to find their own ways to improve
Collaborative activity helps students to see each other as resources for learning
Students being given choices about what and how to learn
Students talk more, adults talk less
Teachers model being a learner
Processes promote, enable and support the best of what we know about learning.

There are three aspects to this cultural shift:

Aspect 1. Modelling the learning process – the ways in which we show that we, too, are learners. It indicates a shift away from teachers being ‘all-knowing subject specialists’ to displaying uncertainty, to sharing their own learning stories, to learning ‘aloud’, to learning alongside students.

Aspect 2: Devolving Responsibility – shifting the emphasis towards learners taking increasing responsibility for their own development. It involves a shift towards students asking more of the questions, monitoring their own learning, doing more of the work, making more choices, pursuing their own lines of enquiry.

Aspect 3. Coaching approaches – moving away from ‘telling’ whenever possible. It is one of the hardest of balancing acts: knowing when you can coach and when you have to tell requires the teacher to have a deep understanding of both the subject matter and the learner.

How these 3 aspects might grow over time.

Here is the progression chart for Relating for Learning. The 5 phases of development will be familiar from the progression grids for learning behaviours. The three columns correspond to progression in the 3 aspects of Relating for Learning.

What are your immediate reactions to this progression grid?

Does it make sense to you?

Can you sense how teaching behaviours change as the culture evolves?

culture-tool-2_shifting-the-culture_v7_cutup-2

The key idea

Talking about learning is about the sort of language content and style that enhances learning, making learning 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 learning. The language of learning helps students to discuss, understand, and become conscious of using and improving their learning behaviours.

In many classrooms, talk is almost exclusively about the content of what will be, is being, or has been, learned. Talk about ‘how’ that learning could happen, is happening, has happened and could happen better, adds a further dimension to classroom discourse; a dimension that shifts the classroom culture to a embrace both the what and the how of learning. By focusing on the how students are enabled to take far greater control of their learning.

The key features of this cultural shift are:

The process of learning, rather than learning performance, becomes the object of conversation.
The gradual introduction of a learning language helps students to become conscious of using their learning behaviours.
Using and extending the breadth and depth of the learning language helps learners to talk about, understand and improve how they learn.
Encouraging learners to notice things about how they are learning, talking about their learning process and assessing how their learning is going means learners become meta-learners.

There are three main aspects to this cultural language shift:

Aspect 1: Exploring learning as a process – the ways in which you enable learners to explore and reflect on the process of learning. It’s a shift away from talking about the ‘what’ of learning and broadens classroom discourse to include conversations about the process of learning, the ‘how’ of learning.

Aspect 2: Creating a language for learning – helping learners to understand and use a language of sufficient precision and subtlety that enables them to describe, discuss and understand the learning process. The learning language begins with naming the learning behaviours of the four strands of a supple learning mind. (emotional, cognitive, social and strategic) It moves on to exploring what these are, when we use them, how we might get better at using them and how we can become a better learner.

Aspect 3: Nudging learning forward – offering feedback, both written and oral, to help learners to improve as learners. This is about how we catch learners actually learning, alert them to it, remind them about it, suggest how they might get better at it. Nudging the learning process broadens feedback to include the learning behaviours employed as well as content.

culture-tool-2_shifting-the-culture_v7_cutup-3

The key idea

Learning about learning involves integrating reflection and review into the way learning is organised; where activities are designed to stretch and challenge not just in outcome terms but in the very nature of ‘doing’ the task (dual focus of content and process). Students’ emotional engagement is a pre-requisite when learning is organised in these ways, and the value of learning is in pushing yourself so that your capacities are stretched and strengthened.

For many students, the word ‘learning’ means ‘knowing / remembering stuff”. The cultural shift to learning about learning, or making learning the object of attention, is about understanding how they are learning as well as what they are learning.

The key features of this cultural shift are:

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 students’ 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, plus 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn.

There are three aspects to the cultural shift:

Aspect 1: Lessons with in-built reflection – reflection on content and reflection on learning behaviours is routinely built into lessons.Review points, rather than the formulaic plenary, focus students on what they have learned and how they have learned it. Reflection is done by students for themselves, not by teachers on their behalf.

Aspect 2: Lessons with a dual focus – lessons are designed intentionally to deliver content and to exercise learning behaviours, and students are made aware of both. The learning behaviours drive the content acquisition, the content is the exercise regime for the learning behaviours, each enhancing the other.

Aspect 3: Lessons with rich and challenging activities – increasingly open-ended activities are designed to engage, to stretch and to challenge. The learning is not over-scaffolded, and the inherent difficulties are not avoided or diluted by overly-helpful teachers. The activities stretch and challenge both content understanding and learning behaviours.

culture-tool-2_shifting-the-culture_v7_cutup-4

The key idea

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

The success of this shift will depend on consistency and strong emphasis. You have to make these ideas/values obvious, big and overblown. Whispering them quietly won’t work. They have to be shouted about and put ‘in-your-face’ if they are to stick, be believed, be understood and capitalised on.

While we would like student learning to be the central focus of classrooms many still celebrate and value successful performance over successful learning. What is considered worthy of display or praise speaks volumes about the underlying, unspoken, classroom culture. What does the cultural shift from a performance culture to a learning friendly culture entail?

The key features of this cultural shift are:

The process of learning, rather than the performance that emanates from this process, being made the object of attention
The underlying values about learning becoming visible through what is enabled, 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.
- Metacognitive behaviours being given a place in the learning process
Learning behaviours are used more often and more skilfully, being nudged and recognised . . . .
So that the growth of learning habits is being attended to closely.

There are three aspects to the cultural shift:

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

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

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

What do you think?

Do these progression grids make sense to you?
Which of the four dimensions is strongest in your classroom?
Weakest?

Make a note of…

One thing that you are thinking of doing, or would like to do, in light of this.

1e) Unpicking the phases of growth: building learning-friendliness

Of course, the development of classroom culture doesn’t grow neatly up each column or evenly across the phases in the grid. The five broad phases of dispositional growth (purple – orange) are affective ways in which people may be inclined to behave: we call this inclination ‘mindedness’.

Here is our interpretation of how classroom culture might grow.

Overview
Teacher-centred
Receives
Responds
Values
Organises
Embodies

Meaning behind the phases

The phases are drawn from Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain.

Phase ‘Teacher-centred’ (Grey) is standard good subject teaching within a classroom culture that is highly teacher-centred.

Phase ‘Receives’ (purple) is about teachers doing something because they are told or expected to. At this stage teachers are trying out a couple of learning-friendly strategies in a classroom that is otherwise highly teacher-centred.

Phase ‘Responds’ (blue) is about gaining interest and expanding the range of cultural shifts being explored and embedded.

Phase ‘Values’ (green) is a key phase since the teacher is now fully committed to building a learning-friendly classroom culture. The experimentation phase is over, the classroom is already learner-focused and ripe for growing a learning-friendly culture.

Phase ‘Organises’ (yellow) is the phase in which all of the aspects of a learning-friendly classroom culture are being explored and developed.

Phase ‘Embodies’ (orange), known as ‘characterised’ in the original taxonomy. In this phase, the learning-friendly culture is embedded and secure. Teachers and learners alike learn in a community of enquiry.

Teacher centred: Standard ‘good’ teaching.

The prevailing culture in the Teacher Centred phase is ‘teacher knows best’. Talk is about content and working hard. Attainment and examination success are the key drivers. The classroom culture focuses on ‘knowing stuff’.

Receives: Toes in the learning waters.

Teachers are beginning to explore other, better ways of working. Classroom talk is mostly about curriculum content, but with some references to supportive learning behaviours. Attainment and examination success are still the key drivers, but learning behaviours are beginning to be discussed / referenced. While still largely focused on content delivery, the culture is beginning to show signs of becoming more learner-friendly.

Responds: Becoming learner focused.

The classroom culture is becoming increasingly learner focused. Classroom talk about learning by teacher and by students uses the school’s chosen language of learning with precision and fluency. The classroom culture brings both content and the associated learning processes into the foreground. Classrooms are developing as places to learn.

Values: Content and Process are equally valued.

Effective learning is more important than efficient teaching. Talking about the process of learning is seen as an essential aid to effective learning. The classroom is increasingly designed to build and stretch, as opposed to exercise, key learning behaviours. The culture reflects the teacher’s interest in and commitment to securing both content and learning progression.

Organises: Increasingly learning focused.

The classroom is becoming increasingly learning focused. Classroom talk about learning relates to how students might improve as learners. Content is the vehicle for stretching learning behaviours. Learning behaviours enhance content understanding. The culture has moved from a ‘teaching room’ to a ‘learning space’. Learning has replaced working.

Embodies: The learning focused classroom culture.

Coaching is the prevailing culture in a community of enquiry. A rich and differentiated language for learning, rooted in the school’s understanding of progression, permeates classroom discourse. The culture is one of high progress driven by secure and sophisticated learning behaviours that are reflected on, developing and widely applied. The classroom culture prizes students’ growth as learners over attainment/achievement, which takes care of itself as learning behaviours are enhanced.

What do you think?

What has struck you about classroom cultures having read the descriptions above?
Which phase best describes your current classroom culture?
Are you confident your learners would see it the same way?

Make a note of…

What you might need to do to move towards a learning-friendly classroom culture
Any thoughts or ideas the text has triggered.

Section

Section 4: Team reflection and planning

Session agenda

1. Session objectives

What do we want to achieve? ( 5 mins)

2 Sharing classroom experiments

How did our experiments go? ( 20 mins)

the changes in practice you tried
how students reacted
what you learned
what next as a result

Probe

what was getting in the way?
what seemed difficult?
what would make it easier?
what made it work particularly well?
why it was successful?
changes in your behaviour

Impact (general)

improvements in students’ behaviour
increased focus
more enjoyment in learning
more/renewed interest in the subject
greater harmony in the classroom
more willingness to try, and try different ways
more positive about themselves as learners
Avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little of no changes in…

Impact ( specific)

You could consider the behaviour-specific improvement indicators for the learning habit you were improving. (i.e. as shown for this behaviour in section 5c below)

3. Recapping on-line materials

What did we think of the materials? ( 15 mins)

Reactions to

The Perseverance grid
Where students are secure
Where the students could be when they leave secondary school
Activities and talk ideas

4. Planning what to do

What do we need to do next? ( 10 mins )

Decide

Which ideas should we all adopt as a school strategy?
How the progression of perseverance should be built across the school. ie how the phases of perseverance might play out against key curriculum stages and even year groups.

5 Personal action planning

What am I going to do? ( 20 mins )

5a Consider

how you want your students to improve/develop/enhance their approach to persevering ?
what you are going to do to bring this about?
develop your enquiry question.

Think of it like this…

If I do XXXX will it improve/develop/enhance YYYY

This is the crunch question. Your students are unlikely to change unless you change!

Capture your learning enquiry as a question

Developing-an-enquiry-question-Perseverance.pdf

5b. Put a short enquiry plan together

Personal-Action-Plan-Perseverance.pdf

5c. Things you might want to look out for that result from your classroom experiment:

a willingness to spend more time on task. All types of task? Some types? Which?
showing less stress or worry about being stuck or challenged
reduced reliance on external support
developing their own ways of dealing with being stuck
greater confidence in themselves
recognising that getting stuck is normal and helpful
willingness to try other ways of tackling a task
greater engagement with tasks
improvement in their belief in themselves as learners (growth mindset)
others you may have observed…

6. Evaluate team session:

How did we do as a team? ( 5 mins )

We wish you well with your rich activity/learning enquiry. Do let us know how it went…

Maybe you would like to write a blog about it to feature on our website for the benefit of the Building Learning Power community.

Section 3: Blending Perseverance with content

So far, you have:

Looked at your students through the lens of the Perseverance learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Perseverance looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage students with Perseverance

Now we look closely at how to blend improving students’ perseverance into the content you have to teach.

A. The principles behind any learning powered lesson

B. Big questions to ask about lesson design

C. Lesson planning in action…an exemplar perseverance focused task

Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if students are aware of them, realise their value and strive to improve them. The curriculum through its lessons provides the rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits.

A. The principles behind any learning powered lesson

Think of yourself as a learning power coach, helping your students to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your students thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage students to explore challenging questions, problems or assertions and become observers of their own learning. You step back from telling and heavy scaffolding and instead try to mobilise your students’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.

Open Me

The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power

1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning

You make it clear to students which learning habits and processes they are using. You try to make every aspect of the learning process as visible as possible through the language you use and through the words and images you display on the walls.

For example:

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.

2: Dual focus teaching…blending content and process

You design activities that combine the dual objectives of ‘what’ will be learned and ‘how’ it will be learned. You make sure students know that the content they are learning is a way of giving their minds a useful workout. (The content is the vehicle for learning)

For example:

Set goals with learning in mind – shift the way you plan.

All your lessons have always had two purposes:

to have learners acquire some knowledge, skills or understanding;
to use some learning behaviours to access the knowledge/understanding or to practise the skills..

…although you may not have been fully aware of the learning behaviours that are being invoked.

As you become more deeply aware of learning behaviours you will think through lesson planning a bit differently:

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

In other words, the goal of the lesson would then have overt content and learning dimensions.

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

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

3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention

Your lessons are designed to intrigue your students. Students don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your students’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.

For example:

Start lessons with a grapple task

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

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

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

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

4: Handling uncertainty…Challenge

You have realised from your own life that what is engaging tends to be what is challenging. Since you see education as a preparation for a learning life, you help students to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.

For example:

Use a range of ways to support challenge

Make positive connections between making mistakes and challenge
Model how to think about and work through challenges
Create a challenge wall; put up questions, extension tasks, riddles, problems. A go-to place for another challenges when other learning is finished
Display work that shows students have improved mistakes etc.
Stimulate different ways of thinking by using what are known as ‘Stingray’ questions…What if...(something they thought they knew is looked at from a different angle – What if the Moon’s gravitational pull disappeared? What if Germany had won the First World War? How would the country look if everyone went Vegan?)
Use the Nando’s Peri-ometer as a visual aid to support the ranking of tasks by level of challenge, and allow students to select the level of challenge that they wish to undertake.

5: Relationships…Working together

Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your students opportunities to experience both. You develop interdependent learners who know how to handle themselves in collaborative groups and able to move around in the social space of learning to best effect.

For example:

Help students to learn how to share their ideas with others.

Many students find it hard to share their ideas with others – in group situations, they seem to get swamped by the louder, by the more assertive, by the quicker thinkers. So they stop trying and become reliant on the ideas of others.

To develop students’ inclination to share their ideas, nudge them with:

What do you think?
Tell your friend what you are thinking?
What do you know about this?
Tell us about . . .
Who would like to tell us . . . .
What does xxx think
Say what you think
Who haven’t we heard from yet?

6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge

You understand that students have to learn how to manage and organise their own learning and that the way to do this is by giving them increasingly demanding opportunities to do so. You orchestrate students taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.

For example:

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.

A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.

Does the lesson plan:

Make it clear to students which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate students’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how students could interact on these tasks?
Embed aspects of planning, reflecting and revising for content and process?

What do you think?

Which of these six principles are a regular feature of your planning?
What do you make of principle 2? Is it the most tricky of the six? The following section B is mostly about this aspect of planning.
Look at the checklist in the green box above this one: Do your lesson plans capture these six aspects of an effective learning experience?

Make a note of…

Which of the six principles might need to be given greater prominence in your planning.

B. Big questions to ask about lesson design.

What we teach and how we teach it (the enacted curriculum) are intertwined and offer teachers a lot of freedom. It is here that you can start applying a learning power filter and deploy a unique combination of content and learning tasks.

Open Me

Prelude

In conventional lessons where the teacher remains the focus of attention and the initiator of all activity, and where the epistemic dimension (the conditions for acquiring knowledge) is not acknowledged, students gain habits of compliance and dependence, rather than curiosity and self-reliance.

In developing learning power, teachers are making conscious choices about which habits to introduce and stretch and how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging. Through such overt coupling of content and specific types of process, students come to know, understand and take control of their learning behaviours – they knowingly use and develop the whole range of learning behaviours.

All lessons function on two levels, they have twin intentions. On the one hand there is content to be acquired, and on the other there are learning behaviours to be exercised in pursuit of this content. The factor that differentiates a standard lesson that effectively ‘delivers the content’ from a learning powered lesson is that the teacher has to think, in advance, about:

the learning behaviours that are necessary for successful content acquisition;
the design of activities /tasks that will stimulate these behaviours;
how learners could reflect on and evaluate their use of these behaviours.

In designing such lessons you have to dare to think differently and flip round your usual lesson design thinking.

A turn-around in lesson design

Think in two dimensions at once – the content dimension and the learning behaviour dimension. It means turning your thinking around – from teaching to learning.

Or put another way

Think to yourself;

what content?
using which learning behaviour(s)?
via an activity to stretch both?

Lesson design questions… one by one

Here the general rules of lesson design have been related to the learning behaviour…perseverance.

Stage 1. What content do students need to learn?

What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.

Use standard lesson planning tools:
- What are students going to be able to do/learn?…think objectives
- How will they know if they been successful?… think success criteria
While keeping an obvious eye on
- What do they already know?….think previous learning.

Stage 2. How will they best learn it?

Using which learning behaviours?

This is the new bit

Not the usual second step but nonetheless a vital second step where the aim is to weave content acquisition with learning behaviours. The content is the vehicle for exercising the learning behaviours and the learning behaviours accelerate the content acquisition.

Using which learning behaviours?…Think types of learning behaviours

Which learning behaviour(s) will help these students get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, perseverance, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these students in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows

Say something like this to yourself .…My students need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using perseverance. Most of my students are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) perseverance approaches confidently.

Stage 3. What type of task/activity will stretch the learning?

Which type of task…Think types of task.

Pick up your thinking from stage 2;

My students need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using perseverance. Most of my students would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) perseverance approaches confidently.

And now think about the sort of task/activity you might develop/design so as to:

- orchestrate a problem-solving activity to enable students’ understanding of xyz content without telling them;

- intrigue them with something that is open to several interpretations;

- stimulate their curiosity;

- grab their attention…visually and aurally;

- allow them to stay stuck before you ask them how they are thinking;

- offer as a nudge to get them thinking differently that doesn’t give the answer away;

- leave it as a problem hanging in the air to which we will return later;

make links between the challenge, and what and how we are learning in this lesson.

The challenge isn’t about the inherent complexity of the subject matter but about how the content is orchestrated to encourage students to use their learning habits to resource their solution.

Think…what/how much information/content do I need to give/reveal? At what point? In what form? To what end?

Say something like this to yourself .…

my students need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using perseverance.
most of my students are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) perseverance approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their perseverance but assist them with the content…without me just telling them!

To summarise…the heart of the lesson

It’s the question ‘using which learning behaviours?’ that causes you to think differently about the lesson planning.

You ask – as always – what are the anticipated objectives/intentions?
The verbs in your resulting objectives will give you clues about the types of task/methodology that will get students there and the sorts of learning behaviours your students will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.

You are designing the task in a way that requires students to contribute their learning ‘powers’ / behaviours. The tasks you design will hook into their learning ‘powers’ and help them to improve them.

Say something like this to yourself:

I am going to think content, learning behaviour and task together:

Perseverance will help students to better access the content;
The aspect of perseverance (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) “Use relevant strategies to clarify tasks/outcomes and planning tools to avoid obstacles.” (Dealing with Challenge column, Green phase).
The type of task/activity that would best stretch both content and learning behaviour, intrigue, challenge, bring people together and give responsibility to students is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want students to do with it?

What do you think?

What strikes you about this way of planning with learning behaviours in mind?
Where are the potential stumbling blocks?
How will you decide which learning behaviour(s) you are going to foreground in your objectives?

Consider a lesson you are about to teach…

What is the content?
Which learning behaviour(s), if missing, would make accessing the content very difficult / impossible?
How could you blend reference to this learning behaviour(s) into the learning objectives?
Can you design a task that will help students to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?

Section 2: Building Perseverance friendly classrooms

Teachers as habit formers

As teachers we are in the habit-forming business. What we say, what we display on classroom walls, what we celebrate, praise or dismiss, what we model or how we design learning activities will all influence the ways in which pupils learn, perform and behave. Classroom cultures have a huge influence on pupils’ learning.

Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:

Support and encourage pupils to step into risky, challenging areas of learning;
Offer students the skills and motivation to create and achieve their own goals;
Help students to overcome and control the negative emotions of learning;
Build reflection in and on learning a regular feature of classroom activity;
Nourish, guide and support students to become confident independent learners.

Section 1: Perseverance and how it grows

1.1 What is 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.
Building Learning Power, Guy Claxton
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.”
Extract from Building Learning Power, by Guy Claxton

In a nutshell…

Perseverance is about;
Keeping going in the face of difficulties; channelling the energy of frustration productively; knowing what a slow and uncertain process learning often is.

A mature learner understands that real learning requires effort and persistence, relishes opportunities to struggle with challenge, and believes that with effort they can become a more effective learner.

What do you think?

Are you aware of students who prefer to succeed at ‘easy’ work ?
Are you aware of students who are over-anxious to get things ‘right’?
Does your reward system reward attainment over ‘having a go’?
Are you aware of parents who view success mainly in terms of achievement and progress?

Make a note of…

Students who remain optimistic when faced with challenge
Students who remain optimistic after making a mistake

1.2 How perseverance might build when we nurture it

Being perseverant isn’t something that switches on on good days and off on bad days. Perseverance grows and builds when it’s nurtured and supported. Furthermore, being perseverant involves gaining control of a range of linked skills and emotions. Take a look at how progression in Perseverance might grow across five components.

Cast your eye over the ‘big picture’ of growing Perseverance below. Then move on to finding out what the columns and the rows are all about.

Download grid as a pdf

1.3 Unpick the columns; what contributes to a readiness to Persevere?

The grid columns are things that might combine to make up the skills and attitudes of a Perseverer.

Overview
1) Dealing with 'stuckness'
2) Managing the learning environment
3) Self-talk
4) Dealing with challenge
5) Orientation to goals

Overview of the grid

Perseverance is about the way we stick at things even when they are difficult. It’s one of the most useful but neglected learning behaviours. What makes us able to persevere more and more usefully? We think several things come into play here. How you are willing and able to deal with being stuck, how you are able to manage distractions and manage the learning environment, how you relate to a challenge and whether you are influenced by goals whether they be your own or imposed by others. All these things contribute to being able to persevere. And lastly there’s your own little voice of self-awareness: what you say to yourself and how this influences your beliefs and values.

Take a closer look at what each column of the grid is about

1) Dealing with ‘stuckness’

How we deal with being stuck

Column 1 is all about way how we react when we get stuck; the strategies we have for overcoming it; being brave about not knowing something; how we cope with making mistakes; how we benefit from feedback about mistakes or being stuck; how we come to love mistakes, become curious about them and learn from them. There’s a long and winding road buried in the statements in this column and the role of the teacher is to ensure students make a significant start on this journey.

2) Managing the learning environment

How adept we are at maintaining focus

Column 2 is about how we manage our learning environment; the extent to which we can manage our own learning climate, ignore or manage distractions, regain focus if lost. Since much of students’ learning takes place in a classroom, they need to be able to manage and take advantage of that environment. They learn to understand just what distracts them from learning and why distractions can be both a help and a hindrance. How they need to learn to overcome the hard slog of practice and use their environment to help. How the learning environment can include all sorts of negativity from others and how they might overcome these disruptive emotions. The learning environment itself has many facets that can trip up and stall learning.

3) Self-talk

The voice of self awareness

Self-talk is what we say to ourselves as we learn. The statements capture what someone in each phase of the grid might be thinking. Students may use some of these phrases when talking with you, or in writing from time to time, but mostly self-talk goes on inside their heads. We have shown a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. Some relate to how emotionally brave they are, others to the strategies they have at their disposal. All such self-talk is important in building a persevering habit.

4) Dealing with challenge

The relationship we have with challenge

Column 4 is about how we relate to challenge: are we more excited by the prospect of triumphing over challenge, or more afraid of failing when faced with difficulty? Challenge needs to be included here with Perseverance because there is little need to persevere with easy, familiar activities. Students need to be challenged even for us to discover how or whether or not they persevere at all. So the growth of ways to cope with challenge helps to cement Perseverance too. Here they learn to enjoy a challenge and recognise the satisfaction of triumphing over difficulty. The phases include practical ideas like recognising risks, sorting out what the challenge is fundamentally about, and using tools to plan and avoid obstacles.

5) Orientation to goals

How our orientation to goals influences our determination to persevere.

Column 5 concerns goals; having goals can have an impact on our perseverance. Let’s face it, if you haven’t got a goal, or at least an interest in something, you are not likely to stick at it and channel your emotion positively to get it done. In the beginning students have little sense of goals or purpose but this can be turned into being able to imagine what something might look like. Later students can be helped to understand what a ‘do-able’ goal is and how to turn goals set by the teacher into a goal that they want to achieve – to make it their goal. A wanted goal is something you put effort into. Later phases in this development include being able to put your goals into a wider context, to realise that being able to do X or Y isn’t just about the here and now but has wider implications for life. This will certainly come into play when choosing options, for example. Do students go for something they like, enjoy and find easy or do they chose some options on the basis of their relevance to their future career? It’s a hard and grown up sort of decision to make. This orientation to goals all turns on how we design our own goals, blend these with the goals of others, and then pursue them with tenacity and independence.

What do you think?

What have you learned about Perseverance from these descriptions?
What have you had confirmed?
What surprised you?
How have your views changed?

Make a note of…

Any ideas for practical classroom experiments that these descriptions have triggered.
Which column your students are most secure in.

1.4 Unpick the rows; getting better at Perseverance

Of course the development of Perseverance does not grow neatly up each column or evenly across the phases in the grid. The five broad phases of dispositional growth (purple – orange) are affective ways in which people may be inclined to behave: we call this inclination ‘mindedness’.

Here is our interpretation of how Perseverance might grow.

Overview
Lacks
Receives
Responds
Values
Organises
Embodies

Meaning behind the phases

The phases are drawn from Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain.

Phase ‘Receives’ (purple) is about doing something because you are told or expected to.

Phase ‘Responds’ (blue) is about gaining interest and doing things more willingly.

Phase ‘Values’ (green) is a key phase since the student now sees the value of behaving in this way. It’s a win for them; to behave like this is in their interest. It’s in this phase that the behaviour becomes more secure.

Phase ‘Organises’ (yellow) is the phase in which the student capitalises on this ‘in their interest’ behaviour and gets themselves organised to use it positively.

Phase ‘Embodies’ (orange), known as ‘characterised’ in the original taxonomy. In this phase the student has made this behaviour their own. It has become part of their character; they can’t not do it and they have become highly skilled in doing it.

We urge you to see this progression as long term. Some phases will take years for people to work through; some will never be worked through. None of the phases are inevitable. There is a lifetime of development captured here. Nevertheless the role of a teacher or parent should surely be to encourage and enable this journey.

Lacks: Minded to give up easily and be needy for support

In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are minded to give up easily. There are all sorts of reasons for this; they may just be constantly distracted from the activity in hand; they may just need constant support from an adult; they may not know which resource might help them or they simply don’t know what stuck means, let alone how to get unstuck. Many students will need to be eased into learning how to learn in a classroom setting and how/what perseverant learners behave/do.

Receives: Minded to seek to stay in their comfort zone

In the Receives (purple) phase, students have made a big leap from having a negative mindset to a neutral one. Here they are inclined to play it safe, staying within their own comfort zone to ensure success and avoid perceived failure. They still need adult support to maintain focus and optimism when tackling tasks they perceive as difficult, but beginning to show willing to take more responsibility.

Responds: Minded to be willing to believe that effort will pay off

In the Responds (blue) phase students develop greater independence and are motivated by trying to reach achievable goals. They are realising that fear, the need for adult support, and distraction can be overcome by having/using more coping strategies and practical ideas to get them unstuck.

Values: Minded to recognise the point of persevering in learning

In the Values (green) phase the student has developed a strong belief that they can get better at learning. They become curious about mistakes and care about the goals they are trying to reach. They develop and use many practical strategies to assist them in dealing with challenge, being stuck and staying focused.

Organises: Minded to learn how to persevere more productively

In the Organises (yellow) phase the student organises themselves to get the job/task/problem done. Risk-taking is underpinned by sound strategies. Failures are analysed for greater understanding. They have accepted responsibility for their behaviour.

Embodies: Minded to see persevering as a way of being

In the Embodies (orange) phase, student behaviour is pervasive and consistent, predictable and importantly characteristic of the learner. Persevering effectively i.e. using all the contributory aspects, is now part of their character.

What do you think?

What has struck you about the act of Perseverance having read the descriptions above?
Which phase do you operate in?
What makes you say that?

Make a note of…

What you might do to assist your students to make headway in their Perseverance behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.

Activity 1: Where are my students now?

Download grid to colour in
Colour in the cells where you think your students are secure.
Draw a red line across the grid to denote where you think most of the school’s students could and should reach by the time they leave.
Please take the results of these tasks with you to the Professional Learning Team session shown in Section 4.

Moving my practice on

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

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.

NEEDS creating

Stop

Solving problems for them

Telling them what they need to do to solve a problem

Reminding them of similar problems already encountered – this is their job!

Doing the reasoning for them

Making all of the decisions about how best to solve a given problem

Start

Identifying important information in problems and separating it from the irrelevant

Requiring students to show their workings as a visual demonstration of their logical train of thought

Exploring flaws in arguments

Encouraging students justify what they say / think

Asking ‘have you done something like this before?’

Modelling how you solve problems

Start slowly

Creating problems where students need to work out a conclusion from partial facts or clues

Introducing or using thinking tools that support disciplined, methodical thought.

Enabling / requiring students to present their solutions to others

Setting problems that require the higher-order thinking skills of analysing, synthesising, justifying, and evaluating.

Experiment with

Team, rather than individual, problem solving

Playing Devil’s advocate

Introducing new information mid-way through a problem to force a re-think

Offering choice about how to present their solutions

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.

Developing my talk for . . . critical thinking and problem solving

Developing your learning language

Here is a range of things you can say to nudge critical thinking and problem solving. 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 critical thinking and problem solving gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

My learning talk nudges to encourage a critical thinking, problem solving outlook

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

To ensure students do the thinking for themselves, use phrases like these to nudge them to:

Utilise effective reasoning skills:

What assumptions are you making? Are they sound?
Can you explain it in clear steps from start to finish?
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?
Are you convinced? How will you convince me?

Have the skills and self-belief to wrestle with difficulty:

Keep going – I think you are getting somewhere.
Go back one step and have another go.
It’s tricky, but that is how it meant to be!

Question received wisdom:

Do you believe that?
Is the evidence reliable?
Why do you think (s)he said / did / wrote that?

Identify the nature of the problem to be solved:

What are you being asked to do?
What information do you have?
Is all of the information equally important?

Make links to previously experienced / solved problems:

What does this remind you of?
What did you do when you were faced with something similar?
What might trip you up?

Plan how to address the problem:

How will you tackle it?
What do you need to do? First? Next?
What might stop you being successful?

Monitor progress:

How is it going?
Are you on track?
Are you happy that you have solved the problem?

Engage with others to resolve differences of opinion:

How will you ensure that everyone agrees?
You will all have to give ground.
Are you all happy with this outcome?

What do you think?

Which of these problem solving 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?
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 meta-cognitive self-talk.
Any positive or negative impact of these problem solving behaviours.

Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage a critical thinking, problem solving frame of mind

Firstly… make students aware of critical thinking, problem solving…when, where, why.
Then… explore critical thinking and problem solving a little more through the language of learning
Try… using critical thinking and problem solving as a lesson starter to tune students into using it
Then start… blending problem solving into the way you teach the content. Use specific critical thinking and problem solving strategies to deepen content understanding.
Ensure… students reflect on the success or otherwise of their problem solving mindframe.

These are the first things you come to on net when you ask for problem solving skills. I think we need to consider some of these. Have we explained what problem solving really is?

7 steps….which obviously need specific skills or behaviours.

Identify the issues.
Understand everyone’s interests.
List the possible solutions (options)
Evaluate the options.
Select an option or options.
Document the agreement(s).
Agree on contingencies, monitoring, and evaluation.

These are the skills

Some key problem-solving skills include:

Active listening
Analysis
Research
Creativity
Communication
Dependability
Decision making
Team-building

1. Making students aware of Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

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

Helping students to develop their reasoning skills

Primary

The beginnings of evidence-based reasoning

A strategy for encouraging children to explain what they are thinking. Whole class or large groups of 10/15 children. You will need a PE hoop and a large assortment of small objects from the classroom and home.

Sit pupils in a circle and place all the items on the floor inside the hoop in the middle of the circle.
Explain that they will take turns to choose 2 objects from inside the hoop which ‘go together’. Tell them there are no right or wrong pairs as long as they can explain why the two they choose might go together.
Give an example: Choose the knife and fork and give your reason: “These go together because I use them both to eat my dinner.”
Encourage pupils to choose different items each time and reward good reasoning. Look out for cause and effect connectives and imaginative reasons.
Use phrases like: “That’s a good reason” and “You explained that really clearly.”
Keep insisting that they say why by using the word ‘because’.
Lift the level of challenge by choosing two seemingly dissimilar objects and asking for something that links them.

At every step, the focus is on explaining what they are thinking and why.

Secondary

Use mathematical brain teasers

The Tower of Hanoi

The Tower of Hanoi is a well-known problem. The task is to move all of the disks, one by one, from pole#1 to pole #3 as shown above. The only constraint is that you can never put a larger disk on top of a smaller one. The minimum number of moves for the above 3-disk problem is 7 – can you see why?

Scaffolding the problem:

Can you move the disks from pole 1 to pole 3?
What is the minimum number of moves needed?
Can you explain why this is the minimum?
How many moves if there are 4 disks?
Can you generalise the problem for ‘n’ disks?

Primary

Adopt a character to make learning visible

Problem Solving

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who/that exhibits the best features of good problem solving. [Go to section 1 of this module if you need some ideas for this]

Talk about the character until your children become familiar with its attributes. Leave the character (actual /picture) on tables when you have set a problem solving task.

Secondary

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.

2. Exploring the language of Problem Solving

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Talk about the process of problem solving

Catch them solving problems and use the opportunity to discuss what was and was not successful.

Use language like:

What did you have to do?
How did you decide how to tackle it?
Had you seen a problem like this before?
Did you check that it was going ok?
Can you explain what you did?
Can you explain why you did that?
Are you sure that you solved the problem?
How else might you have tackled it?
What do good problem solvers do?

Secondary

A way with words

REPLACE WITH ‘Critical Thinking and Problem Solving’ in the centre. Add ‘Sort out what to do’ on one of the arms, ‘Seek evidence’ on another

Collect words that tell you how people learn to solve problems.

Explore well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Getting to the bottom of it
You are either part of the problem or part of the solution

3. Using a Ranking activity as a lesson starter to build evidence-based reasoning

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 problem solve.

Primary and Secondary

Ranking to trigger evidence based reasoning

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; social networking sites etc.

NEEDS SOME PRIMARY EGs above

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 get deeper into a lesson you will need activities which, by their very nature, will develop students’ critical thinking and problem solving skills AND their understanding of the content.

Here is an idea where, by using critical thinking and problem solving, students will gain an understanding of the content AND will develop a problem solving outlook.

4. Focusing on explaining why you think what you are thinking as a learning strategy

Draw out the problem solving behaviours 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 explain and justify their viewpoint.

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

5. An activity to highlight and strengthen Problem Solving

Design specific activities to highlight and strengthen the behaviour

A Problem Solving card sort challenge.

The 18 cards suggest different steps in the problem solving process.

In 4’s, can groups decide on the best order to tackle these tasks?

[The blank cards are in case you, or they, wish to add additional steps]

This is not a simple task, as most of the cards that start ‘Check’ or ‘Monitor’ need to be ongoing rather than done just once. Having tried to put the 18 in order and come to understand that checking points may indicate a need to go back and start afresh, use the ideas on the cards as the basis for a problem solving flow chart. You might need to help to structure the flow chart by suggesting some overarching sections like: Getting going; Doing it; Checking it; Showing it.

And finally, to further meta-cognitive thinking, challenge students to assess how they solved the problem of creating a flow chart against their own flow chart!

Download card sort activity

6. Reflecting in order to learn from experience

Primary

Make reflecting on Critical Thinking and Problem solving part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

Titles

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving learning mat

How well did I solve problems today?

I decided to . . . in order to . . .
I explained my thinking to . . .
I supported my view with evidence when I . . . .
I changed my mind because . . .
I convinced . . . that . . .
I sorted out how to . . . .
I found an error in . . . .
I thought about how to tackle . . . .

INSERT MAT HERE

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

Getting better at Problem Solving

The trajectory from novice to expert problem solver may look something like this:

Ask yourself:

Where are your learners now?

Which behaviours are secure? Which behaviours have yet to become secure?

Securing which single aspect of problem solving would make the biggest difference to your students?

How might you achieve this?

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

Can you see a use for any of the suggested activities?
Have you raised awareness of critical thinking and problem solving with your students?
Does your class have an agreed set of good critical thinking / problem solving 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.

Getting the classroom climate right

Building effective learning behaviours is about creating a culture in classrooms that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable young people to face difficulty calmly, confidently 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 critical thinking and problem solving?

In the classroom that is a learning-friendly environment within which critical thinking and problem solving can grow, there are changes in the relationships; what is discussed; how learning is constructed; and in what is celebrated.

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

The changes in relationships include:

Problem solving is a learner responsibility: When solving problems, students are expected to establish the possible options, to evaluate them, and to select from them, for themselves.
Critical curiosity is a learner responsibility: Students are expected to use their own critical curiosity to explore problems, sometimes of their own creation.
Review points are student led: Responsibility for summarising / distilling what has been learned rests with students, and they lead review points in lessons.
Students pursue their own lines of enquiry: Students ask, and seek to answer, their own questions, rather than those posed by their teachers or dictated by the curriculum. Increasingly they take charge of the direction of their learning.

The changes in what is talked about include:

Students talk about the future: Students talk about what they could do / should do
Rigour matters: Students create logical arguments using precise language, explaining and justifying their thinking which is backed with sound evidence.
Patterns of difficulty are explored: Students discuss similarities and differences between problems. Successful strategies are identified and applied on other problems when applicable.
Relevance is a topic of conversation: Students discuss what is and what is not relevant/important when problem solving.

The changes in how learning is constructed include:

Plan and Review: There are established routines for planning and revising which are used when students are problem solving.
Starting with the end in mind: Lessons contain opportunities for re-visiting prior experience to identify future learning needs.
Enquiry-based learning opportunities: Lessons are constructed so as to stimulate students to undertake enquiry and research, to identify and solve enquiries of their own creation.
Empathy is encouraged: Tasks are designed to stimulate disagreement that needs to be resolved so that a negotiated, consensus view can emerge.
Challenge is high, perseverance is essential: Students are encouraged and expected to tackle taxing problems that are designed to stretch their thinking.

The changes in how learning is celebrated include:

Display shows changes of mind: Display includes early / failed attempts, first drafts, work in progress towards the finished solution.
Display focuses on the ‘how’ of learning: Displays of work show the logical processes that sit behind completed work.
‘Problems’ are re-framed: Problems are seen as learning opportunities rather than difficulties to be resolved.
Precision, Accuracy and Logical thinking are praised: Sound reasoning / convincing lines of argument / evidence-based assertions / attention to detail / the precise use of language are noticed, commented on and rewarded.
Strategies on display: Successful problem solving strategies are displayed for ongoing reference.

[So the outer ring of the culture wheel then contains only the text in bold]

Title

A Learning-Friendly Culture for Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

INSERT CULTURE WHEEL HERE

What do you think?

What do your answers suggest?
How does your classroom culture contribute to students’ reactions or approaches to critical thinking and problem solving?
Is this broadly negative or positive?
What insightful ‘Ah Ha’ moments did you have as you read through the list?
How have these changed your view of critical thinking and problem solving?

Make a note of…

Any ideas that look as if they might help students to become better at critical thinking and solving problems.
An idea on the list you want to start doing.
An idea that interests you, but you are uncertain what it means or how you might do it.

To be added somewhere . . .

Relating

a) I tell my students what I am thinking and why
b) I encourage my students to tell each other what they are thinking and why

a) I offer my students clear explanations of what is going on
b) My students offer me clear explanations of what is going on

a) I monitor the quality of my students’ reasoning skills and advise them how to improve their explanations
b) I offer my students the opportunity to monitor the quality of their reasoning skills and set their own targets for development

Talking

a) I expect my students to support what they say with evidence
b) I encourage my students to seek counter evidence and to change their views if necessary

a) I encourage my students to describe and explain what they are doing
b) I encourage my students to describe/explain what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they are doing it

a) I explain with clarity
b) My students and I have devoted time to exploring how they might build convincing arguments

Constructing

a) When I teach, I am in the habit of telling my students what will happen
b) I build time in to my lessons to enable students to make predictions about what will/might happen

a) I provide well-rounded explanations of the content matter
b) I use thinking routines to encourage my students to explain, support, justify and prove their thinking

a) I design activities that help my students to understand the matter in hand
b) I design activities that help my students to explain the matter in hand

Celebrating

a) I praise correct ‘work’
b) I praise work that is both correct and carefully explained/justified

a) Display illustrates what my students think
b) Display illustrates what my students think and why they think it

a) I praise my students for creating logical arguments
b) I praise my students for spotting, and correcting, flaws in seemingly logical arguments

What is . . . good critical thinking and problem solving?

What do we mean by Critical Thinking and Problem Solving?

Successful Futures identifies Critical Thinking and Problem Solving as one of the four Integral Skills for modern life and work and describes it as:

marshalling critical and logical processes to analyse and understand situations and develop responses and solutions

with the associated sub-skills of:

analysing and understanding; asking questions; evaluating information and situations; being objective when looking at opposite views; challenging perceptions; identifying potential solutions; justifying decisions; identifying and developing arguments.

The two aspects, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving are not, however, inextricably linked. Critical thinking does not always result in problem solving, and problem solving does not always require critical thinking. That said, they do often appear together, and research suggests that effective problem solving is an indicator of sound critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking means making reasoned judgements that are logical and well-thought out. It is a way of thinking in which you don’t simply accept all arguments and conclusions you are exposed to but rather have an attitude involving questioning such arguments and conclusions.

Problem solving is the process of working through details of a problem to reach a solution. Problem solving may include mathematical or systematic operations and can be a gauge of an individual’s critical thinking skills. Equally the problem may be the need to resolve a disagreement, to build consensus, or to restore harmony – the solution to problems such as these may require a degree of critical thinking, but depend inevitably the ‘softer’ social skills of empathy and compromise.

Much as innovation is the application of imagination to find creative solutions to real-world problems, so problem solving is frequently the application of critical thinking to find well-reasoned, logical solutions to real-world problems.

What does being a critical thinking, problem solver involve?

A well formed critical thinking, problem solving habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Utilise effective reasoning skills: building persuasive lines of argument to explain and justify; seeking evidence and counter evidence; applying a wide range of reasoning skills appropriately, ie analysing and synthesising; presenting outcomes logically and persuasively.
Have the skills and self-belief to wrestle with difficulty: having a range of strategies for overcoming inevitable setbacks and difficulties without external support; believing that they can find a solution, and persevering in order to find it.
Question received wisdom: questioning assumptions; having a healthy scepticism; posing hypothetical questions; being sufficiently curious to enjoy seeking and finding a solution.
Identify the nature of the problem to be solved: distilling what the problem is actually about; sorting the essential information from the peripheral; gaining a clear view of what they are trying to achieve.
Make links to previously experienced / solved problems to select and implement a strategy: connecting to prior problem solving experiences; recognising patterns of difficulty to trigger previously successful strategies; building a repertoire of general problem solving strategies that are widely applicable; choosing between available problem solving strategies; deciding what needs to be done, in what order; foreseeing potential obstacles; gaining a sense of what a successful outcome will be like.
Monitor progress: keeping an eye on progress against the success criteria; changing tack if the chosen strategy needs to be modified.
Engage with others to resolve differences of opinion: finding ways to compromise and build consensus; seeking win/win solutions.

Spotting the Critical Thinking, Problem Solvers in your classes

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

Being a learning powered teacher means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

Create from below

Titles

Good learning habits – Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

Your potentially good critical thinking, problem solvers are likely to:

Text:

Tend to look for details.

Work out which information is important

Identify what needs to be done

Think ahead before leaping into action

Work things out step by step

Create a logical line of argument

Adopt a ‘can-do’ attitude

Seek evidence to support their views

Question assumptions

Spot flaws in lines of argument

Show their workings / thinking

Monitor the extent to which they are solving / have solved the problem

Present their thinking with clarity

Understand the need to balance logic and emotion

What do you think?

How many students come to mind when looked at through the lens of critical thinking and problem solving?
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 problem solving characteristics help these students to be better learners?
If the question had been about students without these characteristics, what would you have discovered?

Make a note of…

Those groups or classes that seem to have lots of good critical thinking, problem solving characteristics.
How you think you might capitalise on this.

3. Moving my practice on

Teachers are in the habit forming business

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how your classroom culture helps students to form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Which aspects of your classroom culture are helpful in this respect, and which are perhaps less so? After all, if you are unable or unwilling to make changes to your classroom culture, learners are unlikely to change how they respond to it!

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 classroom?
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 classroom culture and on your students.

Ideas to practise

3. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage a learning-friendly culture that supports the three aspects of Celebrating and Valuing Learning.

For the aspects of Celebrating and Valuing Learning:

A couple of quick wins for Growing Learning Habits to try immediately;
A big idea to shift classroom culture in relation to Growing Learning Habits.;
A couple of quick wins for Re-defining Failure to try immediately;
A big idea to shift classroom culture in relation to Re-defining Failure.
A couple of quick wins for Display to try immediately;
A big idea to shift classroom culture in relation to Display.

1. Quick wins to Grow Learning Habits.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Celebrate growth in learning behaviours

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

Even everyday behaviours such as listening to a partner are being recognised.

It is in this way that you show its importance while at the same time alerting pupils to what effective learners do.

Secondary

Getting better at Collaboration

Here are 4 collaboration Rating Wheels. In each case, the skills become progressively harder as you move round the circle clockwise from 12 o’clock.

Use the wheel that feels ‘right’ for your students – and by ‘right ‘ we mean the wheel where their skills are fairly secure at 12 to 3 o’clock, and increasingly flakey thereafter. Use it to help students to analyse what they might do to improve their collaborative behaviours.

Primary

Capturing progress in learning behaviours

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

Around the ladders, pupils are self-assessing and explaining which of the skills they believe they exhibit, and offering evidence for when and how they did it.

Progression and reflection in action!

Secondary

Helping learners to reflect on how they are improving as a learner

To reflect on how their learning behaviour is improving, use phrases like:

What are you doing in order to be successful?
Which of the learning behaviours are your strong points?
As a class, we need to get better at (capacity ) How might we do that?
What do good (collaborators, listeners, imaginers, questioners etc.) do?
That’s an interesting way to talk about your learning!
What do you think you need to get better at?
How are you going to get better at . . . . ?
How will you know if you have improved as a learner?
I think you are getting to know yourself really well as a learner.

2. A big idea to Grow Learning Habits.

Primary and Secondary

Growing learning habits

The whole point is to enable young people to become better learners, to grow a supple learning mind, to become a life long learner. So the growth of learning behaviours is attended to closely. Successful growth or progression means that not only can students make use of reflection, or imagination, or managing their distractions, but that over time they spontaneously make more and better use of these learning skills and tools and secure them as habits. It is this type of growth, improvement that is acknowledged, recognised, celebrated or praised in some way.

Learning powered classrooms look out for and celebrate three dimensions of progress:

the frequency and strength of the habit – how often it is used spontaneously as the need arises;
the scope of its use – the range of contexts within which the skill is used (from the familiar to new uncharted territory);
the skilfulness of the habit – how the skill becomes more subtle, more appropriate to circumstances, more sophisticated.

In other words, students ask more and more questions not only in one subject but across all subjects and moreover they ask increasingly better, more searching, more generative questions. They take a questioning stance to learning.

Learning behaviours take time to recognise and grow, and it’s important to develop maps or progression ‘trajectories’ that surface the steps between, for example, the natural curiosity of a three year-old and the sophisticated skill-set of the consummate questioner. The trajectories allow teachers to identify, nudge and design activity to help students build progressively the fine grain learning behaviours of the effective learner.

What is being celebrated here is how young people are getting better at how, when and where they are using their learning behaviours. It’s the Building bit of Building Learning Power. There would be little point in introducing such learning behaviours if we didn’t attend to having them grow.

Ask yourself:

Are pupils in our school becoming increasingly skilful as learners during their time with us?

What evidence do we have for this?

3. Quick wins to Re-define Failure.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Mistake of the week

Create a display called ‘Mistake of the Week’. Use it as an opportunity to identify ‘good mistakes’ and to discuss the misconceptions behind them.

Offer a range of examples of good mistakes as lesson starters for students to find and discuss.

The underlying message is that learning means making mistakes, and that the mistakes themselves are learning opportunities. And, by implication, that if you are not making mistakes, then you are not really learning, just practising what you could do already.

Secondary

Mistake Quota

Tell your students that you expect them to make, for example, 3 mistakes in a given lesson. Naturally the level of challenge needs to be sufficiently high that mistakes are a possibility.

If they do not make the quota mistakes, it is a sign that the learning was too easy and that they should be asking for harder, more challenging material.

What you are building is a recognition that mistakes are a natural part of learning; that learning without mistakes is not really learning; that students have the responsibility of monitoring their own levels of challenge, and seeking more challenge when necessary.

Primary

Help students to change their talk, and hence their thinking, about failure.

Shift the talk . . .

From ‘Challenge’ to ‘Interesting challenge’.

From ‘Mistake’ to ‘Learning opportunity’.

From ‘It’s hard’ to ‘It’s tricky’.

From ‘Too hard’ to ‘Tricky learning builds my brain.’

From ‘I can’t do it’ to ‘I can’t do it yet’.

From ‘I’m stuck’ to ‘I’m about to learn’.

From ‘I can’t . . . ‘ to ‘How can I . . . .?’

From ‘I’m good at this’ to ‘This is too easy for me’.

From ‘I don’t know how to’ to ‘I’m learning how to’.

The whole point is to shift the pessimistic, ‘glass half empty’ outlook towards an optimistic, ‘already half full’ attitude.

Secondary

Putting a focus on mistakes

Without making mistakes the chances are that students are coasting and insufficiently challenged. Thus mistakes are the hallmark of challenge. You are aiming at a Goldilocks number of mistakes. Too many and the challenge is too difficult and dispiriting. None or too few and the challenge is too easy. Just right means the student is at a level that pushes them to the edge of what they can do.

The ultimate aim is to help students view mistakes as an essential and valuable part of the learning process. We need to ensure students have a positive view of mistakes, they give access to our thinking and this can be used to change what we do; to enhance our understanding. Being able to overcome mistakes is an important part of perseverance and dealing with challenge.

Putting a focus on mistakes includes:

Praising students for making mistakes
Asking students to tell you about the mistakes they have made
Expecting students to tell you when they have stopped making mistakes i.e. they are needing harder work
Talking about your own mistakes and what you learned from them
Basing making their choice of tasks on the number of mistakes the student makes…it becomes a reference point for quantifying the degree of challenge.

Here’s a couple of ideas to introduce and discuss:

Challenges are food for the brain.
Mistakes are the building blocks of understanding

4. A big idea to Re-define Failure.

Primary and Secondary

Re-defining classroom learning; new ways to view learning

“The hallmark of successful individuals is that they love learning, they seek challenges, they value effort, and they persist in the face of obstacles.” (Carol Dweck, 2000)

Mistakes or errors

‘Errors represent invaluable aids with the potential to help us learn. When we see failure in a new light, success becomes a new and exhilarating concept’. Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success. Matthew Syed

Making mistakes, and more importantly covering them up – or rubbing them out – is now viewed as wasteful. Mistakes are a natural part of learning and recognised as valuable; something to learn from, something to improve on, something to change and try new ways, taking a risk and then learning from it if it doesn’t work. Mistakes are having a makeover not just in classrooms but in wide range of progressive institutions.

Redefining failure is and will be an essential part of reversing pupils’ fixed mindsets

Stuck

Similarly ‘stuck’ is promoted as an interesting place to be rather than a place of shame. Getting stuck, coming against a brick wall, not knowing what to do next is a natural part of learning.If you don’t get stuck the learning is probably not challenging enough. Being stuck is where real learning begins. Pupils who never experience being stuck or struggle with learning can become fragile learners unable to cope emotionally with the inevitable difficulty of learning and life.

Viewing learning as interesting, challenging, stimulating and worthy of effort needs to feed into changing pupils’ fixed mindsets

Effort

Effort is a word we use often without really thinking about what it means. What do children understand by ‘effort’ or ‘try harder’? Using learning power language helps teachers to be much more specific about what sort of effort they suggest pupils make. As one teacher put it;

‘I often used to just tell students to make more effort, and got blank stares back. But when I started using Building Learning Power language I realised I could be much more specific about “making more effort.” I could turn my prompts and nudges into really useful statements. So now I watch students carefully through the Building Learning Power lens and say things like “how could you use your imagination to…?”, Or, “what questions might be helpful to take you further with this?”. I’ve started defining the sort of effort I want them to make’

Praise

The negative value of too much general ability praise, uncovered by Carole Dweck in her research into Growth Mindsets, has caused teachers to think differently about giving praise. Suggested shifts in giving praise include:

Praise the effort, not the ‘ability’;
Praise the process not the outcome;
Praise in specifics of learning behaviours, not generalities;
Praise privately;
Praise authentically, and not too much;
Praise should be seen as separate from feedback; (praise is evaluation)
If using stickers, awards, treats etc (concrete tokens of recognition), make sure they’re given for accomplishing specific process or product goals.

Ask yourself:

How do I treat ‘stuck’, ‘mistakes’ and praise in my classroom?

How much have we re-defined failure?

5. Quick wins to Display Learning.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Displaying learning goals

All the students in this classroom own a colour piece of A4 paper on the classroom wall. There is an envelope attached to the paper which contains a piece of card cut up into five pieces. Each piece of card has a student generated ‘learning how’ goal. For example;

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

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

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

Secondary

Learning Lines

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

An alternative way of bringing the growth of learning behaviours to students’ attention?

Also, an important message about what the school believes is important. Take a look around the public circulation areas in your own school – what do they reveal, intentionally or otherwise, about the school’s priorities?

Primary

Display to celebrate the use of learning behaviours…..in this case Noticing

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

A simple display that reminds pupils of the learning behaviour that they have been using and link it to the curriculum content to put it in context. It could become part of a larger display capturing the different learning behaviours that are used over the course of, say, a term.

Secondary

Create displays to highlight changes and revisions.

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

6. A big idea to Display Learning.

Primary and Secondary

Learning on display

In a learning powered classroom learning will be on display in what you will see, hear and feel. In other words learning is visible in all sorts of ways.

You might find several ways of acknowledging learning on the walls:

‘If – then’ display example, Heathcoat Primary school Tiverton

useful prompts for use when stuck;
a list of agreed ground rules for the social habits the class have created and are focusing on;
displays of pupils’ efforts showing drafts and examples of work in progress to emphasise the idea of learning as a process;
a humorous display of mistakes of the week;
a display showing a partly completed class plan for their next school assembly;
a five point scale pupils have devised about levels of distraction;
some If -Then statements to encourage habit formation;
whiteboard display of icons showing the learning behaviours they are focusing just now;
photographs taken by some of the students which capture their peers displaying some learning behaviours;
statements showing what superpower learners say;
a ladder or learning line showing descriptions of how students might feel about the activities and their learning stretch just completed (low, good, high, overstretched) around which the students gather at the end of a session to reflect on their efforts.

At the side of the room there may be a review table with a label “Put your learning here if you want to come back to it, improve it or review it”. There may be a pile of ‘learning journals’ which children use to illustrate and record the difficulties they are having, or indeed the triumphs.

You will see students moving freely around the classroom selecting resources they think they may need for their tasks. On the a flip chart is today’s selection of tasks at different levels of challenge, but all challenging, for pupils to choose from. Some children are working on their own, some with their teacher, some in teams. They are focused, engaged, enthusiastic and excited about what they are doing. There’s no hint of anxiety or pressure or boredom. They are learning to handle uncertainty, learn together and embrace challenge. No one has told them ‘this is hard’, they are knowingly using their imagination, generative questioning, different sorts of resources, listening for the key points and so forth.

The language is enquiring, propelling the learning forward…what if, how come, now what.; every so often a group will stop and check if they are on track and if they need to try another way to tackle their task; at the end of the session one group reflects on their learning process and its outcomes with their teacher, other groups do this for themselves.

The classroom is humming with the language and imagery of learning. The natural process of learning has been unearthed and given high status. Attention to the environment can be a powerful culture builder. An environment the provokes curiosity and stimulates learning becomes a ‘teacher’ in itself.

Ask yourself:

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

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

Have you considered the impact of what we celebrate and what we value has on classroom culture?
Which aspects of celebrating and valuing learning are already embedded in your classroom culture?
Which aspects might need attention?
To what extent does display reinforce or undermine your commitment to building better learners?

Make a note of…

One thing you could easily do differently in your own classroom to further celebrate and value the process of learning.
How you will monitor the impact of this change.

2. Ideas to practise

Practical ideas to encourage the celebration of the learning process.

Primary and Secondary

The ideas presented can, on the whole, be used in both primary and secondary phases with minor amendments.

In the early stages re-defining learning more as a quest might simply include:

ensuring students (and parents) understand ‘being stuck’ as an interesting, not shameful, position, with tactics to get unstuck;
ensuring students (and yourself and parents) understand what is meant by effort;
ensuring students (and parents) understand the real value of mistakes;
celebrating students’ progress in learning behaviours.

1. Growth in learning habits.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Observe – learn – observe.

Observe children undertaking collaborative activities, analyse the results, work on improving collaborative behaviours and observe again to look for improvements. Things to observe about collaboration might include:

taking turns
making a plan
sharing ideas
helping others
listening actively
identifying what a task calls for
setting realistic goals
and so on…using the tool in the secondary box

This radar diagram shows the results of a learning enquiry by Frizington School in Cumbria. The red zone shows the first set of results where they were somewhat shocked by their children being such poor collaborators. The blue zone plots the same behaviours 6 weeks later.

Read their fascinating story here link to blog

Secondary

Grow collaborative behaviours by monitoring them

Here are 4 collaboration Rating Wheels. In each case, the collaborative behaviours become progressively harder as you move round the circle clockwise from 12 o’clock.

Use a wheel to help students to understand the many and varied aspects of collaboration, or to self-evaluate how their collaborative learning behaviours and to set targets for future development, or for a group to reflect on how they performed as a team and what they might do better next time, or even as a group-work observation tool.

But – select the wheel that feels ‘right’ for your students – and by ‘right ‘ we mean the wheel where their behaviours are fairly secure at 12 to 3 o’clock, and increasingly flakey thereafter.

Primary

Use student friendly tools to discuss progression

This tool asks students to rate their perseverance levels for different subjects and activities and try to identify why they stick at some more than others. They are also asked to consider their perseverance when undertaking hobbies, leisure and sporting activities.

Tools such as this encourage discussions about:

What made them give up
Whether they would have succeeded had they carried on
How they felt when they were struggling
What made you feel it was worth going on trying.

Secondary

Use student friendly tools to discuss progression

A similar tool but this time about making links. Here students are asked to look at the sort of links they are aware of and how often they tend to use such link making behaviours.

This tool encourages discussion about:

making links between one subject and another
whether and how they link previous and new knowledge
how they link real world experiences and facts from book learning
How the use of analogies can help in link making

Primary

Make learning goals public

All the students in this classroom own a coloured piece of A4 paper on the classroom wall. There is an envelope attached to the paper which contains a piece of card cut up into five pieces. Each piece of card has a student generated ‘learning how’ goal. For example:

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

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

Secondary

Setting targets for learning behaviour growth.

Effective learning targets.

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

If we want students to grow their learning behaviours we need to help them to think much more closely about the ‘hows’ and the ‘whats’. Motivation research proposes an effective solution to this called ‘if-then’ planning.

‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. It is the bit that reminds you about the target.

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

So ‘making more effort‘ might become:

If I am finding something hard, then I will try an idea from the ‘stuck poster’

‘Asking more questions in class’ might become:

If I am finding something confusing, then I will ask a friend a question about it.

A simple. do-able target (the Then) preceded by an alert to remember the target (the If).

How might this idea impact on the targets you set, the feedback you offer, and the reports that you write?

Primary

Capture progress in learning behaviours

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

Beside the ladders, students are writing about themselves and where they are now. They are:

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

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

Secondary

Make learning lines public

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

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

2. Re-define failure.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Celebrate mistakes

One dramatic way of celebrating mistakes might be to create a display entitled ‘Mistake of the Week’. Make its creation as an opportunity to identify ‘good mistakes’ and to discuss the misconceptions behind them.

To make mistakes more familiar you might offer a range of examples of ‘good’ mistakes as lesson starters. Ask students to find, correct and discuss the mistakes and how they have improved on them

The underlying message is that real learning always involves making mistakes, and that the mistakes themselves are learning opportunities. By implication, if you are not making mistakes, then you are not really learning, but rather just practising what you could do already.

Secondary

Give mistakes a status

Tell your students that you expect them to make, for example, 3 mistakes in a given lesson. Naturally the level of challenge needs to be sufficiently high that mistakes are a possibility.

If they do not make the quota mistakes, it may be a sign that the learning is too easy and that they should be asking for/selecting harder, more challenging material.

Primary

Help students to change their thinking about failure.

Turn the lens around, make it clear that we FAIL before we succeed, shift the thinking . . .
From ‘Challenge’ to ‘Interesting challenge’
From ‘Mistake’ to ‘Learning opportunity’.
From ‘It’s hard’ to ‘It’s tricky’.
From ‘Too hard’ to ‘Tricky learning builds my brain.’
From ‘I can’t do it’ to ‘I can’t do it yet’.
From ‘I’m stuck’ to ‘I’m about to learn’.
From ‘I can’t . . . ‘ to ‘How can I . . . .?’
From ‘I’m good at this’ to ‘This is too easy for me’.
From ‘I don’t know how to’ to ‘I’m learning how to’.

This is about Growth Mindset and self-belief, challenging that little voice that says ‘I can’t . . . ‘

Create a display around these ideas to initiate a learning conversation to shift the pessimistic, ‘glass half empty’ outlook towards an optimistic, ‘already half full’ attitude?

Secondary

Clarify the meaning of effort

Teachers often call for more effort from students but what do we mean by this?

Effort: it’s about focusing and re-focusing the mind on the learning you are doing. Something is directing students’ attention.

For example the following could be used to focus the mind (making an effort):

looking for different strategies;
using trial and error to deal with challenge;
using success criteria to direct what you do;
asking for feedback on how to improve/apply;
attending to your working memory by
- freeing-up space via scraps of paper;
- verbalising thoughts;
- scaffolding your tasks;.
recalling show you solved this last time;
using motivating self-talk to carry you through.

What would you add to this list of mind focusing learning activities? What other features might effort exhibit?

Primary and Secondary

Put a positive focus on mistakes

Without making mistakes the chances are that students are either coasting or are insufficiently challenged. Thus mistakes are the hallmark of challenge. You are aiming for a Goldilocks number of mistakes. Too many and the challenge is too difficult and dispiriting. None or too few and the challenge is too easy. Just right means the student is at a level that pushes them to the edge of what they can do.

Putting a focus on mistakes includes:

Praising students for making mistakes
Asking students to tell you about the mistakes they have made
Expecting students to tell you when they have stopped making mistakes i.e. they are needing harder work
Talking about your own mistakes and what you learned from them
Basing making their choice of tasks on the number of mistakes the student makes…it becomes a reference point for quantifying the degree of challenge.

Here’s a couple of ideas to introduce and discuss:

Challenges are food for the brain.
Mistakes are the building blocks of understanding

3. Put learning on display.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

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

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

A simple display that reminds students of the learning behaviour that they have been using and link it to the curriculum content to put it in context. It could become part of a larger display capturing the different learning behaviours that are used over the course of, say, a term.

Secondary

Create displays to highlight changes and revisions.

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

Primary

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

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

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

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

Secondary

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

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

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

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

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

Primary and Secondary

Find or make inspirational quotes that reflect positive learning messages.

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

Have you considered the impact of what we celebrate and what we value has on classroom culture?
Which aspects of celebrating and valuing learning are already embedded in your classroom culture?
Which aspects might need attention?
To what extent does display reinforce or undermine your commitment to building better learners?

Make a note of…

One thing you could easily do differently in your own classroom to further celebrate and value the process of learning.
How you will monitor the impact of this change.

1. What is . . celebrating and valuing learning behaviours?

The key idea

The key features of this cultural shift are:

The process of learning, rather than the performance that emanates from this process, being made the object of attention
The underlying values about learning becoming visible through what is enabled, 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.
- Metacognitive behaviours being given a place in the learning process
Learning behaviours are used more often and more skilfully, being nudged and recognised . . . .
So that the growth of learning habits is being attended to closely.

There are three aspects to the cultural shift:

Growing learning habits

The whole point of focusing attention on the ‘how’ of learning is to enable young people to become better learners, to grow a supple learning mind, to become a lifelong learner. So the growth of learning behaviours is attended to closely. Successful growth or progression means that not only can students make use of reflection, or imagination, or managing their distractions, but that over time they spontaneously make more and better use of these learning behaviours and tools and secure them as habits. It is this type of growth and improvement that is acknowledged, recognised, celebrated or praised in some way.

Teachers look out for and celebrate three dimensions of progress:

the frequency and strength of the habit – how often it is used spontaneously as the need arises;
the scope of its use – the range of contexts within which the behaviour is used (from the familiar to new uncharted territory);
the skilfulness of the habit – how the behaviour becomes more subtle, more appropriate to circumstances, more sophisticated.

Learning behaviours take time to recognise and grow, and it’s important to develop maps or progression ‘trajectories’ that show/unpick the steps between, for example, the natural curiosity of a three year-old and the sophisticated skill-set of the consummate questioner. The trajectories allow teachers to identify, nudge and design activity to help students build progressively the fine grain learning behaviours of the effective learner.

Ask yourself:

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

Re-defining classroom learning: new ways to view learning

“The hallmark of successful individuals is that they love learning, they seek challenges, they value effort, and they persist in the face of obstacles.” (Carol Dweck, 2000)

Mistakes or errors

Redefining failure is and will be an essential part of reversing students’ fixed mindsets

Stuck

Similarly, ‘stuck’ is promoted as an interesting place to be rather than a place of shame. Getting stuck, coming against a brick wall, not knowing what to do next is a natural part of learning. If you don’t get stuck the learning is probably not challenging enough. Being stuck is where real learning begins. Students who never experience being stuck or struggle with learning can become fragile learners unable to cope emotionally with the inevitable difficulty of learning and life.

Viewing learning as interesting, challenging, stimulating and worthy of effort needs to feed into changing students’ fixed mindsets

Effort

Effort is a word we use often without really thinking about what it means. What do children understand by ‘effort’ or ‘try harder’? Using a learning language helps teachers to be much more specific about what sort of effort they suggest students make. As one teacher put it;

Praise

Praise the effort, not the ‘ability’;
Praise the process not the outcome;
Praise in specifics of learning behaviours, not generalities;
Praise privately;
Praise authentically, and not too much;
Praise should be seen as separate from feedback; (praise is evaluation)
If using stickers, awards, treats etc (concrete tokens of recognition), make sure they’re given for accomplishing specific process or product goals.

Ask yourself:

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

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

Learning on display

In a learning powered classroom learning will be on display in what you will see, hear and feel. In other words learning is visible in all sorts of ways.

You might find several ways of acknowledging learning on the walls:

‘If – then’ display example, Heathcoat Primary school Tiverton

useful prompts for use when stuck;
a list of agreed ground rules for the social habits the class have created and are focusing on;
displays of students’ efforts showing drafts and examples of work in progress to emphasise the idea of learning as a process;
a humorous display of mistakes of the week;
a display showing a partly completed class plan for their next school assembly;
a five point scale students have devised about levels of distraction;
some If -Then statements to encourage habit formation;
whiteboard display of icons showing the learning behaviours they are focusing just now;
photographs taken by some of the students which capture their peers displaying some learning behaviours;
statements showing what superpower learners say;
a ladder or learning line showing descriptions of how students might feel about the activities and their learning stretch just completed (low, good, high, overstretched) around which the students gather at the end of a session to reflect on their efforts.
a review table for students to park their exercise books with the intention of coming back to review and improve it later

There may be a pile of ‘learning journals’ which students use to illustrate and record the difficulties they are having, or indeed the triumphs.

You will see students moving freely around the classroom selecting resources they think they may need for their tasks. On the flip chart is today’s selection of tasks at different levels of challenge, but all challenging, for students to choose from. Some children are working on their own, some with their teacher, some in teams. They are focused, engaged, enthusiastic and excited about what they are doing. There’s no hint of anxiety or pressure or boredom. They are learning to handle uncertainty, learn together and embrace challenge. No one has told them ‘this is hard’, they are knowingly using their imagination, generative questioning, different sorts of resources, listening for the key points and so forth.

The classroom is humming with the language and imagery of learning. The natural process of learning has been unearthed and given high status. Attention to the environment can be a powerful culture builder. An environment that provokes curiosity and stimulates learning becomes a ‘teacher’ in itself.

Ask yourself:

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

Ask yourself:

What does my classroom culture reveal about the extent to which I value learning over performance?

Now, move to section 2 to explore some quick wins that will help you to Grow, Re-Define and Display learning in your classroom.

3. Moving my practice on

Teachers are in the habit forming business

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 classroom?
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 classroom culture and on your students.

Ideas to practise

3. Ideas for classroom practice

Some ideas to encourage a learning-friendly culture that supports the three aspects of Learning about Learning.

For the aspects of Learning about Learning:

A couple of quick wins for designing rich and challenging activities to try immediately;
A big idea to shift classroom culture in relation to rich and challenging activities.
A couple of quick wins for designing dual focused lessons to try immediately;
A big idea to shift classroom culture in relation dual focused lessons;
A couple of quick wins for Building in Reflection to try immediately;
A big idea to shift classroom culture in relation to Building in Reflection.

1. Quick wins to design rich and challenging activities.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Offer learners more choices

Every time you are able to offer learners a choice their engagement is likely to increase and learners are increasingly inclined to set themselves a level of challenge that’s right for them. This doesn’t mean turning lock stock and barrel to child initiated learning overnight. It is possible to start with small-scale choices, fitting within current practices.

Choices in what to learn.

Which of this set of problems will you begin with?
Where in this text will you start reading?
Which story shall we read to the class at the end of the day?
What questions do you want to address in this topic?

Choices in how to learn.

Which reading place will you choose in the classroom?
Will you present your account to others?
How much shall we operate alone, in small groups, as a class?
What activities will help us learn this the best?

Secondary

The Learning Pit

Challenges are all well and good, but students also need to understand the emotional aspects of rising to challenge. James Nottingham’s Learning Pit is a visual device to help students to understand the move from clarity, through uncertainty and confusion as the challenge unfolds, and finally back to clarity as the challenge is overcome.

Adding strategies that can be used when ‘in the pit’ makes for a useful aide-memoire for students.

The Learning Pit

Primary

An interesting story from Cumbria

Hallbankgate Village School, high up in the Cumbrian fells, is a small rural primary school. A headteacher, 4 teachers, 5 TAs.

Teachers work Monday to Thursday and have Fridays off for marking and preparation. On Fridays, the HT and the TAs run the school, and children can do whatever they want, so long as the HT approves – it is child initiated learning day.

Given this freedom, pupils design and undertake their own learning challenges. For example, 3 year 5 lads have been attempting to break the world record for launching a rocket using only water power!

Ask yourself – do I give my pupils sufficient opportunities to design and explore their own challenges?

Secondary

Try these ideas to support challenge

Make positive connections between making mistakes and challenge
Model how to think about and work through challenges
Create a challenge wall; put up questions, extension tasks, riddles, problems. A go-to place for another challenge when other learning is finished
Display work that shows students have improved mistakes etc.
Stimulate using ‘Stingray’ questions…What if...(something they thought they knew from a different angle – What if gravity was twice as strong? What if the Moon’s gravitational pull disappeared?)
Use the Nando’s Peri-ometer as a visual aid to support the ranking of tasks by level of challenge, and allow students to select the level of challenge that they wish to undertake.

2. A big idea in relation to designing rich and challenging activities.

Primary and Secondary

Rich, challenging activity

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

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

“The presence of challenging learning intentions has multiple consequences. Pupils can be induced to invest greater effort, and invest more of their total capacity than under low demand conditions.”

(Hattie, Visible Learning)

Ask yourself:

What proportion of tasks in my classroom are rich and challenging?

3. Quick wins to design dual-focused lessons.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Coupling content and learning

Every classroom in Cadland Primary school has two walls dedicated to curriculum plans, one for maths and one for literacy. The purpose of these displays is to show the stages of what might be termed a unit of work showing;

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

These lively plans are talked about and added to as the class progresses through them. Learning power behaviours are added at each point in the plan. Now students are not only aware of the what they are learning about but the learning behaviour, the how, they will be using to help them get to grips with the content.

These broad brush descriptions of the learning behaviours being used is a first stage in coupling content with process, the what with the how of learning.

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

Secondary

Setting goals with learning in mind – a shift in the way that we plan.

Lessons have two key purposes:

to enable learners to acquire some knowledge, skills or understanding;
to activate the use of a range of learning behaviours in order to access the knowledge/understanding or to practise the skills.

This has been true for all time whether or not the teacher (or learners) are aware of the learning behaviours that are being invoked.

The difference is that a learning-power-aware teacher thinks through:

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

In other words, the goal of the lesson has both a content and a learning dimension.

In planning terms, the teacher has made a shift from thinking;

From ‘what do I have to teach and how am I going to teach it?’

To ‘what do I have to teach, how will they best learn it, and how am I going to teach it ?’

Primary

Going public with learning.

What is being learned in a particular lesson is generally made public. Usually this is done through the Learning Outcomes / Intentions / Objectives which teachers use to inform pupils about the upcoming learning, and this may be in written or oral format. Some teachers use WALT and WILF to alert pupils to what ‘We Are Learning’ (Objectives) and ‘What I’m Looking For’ (Success criteria).

However the teacher chooses to do it, pupils are made aware of what they will be / are learning.

But are pupils also enabled to understand how they will be learning, the learning behaviours that they will need to engage in order to master the content?

Try one of two strategies:

Building learning behaviours in to content objectives (see the secondary examples to the right), or
Add WISO to WALT and WILF. WISO stands for ‘What I’m Showing Off’. It means that pupils are made aware of the required/anticipated learning behaviours. For example: ‘What I’m Showing Off are my Noticing and Planning skills’.

A simple way to begin to blend content and learning behaviours.

Secondary

Flipping Goals to get student buy-in.

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

Evidence shows that goals that relate to doing something or researching something, or creating something . . . ) are better motivators than goals that relate to knowing something or passing / doing well in a test.

Putting the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

So – a goal relating to ‘understanding xxxxx’ or ‘knowing yyyyy’ is less likely to motivate a learner to make the effort than a goal that starts with some indication of the sort of ‘effort’ or way of doing something;

work with a partner to decide why…….
use your problem solving skills to work out……
use your imagination to ….

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

Have a look at some real examples just to give you a flavour of this technique

With a partner, use your reasoning skills to explain why all prime numbers, with the exception of 2, are odd.

Use your noticing skills to identify three similarities and three differences between these two images.

By using what you already know and your imagination to generate ideas, tell the story of the fire of London from the perspective of a young child living in London at the time.

What you are doing here is beginning to pay some attention to how students will be learning as well as what they will be learning.

4. A big idea in relation to designing dual-focused lessons.

Primary and Secondary

Linking content with learning behaviours

Whether we realise it or not, all lessons have a dual purpose:

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

In conventional lessons where the teacher remains the focus of attention and the initiator of all activity, and where the epistemic dimension is not acknowledged, students gain habits of compliance and dependence, rather than curiosity and self reliance. In developing learning power, teachers are making conscious choices about which habits to introduce and stretch and how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging. Through such overt coupling of content and specific types of process, students come to know, understand and take control of their learning behaviours – they knowingly use and develop the whole range of learning behaviours.

Ask yourself:

Do I ask myself “How are students going to learn it?” instead of ‘How am I going to teach it?”?

5. Quick wins to Build in Reflection.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Use a learning mat to encourage reflection.

Unlike the mats in other modules that are specific to one learning behaviour, this one encourages students to reflect across a wide range of key learning behaviours.

Titles:

Learning Mat

Black box subtitle:

How was I learning today?

bubbles:

I did not give up when . .

My best question today was . .

I looked carefully at . .

I listened carefully to . .

I thought things through carefully when . .

I used my imagination to . .

I worked well with . . . when we . . .

I spotted a connection between . . . and . . .

I changed my mind about . . .

Secondary

Building reflection in to lessons

Reflection is used by many schools for summative evaluation of a piece of work, rather than being woven formatively throughout the learning and production process.

Being able to reflect, review and refine your ideas is one of the key learning characteristics. Students need to be taught:

not to wait till they’ve finished before reviewing what they are doing;
to keep making small checks and revisions all the time as they go along …am I on the right track? Is there something I’m missing?.
to check what they have done at the end…is this as good as I can make it?
and at the end, to think about whether there’s a better way to do it?

Primary

Capture learning in pictures

Take a few photographs of pupils learning. Try to capture feelings, concentration, joy, puzzlement, satisfaction, downheartedness. Use the pictures to start a dialogue about learning. Later on pupils themselves can capture themselves and others learning. Build up a learning picture gallery on a display board.

Secondary

Distilling content and process

Use Tell me three as a simple plenary / review activity.

Tell me:

Three things you have learned today (distilling the content);
Three ways you learned today (distilling the process);
Three things you still need to find out / do (identifying future learning).

6. A big idea in relation to Building in Reflection.

Primary and Secondary

Models of learning

Active Learning cycle

This familiar learning cycle highlights what is needed in order to learn from experience. By active learning we mean active engagement with materials, with ideas, with relationships and with other resources.

The teacher’s role is to facilitate the cycle using questions such as;

1 In the DO phase

What’s happening?
What do you notice?
How are you feeling about this?
What else is happening?

2 In the REVIEW phase

What struck you?
What did you see operating?
How was that significant?
What seemed effective?

3 In the LEARN/SO WHAT phase

How did you make sense of that?
What does that mean to you?
What might help explain that?

4 In the APPLY/ NOW WHAT phase

Where does this leave you?
Where does this take you?
Do you know other situations like this?

Meta cycle

It’s not sufficient to simply have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting on the experience it may quickly be forgotten or its learning potential lost (Gibbs 1988). This is the model that best drives the learning in learner and learning focused classrooms.

Ask yourself:

To what extent is Reflection on either content or process a consistent feature in your classroom?

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

Have you considered the impact of over-focusing on content at the expense of learning?
Which aspects of learning about learning are already embedded in your classroom culture?
Which aspects might need attention?
To what extent does the balance of attention on content and on learning reinforce or undermine your commitment to building better learners?

Make a note of…

One thing you could easily do differently in your own classroom to help learners to better understand the process of learning.
How you will monitor the impact of this change.

2. Ideas to practise

Practical ideas to encourage learning about learning.

Primary and Secondary

The ideas presented can, on the whole, be used in both primary and secondary phases with minor amendments.

The early stages of this aspect of developing learning-friendly classrooms might simply include;

planning lessons to explicitly include reflection and review purposefully
making challenge fun, available and adjustable
introducing a couple of Visible Thinking Routines
beginning to dabble with split screen learning

The classroom becomes a place where young people learn that to struggle with a problem is ultimately satisfying and brings its own rewards.

1. Design rich and challenging activities.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Cultivate a relish for challenge

Help children to think positively about challenge, struggle and not knowing by:

Change the language . . .hard or difficult becomes tricky or grapple or struggle
Talk about how they feel when trying a tricky task
- how did you solve that tricky bit?
- how did it feel when you were doing that?
- what did it feel like when you made it?
- you really stuck well with that even though it was tricky
Ask more open-ended questions that avoid right/wrong answers
- open ended questions invite them to think, not simply remember
- open ended questions lead to deeper answers
Use the traffic light system and explore the amber zone…when they are most absorbed and learning most
Offer different degrees of difficulty but ensure even the easiest is still a challenge requiring effort
Praise for determination, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility rather than right answers…to keep a relish for challenge alive.

Secondary

Offer strategies that assist a learning challenge

The Learning Pit

This tool moves students from a state of cognitive conflict and forces them to think more deeply, critically, and strategically until they discover their “eureka” moment. .. James Nottingham’s Learning Pit helps students to understand the move from clarity, through uncertainty and confusion as the challenge unfolds, and finally back to clarity as the challenge is overcome.

The Learning Pit (click to enlarge)

Primary

Offer rich and challenging activity

Hallbankgate Village School, not all that far from Hadrian’s Wall, is a small rural primary school with a headteacher, 4 teachers and 5 TAs.

Teachers spend Monday to Thursday in the classroom and spend Fridays marking and preparing learning sessions for the following week. On Fridays, the HT and the TAs run the school, and children are given the freedom to learn about whatever they want… so long as the HT approves. Friday is child initiated learning day.

Given this freedom, students design and undertake their own learning challenges. Some are short and are completed in the day. Others are far more extensive, problem solving activities. For example, 3 year 5 lads have been attempting to break the world record for launching a rocket using only water power!

Ask yourself – do I give my students sufficient opportunities to design and explore their own challenges?

Secondary

Use a range of ways to support challenge

Make positive connections between making mistakes and challenge
Model how to think about and work through challenges
Create a challenge wall; put up questions, extension tasks, riddles, problems. A go-to place for another challenges when other learning is finished
Display work that shows students have improved mistakes etc.
Stimulate different ways of thinking by using what are known as ‘Stingray’ questions…What if...(something they thought they knew is looked at from a different angle – What if the Moon’s gravitational pull disappeared? What if Germany had won the First World War? How would the country look if everyone went Vegan?)
Use the Nando’s Peri-ometer as a visual aid to support the ranking of tasks by level of challenge, and allow students to select the level of challenge that they wish to undertake.

2. Design dual-focused lessons.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Make coupling content and process public

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

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

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

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

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

Click to enlarge

Secondary

Set goals with learning in mind – shift the way you plan.

All your lessons have always had two purposes:

to have learners acquire some knowledge, behaviours or understanding;
to use some learning behaviours to access the knowledge/understanding or to practise the behaviours..

…although you may not have been fully aware of the learning behaviours that are being invoked.

As you become more deeply aware of learning behaviours you will think through lesson planning a bit differently:

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

In other words, the goal of the lesson would then have overt content and learning dimensions.

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

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

Primary

Start lessons with a grapple task

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

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

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

Secondary

Put learning behaviours into medium term plans

Where, in your medium term plans, can you find opportunities to stretch students’ cognitive range?

Ask yourself:

What proportion of your lessons are spent on encouraging students to question?
Where might you encourage more student questioning or playing with ideas?
To what extent are the activities pre-digested – where most of the work has been done for them?
How much do the planned activities generate students’ own initiative, questioning, research and information processing?
Could you make more activities ‘wild’ rather than ‘tame’?
What proportion of your series of lessons calls for disciplined, logical thinking and reasoning?
How does the series of lessons build understanding?
Could some of the activities be amended to foster the use of imagination, visualisation, intuition?

Primary and Secondary

Flip Goals to get student buy-in.

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

Evidence shows that goals that relate to doing something or researching something, or creating something . . . are better motivators than goals that relate to knowing something or passing / doing well in a test.

Putting the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

So – a goal (or objective or outcome) relating to ‘understanding xxxxx’ or ‘knowing yyyyy’ is less likely to motivate a learner to make the effort than a goal that starts with some indication of the sort of ‘effort’ or way of doing something;

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

Have a look at some real examples just to give you a flavour of this technique.

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

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

3. Build reflection into learning.

Quick wins to get you going.

Primary

Use a learning mat to encourage reflection.

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 support reflection on the learning behaviours employed.

Unlike the mats in other modules that are specific to one learning behaviour, this one encourages students to reflect across a wide range of key learning behaviours.

Can you spot which learning behaviours each bubble is referencing?

Secondary

Build reflection into lessons

Reflection is a powerful tool for learning usually used to evaluate of a piece of work but rarely woven formatively throughout the learning and production process.

Click to enlarge

There are two aspects to reflection – reflection In action (or monitoring) and reflection On action (or evaluating) – both have a place. The former is undertaken in the hurly-burly of the process of learning, the latter is a retrospective focusing on what happened, what worked and to how to do it better next time.

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

not to wait till they’ve finished before checking how they are getting on;
to keep making small checks and revisions all the time as they go along …am I on the right track? Is there something I’m missing? (Reflection In action)
to check what they have done at the end…is this as good as I can make it? (A bit of both depending on whether it needs further adjustments or not)
and at the end, to think about whether there’s a better way to do it? (Reflection On action)

Primary

Capture learning in pictures to create a display of learners learning

Take a few photographs of students learning. Try to capture feelings, concentration, joy, puzzlement, satisfaction, downheartedness. Create a display of learners learning. Use the display to start a dialogue about learning, and as a reminder of what effective learning looks and feels like.

Later on students can capture themselves and others learning. Build up a learning picture gallery on a display board.

Secondary

Distil content and process

Use Tell me three as a simple plenary / review activity.

Tell me:

Three things you have learned today (distilling the content);
Three ways you learned today (distilling the process);
Three things you still need to find out / do (identifying future learning).

Primary

Make the process of distilling obvious.

After any activity, ask the children what they have been doing, what they have learned, what worked, what didn’t work so well and what they would use again next time.
Make wall displays of things that children have found worked well. Support with photographs and examples, to ensure everyone benefits from the learning. Expect lots of variety – what works for one child might not work for another.

Secondary

Reframe information

If information is currently framed in any of the following, challenge students to change it into another format of their choosing: text; mind map; flow diagram; storyboard; graph; venn diagram; ranked bullet points/list; video; teacher explanation; revision notes etc.

Consider limiting the number of words that can be used – forcing students to limit words and/or employ images instead encourages them to distil what is really important and salient.

Converting from one medium to another requires students to identify the key features. It can only be converted if it is understood, so this technique promotes deep learning. Where students are struggling, it can reveal misconceptions. It helps students to create revision notes for themselves, and in their preferred learning style.

Primary and Secondary

Introduce Visible Thinking Routines

What are Visible Thinking Routines?

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

To be effective such routines need to be;

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

Find out more: Google ‘Visible thinking routines’

A Visible Thinking Routine

Connect Extend Challenge is a visible thinking routine for connecting new ideas to prior learning and encourages reflection.

It goes like this;

CONNECT: How are the ideas and information presented CONNECTED to what you already knew?

EXTEND: What new ideas did you get that EXTENDED or pushed your thinking in new directions?

CHALLENGE: What is still CHALLENGING or confusing for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings or puzzles do you now have?

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

Primary and Secondary

What do you think?

Have you considered the impact of over-focusing on content at the expense of learning?
Which aspects of learning about learning are already embedded in your classroom culture?
Which aspects might need attention?
To what extent does the balance of attention on content and on learning reinforce or undermine your commitment to building better learners?

Make a note of…

One thing you could easily do differently in your own classroom to help learners to better understand the process of learning.
How you will monitor the impact of this change.

1. What is . . learning about learning?

The key idea

The key features of this cultural shift are:

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 students’ 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, plus 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn.

There are three aspects to the cultural shift:

Aspect 1: Lessons with rich and challenging activities – increasingly open-ended activities are designed to engage, to stretch and to challenge. The learning is not over-scaffolded, and the inherent difficulties are not avoided or diluted by overly-helpful teachers. The activities stretch and challenge both content understanding and learning behaviours.

Rich, challenging activity

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

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

“The presence of challenging learning intentions has multiple consequences. Students can be induced to invest greater effort, and invest more of their total capacity than under low demand conditions.”

(Hattie, Visible Learning)

Ask yourself:

What proportion of tasks in my classroom are rich and challenging?

Linking content with learning behaviours

Whether we realise it or not, all lessons have a dual purpose:

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

In conventional lessons where the teacher remains the focus of attention and the initiator of all activity, and where the epistemic dimension is not acknowledged, students gain habits of compliance and dependence, rather than curiosity and self-reliance. In developing learning power, teachers are making conscious choices about which habits to introduce and stretch and how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging. Through such overt coupling of content and specific types of process, students come to know, understand and take control of their learning behaviours – they knowingly use and develop the whole range of learning behaviours.

Ask yourself:

Do I ask myself “How are students going to learn it?” instead of ‘How am I going to teach it?”?

Aspect 3: Lessons with in-built reflection – reflection on content and reflection on learning behaviours is routinely built into lessons.Review points, rather than the formulaic plenary, focus students on what they have learned and how they have learned it. Reflection is done by students for themselves, not by teachers on their behalf.

Models of learning

Active Learning cycle

The teacher’s role is to facilitate the cycle using questions such as;

1 In the DO phase

What’s happening?
What do you notice?
How are you feeling about this?
What else is happening?

2 In the REVIEW phase

What struck you?
What did you see operating?
How was that significant?
What seemed effective?

3 In the LEARN/SO WHAT phase

How did you make sense of that?
What does that mean to you?
What might help explain that?

4 In the APPLY/ NOW WHAT phase

Where does this leave you?
Where does this take you?
Do you know other situations like this?

Meta cycle

Ask yourself:

To what extent is Reflection on either content or process a consistent feature in your classroom?

Ask yourself:

To what extent do my lessons intentionally stretch both content understanding and learning behaviours?

Now, move to section 2 to explore some quick wins that will get you started.

3. Moving my practice on

Teachers are in the habit forming business

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 classroom?
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 classroom culture and on your students.

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Sections Archive

Team Reflection and Planning

Session agenda

Session agenda

Sharing your colouring-in activities

1. Sharing your colouring-in activities (15 mins)

Re-capping online materials

2. Recapping on-line materials: What did we think of the materials? (15 mins)

Planning strategic changes in practice

3. Planning strategic change: What do we all need to do? (15 mins)

Decide

Personal action planning

4. Personal action planning: What am I going to do? (20 mins)

Consider

If I do XXXX will it improve/develop/enhance YYYY?

Capture your learning enquiry as a question

Put an enquiry plan together

Things you might want to look out for that result from your classroom experiments, depending on where you choose to focus your efforts:

Evaluate team session

5. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? ( 5 mins )

How do I make my classroom increasingly learning-friendly?

This section seeks to offer teaching ideas that nudge classroom culture to become increasingly learning-friendly.

How are outcomes for learners affected by classroom culture?

This section seeks to explore linking the progression grids from Section 1 with the resulting ‘outcomes for learners’.

Building on the progression grids from section 1 – adding in the outcomes for learners.

Relationships in the learning-friendly classroom

Relationships in the learning-friendly classroom

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Talk about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

Talk about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Learning about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

Learning about learning in the learning-friendly classroom

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Celebrating and growing learning in the learning-friendly classroom

Celebrating and growing learning in the learning-friendly classroom

In your Learning Diary: Consider the progression chart, and the associated student learning behaviours.

Preparation for the Learning Team meeting

Where is my classroom culture now?

Classroom cultures and how they grow

This section seeks to support teachers to understand the progression from teacher centred to learning-friendly classroom cultures.

1a) What do we mean by classroom culture?

Teacher centred classrooms

Learner centred classrooms

Learning centred classrooms

1b) What do we mean by a learning-friendly classroom culture?

The 4 Shifts in classroom culture

Shifts in Relating

Shifts in Talking

Shifts in Constructing

Shifts in Celebrating

And the shift in the teacher’s role

1c) What does building a learning-friendly culture involve?

A learning friendly culture

Learning Friendly Cultures

1d) Unpicking these aspects: what contributes to a learning-friendly classroom culture?

The grid columns are things that might combine to create a learning-friendly classroom culture.

Overview of the grids

The key idea

The key features of this cultural shift are:

There are three aspects to this cultural shift:

How these 3 aspects might grow over time.

The key idea

The key features of this cultural shift are:

There are three main aspects to this cultural language shift:

The key idea

The key features of this cultural shift are:

There are three aspects to the cultural shift:

The key idea

The key features of this cultural shift are:

There are three aspects to the cultural shift:

What do you think?

Make a note of…<img decoding="async" class="alignright" src="https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Little_r.png" alt="Little_r" width="59" height="57">

1e) Unpicking the phases of growth: building learning-friendliness

Here is our interpretation of how classroom culture might grow.

Meaning behind the phases

The phases are drawn from Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain.

Teacher centred: Standard ‘good’ teaching.

Receives: Toes in the learning waters.

Make a note of…

Make a note of…

Make a note of…