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Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
If this team session is your first one in Stepping Stones, miss out item 2.
1. Session objectives
What do we want to achieve? ( 5 mins)
2 Sharing classroom experiments
How did our experiments go? ( 20 mins)
Share
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 revising grid
Where students are secure
Where the students could be when they leave for secondary school
Classroom culture ideas
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 revising should be built across the school. ie how the phases of revising 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 pupils to improve/develop/enhance their approach to revising?
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 pupils are unlikely to change unless you change!
Looked at your pupils through the lens of the Revising learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Revising looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage pupils with Revising
Now we look closely at how to blend improving pupils’ revising 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 revising focused task
Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if pupils 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 pupils to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your pupils thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage pupils 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 pupils’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.
The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power
1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning
You make it clear to pupils 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:
Help pupils to become reflective and thoughtful about goals.
To evaluate progress towards the goal, display phrases like:
Do I think that’s coming along well.
Have I checked my emerging outcome against my original goals?
Am I still on track?
Did I have to amend my goals part way through? Why was that?
What am I going to do about . . . . . ?
Is there anything I could have done better, differently?
How might I get better at that? What would be a better/alternative way of doing it.
Am I satisfied with how it is going?
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 pupils 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:
Use the visible thinking routine
I used to think . . . . ., Now I think . . . ,
Use this routine to help pupils to reflect on how and why their thinking/understanding is changing:
Remind pupils of the topic you have been working on.
Ask them to respond to each of the sentence stems: I used to think…, Now, I think…
Alternatively ask pupils to write down their views at the beginning of a topic. Invite them to revisit & update their answer during and at the end in light of what has been learned.
Or, at the beginning of a lesson ask pupils to write down what they understand by a particular term that will be explored in the coming lesson (e.g. Phrase (English); Proof (Maths); Power (Science) etc). At the end of the lesson ask them to write down what they now understand by the term.
3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention
Your lessons are designed to intrigue your pupils. Pupils don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your pupils’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.
For example:
Try a range of Thunks at the start of a lesson to capture attention and force a rethink
For example: If cows were cleverer, would we still eat them?
There are plenty to choose from in The Little Book of Thunks by Ian Gilbert
What is a Thunk? A Thunk is a beguiling question about everyday things that stops you in your tracks but helps you start to look at the world in a whole new light.
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 pupils to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
For example:
Use success criteria to revise their learning
Make it clear to pupils what you are looking for in a piece of learning and give them opportunities to check their ‘work ‘against the criteria, either individually or in pairs. Ensure the criteria are linked to the original learning intention. Knowing what is expected encourages pupils to stay on focus and to revise their work to meet the criteria. Invite pupils to create success criteria themselves in order to encourage ownership. Include
what pupils should know
how much, and how, they should include opinions, judgements and their own thinking
what skills they should be able to demonstrate
how to link the outcome to the original learning intention.
5: Relationships…Working together
Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your pupils 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:
Use this as a ‘working together’ plenary session.
Invite pairs or small groups of pupils to predict what the next lesson will focus on, based on their reflections from this and previous series of lessons.
Answers could be given in as the pupils leave the lesson and the answer revealed at the start of the next. You could even introduce a regular ‘predict-the-learning’ segment in your teaching.
Extend this idea by asking pupils to connect and sequence a series of lessons together
6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge
You understand that pupils 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 pupils taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.
For example:
Use learning mats
at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on revising.
A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.
Does the lesson plan:
Make it clear to pupils which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate pupils’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how pupils 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.
Skim read or leave this section if you have met it in other units because… the section applies to any learning behaviour. i.e. not specific to Revising.
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.
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, pupils 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, pupils 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…revising.
Stage 1. What content do pupils need to learn?
What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.
Use standard lesson planning tools:
What are pupils 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 pupils get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, revising, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these pupils in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows
Say something like this to yourself .…My pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using revising. Most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) revising 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 pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using revising. Most of my pupils would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) revising 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 pupils’ 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 I 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 pupils 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 pupils need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using revising.
most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) revising approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their revising 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 pupils there and the sorts of learning behaviours your pupils will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.
You are designing the task in a way that requires pupils 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:
Revising will help pupils to better access the content;
The aspect of revising (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) Reflection in Action, Purple phase, “Checks what they are doing against given criteria”.
The type of task/activity that would best stretch both content and learning behaviour, intrigue, challenge, bring people together and give responsibility to pupils is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want pupils 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 pupils to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, revising focused, task.
How do we design tasks that stretch Revising and assist pupils to approach the content more productively? We cover this in three ways:
1 shows the phases of a lesson where revising is the driving behaviour;
2 considers a simple lesson plan template that can be used for any lesson and distils the Twin Towers lesson into this format;
3 invites you to extend your thinking about the technique into other aspects of the curriculum.
1. A description of the phases of a lesson built around Revising
Look through the lesson below. It uses a slow-reveal strategy to encourage pupils to speculate based on limited information, only to have to reappraise those thoughts as further information is revealed. To work effectively, it needs an image that contains a surprise, a contradiction, something misleading so that first impressions are unlikely to be correct.
The lesson focuses primarily on the first column of the Revising chart – Attitude to Change. It creates a situation in which a change of mind is almost inevitable.
Notice how, despite the focus on learners changing their views as the evidence is revealed, other learning behaviours ‘bubble up’ as the lesson proceeds. It reminds us that learning behaviours don’t function in isolation, that an effective learner not only has a wide range of learning behaviours to call on but also the flexibility to move seamlessly from one to another as required.
Firstly, the lesson plan layout that we are using here:
What’s happening here?
This lesson plan template looks at a lesson episode by episode, as in the models used in the Questioning and Collaborating units. There are sections for Teacher Action,(what you do) Pupil Action,( what you are expecting pupils to do) Teacher talk (what you will say to nudge learning along) and Learning Behaviours activated ( the learning behaviours that this type of activity/nudging comments will stretch). The image/information that is being used by the teacher at each stage of the lesson is shown in the box top left.
NB. The Learning Behaviours identified in the banner at the bottom of the slides identify the learning behaviours the episode will stretch. Note that they can change from episode to episode since none of the behaviours act in isolation.
2. Now to the lesson itself:
Episode 1
What’s happening here?
Pupils are invited to speculate on a range of possibilities based on very limited information,. Just think about this for a minute… asking pupils to speculate activates a blend of noticing, imagining, inferential reasoning, and group working skills. There’s a lot going on in pupils heads! But it’s the way you are doing this, through slow reveal, that will encourage students to develop as flexible learners.
In order to scaffold and nourish this noticing and speculation this episode uses Think, Pair, Share together with the VTR ‘What makes you say that?’
Think/ Pair /Share gives pupils time to think about it for themselves before they get caught up in the cut and thrust of group work, a chance to refine their thoughts in the Pair stage, and again in the Share phase. The visible thinking routine ‘what makes you say that’ encourages pupils to offer explanations and evidence to justify what they are speculating.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours being activated are identified as:
To notice detail, speculate on possibilities and to explain their ideas to each other.
But what you are working towards in terms of the Revising disposition is Recognises learning involves constant rethinking/redoing. (Green/Values level)
Episode 2
What’s happening here?
This is a key part of the lesson. The addition of a new perspective gives the learner cause to, possibly, amend their first idea. The second reveal provides evidence to support some speculations (it is a river bank in a city) and to dispel others (it is looking out to sea). How does this second bit of the picture change how you are seeing the three people in Episode 1?
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours are, at this stage, identified as:
To change (revise) their outlook in light of new information.
However, by looking at information in the progression charts the behaviours you are activating could be described much more deeply as:
To attempt to change or rethink something and amend things
Such augmented explanations can be found in the:
Revising chart, Receives and Responds phases: ‘To attempt to change or rethink something and amend things’
Episode 3
What’s happening here?
The teacher is encouraging speculation here. The evidence is flimsy and inconclusive, but is in contrast to the weather shown in Episodes 1 and 2. The use of ‘Could Be’ language encourages pupils to come up with a range of possible explanations. The teacher may well say things like: “That’s an interesting idea, but if that is not true, what else might explain it” to gain alternative interpretations.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours are, at this stage, identified as:
To speculate (and listen) about a range of possibilities
In terms of the revising progression chart your wider purpose is to help pupils to work towards being able to ‘Edits as they go along.Thinks on their feet within the given variables.’ Green/values.
Episode 4
What’s happening here?
A shift of focus here, away from what pupils could see in the previous Episodes, towards speculation that requires Empathy, and ‘seeing’ beyond the image. Who are these people? What can we infer from the way they are sitting? What might this mean? Do they know the first three people in Episode 1?
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours are, at this stage, identified as:
To use their noticing and empathy skills to speculate on the relationships
In terms of the revising progression chart your wider purpose could be to help pupils to work towards being able to ‘Rethink and restart to change direction.Yellow/organises.
Episode 5
What’s happening here?
This is the key slide – it either dispels or supports the hypotheses that have been developing. Thus far the teacher has been encouraging speculation and accepting all answers as possible, but now there is a focus for what the observers in Episodes 1 and 4 are looking at, there is an explanation of the cloud in Episode 3. Few pupils will have seen this coming – the relaxed demeanour of the observers on this bank is in stark contrast to the tragedy unfolding on the opposite bank. The visible thinking routine: “I used to think . . . . . . But now I think . . . . .” is used here to help pupils to structure an explanation about how their views have changed.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours are, at this stage, identified as:
To make links to what they already know in order to understand what is going on in the image, and challenges them to refine their initial thinking in light of this.
In terms of the revising progression chart your aspiration for your pupils could be to help them to work towards being able to be ‘Constantly on the look out for how to improve/change/reinvent something. Orange/Embodies.
Episode 6
What’s happening here?
Putting it all together. Using the visible thinking routine See/Think/Wonder helps pupils to notice, reason and/or imagine, and question. Prioritising the best STW’s is an evaluation activity. Beginning to seek answers to the best ‘Wonders’ frames future enquiry.
The underlying message to be distilled here is that first impressions, based on partial or incomplete information, are invariably less than perfect. As more information becomes available, views are refined and clarity slowly emerges, but only if we are prepared to let go of those first impressions.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours are, at this stage, identified as:
To distil their thinking, to reflect on how additional information frequently forces a change of perspective, or gives rise to a further range of questions.
In terms of the revising progression chart your aspiration for your pupils could be to help them to work towards being able to ‘Question and moderate normal rules/ideas to detect errors and improve things’ Yellow/Organises.
What do you think?
Have you thought of a lesson as a blend of teacher actions, pupil actions, learning behaviours, and teacher talk before?
The key box is the learning behaviours box across the bottom. Could you write the contents of that box for each Episode in one of your lessons?
How could you use the slow reveal strategy to advantage in your own classroom?
What image would you choose?
Make a note of…
Your initial reactions to the slow reveal strategy.
A situation in which you might use it.
2 A distillation of this lesson.
This is a simple streamlined use-able tool that includes:
What you do (teacher action);
What pupils do (pupil action);
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
Download a blank lesson plan as a MS Word document: Lesson Planning Grid
Here you will find the template populated with the episodes explored in section 1 above. This format helps you to gain a swift overview of the lesson from the various perspectives.
What do you think?
What are your reactions to this lesson plan template?
Does planning for four aspects – teacher action, pupil action, learning behaviours, teacher talk – seem useful?
How does sequencing the lesson as ‘episodes’ help or hinder planning?
Which do you prefer – the blue box approach in section 1 or the grid in this section.
Make a note of…
The extent to which your existing planning template enables you to think about lessons in this way.
What you would like / need to add to it.
3 Extend your thinking about this slow revealtechnique
Consider the 4 images below. They are:
“An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” by Joseph Wright;
Street art by Julian Beever – all of the Batman bit is painted on the pavement;
A b&w photo of the great 1906 earthquake in San Francisco;
An image from Erik Johansson’s website.
Consider each in turn. How would you carve each image up – what would you reveal first, then second . . .
Can you find a reveal sequence that gives very little away in the early stages, or even better that initially misleads the viewer?
Which curriculum area might make use of each of these images?
Do you know of any other images that relate to your planned curriculum that can be treated in the same way?
What do you think?
Where / when / why might you use the slow reveal strategy?
How will you ensure that the slow reveal is an integral part of the lesson, and not just a ‘catchy’ activity before the ‘serious’ work begins?
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 as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Harness display to illustrate that first attempts are rarely the finished article;
Ensure that students act on your feedback and do things differently next time;
Encourage students to monitor how things are going, and change tack if necessary;
Encourage students to evaluate the extent to which they have met the required standards;
Deliberately create situations that require a change of mind.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
However well prepared learners are, they have to expect the unexpected. They have to have the readiness to revise as they go along. Good learners are able to change their plans and think on their feet. They are able to be flexible. To be effective at revising, learners need to monitor how things are going and periodically review where they have got to. Monitoring is the art of looking over your own shoulder as you’re working away at a problem, asking yourself how it’s going. Getting better at monitoring (‘reflection in action’) involves cultivating the little voice of self-awareness that keeps the strategic goals in mind, and is ready to change tack if it seems appropriate. Reviewing (‘reflection on action’) means stopping every so often to take stock of progress, and to ensure that any emerging product—an artwork, an essay, a draft business plan—is on track. Reviewing requires the ability to look at your own work with the critical eye of an editor, and not be afraid of the possibility that some corrections may be needed. Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002
1b) What does being a good Reviser involve?
A well formed Revising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:
Self-monitor how things are going, keeping an eye on the goal
Expect the unexpected, having a readiness to re-shape, re-order, re-form plans to take account of new circumstances.
Remain alive to new, unforeseen opportunities and ideas
Look at what you are doing with a critical eye
Strive to be the best you can be
Make sure things are on track and make improvements along the way.
So at a less abstract level, students need to learn how to deal with change, emotionally and practically. With an inflexible frame of mind they are unlikely to recognise the need to change their ideas or the way they do something. They also need to know what ‘good’ looks like; how to keep an eye on how things are going and the willingness to evaluate how things went against external standards. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing revising moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘have another go’.
The Revising grid below takes account of the constituent parts of building the habit of Revising
Our progression grid for Revising has 6 components:
Revising is about the way we work on something to improve it. Whether it be icing a cake, solving a tricky maths problem or creating a well-crafted essay, all require effort, retries and determination to satisfy ourselves that the result pleases us. How we tackle such a job isn’t just a case of monitoring as we go along or reviewing the result: it will be influenced by other qualities. Our attitude to change, whether we have a sense of quality and what sort of validation we need. The grid intertwines these important contributors to our growth in the habit of Revising.
The learning guru Royce Sadler put it like this: “Students need to be able to judge the quality of what they are producing and be able to regulate what they are doing during the doing itself”.
Take a closer look at what each column of the grid is about
1) Attitude to change
How we relate to the change process
For many of us, doing things differently is scary and only for the bold and confident. But if we want students to enjoy achieving their best learning outcomes, we need to scaffold that process by building confidence – helping students move beyond their comfort zone and becoming more flexible as a learner. In the early phases students adapt what they are doing because they are being told and/or supported to do so. But this support pays off at the ‘value’ phase (green) when students feel positive about their efforts and realise learning is all about rethinking and adjusting and redoing, rather than getting it right first time. By the ‘organises’ phase (yellow), students are ready, willing, and able to move beyond making relatively small changes to making wholesale changes or starting again on a different tack.
2) Sense of standards
How we relate to standards of excellence, quality, and correctness
The next contributory factor in revising what we are doing has to do with how we view quality; whether we have a sense of standards; our view of what’s good, bad or indifferent. In the early phases students accept what they are told about by teachers; what something needs to look like, be like, feel like. Schools are full of them – objectives, criteria, steps to success, outcomes – and constantly trying to achieve them can be dispiriting. But with support and encouragement students are able to begin to think for themselves what makes something good and determine their own standards.
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 would 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 standards, others to self-monitoring, or flexibility. All such self-talk is important in building a revising habit.
4) Reflection IN action
Checking of how things are going
This column is about how we monitor what’s happening as we go along; keeping a weather eye on how things are going. Students need help to do this well. They need to know what they are looking for, what they are tracking. Should they look for good things or bad, for feelings, for whether they understand…? It’s a minefield. The early phases shown here relate to monitoring what you are doing against known criteria, and checking the process of doing something itself. Students need these props in the early phases. It’s only in the ‘valuing’ ( green) phase that they become skilled at editing as they go along, having had practice with checklists and criteria in earlier phases.
Look particularly at the difference between ‘value’ and ‘organised’. In the ‘value’ phase the amends, revisions, and re-tries are being done with the original aim/goal/ objective in mind. In the ‘organised’ phase students are prepared to ditch the original plan, ask hard questions, change the rules and change direction. It’s a big and important shift in becoming an independent learner.
5) Reflection ON action
The inclination to reflect on what we have achieved
This is the essence of learning from experience although sadly it is not a common inclination. The key here is not simply reflecting on what happened and whether we could have improved, but whether we take heed of such lessons and behave differently next time. This is not a natural skill and will need careful structuring and nurturing. Notice that the early phases are about what happened and are heavily scaffolded. By green students are asking why they did it that way, and by yellow they are challenging those familiar ways of working and rethinking the how in order to achieve better outcomes. It’s a breakout moment.
6) Recognising external validation
How we relate to external validation.
The last constituent of revising has to do with how we need and use external validation – the need for a legitimate authority source to confirm that what we are doing is right. When we are chasing facts we need to be sure they are correct. When we are using standards we need to be sure they are sound. In the early phases this authority normally comes from parents and teachers. As students move through the phases there is a move to seeking out experts, dictionaries and original sources. (The internet invariably plays a role here but while it might be a great place to start it’s a terrible place to finish! It needs to be used with discernment.) Sources of legitimate authority plays into how we revise and improve our learning.
What do you think?
What have you learned about revising 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.
1d) Unpicking the rows; getting better at Revising.
Of course the development of revising 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 Revising might grow.
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 ‘just do things’
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are not necessarily aware of doing things well or differently. Once they get going on something they may change it but more for the joy of just doing it. Outcomes maybe rushed or lack finesse, but once completed there may be little interest in revisiting it or in any comments they are offered. External standards are not yet a feature of their world.
Receives: Minded to check what they do.
In the Receives (purple) phase, students begin to make checks on how they are doing against given criteria when prompted. They can talk about what they did and sometimes how. They rely on their teachers or parents to validate what they do/have done.
Responds: Minded to understand standards.
In the Responds (blue) phase students have overcome a fear of mistakes and are more able and willing to monitor what they are doing. They begin to develop the idea of ‘good’ themselves and to understand why given standards are important. They respond positively to supportive feedback and talk reflectively about how they could improve with encouragement.
Values: Minded to value revising
In the Values ( green) phase, students understand the importance of keeping a close eye on progress in order to achieve high-quality outcomes that meet their goals. They see the point in making changes in the light of the original goal or external standard or internal feedback. They understand the need to learn from previous experiences and realise that learning is all about changing understandings; not just knowing stuff. In so doing they widen the scope of external validation.
Organises: Minded to actively seek alternative strategies
In the Organises (yellow) phase revising has become a skilful habit; where revising itself raises more questions than answers. Yes, progress is kept under review but now students question the original goal of the activity. They look more widely for validation and may well change to a more productive strategy or a different goal. They use critical feedback positively and are keen to look back on what and how they achieved what they did in order to learn from the experience.
Embodies: Minded to exploit previous experience to the full
In the Embodies ( orange) phase, students make ongoing checks and amends, and major rethinking, in order to meet their own, often more exacting, standards of achievement. Now they tend not to need the validation of others (marks, grades, exams, quality feedback) because their own critical sense of standards acts as their barometer. They adapt readily to changing circumstances and always reflect on what and how they have done something with the explicit intention of doing it better, more efficiently / differently in the future.
What do you think?
What has struck you about the act of revising 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 revising behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.
Preparation for the Learning Team meeting
Where are my pupils now?
Take a look at the Revising progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Colour in the cells where you think your pupils are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure classes are rare. But looking at your class in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart to denote where you think most of the school’s pupils 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
If this team session is your first one in Stepping Stones, miss out item 2.
1. Session objectives
What do we want to achieve? ( 5 mins)
2. Sharing classroom experiments
How did our experiments go? ( 20 mins)
Share
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
Talk about impact
Avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little of no changes in…
3. Recapping on-line materials
What did we think of the materials? ( 15 mins)
Reactions to
The Planning grid
Where pupils are secure
Where the pupils could be secure when they leave for secondary school
Classroom culture ideas
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 Planning should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Planning might play out against key stages and even year groups.
5. Personal action planning
What am I going to do? (20 mins )
5a.Consider
how you want your pupils to improve/develop/enhance their approach to Planning?
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 pupils are unlikely to change unless you change!
Looked at your pupils through the lens of the Planning learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Planning looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage pupils with Planning
Now we look closely at how to blend improving pupils’ planning 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 planning focused task
Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if pupils 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 pupils to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your pupils thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage pupils 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 pupils’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.
The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power
1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning
You make it clear to pupils 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:
Praise, display and recognise.
Key ideas for encouraging pupils to value the ability to think ahead.
Praise any ‘thinking ahead’ behaviour.
Praise any resistance to being impulsive.
Wall display a simple planning sheet/tool
Talk with pupils about planning the course of the day
Prompt pupils to think about what they might do next
Review how pupils’ plans have gone
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 pupils 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:
‘What will it look like when it’s finished?’ (WWILLWIF)
Set a task — physical, dramatic, written, practical, spoken, visual — that has clear parameters but which is open-ended.
Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action.
Ask pupils to determine WWILLWIF for themselves in conjunction with others.
Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.
3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention
Your lessons are designed to intrigue your pupils. Pupils don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your pupils’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.
For example:
A Thinking Routine. How long will it take ?
Get into the habit of asking pupils ‘how long do you think it will take ?’
This requires pupils to think about the task(s) ahead, think what may or may not be tricky, question whether what they are attempting is realistic and manageable, and stops them ‘doing it’ and makes them ‘think about doing it’.
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 pupils to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
For example:
Challenge plan
Enable pupils to create their own plans for seeking and engaging with challenge:
What’s the goal?
What are the success criteria?
What is the timeframe?
Gather information about the tasks
Link new information to what I already know
Where am I expecting difficulties – blocks and obstacles?
Are there any dependencies? If this….then that….
Use the expert knowledge of others to help distil and refine my ideas
Review where I’ve got to and check my thinking against the original success criteria
Evaluate emerging outcomes against my expectations
Amend the plan or goal if necessary
5: Relationships…Working together
Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your pupils 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:
Planning together
Set pupils the challenge of organising, for example, a Christmas Party for the elderly – ask them to consider the features that they will need to take into consideration?
Suggest they divide the tasks into critical areas – Timing… Invitations… Refreshments…Entertainment… Publicity… Health and Safety… Transport… with a separate group to organise each area. Groups send envoys to the other groups to ensure all the areas meld together. Do not provide the scaffolding
Distil the results as a timeline with allocated responsibilities.
6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge
You understand that pupils 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 pupils taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.
For example:
Monitoring planning
Use Learning Mats at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on planning.
A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.
Does the lesson plan:
Make it clear to pupils which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate pupils’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how pupils 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.
Skim read or leave this section if you have met it in other units because… the section applies to any learning behaviour. i.e. not specific to Planning.
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.
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, pupils 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, pupils 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…planning.
Stage 1. What content do pupils need to learn?
What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.
Use standard lesson planning tools:
What are pupils 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 pupils get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, planning, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these pupils in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows
Say something like this to yourself .…My pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using planning. Most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) planning 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 pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using planning. Most of my pupils would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) planning 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 pupils’ 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 I 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 pupils 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 pupils need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using planning.
most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) planning approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their planning 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 pupils there and the sorts of learning behaviours your pupils will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.
You are designing the task in a way that requires pupils 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:
Planning will help pupils to better access the content;
The aspect of planning (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) “Articulate what needs to be done, in a sensible order and the resources needed” (Planning Actions column, Blue/Responds phase).
The type of task/activity that would best stretch both content and learning behaviour, intrigue, challenge, bring people together and give responsibility to pupils is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want pupils 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 pupils to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, planning focused, task.
How do we design lessons that stretch Planning and assist pupils to approach the content more productively? We cover this in four ways:
1 offers a reminder about the importance of planning
2 shows the phases of a lesson where Planning and learning to plan is the driving behaviour;
3 considers the simple lesson plan template that can be used for any lesson and distils the Planning lesson into this format;
Planning is the ability to take a strategic overview of your learning and make sensible decisions. It’s a much bigger idea than… ‘what needs to be done in what order’. It means:
taking stock of the problem and the parameters within which you must work
assessing the available resources, both inner and outer, and deciding which you think are going to be needed
making an estimate of the time learning will take, and the competing priorities that have to be delayed or sacrificed
imagining a route map for the learning, anticipating hurdles and problems that may arise alongside
Good learners like to take the responsibility for planning and organising their learning. They welcome opportunities to decide when, where, and how they will learn. Research shows that people who can make a reasonable estimate of how long a task will take are more likely to finish on time and produce better work.
Planning your own learning is a sophisticated task. It involves a personal, silent assessment of your learning skills (‘What can I feasibly achieve? What am I capable of doing? What resources would bolster my chances of success?’). The more timid, less confident or lower achieving pupils may find such planning a daunting prospect. Introducing and requiring pupils to work learning out for themselves will take time and careful planning on the part the teacher. When looked at from these diverse angles growing planning mindsets moves well beyond encouraging a pupil to ‘think ahead’
2. Planning used in a lesson.
The lesson below uses follows a fairly traditional pattern;
linking to prior learning;
reminders about ways of doing things;
warm-up tasks;
a main activity;
reflecting on the process.
The content of the lesson is about using a telescope to take pictures of Mars. Although this may sound sophisticated it is a real possibility for pupils. The Faulkes Telescopes are available for schools to book to use them.
The Faulkes Telescope Project offers schools free use of two astronomical telescopes (one in Hawaii and one in Australia, so the telescopes have night sky to observe during the UK’s school hours). The telescopes can be controlled in real time over the Internet using a web browser.
The project is based in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University, and is run by Dr Paul Roche; Dr Sarah Roberts is the project’s education officer. Extensive further information can be found at www.faulkes-telescope.com
However the lesson doesn’t require the pupils to be able to do this for real since the information cards used in the lesson offer all the information necessary for this level of planning i.e. it is heavily scaffolded in order to reinforce critical planning skills. Pupils will need several opportunities of this type in order to reinforce such behaviours before they are likely to be able to plan accurately for themselves.
Overview of lesson plan:
Episode 1 – An outline plan of the lesson
What is happening here?
This brief introduction simply sets the scene for the learning opportunity. The importance a thinking ahead, having a plan for the lesson, and reminding learners of previous learning show from the start how planning is brought into practical use in the classroom.
Episode 2 – features of managing your own learning
What is happening here?
This 5 minute slot is simply to help pupils recall previous learning and experience of being a self-regulating learner. Since the class has been engaged in something of a space theme the relevant information is captured on moon shapes circulating around a reflective planet. Asking pupils to try and remember the terms and distil what they mean to no more than 5 words is quite a big ask. But their whiteboard explanations will enable you to get a feel for where they are with understanding the ideas of reflection and self-regulation.
Episode 3 – Warm up activity…mirroring
What is happening here?
This warm up activity is included simply to help pupils switch into using the main behaviours to be used in the lesson i.e. activated or provoked by the lesson/task design. Of course you could use quite different ideas than teeth cleaning and preparing a meal for an astronaut, but the idea is to start the planning mindset going. Note too that pupils are encouraged to review what they have planned. So however inconsequential something appears to be it’s a good idea to review action!
Episode 4- Seven reminders about effective planning.
What is happening here?
Before the activity itself this teacher decided to remind pupils of the planning behaviours they had been working on and learning about in previous sessions. Although we have shown these on the screen here it’s best not to reveal them to pupils until after they have done their own thinking. So the question about planning behaviours is posed and pupils think back to the previous activity and venture ideas. One of the pupils might do this using a flip chart or similar. Now it’s time for the big reveal when the teacher shows the list one at a time. It’s a good idea to show this list without numbers and jumbled up so that you can ask pupils to un-jumble to list and put it into a workable order.. There’s a lot of link making, noticing and reasoning going on here.
Episode 5- In search of a planet
What is happening here?
Now, after some throat clearing and reminders we come to the main activity of the lesson… that of putting a plan together. This lesson turns on the planning cards and the outline plan.
Planning cards. Each group of four pupils will require a set of these cards which they should then distribute equally amongst them. There are success criteria, information and decision cards and unless you have used this idea before you will need to explain the purpose or function of each card. You could of course make this a slightly more difficult task by removing the function label of the card. Download these resource cards below and you will quickly see how they work
Planning sheet. Each group will need one sheet which provides more scaffolding for the task. The task is basically to arrange the cards in a relevant order on the planning sheet one they have decided their goals, sorted out which information is relevant and made some decisions. You can download the Planning sheets below.
After about 20 minutes planning time ask pupils to gallery their plans and then, as a group look for and explore similarities and differences. This leads into the next episode of the lesson.
Episode 6- Being adaptable
What is happening here?
In this interlude we begin to consider checking and possibly revising the plans. There are 3 views of a telescope to be revealed on the screen and you might ask pupils to work in pairs and try to draw what they see and work out what it might be. Of course this isn’t a drawing exercise but rather through sketching and thinking about something we come to understand more about it. Understanding more may cause us to change our mind about what it is or what’s going on. So this exercise is simply warming pupils up into thinking about their previous plans and whether after looking at them carefully they may want to amend them. Notice here there is no hint of the plans being shown up as wrong or incorrect but that editing, amending, reshaping etc. is all part and parcel of planning
Episode 7- Revising your plans
What is happening here?
With the benefit of the previous episode invite pupils to relook at their plans and make any necessary amends.
Episode 8- Reflecting on planning
What is happening here?
And finally the lesson might conclude with a short session focussing on pupils evaluating their planning behaviours. Pose questions such as ‘What have you found out about planning? What was easy or tricky about it? What was the benefit of reviewing your plans?’ You might use the ubiquitous Think Pair Share here but make sure the questions are thought through alone before pupils share their ideas with others. This is about beginning to understand what you think by articulating it and then trying it out on someone else. The class might come up with a suitable consensus worthy of public display.
Resources to download
Please find below the PPt presentation used to scaffold the lesson for pupils. Notes are given under each slide.
Please find below all the paper resources you need for the lesson…planning cards, planning sheet and sky-maps
What do you think?
Can you think of a curriculum-related subject that might be suitable for this sort of planning treatment? i.e. information cards. decision cards etc
Make a note of…
Which subject you might try this with,and how could you adapt it to make it easier or more demanding?
3 Using a lesson plan template to distil this lesson.
There are hundreds of lesson plan formats but we have used one that is a simple streamlined useable tool that includes:
What you do (teacher action);
What pupils do (pupil action);
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson. The thing that will drive the lesson is your talk…how much you say, when you choose to say it, the tone and register you use, the ‘could be’ nature of it, whether you are in telling or coaching mode.
Download a blank lesson plan as a MS Word document: Lesson Planning Grid [.DOC 33KB]
If we now populate the template with the episodes explored in section 2 above, we get the completed lesson plan. . .
What do you think?
What are your first reactions to this lesson plan template?
Does planning for four aspects – teacher action, pupil action, learning behaviours, teacher talk – seem useful?
How does sequencing the lesson as ‘episodes’ help or hinder planning?
Make a note of…
The extent to which your existing planning template enables you to think about lessons in this way.
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 as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Encourage students to ‘begin with the end in mind’ and so resist the inclination to rush into action;
Build in regular opportunities to stop, to take stock, to consider how it is going, what still needs doing;
Enable students to experience and choose from a wide range of planning tools and strategies;
Encourage students to think ahead to foresee obstacles and potential sticking points;
Ensure that planning and forward thinking becomes, increasingly, students’ responsibility.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
Planning, is the ability to take a strategic overview of your learning, and make sensible decisions. It means:
taking stock of the problem and the parameters within which you must work
assessing the available resources, both inner and outer, and deciding which you think are going to be needed
making an estimate of the time the learning will take, and the competing priorities that may have to be delayed or sacrificed
imagining a route-map for the learning
anticipating hurdles or problems that may arise along the way.
Good learners like taking responsibility for planning and organising their learning. They welcome opportunities to decide for themselves when, where, why and how they are going to learn—and to get better at doing so. Research shows, for example, that people who can make a reasonable estimate of how long a task will take are more likely to finish on time, and to do better work.
Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002
1b) What does being a good Planner involve?
Being able to think ahead isn’t the whole story of Planning. Becoming an effective Planner of your own learning needs you to know something about yourself as a learner; your interests, your needs, your wishes. Training the process of thinking ahead often starts simply by asking students to find the resources they will need to carry out a task. But planning your own learning is a sophisticated task. It involves a personal, silent assessment of your learning skills ( ‘What can I feasibly achieve? What am I capable of doing? What resources would bolster my chances of success?’) The more timid, less confident or lower achieving students may find such planning a daunting prospect. Introducing and requiring students to work learning out for themselves will take time and careful planning on the part the teacher. When looked at from these diverse angles growing planning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think ahead’
The Planning grid below takes account of the constituent parts of building the habit of Planning. As a grid it is probably one of the most straightforward and even boring! The emphasis we would like to stress is not so much the growing sophistication of a plan but rather the growing move towards giving students the opportunity and power to plan learning for themselves. Without such habits they will never become independent learners.
Our progression grid for Planning has 6 components:
Planning is an important aspect of becoming an independent learner. It’s about how we prepare for what we want to learn and the ways we want to do it. Students’ attitude to planning is captured in column two. Without a positive attitude they are unlikely to undertake, let alone perfect, a planning habit, and their attitude can be influenced by how they view themselves as learners. Planning might start out as mere lists in our heads or on paper but as the habit picks up and plans become more complex there are many tools that may be used assist the process. This aspect of planning is picked up in column one. Column four picks up on how students expand and refine goal setting, and the contents of plans themselves are picked up in column five. The final column charts how plans may be monitored and evaluated and how this influences the development of planning over time.
The learning guru Stephen Covey is famous for his: “Start with the end in mind”
Take a closer look at what each column of the grid is about
Planning tools
Tools we might use to help us plan
Our planning may simply start in our heads but as it gets more complex we may need tools to help us work our what to do when and which activities are dependent on others being done first. So the progress of planning tools runs from simple lists to spider diagrams and Post its to flow diagrams to spreadsheets and so on. The suggestions don’t give a full array of such tools. You will be familiar with others. The point here is about moving from simple to complex tools.
Attitude to planning
How we relate to the process of planning
Attitudes are central to whether we do something willingly or not. Here we capture the journey from following a given plan, because they have been required to do so, to planning being a key part of how a person runs their life. As usual, it’s in the Value phase that the process of planning is beginning to make sense and shown to be worthwhile. This is often largely because students discover that good initial planning can help to save time and inefficiencies in the process of learning itself. But these attitudes are also tied up with how a student views themselves as a learner; whether they think they have the skills to carry through with a plan; whether they are brave enough to set themselves challenging targets. And some students may well make a plan but lack the perseverance or commitment to carry it through. So, helping students to get good at planning is a hearts as well as a minds job.
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 would 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 they feel, others to what they are doing in a phase. All such self-talk is important in building a Planning habit, Helping to develop such talk is a critical part of a teacher’s role.
Setting intentions
Goal setting
This column is about how we become more sophisticated at setting out our end goals. This may start with simple statements about what we want something to look like, a visualisation of something we might be working on. As we come to know ourselves and our intentions we become more skilled in estimating what is possible, what’s realistic within time constraints and how such a view of the end result could be measured/assessed; how you would know whether you have achieved the goal.
Planning Actions
The components of plans
This column captures the sort of things commonly associated with a plan; the actions, the order of things, the timing, the resourcing, the contingencies. These elements of a plan grow to become more sophisticated and accurate over time.
Flexibility
How we monitor and change our plans
The last constituent of Planning has to do with how we keep an eye on a plan as it moves along. Because it takes time to plan, this often triggers a feeling that the plan deserves to be checked as it goes along. Such checking may simply be ‘have I met or will I meet that target/milestone’.i.e. is the plan going to plan? Later, as students become more used to carrying plans through they learn that plans often don’t go smoothly and that they have to be amended as circumstances change. This level of understanding and flexibility begins in the value phase and grows to become meta-evaluation; ‘is this method of planning itself effective? Do I need to tweak the process of planning?’
What do you think?
What have you learned about Planning 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.
1d) Unpicking the rows; getting better at Planning.
Of course, the development of Planning 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 Planning might grow.
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 just rush into doing things
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are simply not aware of the concept of planning. They just get on and do things. There is no forethought to their actions and no organisation to how things are done. They enjoy the spontaneity of what they are doing and may, in some cases, feel constrained by even a rudimentary plan.
Receives: Minded to follow a given plan.
In the Receives (purple) phase, students are now using short given plans. They know what a plan is for and like following the steps. They can articulate what they want to achieve (start with the end in mind) and could make a list of what they think they need to do. These are short term plans but solid beginnings have been established.
Responds: Minded to have a sense of short-term purpose.
In the Responds (blue) phase, students can now set or describe their own short term goals. (I want to be able to …) They can also decide what needs to be done in order to reach the goal. They can also sequence the actions sensibly and decide what resources might help. Mind maps are likely to help them think things out and they can check how things are going as they work through their plan. This level of planning sophistication is a big step from the receive phase (purple) and this will take time to achieve.
Values: Minded to value the efficiency of Planning
In the Values (green) phase, students now realise the value of planning and in particular the time it can save. Their own goals are now much more realistic, they have understood which tasks in a plan are significant and how long they might take. Their planning tools have become more complex or indeed they may have designed their own tools. They also realise that plans aren’t set in stone and may have to be amended to fit changing circumstances.
Organises: Minded to seriously organise longer term plans
In the Organises (yellow) phase, Planning has become a skilful well-organised habit. The changes in this phase are about making longer-term plans, building in a range of assessment criteria such as goals, objectives, success criteria and milestones and planning that anticipates possible setbacks. This sophistication may require the use of digital planning tools and has been made possible by relentlessly evaluating and learning from past plans.
Embodies: Minded to cover all eventualities in plans
In the Embodies ( orange) phase, planning has almost become a way of life. Life planning features highly in this phase but this person also approaches and manages life through a plethora of plans; short-term, long-term, strategic, operational. They use sophisticated planning tools that track the various dependencies within a plan, and there’s always a contingency plan to cover changing circumstances. Few people ever reach this level of planning and indeed some would say it was undesirable.
What do you think?
What has struck you about the act of Planning 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 Planning behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.
Preparation for the Learning Team meeting
Where are my pupils now?
Take a look at the Planning progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Colour in the cells where you think your pupils are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure classes are rare. But looking at your class in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart to denote where you think most of the school’s pupils 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
If this team session is your first one in Stepping Stones, miss out item 2.
1. Session objectives.
What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)
2. Sharing classroom experiments.
How did our experiments go? (20 mins)
Share
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 was it successful?
changes in your behaviour
Impact
More/renewed interest in…..
Avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little or no changes in…
3. Recapping on-line materials.
What did we think of the materials? ( 15 mins)
Reactions to
The Imagining grid
Where students are secure
Classroom culture ideas
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 Imagining should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Imagining might play out against key stages and even year groups.
5. Personal action planning.
What am I going to do? ( 20 mins )
5a.Consider
how you want your pupils to improve/develop/enhance their approach to Imagining?
what are you 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 pupils are unlikely to change unless you change!
Looked at your pupils through the lens of the Imagining learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Imagining looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage pupils with Imagining
Now we look closely at how to blend improving pupils’ imagining 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 imagining focused task
Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if pupils 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 pupils to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your pupils thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage pupils 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 pupils’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.
The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power
1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning
You make it clear to pupils 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:
Create a setting where pupils are more likely to engage the imagination and wonder.
Give the pupils the opportunity to ‘incubate’ their ideas, e.g. change the ‘home corner’ into a ‘Creativity Corner’ by dint of making a dark tent with a black sheet, decked out with fairy lights and CDs of relaxing music.
Designate a table for a ‘Clever Creations’ display. Each week display different things the children have made during the week, an unusual lego structure, a play dough pot or a painting. Celebrate these pieces and award ‘Good imagination’ badges/stickers.
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 pupils 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:
Introduce surprising and unpredictable elements into lessons
Link experiences to life across and beyond the curriculum
Design extended learning opportunities
Welcome unlikely and unusual suggestions
Allow time for group explorations of possibilities
Provide rich and varied stimuli
Demonstrate your own creativity
3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention
Your lessons are designed to intrigue your pupils. Pupils don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your pupils’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.
For example:
The Mind’ s Eye
Regularly start a session using the mind’s eye technique. Ask pupils to relax and sit quietly with their eyes closed. Talk quietly about whatever it is and ask the pupils to picture it in their mind’s eye. It can become a very powerful habit.
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 pupils to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
For example:
If / Then Targets
Put ‘If-then’ planning into action in your classroom to make goal setting more effective.
If we want pupils to change their behaviour we need to help them to think much more closely about the ‘hows’ and the ‘whats’. Motivation research proposes an effective solution called ‘if-then’ or ‘when-then’ planning.
‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. They are the triggers that stimulate the ‘Thens’.
‘Thens’ are what you will do about something, the action you will take whenever the ‘If’ happens.
5: Relationships…Working together
Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your pupils 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:
Explore the emotions of others
Use images or paintings or videos that shows a mix of emotions. Encourage pupils to speculate about how the individuals might be feeling/thinking.
The painting is called ‘An experiment with a bird in an air pump’ – look closely at the picture and explain the emotions in the light of this title.
6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge
You understand that pupils 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 pupils taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.
For example:
Use learning mats
at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on imagining.
A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.
Does the lesson plan:
Make it clear to pupils which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate pupils’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how pupils 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.
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, pupils 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, pupils 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…imagining.
Stage 1. What content do pupils need to learn?
What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.
Use standard lesson planning tools:
What are pupils 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 pupils get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, imagining, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these pupils in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows
Say something like this to yourself .…My pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using imagining. Most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) imagining 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 pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using imagining. Most of my pupils would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) imagining 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 pupils’ 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 I 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 pupils 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 pupils need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using imagining.
most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) imagining approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their imagining 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 pupils there and the sorts of learning behaviours your pupils will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.
You are designing the task in a way that requires pupils 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:
Imagining will help pupils to better access the content;
The aspect of imagining (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) ‘Pulls ideas together and turns ‘what is’ into ‘what could be’.
The type of task/activity that would best stretch both content and learning behaviour, intrigue, challenge, bring people together and give responsibility to pupils is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want pupils 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 pupils to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, imagining focused, task.
How do we design tasks that stretch Imagining and assist pupils to approach the content more productively? We cover this in three ways:
1 shows the phases of a lesson where imagining is the driving behaviour;
2 considers a simple lesson plan template that can be used for any lesson and distils the ‘Walker’ lesson into this format;
3 invites you to extend your thinking into other aspects of the curriculum.
1) The phases of a lesson where imagining is the driving behaviour.
Engaging all the senses to trigger the imagination
Episode 1 – What do you notice?:
What is going on here?
Say ‘I want you to be nosy – notice anything about the picture, and when you have done that, share what you have noticed with your partner’
What have you done?
Encouraged idea of nosiness, inquisitiveness, curiosity . . .
Given a very precise task – notice something, and tell your partner.
Used word notice rather than see – why?
Started with a low challenge task
Used the word ‘when’ – it presupposes success
Does anyone want to say what they think is happening here? In each case, ask the respondent to look again at the picture to identify the clues that led them to that conclusion. Use ‘what makes you say that’ or ‘because’ to deepen thinking. Conversely, seek alternative explanations. Ask ‘what else could that be?’ Use the ‘maybe hand’ as you go, raise fingers as you illicit alternative explanations until you have a handful of possibilities.
[You will return to the ‘what do you think is happening’ in Episode 5]
Episode 2 – Turn up the colours:
What is going on here?
Ask pupils to study the picture in silence for 20 secs. This time, invite them to see the picture in colour – ‘turn up the colours in your head and tell me what you notice’. Ask who can see colours (some can, some can’t!).
Ask them what they can see in colour.
Respond to answers by probing for more detail to deepen thinking – is it a dark blue? How would you describe it?
[At this stage, the responses generally focus on the colour of the tunic / braiding and the colour of the light coming from the lamp. Once this has been explored, widen it to include the colour of the cobble stones, of the moon, of the rats, of the bottle . . . . ]
Episode 3 – Turn up the sounds:
What is going on here?
Again 20 secs silence before responding.
Now turn up the sounds coming out of the picture – and when you have heard them, tell me what you hear.
Probe detail – how long is the sound? Broken or continuous? Volume? Pitch? What can you compare it to?
(ie “I can hear his footsteps” – probe with ‘Is he moving quickly?’, ‘Hard or soft soles on his shoes?’,
or “I can hear the wind blowing / the lamp chain creaking in the wind” – probe with ‘Is it howling?’, ‘Is it blowing towards us or away from us?’,
or ” I can hear people talking” (this is usually from a pub or from behind the Walker in the square at the back of the image – probe with ‘Can you hear what they are saying?’, ‘How many people are talking?’.)
[Try, if possible, to start with those who could not see colour, but could hear sounds].
Experience tells us that this is the most imaginative and creative phase of this lesson. Usually most pupils can hear sounds, even the ones who could not see colours. Be prepared to spend time on this Episode, and ready yourself with a range of probing questions so that you are not flying blind all of the time.
Episode 4 – Jump into the picture:
What is going on here?
Look at the image again. Now I am going to count to 3. On the count of 3 I want you to jump into the picture and stand somewhere in the picture.
Ok 1,2,3 Go !
As they are looking in silence, quietly nudge their thinking – what can they see and hear, how do they feel?
Share ideas in whole group. Probe with:
Where did you stand? Why there?
What can you smell?
How do you feel?
If the opportunity presents itself, try to cross-reference the senses: If someone says it is cold, ask what is the shape of cold; or the taste of cold, or the sound etc.
Episode 5 – What do you think is going on here?
What is going on here?
This is where you get one or two pupils to tell their narrative of what they think is happening.
Give them time to distil their thoughts and create their individual ‘story’. Then move to sharing with a partner.
Finally, ask who has heard a really interesting story (ie the partner recommends someone to share their story with the whole class).
Have questions to hand to sharpen their explanations:
Is he a goodie or a baddie ?
Is he walking towards something, or away from something.
What has he got in his left hand ?
Why the look over the shoulder ?
What’s on the paper on the wall of the building to the left ?
2) Using a lesson plan template to distil this lesson.
Given that there are hundreds of lesson plan formats we will use a few different types of planning tools over the course of these units. This one is a simple streamlined useable tool that includes:
What you do (teacher action);
What pupils do (pupil action);
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
Download a blank lesson plan as a MS Word document:
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 as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Use tentative, ‘Could Be’, ‘What If’ language to promote imagination and speculation;
Encourage students to take risks in pursuit of novel, creative outcomes;
Enable students to consider problems from multiple perspectives to stimulate new approaches and solutions;
Use guided visualisation to help students to explore possibilities and to create their own scenarios;
Model your own creativity and imaginative responses when faced with challenge.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
Imagining is an important way of thinking but one that seems to be afforded too few opportunities in classrooms. Imagination isn’t just a cute faculty that children use to weave fantasies: it is one of the most effective tools in the learner’s toolbox. Scientists, designers and executives need a powerful imagination just as much as painters and novelists, and it can either be developed, through appropriate experience and encouragement, or left to shrivel up. Good learners are ready and able to look at things in different ways. They like playing with ideas and possibilities and adopting different perspectives (even though they may not have a clear idea of where their imagination is leading them). They use pictures and diagrams to help them think and learn.
There are two kinds of imagination: active and receptive. In active imagination, you deliberately create a scenario to run in your mind’s eye. Sports people use this kind of mental rehearsal and experiments have shown it to be very effective at improving their level of skill.
The second kind of imagination is more receptive, like daydreaming: letting a problem slip to the back of your mind, and then just sliding into a kind of semi-awake reverie, where the mind plays with ideas and images without much control on your part. Successful learners and inventors know how to make good use of this kind of creative intuition. They are interested in inklings and ideas that just bubble up into their minds.
Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002
1b) What does being a good Imaginer involve?
A well formed Imagining habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:
Use the mind as a theatre in which to play out ideas and possible actions experimentally.
Use a rich variety of visual, aural and sensory experiences to trigger creative and lateral thinking.
Explore possibilities speculatively, saying ‘What might …’, ‘What could …’ and ‘What if …?’ rather than being constrained by what is.
Retain a childlike playfulness when confronted with challenges and difficulties.
Be aware of intended outcomes whilst adopting a flexible approach to realising goals.
Rehearse actions in the mind before performing them in reality.
So, at a less abstract level, students need to have a wide range of experiences on which to base their imaginations; to have the bravery to take imaginative risks; to have the ability to visualise what they will do in advance of taking action; to be happy to allow their minds to explore intuitions and possible lines of enquiry; and to create innovative creative outcomes. When looked at from these diverse angles growing imagination moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘be creative’.
2 Our progression chart for Imagining has 6 components:
Imagining in all its forms is about using the mind as a theatre in which to play with ideas. It’s about stepping outside the reality of now and thinking about ‘could be’, ‘what if’. Such thinking can be enriched through a range of experiences or it can be left to atrophy. This chart has a number of perhaps surprising features; how the imagination can be nurtured; how the growth of empathy is important in imagination; what outcomes emerge from different frames of mind and how the two types of imagining grow. At the root of it all lies the range of experiences children are afforded. The richer the range of experience, both actual and through stories,art,music etc. the richer the bedrock for the imagination to play with. Imagination has strong connections with Making Links for it relies on linking possibilities, and indeed impossibilities, in new, unusual and absurd ways. The grid attempts to intertwine these important contributors to growing the habit of Imagining.
“ Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”– Albert Einstein
Take a closer look at what each column of the chart is about
Nurturing imagination
How growing experience fuels imagination
Without rich experiences of life and indeed other imaginations we have little raw material to fuel our imagination. This column is about building that experience from day to day living, to purposefully gathering ideas to trigger the imagination. Affording, building and helping children to retrieve such experiences becomes an important role for teachers and parents
Growing empathy
Seeing things from other viewpoints
Empathy enables our mind to detach itself from oneself and see the world from other viewpoints, seeing other realities not as absolutes but just alternatives. Hence growing empathy fuels our imagination as we learn to see things in ways that are different to our own. We might do this from meeting and talking with others but we can also get a feel for such differences through film or television where we are often put into the lives of others.
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 would 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 standards, others to self-monitoring, or flexibility. All such self-talk is important in building a Imagining habit.
Active imagination
Deliberate creation of imaginative scenarios
Here we can see the growth of a conscious use of imagination. It may begin with being based in concrete experiences eg imaginative play in classrooms where children transfer their experiences of life into a child sized setting. But it moves on to pulling ideas together ( linking) and asking ‘what if?’ From there we might move to being able to visualise what we want to achieve or make or create. We consciously imagine an end point and even a way of doing it. We are able to imagine ourselves through an experience using all the ways of doing it that we know will work; we rehearse it in our mind before actually doing it. This is very different from simply imagining ourselves ‘winning’, this is living the process that will, hopefully, lead us to ‘winning’. Imagining such a process is almost as good as actually practising it in reality.
Receptive imagination
Generating a state of reverie
This type of imagining is about shifting a problem to the back of your mind and entering an almost dreamlike state to play with ideas. You follow your intuition, follow inklings and hunches and let things just bubble up in your mind. it’s a state of wondering, shifting, sifting, juxtaposing, just to see where it goes.
Imaginative outcomes
Growing the outcomes of imagination.
The last constituent of Imagining has to do with how the growth of our way of imagining leads to different sorts of outcomes. In the early stages, our limited experiences lead to predictable and cautious outcomes. When our imagination allows us to suspend reality and abandon our inhibitions the outcomes are more independent and constructive. Yet later, when our imagination lets us break normal rules and distort reality the outcomes are more original, more playful, more innovative.
What do you think?
What have you learned about Imagining 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.
4) Unpicking the rows; getting better at Imagining.
Of course, the development of Imagining doesn’t grow neatly up each column or evenly across the phases in the grid. The five broad phases of dispositional growth (receives – embodies) are affective ways in which people may be inclined to behave: we call this inclination ‘mindedness’.
Here is our interpretation of how Imagining might grow.
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 pretend a little
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, pupils are unaware of the concept of imagining. They may play at being another ( known) character but rarely ascribe the label of imagining. Their experience of the world is somewhat limited and this limitation affects the richness of their early imaginative play. They tend to stick to the ‘rules’ of reality.
Receives: Minded to re-play reality.
In the Receives (purple) phase, students are busy building up their range of experiences of the world and this in large part prescribes how they imagine things to be. There imaginative state is still often suggested by adults but they are recognising that others can and do have different kinds of feelings and thoughts to themselves. This can be the source of some discomfort.
Responds: Minded to imagine beyond the rules of reality .
In the Responds (blue) phase, students are broadening their range of experiences not only of and in real life settings but also through stories and myths and art and fairy tales. Such stories allow them to appreciate that at least in stories the rules of reality can be broken or disregarded. In the growth of empathy, they are again stepping out of their more restricted world and into the lives of others through film or the internet. This allows them an insight into the lives of others. So their growing experiences lead to more imitative and responsive imaginative outcomes.
Values: Minded to put their imagination to practical use
In the Values ( green) phase, students know how to use their memories of experiences and stories to achieve their own imaginative writing. They are able to abandon their inhibitions and create other worlds. They can see that in the world of imagination they can ‘get’ things to act differently and this frees them to think more boldly.
Organises: Minded to let their imagination run wild
In the Organises (yellow) phase, Imagining has become a skilful habit;they are organising themselves to fuel their imagination further. They often collect pictures or songs or poems or artifacts that they may use to trigger their imagination in the future. Their listening habits have shifted to being focused on understanding other viewpoints and all this combines to give them insights into other real and imaginary worlds. this gives them what they need to achieve original outcomes.
Embodies: Minded to use imagination as a default setting to solve problems
In the Embodies ( orange) phase, we are genuinely able to detach from our own views and emotions and appreciate those of others as alternatives, even when we disagree with them. In this phase, we use our imaginations freely to solve problems innovatively. The constraints of our world as we know it, our inhibitions, our conscious criticism (telling ourselves that’s a silly idea) have been dropped as inhibitors and our imagination helps us to solve problems, entertain, provoke further thought.
What do you think?
What has struck you about the act of Imagining 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 Imagining behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.
Preparation for the Learning Team meeting
Where are my pupils now?
Take a look at the Imagining progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Colour in the cells where you think your pupils are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure classes are rare. But looking at your class in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart to denote where you think most of the school’s pupils 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
If this team session is your first one in Stepping Stones, miss out item 2.
1. Session objectives
What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)
2. Sharing classroom experiments
How did our experiments go? (20 mins)
Share
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
Talk about impact
improvements in students’ behaviour
more/renewed interest in the subject
more harmony in the classroom
greater willingness to try, and try different ways
Avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little of no changes in…
3. Recapping on-line materials.
What did we think of the materials? ( 15 mins)
Reactions to
The Reasoning grid
Where pupils are secure
Where the pupils could be secure when they leave for secondary school
Classroom culture ideas
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 Reasoning should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Reasoning might play out against key stages and even year groups.
5. Personal action planning.
What am I going to do? ( 20 mins )
5a. Consider
how you want your pupils to improve/develop/enhance their approach to Reasoning?
what are you 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 pupils are unlikely to change unless you change!
Looked at your pupils through the lens of the Reasoning learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Reasoning looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage pupils with Reasoning
Now we look closely at how to blend improving pupils’ reasoning 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 reasoning focused task
Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if pupils 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 pupils to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your pupils thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage pupils 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 pupils’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.
The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power
1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning
You make it clear to pupils 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:
Use displays of reasoning behaviours such as:
If – Then suggestions:
If I believe that I have proved something, then I will go back over it to check that I have not made any errors or false assumptions.
If I feel certain about an issue, then I will check for any counter evidence.
Or useful reminders such as:
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 pupils 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:
A simple, straightforward way of showing the purpose of learning objectives or goals…simply add SO THAT at the end of the objective. The SO THAT is similar to the why. It aims to offer a wider reason for pursuing the learning objective. So an objective becomes…
Be able to xxxxxxx So That. . . . add the wider purpose
Continue to put the ‘how’ before the ‘what’ in constructing objectives or intentions.
As a team, using xxx reasoning (the how) be able to….(the what.)…. so that…(the relevance)……
3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention
Your lessons are designed to intrigue your pupils. Pupils don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your pupils’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.
For example:
Quick learning challenges to warm up/ tune-in to relevant learning muscles
Challenge: “ There are nine little pigs in a field.
By drawing two squares how can you give each pig its own pen?”
5 minutes to complete
Use Coaching Questions with “could be” or “might be” language. “How differently can we draw the squares?” “Can we draw squares outside the box?”
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 pupils to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
For example:
Spot the mistake.
Offer pupils examples of written work with different numbers of mistakes in them. Challenge them to work in pairs to correctly identify the mistakes in each example. When complete tell pairs if they have found the right number of mistakes but if not don’t discuss which, if any, they have overlooked. Ask for explanations of the errors and how they can be avoided.
5: Relationships…Working together
Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your pupils 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:
Sorting how decisions are made.
What could groups do when they can’t agree on the logic of the situation? Try this three stage approach to reaching a consensus.
Once a range of alternative ideas/strategies have been identified:
Stage 1 – a few minutes whole group discussion. If one idea emerges as everyone’s favourite, then a consensus has been reached. If no single idea has everyone’s support, move to stage 2
Stage 2 – Now, try for a compromise involving some ‘give and take’. Look at two or three of the most popular ideas, and encourage pupils to ask:
What changes are needed for one of these ideas to be acceptable to everyone?, or failing that . .
Which one would we all be willing to try, for a short time, to see how it works out. Then back to stage 1. Decide: pursue/ change tack. If there is still no agreement. . . .
Stage 3 – the last resort – voting. Show of hands, or a secret vote. Or:
Label the different possibilities A/B/C/D etc
Each person nominates their top three
Tally scores and the idea with the greatest number of ‘hits’ is the group’s preferred solution.
6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge
You understand that pupils 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 pupils taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.
For example:
Use learning mats
at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on reasoning.
A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.
Does the lesson plan:
Make it clear to pupils which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate pupils’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how pupils 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.
Skim read or leave this section if you have met it in other units because… the section applies to any learning behaviour. i.e. not specific to Reasoning.
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.
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, pupils 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, pupils 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…reasoning.
Stage 1. What content do pupils need to learn?
What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.
Use standard lesson planning tools:
What are pupils 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 pupils get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, reasoning, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these pupils in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows
Say something like this to yourself .…My pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using reasoning. Most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) reasoning 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 pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using reasoning. Most of my pupils would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) reasoning 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 pupils’ 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 I 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 pupils 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 pupils need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using reasoning.
most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) reasoning approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their reasoning and 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 pupils there and the sorts of learning behaviours your pupils will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.
You are designing the task in a way that requires pupils 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:
Reasoning will help pupils to better access the content;
The aspect of reasoning (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) “reduce uncertainty using justifiable evidence” (Frames of Mind 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 pupils is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want pupils 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 pupils to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, reasoning focused, task.
How do we design tasks that stretch Reasoning and assist pupils to approach the content more productively? We cover this in four ways:
A description of the phases of a lesson designed to explore a type of reasoning
1. A description of the phases of a lesson designed to explore a type of reasoning.
Look through the lesson below. It uses spot the difference to encourage pupils to speculate based on limited information, using inferential reasoning to analyse evidence and counter evidence.
The lesson focuses on the Frames of Mind and the Applying Reasoning columns of the Reasoning chart, mostly at the blue through yellow phases. It creates a situation in which pupils have to do the best they can with a range of inconclusive and sometimes contradictory evidence.
Notice how, despite the focus on learners amending their ideas as the evidence is found, other learning behaviours ‘bubble up’ as the lesson proceeds. It reminds us that given effective support learning behaviours don’t function in isolation, that learners not only have a wide range of learning behaviours to call on but that they can move seamlessly from one to another as required.
Firstly, an overview of the lesson:
Using inferential reasoning to analyse evidence and counter evidence
Episode 1 – What time of day is this?
What is going on here?
At this stage, pupils can see only one of the 2 images.
The question ‘What time of day is this?’ encourages pupils to hypothesise based on precious little evidence.
About the only thing we know for certain is that it is not at night. Beyond that, it is educated guesswork.
Clues that might yield some insight:
people;
clothing;
the woman’s watch;
light and shadow;
the white shopping bag;
others?
The important thing here is that pupils try to support their view with evidence of some kind, however flimsy.
Use the visible thinking routine ‘what makes you say that?’ to encourage explanation and justification.
Vary it with:
Can you give me a bit more on why you think that?
Convince me;
How can you be sure?
[Hints:
The woman on the right has a white bag tucked behind her. Has she been shopping? If yes, then it must be late enough for her to have already been to the shops.
Try as you might, the dial on her watch is not visible.
The light appears bright – does that suggest towards the middle of the day?
The atmosphere is fairly relaxed – is this lunchtime, or thereabouts ?]
Episode 2 – Spot the differences:
What is going on here?
They now see both images, side by side.
Be careful not to hint at the time difference – simply say that the 2 pictures are of the same scene, taken at different times.
Episode 2 is a noticing activity, looking to identify similarity and, more importantly, subtle/obscure differences.
Conduct as a Think / Pair / Share activity on tables.
Gallery pupils’ differences and similarities.
[Hints:
If pupils need help, get them to focus on the 2 central characters, the people in the background, where the sunlight and shadows are.]
Episode 3 – Which photo was taken first?:
What is going on here?
Begin by exploring which of the differences and similarities identified in Episode 2 might be important, and which might not be relevant.
As with Episode 1, the evidence is again inconclusive, but this time totally so. Lengthening shadows from one image to the next might tell you something – but only if we know it is afternoon. Otherwise they could be the shortening shadows of the morning.
There is simply too little evidence here to justify a conclusive answer. Even an educated guess is little more than a guess.
The key point here is not to answer the question ‘Which photo was taken first?’, but to help pupils to realise that reasoning without evidence to back it up is nothing more than a personal opinion.
However there is one thing that we do know for certain – that the differences identified in Episode 2 must mean that the 2 photos were not taken at the same time. Which leads into Episode 4. . .
[Hints:
We can find no evidence that either image precedes the other. Let us know if you spot something that we have missed!]
Episode 4 – What time elapsed between these two images?:
What is going on here?
More like Episode 1 than Episode 3, this time there is evidence that pupils can use.
Begin by going back to the gallery of differences and similarities – are the ones that appeared important in relation to deciding which photo was taken first also the ones that are important in deciding on the elapsed time? You are leading them to see that evidence needs to be relevant to the question being asked.
What they can be certain of is that sufficient time must have elapsed for all of the differences to have occurred. The differences suggest a longer elapsed time. Conversely, all of the similarities (ie the things that have not changed) are counter evidence suggesting a shorter elapsed time. Here pupils have to balance evidence and counter evidence to come to a hypothesis that is supported by all of the ‘facts’.
If pupils need help, nudge them consider the implications of:
The rearranged shopping bag behind the woman on the right;
The (dis)appearance of the man in the red shirt (top left);
The continued presence of the man in the white shirt (over left shoulder of woman on the right);
The sunlight striking the flowers middle left.
Use the visible thinking routine Point / Evidence / Explain to help pupils to structure their arguments (See section 2, Purple to Blue)
[Hints:
The differences need to have sufficient time to happen – all of the background people need time to change positions / appear / disappear; the woman to the right needs time to rearrange the white bag behind her (does she show her friend what she has bought, and then put the bag back behind her?); critically, the light falling on the flowers to the left of the women has changed, and the flowers in full sunlight have changed – this is the key piece of evidence that confirms an elapsed time of more than a minute or two.]
Episode 5 – Agreeing within what time window these two images were taken
What is going on here?
Given that pupils were unable to give a definitive answer in Episode 4 because of lack of firm evidence, they are now encouraged to consider all of the available evidence to decide on the most probable minimum and maximum times within which the two images were taken.
The argument will centre on which difference probably took longest to happen – could it be that the woman on the right has done something with the bag behind herself? Did she open it to show her friend what she had bought? Or it could be combination of events all of which are unlikely to have happened simultaneously?
It will also have to take into account the similarities that are least likely to be sustained – the women are unlikely to sit there for an hour and the guy in the white shirt also sit in the same place for an hour.
Pupils are being encouraged to do the best they can with all of the circumstantial evidence available to come up with their best guess.
The message here is that even when we have to make a guess, we can at least make a guess that is both plausible and consistent with the available evidence.
[Hints:
The two key things to balance are a) the shifting sunlight and b) those things that have not changed. The time window has to be large enough for the shift in sunlight to have occurred, and yet short enough for the women and the guy in the white shirt to have remained in almost identical positions.
So what would your answer be? A minimum of 30 minutes for the sun to shift position, and a maximum of an hour for the 2 women and the man to not move?
Can you do any better – on the available evidence?]
Episode 6 – Distilling what has been learned about Reasoning
What is going on here?
Time to reflect on the activity and to tease out the key learning points.
These might include:
Opinions need to be backed by evidence;
Sometimes the evidence is inconclusive;
It takes time to gather the necessary evidence;
We need to be logical in order to convince others;
We have to careful when we make assumptions;
We cannot prove everything;
[PS – If you are hoping that at some point we are going to give the correct answers, dream on ! We don’t know either!!]
2. The lesson plan shown as a simple grid
This simple streamlined useable grid captures the lesson just shown above and includes:
What you do (teacher action)
What pupils do (pupil action)
The types of learning behaviours being called upon
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
Here is the grid lesson template for the reasoning lesson shown and analysed above:
Download a blank lesson plan as a MS Word document: Lesson Planning Grid [.DOC 33KB]
What do you think?
What are your first reactions to this lesson?
The lesson activates high level reasoning skills – Which phase of Reasoning best represents the skills needed for success?
Does the fact that there is no definitive ‘answer’ detract from or enhance the activity?
Make a note of…
A class that you teach with sufficiently high levels of reasoning skills to access this lesson.
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 as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Enable pupils to go beyond describing and explaining to justifying and proving;
Create opportunities for pupils to present their reasoning to others;
Make pupils aware of different types of reasoning;
Ensure that pupils value rigour and precision;
Encourage pupils to support their ideas with evidence, and to reconsider ideas in light of counter evidence.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
Reasoning is the kind of logical, analytical, explicit disciplined thinking that schools often focus on (sometimes to the exclusion of some of the other elements). There is a lot of interest at the moment in ways of teaching thinking, and there are many materials for teaching thinking on the market. In BLP, such ‘Show your working’kinds of thinking are a very important part of the good learner’s toolkit, but they are not the be-all and end-all of learning. In fact, research suggests that secondary schools have not been very successful at developing students’ ability to think logically in real life.
It turns out to be quite difficult to free any kind of thinking or learning skill from its ties to the particular setting and subject matter in which it was originally practised.
Nevertheless, being able to construct logical arguments or make practical use of Venn diagrams, for example, is very useful, and good learners need practice at using such tools in the context of their real-life concerns.
Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002
1b) What does being a good Reasoner involve?
A well formed Reasoning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:
Resist jumping to conclusions
Seek justifiable evidence to shape sound, well-honed arguments.
Scrutinise your assumptions
Seek evidence and counter evidence, look for false steps and carefully draw conclusions.
Remain suspicious, doubting and self-doubting in order to avoid unwarranted certainty.
Convey your logical thinking clearly, through dialogue, symbols, analogies, prose and pictures.
So, at a less abstract level, students need to learn the inclination to resist impulsive responses; to respond logically and thoughtfully; to apply logic by explaining, justifying and, ultimately, proving what they think; to utilise a range of reasoning tools; and to develop strategies for presenting their reasoning to others persuasively. When looked at from these diverse angles growing reasoning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think it through’.
The Reasoning grid below takes account of the constituent parts of building the habit of Reasoning
Our progression grid for Reasoning has 5 components:
Reasoning is about disciplined thinking, making logical arguments and backing them up with proof. It’s a complex process in itself as well as in its development. The first column shows how our disposition or inclination to reason might develop; how this manifests itself from using trial and error thinking to high-level meta-reasoning (thinking about how we reason). Column two shows how we might talk about these phases and column three shows what we might actually do when we apply the disposition in each phase of growth. Column four suggests the sort of reasoning tools we would be using and column five suggests how we might present our reasoning to others.
Frames of mind
How we are disposed to reason
The first column shows a broad sweep of our dispositions to reason. At first, we might approach reasoning in a haphazard way using a trial and error frame of mind. We move on to asking questions and making propositions. what’s this really about? Is this because? What do I know about this? We might move on to seeking evidence to try to justify or prove our point and then on again to wanting to make even more sure of our evidence and maybe question our original assumptions. Finally, at the embodies phase we are reason about reasoning and how we can improve the process. So the range moves from being impulsive to being super cautious, where not getting thinking wrong is a huge part of getting it right.
Self-talk
The voice of self-awareness
Self-talk is what we say to ourselves as we learn. The statements here capture what someone in each phase of the grid would 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. All such self-talk is important in building a Reasoning habit.
Applying reasoning
What we do when we reason
In the first phase of reasoning, we might be able to describe or explain what we are thinking but not why we are thinking in this way. Later we can justify and say why we are thinking something but we aren’t able to prove it. We might though be able to convince others of our point. Later we are able to prove our thinking through solid evidence. One might think that would be enough but good reasoners go further to check for false steps and check their original assumptions. And finally, the super reasoner knows about and seeks to avoid common traps in logic and fallacious arguments.
Reasoning tools
The thinking tools we use in reasoning.
In the first phases of reasoning, we might just guess at things or compare and contrast things. Is this like that? How is this different from that? Later we might speculate about things, try to spot patterns, visualise next steps or solutions. In the next phase, we use deductive reasoning where we apply a general rule to specific problems. In the later phases, we evaluate pros and cons and look for alternative solutions. And in the final phase, we try to provoke new ways of thinking about things.
If you are interested in a brief glance at different types of reasoning refer to 6) Types of Reasoning.
Presenting Reasoning
Ways of showing our reasoning
The point of reasoning is not merely to convince ourselves, but to convince others of our thinking. This applies to a mathematical proof as much as it does to a philosophical argument or an analysis of a newspaper column. We might start simply by telling what we did and maybe why we did this. We move forward to being able to show how we worked something out and later show this through symbols and diagrams as well as words. Lastly, we are able to make convincing presentations of our views, arguments and proofs in terms that would suit any audience.
Reasoning within an argument gives the rationale behind why one choice, for example, should be selected over another. The main two types of reasoning are:
Deductive Reasoning: starting from the general rule and moving to specifics.
Inductive Reasoning: starting from specifics and deriving a general rule.
And other types that are variants on deductive or inductive reasoning are:
Abduction: the process of creating explanatory hypotheses.
Backwards Reasoning: Start from what you want and work back.
Butterfly Logic: How people often argue.
Analogical Reasoning: relating things to novel other situations.
Cause-and-Effect Reasoning: showing causes and resulting effect.
Cause-to-Effects Reasoning: starting from the cause and going forward.
Effects-to-Cause Reasoning: starting from the effect and working backward.
Comparative Reasoning: comparing one thing against another.
Conditional Reasoning: using if…then…
Criteria Reasoning: comparing against established criteria.
Decompositional Reasoning: understand the parts to understand the whole.
Exemplar Reasoning: using an example.
Modal Logic: arguing about necessity and possibility.
Pros-vs-cons Reasoning: using arguments both for and against a case.
Residue Reasoning: Removing first what is not logical.
Set-based Reasoning: based on categories and membership relationships.
Systemic Reasoning: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Syllogistic Reasoning: drawing conclusions from premises.
Traditional Logic: assuming premises are correct.
Note that these are not all mutually exclusive methods and several give different lenses onto overlapping areas. In classical argument, for example, all arguments are framed as either inductive or deductive.
If you are interested in a brief glance at different types of reasoning click here
What do you think?
What have you learned about Reasoning 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.
1d) Unpicking the rows: getting better at Reasoning
Of course, the development of Reasoning 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 Reasoning might grow.
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 use what they think they know
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, pupils talk about what they know. They don’t consider having to prove or justify what they say, in their view they just ‘know stuff’. They probably have little cause to have to explain why they think something and their quick thinking based on limited experiences means that they often jump to conclusions. There are many people who don’t get far from this starting point or fall back to it.
Receives: Minded to say why.
In the Receives (purple) phase, pupils become more curious about things. They may enjoy talking about (describing) what they are thinking but as yet find it hard to explain why they think it. ‘Describes’ is seen as a step 1 in reasoning, while ‘Explaining’…offering some reasons for what they did (correct or incorrect) is seen as step 2. They will enjoy the challenge of comparing and contrasting things or guessing or estimating how things might be. Precision isn’t yet part of their bag.
Responds: Minded to form a line of argument.
In the Responds (blue) phase, students have more confidence in their reasoning although they may not be correct. In ‘convincing’ they may use the words ‘I reckon’ or ‘without-doubt’ They are also then able to justify forming a correct logical chain of argument. They use words like ‘because’ or ‘therefore’ or ‘and so’.
Values: Minded to prove a point or argument
In the Values (green) phase, students understand the importance of needing to show how they worked something out. Now they can give a watertight argument based on generalisations ( deductive reasoning). There is an assumption at this phase that students can communicate their solutions in a written form.
Organises: Minded to check and counter check for accuracy/logic
In the Organises (yellow) phase Reasoning has become a skilful habit. By this stage proofs have been made but then thinking begins again…’is this proof good enough?’, Is there a flaw in this argument that I haven’t spotted? Is there any counter evidence I need to consider? This is a highly cautious phase.
Embodies: Minded to be a meta reasoner
In the Embodies ( orange) phase, it’s fair to say that. few people make it that far. High-level Reasoning is much more complex than we have been able to indicate here but in essence, this phase is about thinking deeply about the reasoning or logic process itself and how it might be improved. Such people are highly skilled in making and presenting complex logical arguments in a way that many audiences will understand.
Colour in the cells where you think your pupils are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure classes are rare. But looking at your class in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart to denote where you think most of the school’s pupils 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
If this team session is your first one in Stepping Stones, miss out 2.
1. Session objectives
What do we want to achieve? ( 5 mins)
2. Sharing classroom experiments
How did our experiments go? ( 20 mins)
Share
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
Talk about impact (general)
improvements in the ‘feel’ of the classroom culture
increased time on task
less low level disruption
more talk about learning
greater enjoyment in learning
more/renewed interest in the subject
more harmony in the classroom
greater willingness to try, and try different ways
Less/more avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little of no change in…
Impact (specific)
Or…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 Making Links grid
Where pupils are secure
Where the pupils could be secure when they leave for secondary school
Classroom culture ideas
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 Making Links should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Making Links might play out against key stages and even year groups.
5. Personal action planning
What am I going to do? ( 20 mins )
5a.Consider
how you want your pupils to improve/develop/enhance their approach to Making Links
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 pupils are unlikely to change unless you change!
Looked at your pupils through the lens of the Making Links learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Making Links looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage pupils with Making Links
Now we look closely at how to blend improving pupils’ making links 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 making links focused task
Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if pupils 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 pupils to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your pupils thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage pupils 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 pupils’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.
The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power
1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning
You make it clear to pupils 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:
Use display
Show connections between ideas, characters, objects that are being studied through the use of classroom wall displays. Refer to them and encourage pupils to add new connections as they emerge.
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 pupils 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:
Mind Maps
Use mind maps to encourage pupils to link and explain how information and ideas seem to be associated.
Use mind mapping at the beginning, middle and end of a unit of study to show how links and understanding change as knowledge grows.
Use at the end of a module of learning as a synthesising tool.
Use a ‘thought shower mind map’ at the outset of a lesson to connect with prior learning and activate link making.
3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention
Your lessons are designed to intrigue your pupils. Pupils don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your pupils’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.
For example:
Word Play
_________ is like (a) ________ because….
The first blank is for the subject-related topic, concept etc.
The second blank is for the random (?) noun.
e.g. Punctuation is like a river because . . .
Use as an engaging starter or a reflective, plenary activity
It stimulates pupils to make links between what they have just learned and things they already know.
Use it more generally towards the end of a topic as a transferring or distilling activity.
You could… choose the noun at random; structure more carefully and choose a noun to help scaffold the learning; encourage pupils to choose their own (random?) noun. It could be an end of topic homework.
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 pupils to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
For example:
Visible Thinking Routine
Connect, Extend, Challenge
Helps pupils make connections between new ideas and prior knowledge. Also encourages them to take stock of ongoing questions, puzzles and difficulties as they reflect on what they are learning.
Connect…how are the ideas and information presented connected to what you already know?
Extend…what new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?
Challenge…what is still challenging you or confusing for you to get your mind round? What questions, wondering or puzzles do you now have?
The natural place to use this routine is after pupils have learned something new. For example: after exploring a work of art, a theory, a method, a piece of evidence. Try it as a reflection during a lesson, after a longer project, or when completing a unit of study.
The routine works just as well with the whole class, small groups or individually.
[This Visible Thinking routine is further illustrated as part of a lesson in section 3c]
5: Relationships…Working together
Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your pupils 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:
Invite groups of four to consider the different ways we connect ideas —logical, diverse, lateral, etc. Give each group a bag of items that are connected or linked in some sort of way. Pupils have to work out how they are linked. Nudge with “What’s happening here and what makes you say that?”
Debrief through discussion “What is happening in our minds when we make connections between things?” “Sometimes it is important to think logically and systematically, and sometimes we need to allow ourselves to imagine possibilities.” “Why is it important to make connections?” “What does making connections help us to do?”
Alternatives Run activity with all groups having the same articles OR with all groups having different articles. OR having bags of items with no obvious links. Pupils make up their own.
6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge
You understand that pupils 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 pupils taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.
For example:
Learning Logs
Introduce Learning Logs to encourage pupils to reflect on how they are making links in order to build understanding. Ensure link making ideas stretch beyond school and subjects
A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.
Does the lesson plan:
Make it clear to pupils which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate pupils’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how pupils 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.
Skim read or leave this section if you have met it in other units because… the section applies to any learning behaviour. i.e. not specific to Making Links.
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.
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, pupils 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, pupils 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…making links.
Stage 1. What content do pupils need to learn?
What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.
Use standard lesson planning tools:
What are pupils 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 pupils get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, making links, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these pupils in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows
Say something like this to yourself .…My pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using making links. Most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) making links 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 pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using making links. Most of my pupils would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) making links 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 pupils’ 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 I 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 pupils 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 pupils need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using making links.
most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) making links approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their making links 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 pupils there and the sorts of learning behaviours your pupils will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.
You are designing the task in a way that requires pupils 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:
Making links will help pupils to better access the content;
The aspect of making links (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) “Remembers lists, facts definitions through note taking, highlighting, using mnemonics” (Ways of Making Meaning column, Purple phase)
The type of task/activity that would best stretch both content and learning behaviour, intrigue, challenge, bring people together and give responsibility to pupils is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want pupils 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 pupils to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, link making, task.
How do we design tasks that stretch Link Making and assist pupils to approach the content more productively? We cover this in four ways:
1 describes the Connect/Extend/Challenge visible thinking routine;
2 shows the phases of a lesson where Connect/Extend/Challenge is embedded;
3 considers a simple lesson plan template that can be used for any lesson and distils the Link Making lesson into this format;
4 invites you to extend your thinking about the Connect/Extend/Challenge technique into other aspects of the curriculum.
[Follow the link to see C/E/C and all of the other Visible Thinking routines.]
Connect Extend Challenge – A routine for connecting new ideas to prior knowledge.
The routine uses three questions:
How are the ideas and information presented CONNECTED to what you already knew?
What new ideas did you get that EXTENDED or pushed your thinking in new directions?
What is still CHALLENGING or confusing for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings or puzzles do you now have?
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage? The routine helps pupils 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.
Application: When and Where can it be used?
The natural place to use the Connect-Extend-Challenge routine is after pupils have learned something new. It doesn’t matter how much they have learned – it can be a lesson’s worth, or a unit’s worth. The routine is broadly applicable: Use it after pupils have explored a work of art, or anything else in the curriculum. Try it as a reflection during a lesson, after a longer project, or when completing a unit of study.
Launch: Some tips for starting and using this routine.
This routine works well with the whole class, in small groups or individually. Keep a visible record of pupils’ ideas. If you are working in a group, ask pupils to share some of their thoughts and collect a list of ideas in each of the three categories Or have pupils write their individual responses on post-it notes and add them to a class chart. Keep pupils’ visible thinking alive over time: Continually add new ideas to the lists and revisit the ideas and questions on the chart as pupils’ understanding around a topic develops
2. A lesson that has uses Connect / Extend / Challenge to support curriculum understanding.
Overview of lesson plan:
[Previous Episodes – Learning some curriculum content
What is happening here?
This is standard fayre – your class have been studying something and you want them to reflect on what they have learned, how it changes what they previously thought they knew, and what they still need to understand. The duration of this study may simply be a lesson, or it may be a series of lessons.
The critical aspect is that Connect/Extend/Challenge is used after some new learning has happened, otherwise it is impossible to access the Connect and Extend aspects.
Timings for the 3 Episodes depend on how much new learning has been achieved, which must, in part at least, be a consequence of the duration of the learning experience. Using Connect/Extend/Challenge as a review point towards the end of a lesson might only be a 5 minute plenary activity designed to alert pupils to what has been learned and to look forward to the upcoming learning in the next lesson. However if used after an extended project, the routine might well extend to 30 minutes due to the amount of new learning to be considered.
In the lesson illustrated below, we assume the 5 minute plenary format. Simply extend the timings if you are applying it to a more substantial piece of learning.]
Episode 1 – How are the ideas and information presented CONNECTED to what you already knew?
What is happening here?
In this Episode, pupils are encouraged to think back to their prior understanding of the content / topic.
[This would obviously not work if they had no prior knowledge of the topic being studied. It may have been worth checking this out before embarking on the lesson/topic by asking pupils to record their answers to the question: ‘what do you think you already know about . . . . . ?’ – It is a classic way of identifying misconceptions that can be addressed through the upcoming session(s). It is also the first step in the visible thinking routine Think/ Puzzle/ Explore – more of which later].
Here, pupils are invited to connect their new learning to their prior understandings, so helping them to see learning as an integrated whole rather than a series of unconnected ‘facts’ to be memorised.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours being activated aresimply identified as:
To reflect on and connect new learning to previously existing knowledge and understandings.
In Link Making terms, it moves learners from ‘knowing stuff’ to thinking about how the new learning connects to what they already know/knew. It encourages them to ‘Relate what they are learning to past experiences with adult support’ [Making Links grid, Ways of Making Meaning column, Receives/Purple phase].
Episode 2 – What new ideas did you get that EXTENDED or pushed your thinking in new directions?
What is happening here?
Having used the Connect phase to remind pupils of a) what they used to know and b) what they now know about a topic, the Extend phase encourages pupils to reflect on how the new learning may force a change in what they thought they knew previously. It is a revising activity where learners have to connect and align their prior understandings with their new learning. It is the point at which the gap between what was known at the outset and what is known now is identified (progress, as we would call it), and also where earlier misconceptions are refined in light of the new learning.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours being activated are summarised as:
To distil their new learning and consider the extent to which new learning forces a re-think of what was previously understood.
Essentially, the addition of the ‘Extend’ aspect of CEC lifts the requirements further. Episode 2 encourages pupils to ‘Use new learning to review prior learning’ (Making Links, Responds/Blue phase), and also to ‘link new information to what they already know and develop new ways of thinking about it’ (Meta Learning, Responds/Blue phase) in order to ‘Recognise learning involves constant rethinking / redoing’ (Revising, Values/Green phase).
Episode 3 – What is still CHALLENGING or confusing for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings or puzzles do you now have?
What is happening here?
Having used the Connect phase to remind pupils of a) what they used to know and b) what they now know about a topic, and the Extend phase to refine thinking in the light of new learning, the previous 2 Episodes were focusing on what was previously, and what is now, known.
In the Challenge phase, pupils are encouraged to consider what it is they donot yet know.
Pupils find it relatively easy to say what it is they know they do not know (the known unknowns), but cannot possibly say what they don’t know they do not know (the unknown unknowns). It is here that the skilled teacher judges how many more ‘unknowns’ it is sensible to throw into the mix.
In the bottom blue box, the Learning Behaviours being activated are summarised as:
To reflect on what is and what is not understood, and to share what they do not understand with others, and to consider what they might do about it.
The ‘Challenge’ aspect of CEC encourages pupils to consider ‘What do I need to know’ (Meta Learning grid, Responds/Blue phase), to explain what they do and do not understand, and, ideally, to identify and think about how to bridge the gap between what they do know and what they need to know – all high level meta-cognitive skills.
The powerpoint can be downloaded here if you wish:
Can you think of a situation in which you could use Connect/Extend/Challenge to advantage in your own classroom?
Make a note of…
When you might try this.
How you capture the ‘challenges’.
How you will adapt your planning to address them.
3 Using a lesson plan template to distil this lesson.
Given that there are hundreds of lesson plan formats we will use a few different types of planning tools over the course of these units. This one is a simple streamlined useable tool that includes:
What you do (teacher action);
What pupils do (pupil action);
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
Download a blank lesson plan as a MS Word document: Lesson Planning Grid [.DOC 33KB]
If we now populate the template with the episodes explored in section 2 above, we get the completed lesson plan. . .
What are your first reactions to this lesson plan template?
Does planning for four aspects – teacher action, pupil action, learning behaviours, teacher talk – seem useful?
How does sequencing the lesson as ‘episodes’ help or hinder planning?
Make a note of…
The extent to which your existing planning template enables you to think about lessons in this way.
What you would like / need to add to it.
4 Extend your thinking about the Connect/Extend/Challenge visible thinking routine
Why use Connect/Extend/Challenge?
The whole point of the strategy is not that it should be used occasionally at the end of a project as a sort of topic plenary, rather it should be used frequently so that it should in time become habituated so that pupils’ responses to all new learning is to use it to further enhance and refine their web of understanding. Furthermore, the ‘challenges’ that arise help to focus the next steps for both teaching and learning.
Going beyond Connect/Extend/Challenge to Think/Puzzle/Explore
The visible thinking routine Think/Puzzle/Explore has three driving questions:
What do you think you know about this topic?
What questions or puzzles do you have?
How can you explore this topic?
[Think/Puzzle/Explore is detailed in ‘Moving beyond Green’ in section 2. It is designed to help pupils connect to prior knowledge, to stimulate curiosity and to lay the groundwork for independent inquiry.]
It is similar to but subtly different from Connect/Extend/Challenge. On the surface, ‘Connect’ and ‘Think’ are similar, as are ‘Challenge’ and ‘Puzzles’. Extend is missing from T/P/E because it is designed to be used before the new learning takes place, whereas C/E/C is used after new learning has taken place. The addition of ‘Explore’ encourages and sets the scene for higher levels of learner independence than C/E/C, which is more heavily teacher directed.
As learners mature, it should be possible to use T/P/E as a stimulus to independent enquiry, and C/E/C as an ongoing review tool during such enquiry.
Going beyond Connect/Extend/Challenge to 3-2-1 Bridge
The visible thinking routine 3-2-1 Bridge is a routine for activating prior knowledge and making connections.
Prior to embarking on a new topic, students are asked for 3 Thoughts, 2 Questions and 1 Analogy about the topic.
After studying the topic, students are again asked the same 3-2-1, and this time with the addition of Bridge, when they are asked to explain how their new responses connect to their initial responses.
Unlike Think, Puzzle Explore which takes place before learning and Connect/Extend/Challenge which is undertaken after learning, 3-2-1 Bridge occurs both before and after new learning.
It lacks the Explore aspect of T/P/E, and the Extend aspect of C/E/C, but otherwise is very similar to both in terms of helping students to activate prior knowledge and link it to new learning.
What do you think?
Where / when / why might you use T/P/E?
Where / when / why might you use 3-2-1 Bridge?
Which of the three routines do you think would work best with your students? How will you find out?
How will you use the ‘puzzles’ that are generated?
How will these ‘puzzles’ inform your planning?
How will you enable pupils to undertake what they would like to ‘Explore’ so as to support their growth as independent enquirers?
Make a note of…
Which class you might try these visible thinking routines with.
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 as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Help students to connect new learning with prior knowledge;
Encourage students to consider where else new learning might be applied;
Employ metaphors and analogies to explain new learning;
Enable students to explore the overlap between different subject areas;
Ensure that students build their own web of understanding for themselves.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
Making links between different things comprises not only the ability to see or make relationships but also the inclination to look for them.
Trying to hook up new experiences with what you already know is what some people call ‘making meaning’.
New ideas become meaningful to the extent that we can incorporate them within our own mental webs of associations and significances. When the patterns of relationship to be discovered are rather complex or subtle, business guru Peter Senge calls it ‘systems thinking’. Good learners get pleasure from seeing how things fit together. They are interested in the big picture, and how new learning expands it.
Good learners can make all kinds of different links. They can link together this lesson’s physics topic with what they were doing in maths last week. They can look for links to their own goals and interests, to discover the relevance of the new learning to their own lives. They find links to their own real-life experience—using new ideas or theories to make sense of past impressions. They weave new events into their developing autobiographical story relating them to their sense of self. They can connect new learning with their own opinions and beliefs, so that they come out not just knowing something new, but looking at the world in a different way. And—very importantly for creativity—they may look for analogies in their own memory that give them a handle on a complicated new domain.‘What’s it like?’they ask themselves.
Extract from Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton
1b) What does being a good Link Maker involve?
Learning is about making connections – you will experience them through the ‘ah ha’ experience of seeing a connection between two previously isolated concepts, or the satisfaction of seeing the connection between an abstract idea and a ‘hands-on’ concrete experience. It’s how you make sense of the world. To be a good link maker you need to keep stimulating your brain and enriching your experiences because through active learning you quite literally ‘build’ your own mind. This is done in many ways; through having a repertoire of cognitive strategies; through the social process of constructing knowledge; by connecting experience and learning; through how you direct the work of learning, sometimes called meta-learning or simply reflection (see the module on Me-Learning). And at the heart of all this is your attitude to knowledge; whether it is bound up in rules and ‘is-language’, or whether you see knowledge as provisional, ever building and changing. When looked at from these diverse angles growing link making moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘look for a link’.
The Making Links grid below attempts to capture these constituent parts of building the habit of Making Links.
Our progression grid for Making Links has 6 components:
Making Links is about how you understand and make meaning of the world. Your brain develops schema (plural, schemata): this is a cognitive structure that organises collections of bits of information that build together to form a concept of something. This working structure changes and grows throughout life. Each new event, filtered by perception, is organised and connected to the existing structure to create meaning. We as teachers cannot transfer our own knowledge ready-made to pupils. They remember what they understand – what they have connected in their own schemata. When a schema is very sparse for a particular subject, connections are hard to find and make. Teachers should always be helping children to make the connections that lead to deeper understanding. We can help pupils to become effective learners through cognitive (col 1) and meta-cognitive strategies (col 3) to gain insight into the how of learning. But to make connections more easily across different disciplines, or linking the obvious with the more obscure, we need to get beyond being bound by early rules and conventions and view our knowledge system as open and flexible, allowing all manner of possibilities (col 4). It is in this way that our minds truly grow.
“ Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories and ideas.” Daniel Tammet
Take a closer look at what each column of the grid is about
Ways of making meaning (cognitive)
Building cognitive understanding
The first contributory factor is how we retain and organise information or content; the ‘what’ of learning. Firstly how we remember facts, lists, definitions etc., and bring it into working memory. Then how we actively connect the new information with what we already know and develop; an organisational framework for that subject. Then how we construct connections and develop relationships between the ideas. It’s the nuts and bolts of how we construct meaning.
Ways of making meaning (experiential and social)
Building understanding through experience and with other people.
The next contributory factor in Making Links is how we make meaning by ‘learning by doing’ and learning with others. (Worthy of two columns, perhaps, but we didn’t have the space!) It’s about how we learn by doing real things, often with others (problem solving, simulations, gaming, role playing, being an apprentice); how we use experience to improve learning; how we use learning to improve our performance; how we construct meanings with other people. Experiential learning is at the heart of collaborative learning teams and learning communities. It links strongly with the next column, since reflecting on action is what brings about improvement.
Using reflection to assist connections
Meta-learning
The next contributory factor is about how we reflect on the action of learning itself. Research suggests that good learners are more effective in their use of these strategies. Learners become more aware of their own cognitive strategies and analyse the effectiveness of their learning as they go along. It plays a big part in scaffolding how we construct our minds rather than passively receiving information.
Fluidity of knowledge
Open mindedness
This is an important column in that it concerns how we view what we know; how open we are to information and experiences. If we have dogmatic views about things, or our views are fixed, we are unlikely to add more. If we are a stickler for rules our understanding will be limited by that stance. The more open minded one is the easier it is to make interesting, unusual, imaginative, comical and even absurd links between ideas. This is where ‘could be’ language wins over ‘is language’.
Self talk
The voice of self knowledge
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. The examples indicate how link making grows more sophisticated over time.
Breadth of making links
How extensive our link making is
The last constituent of making links has to do with the breadth of our link making. Whereas column one was more about storing knowledge, this column is about linking that knowledge together in a broad sense. The key to being able to link things together is the breadth of experience we have. If you have never had experience of the sea or learned Latin you won’t be able to draw on that body of knowledge and experience to influence your understanding the world. When you have little knowledge of something you will struggle to make links within the subject let alone between subjects.
What do you think?
What have you learned about making links 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.
1d) Unpicking the rows: getting better at Making Links.
Of course the development of making links 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 Making links might grow.
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 own 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 ‘just do things’
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are unaware of making links. Their experience of the world and life is limited and they have no language to help them understand learning. These various limitations mean link making will be limited and certainly not conscious. It’s a low level to build from but even at the start of schooling children will arrive with very different levels of experience and knowledge. Having these experiences secured by talking about them offers a good start.
Receives: Minded to build up knowledge.
In the Receives (purple) phase, students are still unaware of making links unless it is pointed out to them. They concentrate on learning more but without worrying how things might fit together. Their link making is limited by lack of knowledge and experiences if this isn’t nurtured.
Responds: Minded to develop understanding.
In the Responds (blue) phase, students are enjoying adding to their knowledge store. They secure their new learning by talking about it and putting it into their own words. This is further refined by monitoring whether they understand something and how it fits with what they already know. Here they are developing the vocabulary and specialised terms of a discipline.
Values: Minded to broaden the scope of learning.
In the Values (green) phase, students understand the need to learn from previous experiences and realise that learning is all about changing understandings, not just knowing stuff. They might connect new learning to previous learning through the use of analogies and extend what they know through problem-solving with others.
Organises: Minded to actively reorganise their understanding.
In the Organises (yellow) phase, making links has become a skilful habit. Students are relaxed about reorganising their ideas and linking between disciplines. They can work with others to get their heads around tricky problems, and reflection now moves up a gear to analysing the difficulties they are having in learning. All this is assisted by accumulating diverse perspectives on life.
Embodies: Minded to exploit experiences to the full
In the Embodies (orange) phase, students adapt readily to changing circumstances and regulate their behaviour with the explicit intention of doing it better, more efficiently/differently. They have plenty of cognitive strategies to help them learn efficiently and these are made more effective through their breadth of experience and knowledge. They build their own complex understanding of the world which is drawn from a web of associations between knowing, doing and reflecting.
What do you think?
What has struck you about the act of link making, 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 link making behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.
Preparation for the Learning Team meeting
Where are my pupils now?
Take a look at the Making Links progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Colour in the cells where you think your pupils are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure classes are rare. But looking at your class in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart to denote where you think most of the school’s pupils 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
If this team session is your first one in Stepping Stones, miss out item 2.
1. Session objectives
What do we want to achieve? ( 5 mins)
2. Sharing classroom experiments
How did our experiments go? ( 20 mins)
Share
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
Talk about impact
improvements in the ‘feel’ of the classroom
increased time on task
less low level disruption
more talk about learning
more enjoyment in learning
more/renewed interest in the subject
more harmony in the classroom
greater willingness to try, and try different ways
Avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little of no change in…
Also…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 Listening grid
Where pupils are secure
Where the pupils could be secure when they leave for secondary school
Classroom culture ideas
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 Listening should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Listening might play out against key stages and even year groups.
5. Personal action planning
What am I going to do? ( 20 mins )
5a.Consider
how you want your pupils to improve/develop/enhance their approach to Listening?
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 pupils are unlikely to change unless you change!
Looked at your pupils through the lens of the Listening learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Listening looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage pupils with Listening
Now we look closely at how to blend improving pupils’ listening 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 listening focused task
Learning habits form through use and practice, but desirable habits survive and flourish better if pupils 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 pupils to help themselves to develop their learning habits. Hence your lessons are much more likely to contain challenges and activities that get your pupils thinking and learning for themselves. You encourage pupils 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 pupils’ learning behaviours. You are organising learning to let them take the strain.
The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power
1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning
You make it clear to pupils 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:
Good listener prompts
Have the pupils make suggestions about good listening
Pay attention. Focus on the person and what is being said
Don’t get distracted by other things around you
Show you’re listening by saying uh-huh or nodding your head
Keep quiet while the other person’s talking
Wait to ask a question or give comments that show others that you care about what they’re saying.
Make these into a public display and refer to them often. Here is an example from a group of 9 year olds.
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 pupils 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:
Make the listening intentions in any lesson clear
In order to teach with listening in mind, it is a good idea to set up the lesson with a specific listening purpose. For example,
in one lesson it may be appropriate to require pupils merely to listen with relaxed enjoyment to appreciate the experience for itself;
on another occasion the focus may be on listening with discernment,
whilst another may require listening in order to generate counter arguments.
3: Emotional engagement…Capturing attention
Your lessons are designed to intrigue your pupils. Pupils don’t put in the effort unless their energy and attention are captured by what they are doing. You capture your pupils’ emotional engagement by giving them more of a stake in the process of learning.
For example:
Start lessons with an aural challenge…from time to time
Provide complex directions or instructions. For example…
A sense of direction exercises:
You are facing east, you make an about-face, and then you turn left. Which direction is now on your left?
Castle Street is parallel to St John’s Street. The Avenue is perpendicular to Purley Road. Purley Road is parallel to St. John’s Street. Is The Avenue parallel or perpendicular to Castle Street?
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 pupils to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.
For example:
There’s something wrong here
Teacher reads a sentence or statement without expression, then reads it again with changes – no repetition. Pupils are asked to spot the changes. This can work particularly well when using a foreign language.
Examples:
Karen takes the train to work but Katherine always drives / Clare takes the bus to work but Kim sometimes drives.
Next year Christine is going on holiday to France / Next week Christina is going to work in France.
After Easter, Lynn and Drew are going to Switzerland to visit Drew’s mother / During Easter, Linda and Drew are going to Swansea to visit Linda’s mother.
5: Relationships…Working together
Learning is both a sociable and a solitary activity, and you offer your pupils 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:
Enable pupils to define how best to listen when working with others
Agree common goals (‘Let’s make sure we know what we’re trying to do…’)
Use encouraging language (‘That’s a good idea…that’s interesting…’)
Ask for clarification (‘I don’t quite get what you mean by that…’)
Paraphrase (‘Let’s just say that again…’)
Remember quiet people are also listening and have valuable things to say – draw them in
Don’t talk over each other
Don’t undermine other people – no put downs
6: Reflection and responsibility…Taking charge
You understand that pupils 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 pupils taking charge of their learning by expecting them to plan what they do, distil meaning from it, and revise it accordingly.
For example:
Use learning mats
at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on listening.
A checklist for lesson planning based on these six principles.
Does the lesson plan:
Make it clear to pupils which learning behaviours are being activated?
Match and blend the learning behaviour with content?
Include a tactic to captivate pupils’ attention?
Have sufficiently challenging learning activities to sustain interest for all?
Offer choice on how pupils 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.
Skim read or leave this section if you have met it in other units because… the section applies to any learning behaviour. i.e. not specific to Listening.
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.
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, pupils 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, pupils 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…listening.
Stage 1. What content do pupils need to learn?
What content has to be learned? …..Think outcomes.
Use standard lesson planning tools:
What are pupils 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 pupils get closer to understanding this content?…think learning behaviour charts.
Which aspect of, say, listening, lends itself to achieving these outcomes?…think progression columns.
How skilled are these pupils in using this learning behaviour …think progression phases/rows
Say something like this to yourself .…My pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using listening. Most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) listening 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 pupils need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using listening. Most of my pupils would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) listening 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 pupils’ 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 I 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 pupils 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 pupils need to achieve xxx.
at this point we could get closer to this content by using listening.
most of my pupils are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) listening approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their listening 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 pupils there and the sorts of learning behaviours your pupils will need to contribute to this learning endeavour.
You are designing the task in a way that requires pupils 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:
Listening will help pupils to better access the content;
The aspect of listening (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) ‘Listen actively for intention, emotion and mixed messages’. (Conventions of Listening column, Values/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 pupils is………
Think….what information do I need to reveal/give, in what form, at what point, and what do I want pupils 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 pupils to access the content and exercise the key learning behaviour(s) you have identified?
C. Lesson planning in action – how do we build Listening into lesson design?
This section differs radically from the same section in other modules in that the lesson is one for you to do, rather than one that you can teach to your pupils. In section 4 we pick up how you can apply the ideas to your own lesson planning.
How do we design tasks that stretch Listening and assist pupils to approach the content more productively? We cover this in four ways:
1 Preliminary thinking about the lesson;
2 Planning the Episodes of the lesson;
3 Distilling the plan on to a single sheet of paper;
4 Extending your thinking about Listening for different purposes into other aspects of the curriculum.
When we talk to teachers about their pupils’ listening abilities, many say that poor listening skills limit pupils’ ability to access the content. Much like Noticing, which is frequently confused with ‘looking’, so Listening is mistaken for ‘hearing’. The confusion arises because both looking and hearing are involuntary and something that we do without effort or intentionality, whereas Noticing and Listening require effort, time, patience and perseverance.
The progression chart for Listening, and in particular (but not exclusively) the column entitled ‘Informational listening to gain understanding’ identifies a range of things that might be listened for:
basic understanding of the idea as presented;
the quality / importance of the idea;
the extent to which the idea engages interest and curiosity;
facts and information about the idea;
the big ideas and the main points;
the speaker’s intentions, values and emotions;
ideas to put into one’s own words;
to formulate questions to better understand what is being said;
to listen for what is not being said.
Little wonder that with so much going on, pupils find it hard to listen on all of these fronts simultaneously. But, we can help pupils to become more effective listeners by practising these different skills separately, before attempting to combine them.
The following lesson focuses on listening to the Ted Talk by Eduardo Briceno – How to get better at the things you care about – and invites you to listen to parts of it, focusing on one aspect of listening at a time. We guarantee that you will find this difficult but fascinating.
2. Listening for different purposes in a lesson.
The lesson below uses the audio for the Ted Talk to practise listening for different purposes.
You are invited to follow this lesson through yourself to get the feel of what listening for different purposes feels like, and perhaps to deepen your understanding of how complex listening really is.
Episode 1 – Listening to engage with the message
What is happening here?
Eduardo lays out the idea of Performance and Learning Zones in the 2 minute introduction to the Ted Talk. At this stage the listener is invited to use purple and blue phase listening skills to determine whether the idea is relevant and likely to engage their interest.
In particular, the listener is ‘trying hard to make sense of the messages; showing interest in understanding the message as it was intended, and the quality of the message/idea’. (Listening Purple phase skills) and ‘showing curiosity and genuine interest in what is being said’ (Listening Blue phase skill).
Episode 2 – Listening to the ideas presented
What is happening here?
Here we are encouraging you, the listener, to focus on the information that is being presented, and in particular on new information that was previously unknown or only dimly understood. For example, the idea that in many professions people cease to improve after the first couple of years in post. Or, that deliberate practice means breaking the skills down and practising each separately.
In listening terms, the listener is ‘beginning to listen for different purposes, seeking to identify the big ideas and main points, looking for the golden nugget of information, and listening for information about the idea’. (Listening Blue phase skills).
Episode 3 – Listening to summarise the key ideas
What is happening here?
Here we ask you to listen again to the same 3 minute section of the Ted Talk. This time the task is to listen for the main points and key ideas, and then to put them into your own words. It requires listening, noticing and distilling skills.
In listening terms, the listener ‘paraphrases in their own words what they believe the speaker said’. (Listening Green phase skills)
Episode 4- Listening to ask questions and seek clarification.
What is happening here?
While listening to the remainder of the Ted Talk, you, the listener, practises the skills exercised in Episodes 1/2/3, and undertake a further high level listening skill – listening in order to ask questions and to delve further. It blends our listening, noticing, distilling and questioning skills.
In listening terms, the listener ‘seeks information and ideas, looks to identify key messages, and considers what they do not yet understand and need further clarification on’. Listeners ‘use open ended questions to get closer to understanding the message’ (Listening Yellow phase).
So, having now heard the whole talk:
what questions do you have?
what clarification might you need?
what is not yet resolved for you?
At that point when the speaker says ‘does anyone have any questions?’, what would your open ended question be?
Episode 5- Listening to consider the beliefs of the speaker and for the implications of what he is saying.
What is happening here?
Listen now to the complete Ted Talk, this time practising the effective listening habits used in previous Episodes and extending listening to include considering the values and beliefs of the speaker and how the content of the message might have implications for your professional practice.
In listening terms, the listener ‘listens actively for intention, emotion and beliefs’ (Listening Green phase) and ‘listens sensitively in order to pick up messages ‘between the lines’ and look beyond the words’ (Listening Gold phase).
Eduardo’s talk challenges teachers to consider 2 substantial questions:
In my classroom;
What is the balance of time that my pupils spend in their performance and learning zones,
is that balance correct,
and do they know which they are doing when?
2. In my professional life:
How much time do I, as a professional, spend in my performance zone, and how much in my learning zone,
and is this balance correct/appropriate?
How would you respond to these 2 questions? How might your answers impact on you and on your classroom?
And finally, after Episode 5, reflect on how often you felt the need to pause and consider, or to re-wind and listen again. If we find listening easier when we can pause and/or re-wind, what about our pupils who are probably less skilful listeners?
What do you think?
Can you think of a curriculum-related video/audio that could be treated in this way?
Do you think that practising listening skills in isolation (deliberate practice) would help your pupils to become more effective listeners?
Make a note of…
Which class you might try this with, using which video/audio?
3 Using a lesson plan template to distil this lesson.
Here is the simple streamlined useable lesson plan tool that includes:
how the learning is organised;
what you do;
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you ask yourself as each Episode unfolds.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
What do you think?
What are your first reactions to this lesson plan template?
Does planning for four aspects – teacher action, pupil action, learning behaviours, teacher talk – seem useful?
How does sequencing the lesson as ‘episodes’ help or hinder planning?
Make a note of…
The extent to which your existing planning template enables you to think about lessons in this way.
What you would like / need to add to it.
4 Extend your thinking about listening for different purposes
When do your pupils need to listen attentively?
The lesson described above uses audio from a Ted Talk, but any audio will suffice – it could even be yourself doing some teacher input to a class.
Ask yourself – is it easier to listen for just one or two things at a time, rather than trying to capture everything at once? And if so – how can I give my pupils the chance to practise these skills separately?
Consider splitting the class into two or three groups –
one group to listen for facts/information
another to seek ‘the big ideas’
another to consider the values and intentions of the speaker.
Then each group explains what they ‘heard’ to the other groups.
Or perhaps use Jigsaw listening (See Section 2, Purple to Blue in this unit) to share and synthesise what has been heard.
Or, as in the Ted Talk lesson, get them all listening for just one aspect at a time, repeating the audio to listen for other aspects as necessary.
A word of warning: Practising listening once will always be ineffective – the whole point of deliberate practice is the practice bit. Teachers need to use these strategies repeatedly to build pupil listening skills over time, progressively and cumulatively. And, unlike the Ted Talk lesson which was aimed at adults who may already possess good listening skills, pupils probably need to secure purple and blue phase listening behaviours before you introduce higher level listening skills.
What do you think?
Is it worth practising these listening skills one at a time?
Which particular skills are most lacking in your learners, and therefore most in need of attention?
Do you already use video/audio that you could harness to build listening skills?
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 as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Model, discuss and critique the habits of Active Listening;
Create situations that require students to listen for various, different types of information;
Construct opportunities for students to view situations through others’ eyes;
Encourage students to keep an open mind, resisting the inclination to jump to conclusions on partial information;
Help students to listen ‘beyond the words’, to what is not being said, to the values, beliefs and emotions of the speaker.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
Empathy and listening are core skills. We bracket them together because listening is the main medium through which empathy is generated and communicated. Students can quite readily be coached in the art of being a good listener, and can be given games and exercises that help them develop the ability to hear what someone else has said and, if necessary, play it back to them. Teachers sometimes complain that students will not listen, either to them or to each other; but the habit of listening can be cultivated in most classes inside a term. The most powerful way to do this is for the teachers to model good listening. Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002.
1b) What does being a good Listener involve?
Understanding how to listen effectively is an essential skill that benefits everything from family life to business. It’s one of the most critical skills for working effectively in teams. Hearing and listening are different. Whereas hearing is a automatic and effortless process when sound waves strike the ear drum and cause vibrations in the brain, listening is about the brain giving those sounds meaning. It’s unnatural, and it requires effort. There’s all sorts of faulty listening. Sometimes we fake it or pretend to listen; sometimes we only respond to the remarks we are interested in and reject the rest. Sometimes we listen defensively and take innocent remarks as personal attacks. Or, we listen to collect information to use to attack the speaker, or we avoid particular topics, or we listen insensitively and can’t look beyond the words for other meanings, or we turn the conversation to ourselves. So, listening is indeed hard and requires effort. To be a good listener you need to be able to listen for information, listen to judge the quality of the information and listen empathetically to build a relationship and help solve a problem. When looked at from these diverse angles growing Listening moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘do good listening’.
The Listening grid below takes account of the constituent parts of building the habit of being a good listener.
Our progression grid for Listening has 6 components:
Listening is not just a communication action, it’s a human action. Successful listening has four stages. Firstly we have to pay attention to what is being said and then make sense of it. We have to respond to the speaker showing you care both verbally and non-verbally. And finally we have to remember the message. In trying to encapsulate this effortful skill the grid looks at the normal conventions of this social process and the growth of skills in the three key listening habits; informational listening; critical listening; empathetic listening. Most of these ideas are gleaned from the work of Stephen Covey,
“Seek first to understand…Then to be understood”. Stephen Covey 1997
Take a closer look at what each column of the grid is about
Conventions of listening
The social conventions of listening
How we move from the convention of taking turns when listening rather than hogging a conversation, to being curious and respecting the speaker. Moving on to listening actively and picking up intentions and emotions in the speaker and knowing how best to respond when people think differently, both from yourself and others, in a conversation
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 would 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 understanding the message while others relate to responding to the speaker. All such self-talk is important in building a listening habit.
Informational listening to gain understanding
Trying to understand ideas
The key here is to separate the message from the speaker, being open to finding the golden nugget of the message by looking for the big ideas and main points, asking questions to gain more information ( closed and open) and paraphrasing in your own words to check what was meant. And finally being able to listen between the lines, looking beyond the words to find meaning.
Critical listening
Judging the quality of ideas
This column is about judging the quality of the message and deciding whether to accept it or reject it. The first stage is to concentrate on listening. It’s important not to make a judgement too early, to separate the message from the speaker and to ignore information that may lead you to verbally attack the speaker. It’s important through sensitive questioning to evaluate the speaker’s credibility and check the source of the information. The conversation may then move on to examining the evidence and using reasoning skills before making a decision to accept or reject the argument/ information/idea. Finally being able to respond empathetically when rejecting an idea with your counter arguments.
Empathetic listening
Helping people to sort out problems
Empathetic listening is the first step to understanding someone. The goal here is to build a relationship or to help someone solve a problem. This style of listening demands you show the most respect for the other person’s point of view. The thrust of such conversation is to help the speaker draw conclusions for themselves. Your role is to question in order to sort out problems, offer supportive responses, prompt the speaker to make suggestions for themselves and paraphrase their words to check understanding. Having said that you will have to choose the best style to meet the other person’s likely reaction to your help. Some appreciate direct advice, others may want you to make a decision for them, some may be defensive and want to lash out and “kill the messenger”, while others can’t think through the problems even with sensitive probing and paraphrasing. This is the hardest listening skill and takes lots of practice.
What do you think?
What have you learned about Listening 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.
1d) Unpicking the rows; getting better at Listening
Of course, the development of Listening 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 Listening might grow.
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 talk rather than listen
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are not necessarily aware of listening even when told to listen. They tend to think listening is about hearing. They have no understanding of the fact that listening is a skill demanding a lot of effort.
Receives: Minded to show an interest in others’ talk
In the Receives (purple) phase, students are aware of how to behave when listening to someone else and are showing an interest in what people have to say. They might ask you to repeat something or ask you to say what you mean by something. They may want to know whether what is said is right and try to keep friends with people.
Responds: Minded to sort the message from the messenger
In the Responds(blue) phase, students have a genuine interest in what is being said. They want to know more, they can sort out what the speaker is saying and from this interest they don’t attempt to turn the conversation to themselves. They have learned the important skill of decoupling the information from the messenger
Values: Minded to listen to understand ideas and emotions
In the Values ( green) phase, students listen more deeply for both the message/idea and the emotions that might go with it. They are able to check what is being said through paraphrasing and check the quality of an idea by checking for evidence and reasoning questions. They are aware that the speaker must be treated civilly and can empathise with the person’s view without necessarily agreeing with it.
Organises: Minded to sensitively explore what the speaker is saying/conveying
In the Organises (yellow) phase, the listener can gently probe people’s problems and use open-ended questions skilfully to gain a better understanding of both the speaker and their ideas. The skill here is to remove the emotion out of critical listening but not to duck any tricky issues. It’s about keeping a conversation on an even keel despite differences of opinion or values.
Embodies: Minded to listen and respond empathetically
In the Embodies (orange) phase, students always maintain respect for the speaker. They can pick up nuances and read between the lines for what is really being conveyed. They always respond with sensitivity to the speaker while at the same time rejecting their ideas. They never put themselves in danger of being “lashed out at” by the speaker and are well equipped to offer advice in a way that will suit the needs of the other person.
What do you think?
What has struck you about the act of listening 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 listening behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.
Preparation for the Learning Team meeting
Where are my pupils now?
Take a look at the Listening progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Colour in the cells where you think your pupils are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure classes are rare. But looking at your class in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart to denote where you think most of the school’s pupils 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
Where the students could be secure 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 Me Learning should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Me Learning might play out against key 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 Me Learning?
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!
Looked at your students through the lens of the Meta Learning learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Meta Learning looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage students with Meta Learning
Now we look closely at how to blend improving students’ Meta Learning 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 Meta Learning 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.
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:
Rethink displays to illustrate work in progress
Collect and display work at different stages of development, with arrows and notes highlighting changes and their impact. Refer to these to encourage students to review and amend their work. Provide guidelines with questions they can ask themselves or each other at different stages in the process. Show that you do not expect perfection at a first attempt!
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:
Embed learning how to learn into every lesson
Frequently include the following questions when talking with students:
how did you go about finding that out?
how would you explain that to someone else?
what did you do to help you read that new/unfamiliar word?
what made you persist/give up on that task?
why do you think this is too difficult/easy for you?
and so on
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:
Establish Reflecting as a classroom routine
Going for Three:
Begin each lesson with ‘Tell me Three . .
things we learned last lesson
ways we learned last lesson
things we still need to find out
things you hope to achieve today’.
End each lesson with ‘Tell me Three . .
things we learned today
learning skills we used today
things we need to do next lesson
ways you could become a more effective learner’ etc.
Ensure that students tell you three. Do not lapse into doing it for them!
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:
Develop a project around ‘the best place to learn’.
Discuss the best conditions for learning.
What would the building/room need to have in it and why?
What time of day?
Quiet or with music?
Curl up on chairs or desk and table?
A little and often or long labs of time?
With other people or alone?
Use this type of discussion to broaden the students’ views of good learning. Later discussions could include long and short term memory, spacing content, retrieval practice, desirable difficulties, interleaving content, self-testing and so forth. Make a display of ‘the best place to learn’ or ‘the best conditions for learning’.
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:
Formulate-Share-Listen-Create
A development of Think Pair Share is called `Formulate-Share-Listen-Create’ (Johnson et al., 1991). The important addition here is to ask learners to create something collaboratively after the earlier steps have been followed through. Ask students to;
Formulate your answer to the question individually.
Share your answer with your partner.
Listen carefully to your partner’s answer.
Note similarities and differences in your answers.
Create a new answer that incorporates the best of the ideas.
Be prepared to present your answer if called upon.
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:
Learning mats to monitor meta learning
As learners we need to gain an accurate sense of ourselves. Eventually this means being able to take our own learning strengths and weaknesses into account when weighing up a learning challenge or project. Students need lots of practice in thinking and talking about themselves as growing learners. Prompt the use of and reflection on Meta Learning.
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.
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…Meta Learning.
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, Meta Learning, 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 Meta Learning. Most of my students are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) Meta Learning 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 Meta Learning. Most of my students would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) Meta Learning 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 asking them how they are thinking;
offer 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 Meta Learning.
most of my students are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) Meta Learning approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their Meta Learning 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:
Meta Learning will help students to better access the content;
The aspect of Meta Learning (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) Ask myself “What do I need to know? How am I going to come to know it?”(‘Talking about my learning’ column, Blue 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?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, Meta Learning focused, task.
Where lessons in other units have been designed to blend content with a learning behaviour, here the lesson content is about understanding the learning process itself. How do we design tasks that intentionally activate / stretch a wide range of learning behaviours and enable learners to reflect on how and how well they have used those behaviours?
We cover this in three ways:
Section 1 shows the phases of a lesson where a range of learning behaviours are activated in different Episodes of the lesson and subsequently reflected on and discussed;
Section 2 considers a simple lesson plan template that can be used for any lesson and distils the Meta Learning( learning about learning) lesson into this format;
Section 3 invites you to extend your thinking about the lesson and how to help students to become increasingly skilful, self-aware, self-regulating learners.
1. Activating and stretching a wide range of learning behaviours in a single lesson.
[NB: This lesson is unusual in that it sets out to activate different learning behaviours in the different Episodes of the lesson. Whereas lessons in other units focus on one learning behaviour, while accepting that others would ‘bubble up’ as the lesson unfolded, here we intentionally spread the net in order to activate a wide range of behaviours on which to reflect. The key part of the lesson comes in Episode 7 – the first 6 Episodes are simply setting up a range of learning behaviours that can be reflected upon in Episode 7.]
Episode 1 – How might we set about solving the Mystery Accident?
What is happening here?
In this Episode, students become familiar with the Mystery Accident and think about the kinds of questions that they will need to answer and how they might go about working out what has happened. It requires students to:
frame their own questions;
think ahead to plan how they might go about finding out.
None of this will be possible without the ability to notice detail, the learning behaviour that so frequently triggers a range of cognitive learning behaviours.
Resist the temptation to gather answers and speculations at this stage – that comes in subsequent Episodes.
Use the visible thinking routine Think / Puzzle / Explore to achieve three things:
‘What do you Think you know about this?’ encourages students to make links with prior experience;
‘What is Puzzling you?’ encourages the generation of a range of questions and lines of enquiry;
‘How might you Explore this?’ encourages students to begin to plan how they might tackle the problem in order to answer their questions.
Consider how you might collect their ‘questions’ for reference in later Episodes.
Episode 2 – How many people and animals are involved?
What is happening here?
Ask – How many people and animals are involved?
Essentially this is a Noticing activity in order to arrive at a list of characters.
You will need to work the following sorts of thing out in advance.
Some characters we can be certain of – there is a man and a dog (the headline says so), there is a cyclist (we can see the tracks in the snow), there is an old lady (we can see her), and someone must be driving the ambulance.
And then there are the footprints coming in from the left of the image along the pavement – they indicate another person. Ditto the footprints around the phone box. [Accept all answers without comment at this stage, but at some point in the upcoming Episodes students will need to consider whether all of these characters are different people]
And finally – the dog runs off to chase something. Usually people assume this to be a cat, but all we really know about this animal is that it can climb trees, and that dogs are inclined to chase it. A cat may be the most likely suspect, but a squirrel also fits the bill. Whichever suggestion you get, use the ‘Could Be’ approach to deepen thinking and open up other possibilities.
[So – a maximum of 6 people and 2 animals – old woman, the person who helps out, the person by phone box, the cyclist, the injured man, the ambulance driver, plus the dog and the tree climbing animal.]
Episode 3 – Where does the story begin?
What is happening here?
Where does the story begin?
This is a focusing activity in which students use their reasoning skills to decide where the action begins.
Use ‘What makes you say that?‘ to encourage students to explain their reasoning.
In terms of the hit and run, the answer is bottom right of the image – the man walking his dog on a snowy morning.
Ask the supplementary question: What can the man and dog see as they first enter the scene? The question is deceptively simple, but it helps students to visualise the scene before the accident and to realise that the ambulance and some of the characters have yet to arrive at the scene.
[But there are other possibilities – the person at the phone box could have been first on the scene long before the man with dog arrived; the person arriving from the left might have come into view around the same time as the man and dog.]
Episode 4- Can you tell the story, from beginning to end?
What is happening here?
Can you tell the story, from beginning to end?
This is where students use a range of learning behaviours to collect and combine evidence to sequence the events into a plausible story line. Begin by asking; ‘How long do you think you will need for this?’ – it is a quick way to get them thinking ahead and planning what needs doing. During the sharing ideas across the class phase, students will have to listen carefully to the ideas of others, contribute their own explanations and be prepared to revise their ideas in light of others’ contributions.
[Hints #1:
Some students will be able to do this for themselves and you need to offer nothing further to nudge them towards producing a story line.
If some need help, use some or more of:
Is the cyclist riding left to right, or right to left? How do you know?
Where is the dog?
Where does the ambulance stop?
Who is the person who comes in from the left of the image? What do they do? What might explain their footprint pattern?
Where does the old lady put the chair?]
[Hints #2
To stretch those groups who arrive at a solution quickly, ask if their story explains (not all in one go, obviously!):
Who is the ‘good samaritan? (We do not know this for certain. A helpful passer-by? Paramedic?)
Why does the good samaritan ‘bunny-hop’ from the scene of the accident across the road when helping the victim? (They do not, they are walking one step at a time supporting the injured man)
What are the man’s injuries? (Left leg / ankle – because samaritan supports on left side)
Was the dog free before the accident, or freed by the accident? (Before – look at the lead making marks in the snow as dog runs off. This is rarely noticed without a hint of some kind, or at the very least being asked the question)
Does the ambulance driver get out? (No footprints near where ambulance stops – can they explain this?)
Who has been at the phone box? (If they say it was someone else who phoned for ambulance, ask why they not go over to help at the scene of accident? If it was the cyclist, ask why did they do it?)
Where is everybody? (Old lady aside, everybody has left the scene. Samaritan must get in the ambulance – why?)
Does your story address all of the questions we generated in Episode 1?]
Episode 5- Imagine you are a reporter . . .
What is happening here?
Imagine you are a reporter . . .
Thus far students have been looking at and trying to assemble the available evidence into a credible story line.
Students are to imagine that they are a reporter who has been sent to interview one of the people in the story. (They can choose any one of the six people)
Here we are asking students to plan the three questions that they would ask, and then to use their empathy skills to answer those questions from someone else’s perspective. The restriction to three questions make this a distilling activity, and the swapping of questions opens up the possibility of unexpected responses.
End the Episode by discussing any questions that received a surprising response.
It sets the scene for Episode 6.
Episode 6- Can you write the headline and first paragraph of your newspaper report?
What is happening here?
Can you write the headline and first paragraph of your newspaper report?
A distilling and creative activity. Important information only goes in the headline and first paragraph of a newspaper report – how would they construct that headline and first paragraph to convey the key information, as they see it?
Write the Headline / paragraph in pairs. Move to and share in 4’s. Pairs who have read a report that they really like nominate it to be read out to the whole class.
Conclude with discussion about identifying and linking the characteristics that these reports had in common.
Episode 7- Which learning behaviours did you use in solving this mystery?
What is happening here?
Which learning behaviours did you use in solving this mystery?
This is the key part of this lesson. It is the opportunity for students to think back over the previous 6 Episodes and reflect on how they behaved as learners in tackling the challenges – it is where Meta Learning comes to the fore.
As individuals, students fill in the Rating Wheel as follows:
Consider the sector at 1 o’clock – ‘Did I ask lots of questions?’
If the student believes that they had asked lots of questions, they shade / colour in all or most of the sector. If a few questions it might be coloured only half way. If they never asked any questions, they will leave the sector blank;
Repeat for all of the other sectors.
They will end up with a ‘picture’ of the learning behaviours that they believe they used.
Move students into pairs to compare and contrast, explain their reasons for colouring as they did, and to adjust their colouring in light of the conversation if they wish.
Probe their thinking by asking at which Episodes in the lesson they did particular learning behaviours.
Then broaden the discussion to thinking about the past week of learning – how would they colour in the wheel if they were considering all of their lessons over the past day / week?
And finally:
Ask… ‘Which of these learning behaviours do you consider to be a personal strength?’
Ask… ‘Which do you consider to be in need of further development?
Ask … ‘How might you go about this?’
[Depending on their depth of understanding, they may need a great deal of support to answer ‘How might you go about this?’
The idea of If/Then targets may help here.
See the introduction to If/Then targets in the unit ‘Engage students in Achieving Goals’. For examples of If/Then targets for each learning behaviour, look in Section 2 of any unit titled ‘Putting xxx into learning’ – the suggested If/Thens are the last entry in all of the ‘More Ideas to Try’ section.]
Would they be sufficiently self-aware as learners to be able to colour in the rating wheel?
How much scaffolding and support would they need?
How will you help them to arrive at a personal learning development target, an If/Then that addresses one of their perceived weaknesses?
Make a note of…
A class you might try this with.
How you might build on this lesson and use the Rating Wheel to keep reflection on learning and the resulting meta-cognitive talk a regular feature of your classroom.
2 Using a lesson plan template to distil this lesson.
Given that there are hundreds of lesson plan formats we will use a few different types of planning tools over the course of these units. This one is a simple streamlined useable tool that includes:
What you do (teacher action);
What students do (student action);
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
If we now populate the template with the episodes explored in section 2 above, we get the completed lesson plan. . .
What do you think?
What are your first reactions to this lesson plan template?
Does planning for four aspects – teacher action, student action, learning behaviours, teacher talk – seem useful?
How does sequencing the lesson as ‘episodes’ help or hinder planning?
Make a note of…
The extent to which your existing planning template enables you to think about lessons in this way.
What you would like / need to add to it.
3 Extend your thinking about the lesson and how to help students to become increasingly skilful, self-aware, self-regulating learners.
The problem with the Rating Wheel used in Episode 7 is that it tends to capture whether the learning behaviour has been used, but fails to capture how well it has been used – i.e. frequency rather than skilfulness.
To capture skilfulness, we would need to dig in much more deeply. For example, if we wished to explore skilfulness in Meta Learning, we could use a Rating Wheel like this:
We have built this Rating Wheel from the progression grid so that the learning behaviours become increasingly more skilful as you move clockwise from 12 o’clock. This wheel has been designed for a learner who is already fairly skilled at Meta Learning.
For a less skilful learner, we might use a wheel like this:
The higher order skills on the first wheel (from 6 to 12 o’clock) have been removed, the skills from 12 to 6 o’clock have moved clockwise to be replaced by skills more likely to be seen in younger, less skilful learners. Again, the Wheel is read clockwise from 12 o’clock.
What do you think?
Which of the skills on these wheels are secure in your learners?
Which ones might need attention?
How might you use the wheels to monitor the growth of skilfulness in Meta Learning?
(Why) would you need to put the wheels into ‘student’ speak’?
Key Question – could you use, for example, the Collaboration progression chart to produce your own Collaboration Wheel(s) in the same style?
Make a note of…
The learning behaviour progression charts that you (and your school) could really do with using to create your own rating wheels.
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 students learn, perform and behave. Classroom cultures have a huge influence on students’ learning as you will remember from the Culture unit.
Five big shifts to get you started. Ask yourself – how might you:
Enable learners to lead plenaries and review points;
Encourage learners to discuss the learning process;
Use display to celebrate learning in progress and the processes used;
Create opportunities for students to co-construct learning with you;
Shift responsibility for learning to learners.
Now look at the Learning Chart sections below where you will find plenty more ideas to try.
1a) What do we mean by Me-Learning or Meta Learning ?
Meta-learning involves drawing out of your learning experience a more general, explicit understanding of the process of learning, and specific knowledge about yourself as a learner. Let’s take these two aspects of meta-learning in turn.
There is a wealth of research which shows that good learners know a lot about learning.
They possess a vocabulary for talking about the process of learning itself, and are able to articulate how learning works.
Good readers, even quite young ones, are often able tell you half-a-dozen things they can do when they come across an unfamiliar word: they sound it out, break it down into bits, re-read the previous sentence, read on to see if the meaning becomes clear, look at the picture and think about it, and so on. And so, more generally, for good learners. The more able they are to talk about their learning, the more likely they are to be able to apply their knowledge to new domains too: meta-learning increases generalisation.
And good learners also need an accurate sense of themselves as learners. Being a good learner means being able to take your own strengths and weaknesses into account as you are weighing up a learning challenge, or deciding on a course of ‘professional development.’
The skills and dispositions of meta-learning can be cultivated simply by a teacher’s persistent use of questions such as ‘How did you go about finding that out?’ or ‘How would you go about teaching that to other people?’
Extract from Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton 2oo2
1b) What does being a good Me-Learner involve?
We have given meta learning the friendly title of Me-Learning. Becoming a Me-learner; being able to assess the effectiveness of your own learning process and regulate it for greater success, is made up of several strands; How you become and stay motivated and plan your learning, how you build and organise your ideas; how you learn with and from others; how you manage your learning environment and how you monitor your learning process itself in order to improve. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing meta learning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think about it’.
The progression grid is made up of sections from several of the other learning behaviours that you will have come across previously. Here they are drawn together to reflect a person’s self-knowledge about their learning. The grid below captures of the constituent parts of building the habit of Me-Learning
Our progression grid for Me-Learning has 6 components:
John Biggs (1985) is credited with creating and defining the concept of Meta learning. His conception is framed around the ideas of “being aware of and taking control of one’s own learning”. Implicit within this conception are the ideas that people need to have a knowledge of how they learn; have the motivation to be proactive in managing themselves in this way; have the capacity to be able to regulate their learning. The grid intertwines these important contributors to growing in the habit of Me-Learning; how we act in a progressive manner with other people and with available social, physical and intellectual resources learning how to learn.
“The knowledge worker needs one thing only: to learn how to learn”
[The great business guru Peter F Drucker]
Take a closer look at what each column of the grid is about
How I get motivated and plan my learning.
What we do to get started on learning
Proactive learners get involved in thinking about learning before they start. This involves analysing a task and wondering if they are motivated enough to make a start. We are unlikely to engage in tasks or set goals and make a plan if we aren’t interested in them. We are also likely to think about whether we have the necessary ‘means to learn’. Do we have the skill and the will and will it be worthwhile for us? As we go along we gain added motivation from seeing our knowing about the subject grow from engaging in the process. When we bump into difficulties we have strategies to help us keep going through the inevitable hard slog bits. We can work through a process of dissatisfaction to satisfaction as understanding emerges.
How I build and organise my ideas.
How do I work with ideas?
The next contributory factor in Me-Learning has to do with gathering and using information. What sort of information is needed and where does it come from? How does it fit with what I already know about and how can I retell the ‘story’ of this differently so that I’m incorporating the new ideas with the older ones. How could I distil and refine this new thinking into words or pictures or a recipe or a diagram so that I can make sense of it and other people can too.
How I learn with and from others
Me-learners know how to learn from others, not necessarily face to face or in teams but more and more through distributed electronic contact. They share their hypotheses with others, they pose questions and absorb others’ perspectives. This becomes an iterative process in gaining new ways of knowing and new insights until the learner is happy to craft their ideas and thoughts for the desired outcome.
How I manage my learning environment.
Getting comfortable for learning
The effective Me-learner understands that the learning environment needs structuring in order to optimise their learning effort. Some will be content with a computer, others will need acres of space and lots of paper and pens. Some like it hot, some work best in the small hours. They will be cognisant of their physical surroundings and their emotional state. They learn how to manage distractions, how to channel their emotional energy positively and how and when to break state.
In other words, they learn how to regulate their environment just as much they are regulating other aspects of the learning process.
Talking about my learning
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 setting about learning, others to talking through which learning methods or resources might be useful, and others to monitoring and evaluating the learning being used. All such self-talk is important in building a Me-Learning habit.
How I monitor and evaluate my learning.
Keeping an eye on the how of learning.
The last constituent of Me Learning has to do with how we self-observe how our learning is going as well as the conditions that surround and influence it. Self-monitoring enables you to adjust how you are doing things and whether it is effective enough to achieve the goal; there is a causal link. It’s the goal that’s important and keeps you going. This means that even though you might have to alter your environment, or take account of some negative feelings, or clarify more information all these encourage further effort to improve, in order to reach your goals.
What do you think?
What have you learned about Me-Learning 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.
1d) Unpicking the rows; getting better at Me-Learning.
Of course, the development of Me-Learning 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 Me Learning might grow.
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 ‘just do things’
In this ‘Lacks’ (grey) phase, students are not necessarily aware of learning, they are just doing things. They have no language to talk about learning and the word learning itself is hardly part of their repertoire. Self-reflection of any sort is unlikely to figure in their lives.
Receives: Minded to be interested in learning .
In the Receives (purple) phase, students are aware of what interests them and how to find information. They know that some surroundings are better than others for learning and that they can learn from other people. They are showing an interest in learning and enjoy finding out about lots of things.
Responds: Minded to have a sense of direction in learning.
In the Responds (blue) phase, students have the developed the skill of knowing what they want to achieve and be motivated to do so. They can visualise the broad direction they want to go in, call on others to guide their thinking and make a realistic plan based on their learning strengths. This phase is a big step up from the one before; it requires a broad range of skills which are undertaken consciously. (eg visualising, being aware of their learning skills, goal setting, outline planning, choosing surroundings.
Values: Minded to enjoy their learning effort.
In the Values (green) phase, students are aware of how their learning is growing and they are careful to capture this new awareness in in drafts or models or trial artefacts. They are moulding their environment to meet their needs and their enthusiasm helps them to keep going and manage distractions. They are using a wide variety of learning methods and value the opportunity to discuss things with others. They are consciously aware of keeping all these elements on track.
Organises: Minded to refine what they are learning to meet their goals
In the Organises (yellow) phase, Me-Learning has become a skilful habit. Reviewing progress now turns to evaluating the emerging outcomes and adapting the learning process to make sure the goal is achieved and get through difficult times with well-paced downtime. In some cases, students may question the original goal in this phase and take action on another path. They use knowledgeable experts to help refine their thinking.
Embodies: Minded to self-regulate all aspects of their learning process
In the Embodies (orange) phase, students know themselves well as learners ; their learning strengths (their questioning, imagining, reasoning, noticing, listening, linking skills); how to motivate themselves; how to search for ideas and blend them into understanding; how to work purposefully with others and tweak their learning environment for comfort. They self-regulate themselves as learners to accomplish their self-determined goals.
What do you think?
What has struck you about the act of Me-Learning 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 Me-Learning behaviour.
Any practical ideas the text has triggered.
Preparation for the Learning Team meeting
Where are my students now?
Take a look at the Meta Learning progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Colour in the cells where you think your students are secure.
Some will barely be on the chart while others may be quite a way up. Neat straight lines of secure behaviours are rare. But looking at your students in this way should give you an idea of what you need to work on.
Draw a red line across the chart 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
If you want to read again the notes on Professional Learning Teams, click on the view notes tab in this box
Professional Learning Teams: what and how
The purpose of these meetings is for the team to act as a teacher learning community or Professional Learning Team: a small group of teachers who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of building better learners, commit to trying out new things, reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers with similar subjects or age groups, and who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.
The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this even better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that happen? In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand both triumphs and tribulations. These short guidelines may be helpful in setting a climate for the team itself.
Everyone is expected to report back on their classroom experiments
Coaching questions and probes of colleagues’ classroom experiments encourage deeper reflection.
The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which might include;
No group member can ‘pass’
Listen between the lines when it’s not your turn
Actively discuss everyone’s input
Constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental
Everyone fully engaged in the group •What is said is confidential to the group • Respect others’ views and encourage others’ ideas
greater willingness to try, and try different ways
Avoidance of…..
Improvements in……
Increases in…….
Little to no changes in…
3. Recapping on-line materials
What did we think of the materials? ( 15 mins)
Reactions to
The Resource Learning grid
Where students are secure
Where students could be secure 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 Resource Learning should be built across the school. ie how the phases of Resource Learning might play out against key 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 Resource Learning?
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!
Looked at your students through the lens of the Resourcing Learning chart
Gained a sense of what becoming better at Resourcing Learning looks like
Explored a range of ideas and activities that will help to engage students with Resourcing Learning
Now we look closely at how to blend improving students’ Resourcing Learning 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 Resourcing Learning 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.
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:
Use display to record key learning
Set aside an area of display where students are asked to share any strategies or ‘top tips’ that they have found particularly helpful in their own learning. For those offering the ‘top tip’, it is a distilling activity, but the resulting gallery of ‘top tips’ invites students to adopt the successful strategies of others. This will also support the skills of noticing, collaborating, and distilling.
Organise your classroom in such a way that students are able to select, get and return the resources they need.
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:
Encourage self regulation of resources
Design tasks that require the use of a range of resources and gradually expect the students to select what they need. At the beginning of a session talk with students about the things they might use to help them with their 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:
Ideas Factory
Invite students to work as teams of famous inventors who are going to come up with a new gadget to help other people. It must be useful and commercially viable. Use mindmaps to show the needs of their potential customers and gadgets that could be invented to meet the needs. What materials would they need to make it? Who do they know with the skills to help? Where might they find out relevant information? Success criteria for the task should focus on the way groups have thought about using resources rather than on the finished gadget.
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:
Scrapheap Challenge
Collect a pile of unrelated objects, or ask students to bring in one object each and mix them in random groupings – e.g. a copper tube, piece of cloth, felt pen, blu-tack. Challenge students to make as many things as they can from the objects, using all of them but nothing else. Discuss examples of particularly imaginative/effective use of materials and whether these ideas can be used in another context.
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:
Changing Habits –from unhelpful to helpful habits
Explore this through role play. Use imaginary characters to create more emotional distance. Discuss peer and family influence on forming habits. How many of our habits do we pick up from those around us? To what extent can we choose our habits?
In pairs, identify habits that could easily be changed (i.e. always eating cornflakes for breakfast), and discuss how this came to be a habit. Decide to change one habit for a set period of time. Discuss what happened. How did the new ‘habit’ feel the first time? How did it feel after 21 times? How could students use this experience to imitate other people’s helpful habits?
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:
Use learning mats
at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on Resourcing Learning.
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.
Skim read or leave this section if you have met it in other units because… the section applies to any learning behaviour. i.e. not specific to Resourcing Learning/Capitalising.
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.
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…Resourcing Learning.
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, Resourcing Learning, 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 Resourcing Learning. Most of my students are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue) Resourcing Learning 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 Resourcing Learning. Most of my students would be able to use xxx phase (e.g. blue/responds phase) Resourcing Learning 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 I 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 Resourcing Learning.
most of my students are able to use xxx phase (e.g. respond/blue phase) Resourcing Learning approaches confidently.
What type of task would stretch their Resourcing Learning 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:
Resourcing Learning will help students to better access the content;
The aspect of Resourcing Learning (column) and phase (row) that would fit best is (for example) ‘use a wide range of sources of information which are accessed increasingly independently’ (Resourcing Learning grid, Using Expertise column, Values 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?
C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, Resourcing Learning focused, task.
How do we design tasks that stretch Resourcing Learning and assist students to approach the content more productively? We cover this in four ways:
1 describes the Think/Puzzle/Explore visible thinking routine;
2 shows the phases of a lesson where Resourcing Learning is the driving behaviour;
3 offers a simple lesson plan template that can be used for any lesson and distils the Resourcing lesson into this format;
4 invites you to extend your thinking about the ways in which we might build learner independence.
Think Puzzle Explore – is a routine that sets the stage for deeper inquiry
Three core questions guide students in this routine:
What do you think you know about this topic?
What questions or puzzles do you have?
How can you explore this topic?
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
The whole routine helps students connect to prior knowledge, stimulates curiosity lays the groundwork for independent inquiry.
Application: When and Where can it be used?
You can use Think/Puzzle/Explore at the beginning of a topic and when you want students to develop their own investigative questions
Launch: tips for starting and using this routine.
Begin by giving students a few quiet moments to consider the topic at hand.
Work as a whole class or in small groups and brainstorm ideas in response to:
What do you think you know about this topic? Expect misconceptions at this point but include on a list for consideration after further study
What questions or puzzles do you have? Expect simple ideas and questions but include in a list and push for thoughts that are truly puzzling or interesting them.
How can you explore this topic?
Make sure to give adequate time between each question for students to think about and articulate their ideas.
When beginning to use this routine it is sometimes best to do the Think and Puzzle questions together first. In some cases, you may want to have students do this part of the routine individually on paper or in their heads before sharing ideas in a group. Return to the Explore aspect after sharing ideas and puzzles. It may be helpful to a think about what makes an interesting question, or puzzle, and then discuss strategies for exploring selected questions.
Keep a visible record of students’ ideas. If you are working in a group, ask students to share some of their thoughts and collect a broad list of ideas about the artwork or topic on chart paper. Or students can write their individual responses on post-it notes and later add them to a class list of ideas.
2. A lesson with Resourcing Learning to encourage independence.
The lesson below is based around the Aberfan disaster of 1966, but the same principles could be applied to any area of study so long as there are sufficient resources available for independent access by students. The lesson itself starts in a highly structured manner to secure interest and to set the scene for the subsequent independent enquiry.
Overview of lesson plan:
What is happening here?
The lesson exercises a wide variety of learning behaviours in the different Episodes, but in terms of Resourcing Learning and Questioning, it assumes that students have the skills described at the Responds (Blue) and Values (Green) phases of the Resourcing Learning and Questioning grids. Learners already at the Values phase will need little support to access the lesson, whereas Responds phase learners will need more scaffolding and support.
Ask yourself – where are most of my learners on this progression chart? Do they have the necessary Resourcing and Search skills to undertake this lesson?
Episode 1 – What might this poem be about?
[This is an Episode with 5 separate phases – see the Powerpoint download and the lesson plan grid for more detail.]
A starter activity to intrigue and build interest in further research.
[This is a complex activity to run, and the slide above is only an overview. Download the powerpoint or grid for detail on how to facilitate the 5 different phases of the Episode.]
The different phases of this Episode stimulate a range of learning behaviours. In Episode 1:
Phase 1 – Trying to gain meaning from just one stanza of the poem requires attentive noticing and imagination;
Phase 2 – Circulating to find out more provokes distilling, making links, questioning, listening and revising;
Phase 3 – Deciding how to tackle the problem involves stopping and planning what to do next;
Phase 4 – Putting the stanzas in order requires learners to make links, speculate, explain their thinking and revise their ideas as they go along;
Phase 5 – Deciding/Agreeing what the poem might be about requires a blend of reasoning, imagining and negotiation/consensus building;
Working as a team of 4 requires a range of collaborative learning behaviours throughout.
This is a rich activity that activates a wide range of learning behaviours as it draws students into the lesson. It aims to be a more engaging introduction than ‘Today we are studying the Aberfan Disaster’
Episode 2 –
What are these 2 boys thinking?
What is happening here?
Having established that the poem relates to a disaster of some kind (they may even have heard something about Aberfan before), this Episode uses some visible thinking routines to explore an image and to ‘Step Inside’ the minds of the 2 boys in the forefront.
For more detail on the Step Inside visible thinking routine:
Primarily an Empathy related activity that depends on good noticing, the addition of ‘what makes you say that’ and ‘what else might explain . . . ‘ overlays aspects of reasoning and imagining, ‘which one question . . . ‘ adds questioning and distilling, and ‘what does this remind you of’ stimulates link making.
Episode 3 – What can you find out about the Aberfan disaster?
What is happening here?
At this stage, you are encouraging students to begin looking for information, almost certainly from the internet. Their research may, at this stage, be relatively superficial and related to finding out some facts/dates/number of casualties etc, but it sets the scene for Episode 4 and for the more focused research that is to follow.
The learning behaviours being activated in this Episode relate to the Questioning grid, and in particular the ‘Search skills’ column. How sophisticated are your learners’ search skills? How much scaffolding will you need to provide?
Episode 4 – Taking Stock, Framing an Enquiry
What is happening here?
Having done some preliminary research on the internet, this Episode uses the Think/Puzzle/Explore visible thinking routine to help students to distil what they have found out, to consider the things that are puzzling them, the questions to which they would like answers, and to begin to think about how they might go about finding this out. It is here that you are setting up the independent enquiry that is to follow.
The ‘Think’ phase encourages students to pool what they have found out, what they think they know already.
The ‘Puzzle’ phase begins to identify potential lines of enquiry.
[It may be worth having a few ‘puzzles’ of your own pre-prepared in case students struggle to identify questions: Was it a natural disaster? Who/what was most responsible? What was the role of Lord Robins? What prevention legislation did it lead to, if any? What is Aberfan like today? etc. Use only if students are struggling and you have to!]
The ‘Explore’ phase encourages some preliminary thinking about what they will do next and how they will do it.
[NB. How groups might organise themselves to undertake such an enquiry is also explored in section 3c of the Planning module.]
Episode 5 – Undertaking independent enquiry
What is happening here?
Having set up the enquiry in Episode 4, here the students, in groups of 4, pursue their own line(s) of enquiry.
Consider:
How long will you give them – it needs to be a significant amount of time if they are to dig beyond the superficial.
How you will maintain momentum – will you need mini review points to check/monitor progress?
How you will help them to assess reliability / possible bias in what they are discovering.
How they will report/share the outcomes of their enquiry so that others may share their insights – will it be a report, a presentation to other groups, a ‘jigsaw’ activity where groups are reconfigured, or something else?
To what extent you are able/prepared to allow students to decide these things for themselves. The more they can decide for themselves, the greater the levels of independence and interdependence.
What do you think?
Can you think of something from your own curriculum that could be treated in this, or a similar, way?
Make a note of…
Which class you might try this with.
3 Using a lesson plan template to distil this lesson.
Given that there are hundreds of lesson plan formats we will use a few different types of planning tools over the course of these units. This one is a simple streamlined useable tool that includes:
What you do (teacher action);
What students do (student action);
What the learning behaviours being called upon are (learning behaviours);
What you say (learning talk) to nudge the learning behaviour along.
The format is divided into episodes to show the change of purpose, action and use of learning behaviour across the course of the lesson.
If we now populate the template with the episodes explored in section 2 above, we get the completed lesson plan. . .
What do you think?
What are your first reactions to this lesson plan template?
Does planning for four aspects – teacher action, student action, learning behaviours, teacher talk – seem useful?
How does sequencing the lesson as ‘episodes’ help or hinder planning?
Make a note of…
The extent to which your existing planning template enables you to think about lessons in this way.
What you would like / need to add to it.
4 Extend your thinking about stimulating independent enquiry.
We all would like learners to become increasingly independent as they move through their schooling. Many schools embed such a commitment into their mission statement, in the recognition that lifelong learning necessarily requires learners to be able to control and direct their own learning.
But . . .
It is an uncomfortable truth that, despite our best intentions, research suggests that the longer students stay in school the more, not less, dependent they become on their teachers.
Many schools tell us that the biggest problem is that seemingly successful yet dependent learners at key stage 4 are unable to make the shift towards independent study post 16. A significant number of Ofsted reports cite lack of learner independence as one of the reasons that a school is not yet outstanding. It appears that, left to chance, independence often fails to flourish, sacrificed perhaps on the altar of meeting targets, passing exams, delivering an increasingly overloaded curriculum.
King’s School, Macclesfield, bucks the trend – there is a planned programme of increasingly independent study units running through Key Stages 3, 4 and 5. Time is given to these activities, successes are celebrated, and students talk with enthusiasm about the impact on their ability to explore and study areas of personal interest. Could the same be said of your school? Your classroom?
Ask yourself
Do learners gain in independence as they move through the school?
Why/how does this happen?
Are opportunities for growing independence built into curriculum plans, or is it left to chance?
How does my classroom contribute to growing independent learners?
How could my classroom contribute to growing independent learners?
Make a note of…
One thing you will do differently in order to nurture learner independence
Some guidelines for team reflection sessions
