Sections Archive

Making Links

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.

Open Me

1. A description of the Connect / Extend / Challenge thinking routine

The following lesson is based around a visible thinking routine from the Visible Thinking website.

visiblethinking website

[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 are simply 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 do not 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:

Download PowerPoint

What do you think?

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.

Revising

Collaboration

Questioning

Perseveance

Moving on

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Playing the Learning Power Game Unit by Unit	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’	Moving on to Year 2

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Leadership questions you’ll want to muse on.

Essential leadership considerations – laying the foundations of success.

This is a critically important section. It outlines all of the leadership considerations necessary for the successful implementation of ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’.

Take your time to reflect on all 7 aspects – it is only when you address all 7 that you will have laid the foundations of success.

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

1. How does this programme chime/fit with our school values?

Having read through the outline of the programme content and approach the first questions you will want to muse on are;

How does Playing the Learning Power Game fit with our school’s ethos?
Will this programme strengthen our values and organisation?
How will we ensure stakeholders buy in to it?

Shared values govern a school’s health and when implementing change the expectation is often that teachers will change/adapt their teaching behaviours. As research has told us, this is only possible where there’s a change culture and real, lived school values. So whatever you decide as a result of considering all the questions below, they should all be seen to fit with your school’s values. Shared values is not so much a place to start but the one that will have a guiding influence over all your other questions.

The principles and values of the programme ⬇️

Question – How does Playing the Learning Power Game fit with our school’s ethos?

Issues to consider:

It might first be reassuring to consider the ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’ programme itself to make sure it fits with the school’s values. School values can be gleaned from a school’s vision and/or mission statements, from your goals or anticipated outcomes or even current targets.

One reason for taking on ‘Playing the Learning Power Game‘ is to help prepare students for a lifetime of learning, to:

grow learner independence;
help learners to understand the process of learning, how they learn, and how they can get better at learning;
empower learners to lead a productive lifetime of learning.

Solutions:

The key here is to ask:

Do these points chime with our school values?
Does this fit well with our vision of the purposes of education?
If our vision / mission statement does match, is our vision lived in the day to day life of the school, or is it more aspirational and indicative of a direction of travel?
If our vision is at odds with Playing the Learning Power Game, do we need to open up a conversation about the core purposes of education?

Question – Will this programme strengthen our values and organisation?

Issues to consider:

Many teachers would like their students to be more independent, less needy, better motivated, more engaged, curious, perseverant . . . .

Fewer teachers are ready to face up to the reality that to change their learners’ learning behaviours, teachers must first change their teaching behaviours!

Ask yourself – Are our teachers ready for these changes?

Who will buy in?
Who might resist?
Who will find it easiest to tweak their teaching behaviours?
Who will find it harder?

Solutions:

Remain aware that changing practice is hard and takes both time and deliberate practice.

It’s not just about knowing new stuff, it is about doing what you do differently. That’s much harder. It involves changes to:

what you know – knowledge;
what you believe – feelings or attitudes;
what you can do – your skills;
what you actually do – putting it all into practice.

So changing how you teach is a delicate, complex process……...that’s why it’s hard!

And the hardest thing isn’t getting new ideas into teachers’ heads . . .

It’s getting the old ones out…….that’s why it takes time and effort.

It takes time and practice to undo old habits and become graceful at new ones.

All the evidence shows that teachers change their practice when they work together and support each other in trying out new teaching strategies, within a culture of classroom based action research. It is about teachers being empowered to explore together to find out what works with their students, in this context, at this time. As a consequence, the school learns its way forward, together.

All of these principles are embedded into the very design of Playing the Learning Power Game programme.

Question – How will we ensure stakeholders buy in to it?

Issues to consider:

Who are the stakeholders that might need to be informed about Playing the Learning Power Game?

Your list might include:

Members of SLT;
Learning Champions;
Teachers;
TA’s;
Governors;
Parents.

Solutions:

We would not presume to tell you how to do this, as you know your audience and will want to tailor what you say to them.

The powerpoint contained in the section ‘Leading Playing the Learning Power Game’ is designed to introduce the programme to staff, but it can easily be shortened for a different audience.

A copy of that powerpoint is below:

Download the ppt Presenter notes

2. What sort of skills/competencies would the programme enhance?

Having thought about how the programme fits with school values your next questions may well revolve around your staff and your learners’ competencies, wondering how you can assess what your teachers’ classroom cultures and your students’ learning behaviours are really like now?

You may want to muse on;

What are our students’ learning behaviours like now?
What are our classroom cultures like now?

Finding baselines for students and cultures ⬇️

Question – What are our students’ learning behaviours like now?

The key here is the word ‘learning’ being associated with behaviours. All schools have broad views of their students’ behaviours; timid, outgoing, shy, troublesome, keen, engaged and so forth. But many schools would find it hard to go much deeper other than perhaps to refer to a child’s test or exam results. Researchers at Bristol University uncovered key psychological characteristics that were and are judged to be of the highest value in helping students to learn and thrive in a complex world. It is these learning behaviours that can be developed by everyone regardless of ‘ability’, social background, or age, that are of interest here.

Issues to consider:

Take a look at the first model of ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’ – the Supple Learning Mind:

Ask… what do we know about our students’ learning behaviours at present?

Do we have any systems in place in relation to tracking student learning behaviours?

[Once teachers have completed Unit 1 and built their students’ Learning Profiles, you will have a rich resource to interrogate and so begin to answer these questions.]

Solutions:

To get you going – Have a discussion about the students in your school.

No need for any research – just go on your instincts at this stage. Unit 1 will provide richer data that you can analyse later.

Download the short questionnaire. Ask yourselves:

Leaving aside obvious ‘outliers’, where do we think the majority of our learners are on this Skilled / Unskilled scale? Broadly skilled or unskilled?
As learners progress through our school, do they seem to become more skilled or is there no difference with age?
Are there any gender differences?
Are our higher attainers more skilled than our lower attainers? What might this be telling us?
Do we have any evidence to support our views, or is this really a gut instinct?
What might all of this mean for us?

And finally – What strategies do we currently have in place to:

gather information about our students’ learning behaviours?
intervene to help students to grow their learning behaviours?

Download the short questionnaire

Question – What are our classroom cultures like now?

Issues to consider:

Now look at the second model of ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’ – the Teachers’ Palette:

Ask yourself …What do we know about our classroom cultures at present?

Do we have any monitoring systems in place that explore classroom cultures?

How will we know if our classroom cultures are changing as teachers engage with ‘Playing the Learning Power Game‘?

Solutions:

To get you going – Have a discussion about the prevailing classroom culture in your school.

No need for any research – just go on your instincts at this stage. You will gather richer data as ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’ becomes embedded in everyday practice.

Download the short questionnaire. Ask yourselves:

On each of the 12 indicators, are our classrooms closer to being Teacher Focused or closer to Learning Friendly?
Are there any exceptions to this? Are some classrooms more learning friendly than others? Why might this be? Are some classrooms less learning friendly than others? Why might this be?
Is there any variation across year groups?
Do we already have examples of learning friendly classrooms that others may learn from?
What might all of this mean for us?

And finally – What strategies do we currently have in place to:

gather information about classroom culture?
identify and share best practice?

Download the short questionnaire

3. How could we accommodate the staff development approaches suggested?

Having mused on the skills and competencies that the programme will enhance you might then wonder how you go about enhancing staff skills and whether the school could support the staff development approaches that are embedded in the programme. You may want to consider;

What’s the best way to organise the development of staff across the school?
How will we achieve high levels of engagement with the programme?

Ways and means of developing staff ⬇️

Question – What’s the best way to organise the development of staff across the school?

Issues to consider:

The way that the school decides to organise staff to engage with the programme and learn together impacts on how the programme will be led, who will lead it, and how it will be resourced in terms of directed time. As such, this is a decision that will inform many aspects of the strategy.
Central to the programme is that staff will blend 3 ways of engaging with the learning programme: by exploring the online materials individually ( available at any time of day); by learning collaboratively with and from colleagues to identify ways forward; and by initiating small scale enquiries in their own classrooms. This idea is explored in the previous section of this module, and is developed further in ‘Playing the Learning Power Game‘ (see copy below).
The school will have to decide how it will structure the teams of staff who will learn together. In our preferred order, the choices are:
- adopting the full Professional Learning Team approach;
- using a number of ‘learning champions’ to lead the thinking of small teams of staff – maybe one champion steering the learning of, say, 3 colleagues;
- small groups of 2 or 3 staff working as a coaching partnership of equals, learning their way forward together;
- giving staff access to the online materials and just hoping that somehow learning conversations will arise as a result.

Solutions:

Adopting the full Professional Learning Team approach:-

Is our preferred option. The benefits are well researched and we recommend that you work in this way, unless there are powerful, local reasons for doing otherwise. Think very carefully about the composition of the teams you create – is it best to create teams with a blend of experience, openness to change, subject / age group specialism, or might a simpler structure like ‘all KS2 staff together’ be preferable? The choice is yours, and you will make it based on your knowledge of your staff.

Using a number of ‘learning champions’ to lead the thinking of small teams of staff – maybe one champion steering the learning of, say, 3 colleagues:-

Is an attractive alternative to the PLT approach above. It is effectively PLTs, but half the size. The downside is it limits the number of colleagues individuals will be learning with and from. Coordination and lines of communication will need attention. The size of the school may be important – a small primary school may be able to make such an approach work, but even a three form entry primary would need more than 10 champions if TA’s are included in the programme.

Small groups of 2 or 3 staff working as a coaching partnership of equals, learning their way forward together:-

Is a democratic strategy that may work well but the composition of the coaching partnerships is critical. One less than enthusiastic voice may have a disproportionate impact on other members and you will need to construct the partnerships carefully. Beware simple solutions like ‘we are a 2 form entry school, so let’s pair up the two year 1 class teachers etc’ – you risk building in insularity.

Giving staff access to the online materials and just hoping that somehow learning conversations will arise as a result:-

Is more wishful thinking than a strategy! You almost guarantee that the programme will have limited if any impact across the school. Some individual teachers may engage, but that’s about the most you can hope for. Don’t go there!

Question – How will we achieve high levels of engagement with the programme?

Issues to consider:

Playing the Learning Power Game is a programme designed to help teachers to intentionally build their students’ learning power. This necessarily involves teachers changing their teaching behaviours to enable students to change their learning behaviours.
But – changing working practices is hard and delicate work. Research shows it works best when you can meet in a safe professional environment in which to explore and plan how you could change, and then share and probe the triumphs, tribulations and outcomes of the classroom experiments. [Hence why we advocate PLTs as the most powerful approach.]
In terms of engaging with the programme, think about your colleagues and how they may need to be handled differently. You may need to be prepared to:
- direct the activities of the most inexperienced and rule bound practitioners;
- coach those with limited experience but with openness to change;
- allow those with experience and openness to change to forge their own pathway to developing their practice;
- and perhaps most tricky, find ways to re-ignite the interests of those with experience coupled with a reluctance to change their practice.
Openness to change is the key to engagement – without such openness, engagement is likely to be weaker. Ask yourself – how will we sell the need for change to our staff? What is the itch of dissatisfaction felt by everyone that can be harnessed to drive the need for ‘doing things differently’? (This may be ‘pupils are not the same post Covid’ or ‘catch-up is not working as expected’ or ‘our kids are too needy / passive’ or whatever it is that is making it impossible to apply old solutions to new problems).

Solutions:

This is a whole-school initiative. Engagement levels will be impacted by how the programme is launched to staff, how it fits with the school’s ethos and values, how effectively it is led and managed, and how it meets their personal and professional priorities. Careful attention to all of the other ‘Questions’ explored in this section will lay the foundations for engagement.

But ultimately it is the ‘Team’ nature of the preferred Professional Learning Team approach that cements engagement – the responsibility to ‘not let the team down’ proves to be more powerful than any attempts at forcing engagement.

What will you do if it becomes apparent that a member of staff is still failing to engage with the programme, is not pulling their weight in team meetings, etc? A one to one conversation will be a starting point – there may be personal reasons that are making participation difficult that you are not aware of.

But some things are non-negotiable – this is a whole-school initiative, it is an expectation that all staff engage purposefully, and given that you will have removed all obstacles like workload issues, you do whatever you would normally do to address a failure to adequately fulfil a professional responsibility. Experienced leaders make extensive use of carrots, but also have sticks when needed!

An essential read about how Professional Learning Teams work. ⬇️

Working together to ensure success

This ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’ online programme provides you with the research and ideas to work with but it can’t in itself bring about change in classrooms. To make these ideas work best in classrooms across the school you’ll need to discuss and tease out what you have read, think things through with your colleagues and then try some of the ideas out for real with students.

Useful types of CPD include:

Teacher learning communities, or as we refer to them, Professional Learning Teams (see below)
Coaching partnerships
Small-scale learning enquiries
Classroom observations and personal review
Learning walks.

We can’t insist on particular ways of enabling these ideas to become a reality in your classrooms, but, learning with your colleagues will give you and your students a far greater chance of success.

Learning Team Meetings

Changing working practices is hard and delicate work. Research shows it works best when you can meet in a safe professional environment in which to explore and plan how you could change, and then share and probe the triumphs, tribulations and outcomes of the classroom experiments. Research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame, describes such teams as:

a small group of teachers who meet together regularly
to deepen their understanding of an approach,
to commit to trying out new things,
to reflect on and share their experiments with each other.

If the school decides to adopt this professional learning approach we have provided 7 customised team meeting agendas at key points in the programme.

A quick look at learning together.

Professional Learning Teams

Discussions with colleagues are often known as Professional Learning Teams. What they aim to plan and support are thought of as Classroom Based Enquiries.

PLTs are groups of 8-10 teachers (and TA’s?) who meet together regularly to deepen their understanding of an approach. They try out ideas offered in the programme and reflect on and share their experiments with each other. Such communities work best when they are voluntary, grouping similar subjects or age groups and meet monthly for about 75 minutes over a couple of years. Such communities support and scaffold teachers’ habit change. In short this approach:

deepens staff understanding of learning;
draws on the support of colleagues;
unpacks the ‘how to’ together when it’s unclear;
results in a plan to try out new things, considering what’s doable for their students;
benefits from reflection on and sharing of data from their experiments with each other;
draws on sharing trials and tribulations and what they will do differently.

The typical session agenda follows this pattern;

Agreeing objectives and agenda (5mins)
Sharing learning enquiries (20mins) from 2nd meeting on
Re-capping the on-line materials (15mins)
Deciding what’s to be done (15mins) at whole school and individual level
Personal Action Planning (20mins)
Evaluating the meeting process (5mins)

This agenda format also works when you prefer to use learning partnerships such as;

pairs of teachers acting as a coaching partnership
one member of staff (learning champion) leading and coaching other staff

In Units 1, 2, 3 and 4 you will find suggested detailed meeting agendas aimed to keep you on track.

4. How do we prevent it becoming a workload issue?

Of course the school has all sort of instructions for how staff need to go about completing certain tasks and processes to ensure all runs smoothly. However, when thinking about changing your school’s systems, it’s sometimes necessary to assess the different types of project management and workflows which are currently in place. You might want to ask yourself;

How will we prevent Playing the Learning Power Game becoming a workload issue for teachers, support staff, the programme lead, and senior leaders?
What will need to be changed to create the necessary directed time for ongoing engagement with the online learning aspects of the programme?
What will need to be changed to create the necessary directed time for the 7 programme related meetings?

Accommodating the programme ⬇️

Question – How will we prevent Playing the Learning Power Game becoming a workload issue for teachers, support staff, the programme lead, and senior leaders?

Issues to consider:

The Playing the Learning Power Game programme requires participants to engage with the online materials, to plan for and implement small scale learning enquiries in their classrooms, and to meet with colleagues to reflect on the impact and plan for further developments.
This may well amount to in excess of 20 hours in a calendar year.
Failure to address these time requirements will simply add to teacher workload, and moreover such a failure gives the message that the programme is not of sufficient importance to merit dedicated directed time.
You cannot will the ends without willing the means.

Solutions:

Take a hard look at your existing directed time budget – is there any flexibility?
Ask yourself the hard question – what are we going to stop doing in order to make time for this programme ?
Utilise all (or almost all) of the directed time you would ordinarily earmark for staff development to Playing the Learning Power Game.

Question – What will need to be changed to create the necessary directed time for ongoing engagement with the online learning aspects of the programme?

Issues to consider:

Accessing and acting on the online materials is an essential component of the programme. The online materials frame the CPD and ensure that teachers are working together on the same materials at the same time. This may amount to 3 or 4 hours reading and exploration for each of the 4 units – something around 12/16 hours spread over an academic year.
Access can be at any time the teacher wishes (assuming they are online). Is there any particular advantage in trying to ensure that all teachers access the materials simultaneously, or will you expect them to access the materials at a time they find suitable within a time frame determined by the programme leader?

Solutions:

Think about how you intend using your INSET time for the year.
Since engagement with the online materials is in-service training, why not use 3 of these INSET days flexibly – 3 closure days when teachers are not required to attend school, giving each teacher 18 hours of development time to access the online aspects of the programme across the year, at times that fit their personal circumstances.
You would need to have a clear plan of which materials have to be accessed when to ensure that the staff can move forward together.

Question – What will need to be changed to create the necessary directed time for the 7 programme related meetings?

Issues to consider:

In effect there will be six such meetings in the academic year (as the 7th one will almost certainly fall in the next academic year).
The timing of these meetings is fairly tightly defined (assuming that the school is following our suggested timings).
Schedule them into your annual meeting cycle and you are leaving minimal room for ‘slippage’. Leave timings to chance and you almost certainly build in time-slippage as these meetings act as ‘staging points’, deadlines for getting things done so that teachers are ready for the meeting.
Will these 6 meetings be additional to the normal weekly meeting cycle throughout the 38 weeks of the year? If additional, where is the directed time coming from? Will teachers really want 2 meetings in the same week 6 times a year?
If the meetings are going to be 6 of your normal 38 meeting cycle, you now have only 32 meetings available for ‘other business’ – which meetings will you do without to accommodate the 6 for the programme?

Solutions:

These meetings have to be scheduled in advance to establish the ‘rhythm’ for the programme over the year.
Schedule them as part of the weekly programme of meetings at the outset of the year and you are committing to following our recommended timings in terms of how long each unit will take. Fixed meetings drive the programme forward as planned and inject urgency.
Schedule them ‘flexibly’, moving meetings by a couple of weeks here and there to accommodate unexpected pinch points etc, and you will almost certainly end up with a programme that lasts somewhat more than one year. This may or may not be a bad thing! You may take the view that following the programme at a more leisurely pace at times that work best for your school is the way to go.
The choice is yours. But choose you must!

5. Who will lead it and what accountability may be needed?

Clear chains of command avoid chaos & confusion and the school will have a simple structure because it creates a sense of accountability within the school. You may like to consider;

Who will lead this change strategy and what accountability may be needed in the system?
How will the programme leader keep senior leaders informed of developments? How will senior leaders support the programme leader?

Leading and monitoring the programme ⬇️

Question – Who will lead this change strategy and what accountability may be needed in the system?

Issues to consider:

The programme will need to be overseen by someone, or maybe by a small group of people. Whether it is an individual or a small team may well be determined by the staff development approach that you decided in 3 above.
There may be someone on your staff who already holds a responsibility for teaching and learning, or perhaps staff development – will they lead the programme?
You may consider a programme leader from outside of the school leadership team – is there someone you have in mind?
If you are going down a learning champion route – how will you select your learning champions? Will you choose / nominate them? Will you invite expressions of interest from teachers?
Whoever you choose to lead the programme, how will you ensure that they have sufficient time to familiarise themselves with Playing the Learning Power Game before it is launched to staff?
Will there be a written job description for the programme leader?
Remember – the issues raised in 4 above in relation to teacher workload apply equally to the programme leader. How will you ensure that the programme lead has sufficient time to discharge their responsibilities?

Solutions:

Once the programme leader(s) have been identified, discuss with them their development needs and the time that they need to lead the programme successfully. Don’t expect to be able to answer this immediately – regard it as an ongoing issue that will need to be re-visited as the programme moves forward.
Consider if any fixed term incentives need to be offered for the duration of the programme.
Remember – it is a false economy to invest in the programme itself but neglect making adequate provision for its leadership.

Question – How will the programme leader keep senior leaders informed of developments? How will senior leaders support the programme leader?

Issues to consider:

If the programme lead is already a member of the leadership team, then it is likely that existing communication routes will be sufficient.
If the programme lead is not on the leadership team, an alternative solution will be required.
If you have decided to use a small team to lead the programme (learning champions), again an alternative solution will be required.

Solutions:

Ensure that Playing the Learning Power Game is a consistent item on senior leadership team meetings.
Either invite the programme lead to join SLT for programme related agenda items, or preferably make a clear statement of the importance of the programme by making the lead an SLT member for the duration.
Probably the most time-efficient way is to ensure that at least one member of the leadership team is one of the learning champions.

6. How are we going to support the programme?

Leadership and Management behaviour patterns

The school will have its own leadership / management styles and indeed it is this style that often decides the level of staff productivity and satisfaction in an organisation. Hence you will have been wondering;

How will leaders create the conditions where teachers are encouraged to take risks, to try things out, to fail in safety?
How will leaders demonstrate an ongoing interest in the enquiries that teachers are undertaking?

[Here, ‘leaders’ includes members of the senior leadership team and the programme lead (if not an SLT member).]

The style of the programme ⬇️

Question – How will leaders create the conditions where teachers are encouraged to take risks, to try things out, to fail in safety?

Issues to consider:

Flawless execution of tried and tested teaching routines is at odds with a programme that intentionally seeks to help teachers to adjust their classroom practice to focus more explicitly on growing students’ learning behaviours.
Teachers are being asked to take risks, to see what happens, to explore possibilities. Inevitably some things will work well, but others less so.
This will not fit well in a system that is risk averse, that prides itself on not making mistakes.
To what extent is your school (and your leadership team) risk averse?

Solutions:

There are 2 key leadership behaviours that support innovation:

Dialogue – because what leaders talk about reveals their true priorities. If leaders are going to support innovation, risk taking and change, they need to make talking about it their priority. They need to model it in the way that they lead the school, and in the ways in which they embrace (or resist) change. Teachers will find it hard to innovate in a school led by risk-averse leaders. Take a hard look at how teachers view senior leaders – do teachers feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them, and if not, how can senior leaders change the narrative?
Enabling exploration – because ‘permission to act’ needs to be devolved to teachers. In a top-down leadership structure within which senior leaders define ‘good practice’ and how things are to be done in classrooms, permission to innovate is denied teachers because they are required to follow agreed procedures / systems / methods. This may be appropriate if practice is poor and is in need of greater consistency, but it acts directly against the individual teacher innovation envisaged by this programme. How can leaders make it clear that teachers are responsible for seeking their own solutions, rather than slavishly following orthodoxy? How can they / do they model this in their own everyday leadership practices?

Question – How will leaders demonstrate an ongoing interest in the enquiries that teachers are undertaking?

Issues to consider:

How frequently do leaders currently find time to get into classrooms, and for what purpose?
How will leaders separate their ongoing responsibility to monitor practice and quality assure the provision with the need to maintain an ongoing interest in teacher enquiries?
What would ‘interest in the enquiries’ look and feel like? Will there be any paper records? Why? For whom?
Who will initiate these conversations – leaders undertaking a ‘learning walk’ at a time of their choosing, or teachers inviting senior leaders into their classroom to observe / support the enquiry they are undertaking?
What will leaders do with the outcomes from their ‘interest in the enquiries’?

Solutions:

Keep all existing observation systems, especially those that have a judgemental element to them (ie Performance Management, Capability) separate from these developmental observations.
Move towards teachers inviting leaders into their classroom at a time of their choosing. This may have to begin with leaders asking to be invited in to observe something that is being trialled, but if the observation is formative, non-threatening and supportive, teacher initiated invites will surely follow.
Leaders must allow plenty of time to discuss what has been observed with the teacher after the lesson. This is the opportunity for the teacher and the leader to exchange views and learn with and from each other. It is this discussion that shifts the observation towards the developmental.
The overview that this affords leaders enables them to share emerging innovative practice, to pair up teachers working on similar lines of enquiry, to encourage teachers to showcase their experiments.

As this innovation goes along, the big lessons for leaders are to:

keep close to the developments;
keep it high profile in school, visit classrooms regularly;
talk with teachers about how they are weaving the ideas into their lessons;
focus on the kinds of learning processes teachers are routinely asking students to use;
identify where the new practice is really taking hold or is faltering.

7. How do we expect it to work? How will we create a plan to pull all this together?

The purpose and organisation of the change

The Playing the Learning Power game programme is a strategy and will have a place in the school’s plan to implement change and so gain improved outcomes for students. A well-crafted strategy will draw together the answers from the other six questions dealt with above. You may find yourself musing on;

What is our strategy for implementing ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’?
Is the plan sufficiently detailed to show time frames, responsibilities of key players, monitoring checkpoints, contingencies, funding/time implications?

Putting a plan together ⬇️

Question – What is our strategy for implementing ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’?

Issues to consider:

Any strategy needs to take into account all of the preceding 6 sections:

How Playing the Learning Power Game fits with our school ethos;
Where we are now and the direction of travel;
How we will organise staff learning;
How we will adjust school systems to make this achievable;
The leadership of the programme;
How sensitive leadership will support the programme.

Neglecting any of the 6 at this stage will limit the potential impact of Playing the Learning Power Game.

Consider how your plan will inform your Self Evaluation form – you should already be able to describe what you are Intending to achieve and how you plan to Implement it. The Impact of these plans will be evidenced by ongoing monitoring as the programme develops over the next year or so.

Solutions:

Decide how your plan will link to the school improvement plan – will the Playing the Learning Power Game plan be embedded in the SIP, or a plan in its own right that is cross referenced into the SIP?
Whichever you decide, use your SIP planning format since the investment that the school is making in the programme should receive the same treatment as other whole-school priorities.
Keep a close eye on your SEF and how you will weave Playing the Learning Power Game into it.

Question – Is the plan sufficiently detailed to show time frames, responsibilities of key players, monitoring checkpoints, contingencies, funding/time implications?

Issues to consider:

The level of detail contained in your plan is important. It sends a message to staff and to Governors that you have considered a wide range of programme related issues and provides a route map for implementation.

On first meeting Playing the Learning Power Game, it may be difficult to sense how the programme will play out over the first year or so. Who will be doing what, when etc. This will be as true for leaders as it will be for members of staff.

Would it be worth trying to capture how/when the Units will be phased in; when staff will be reading the online materials; when they will be meeting with colleagues to discuss and plan; when they will be trialling enquiries in their own classrooms? In other words, is it worth fleshing out the ‘rhythm of the year’?

Solutions:

You have already met the ‘Big Ambition’ of the programme. Each row of yellow cells describes one of the phases of the programme and describes what the key players will be doing:

Use this to populate the year plan below – it will help you to get your head around all of the elements of the programme and how they will fit together and play out over time as the year progresses.

Download the Big Ambition (full version) Download the Year Plan

You are now in ‘Leading . .Playing the Learning Power Game’.Leadership questions.

Use the navigation bar to move to other sections

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

Playing the learning power game…unit by unit

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Playing the Learning Power Game Unit by Unit	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

Unit 1 – Understanding Learning and Cultures

The intention of Unit 1 is to..

..introduce the two foundational frameworks of Learning Power . . the Supple Learning Mind, and the Teachers’ Palette . . the warp and the weft of learning.

..introduce teachers to the intriguing prospect of growing and developing learning habits

…offer teachers a chance to explore yourself as a learner and complete their own learning profile

…start teachers on a journey of understanding their students’ learning by compiling and analysing their learning profiles

Sections 1D and 1E are vitally important because the results will shape their practice thereafter.

The best way of tackling this unit is to..

Read through Section 1A to explore the big ideas that underpin Learning Power

Read through Section 1B just to give teachers confidence about the approach

Settle down, maybe one evening, and explore their own learning habits (Section 1C)

Undertake the fascinating exercise of completing a learning profile for each of their students. Teachers might do 3 or 4 a day over a couple of weeks (Sections 1D and 1E)

Slowly unpack what the data in the profiles is telling you.

Timing. We suggest teachers give yourselves a couple of months to understand, collect and analyse this data. Their view of their students learning behaviours will henceforth influence and shape their practice. If their programme started in Sept teachers should aim to complete this unit by the end of the first half term. (e.g. Sept to end Oct)

Team Meeting 1 is scheduled for the end of Unit 1, after Section 1E

As a result it should have the following impact.

Teachers will have become familiar with the underlying concepts of Learning Power

Teachers will have gained interesting insights into themselves as a learner.

Their student learning profiles will be giving teachers some of the most influential data they’ve ever had to shape their classroom practice.

Read about the contents of Unit 1

Section 1A. The warp and weft of Learning Power…

.. is a tapestry of activities on the part of both teachers and learners. The warp of Learning Power is made up of the learning behaviours teachers want students to develop. And these are being developed and woven together by the weft of all the different methods that teachers have at their disposal: the language teachers use and the explicit attention teachers pay to the ‘how’ of learning; the activities teachers make available, and the way these are framed for students; and the aspects of learning power that teachers model in a dozen different ways, throughout the school day.

This section introduces and explores the 2 models that underpin Learning Power:

The Supple Learning Mind – the key learning behaviours that were and are judged to be of the highest value in helping students to learn and thrive in a complex world;
The Teachers’ Palette – the ways that teachers: shift responsibility for learning towards students; talk about the process of learning; plan lessons that consciously develop positive learning behaviours; celebrate the growth of learning.

Section 1B. Why learning habits matter

‘Why learning habits matter’ explores the background, heritage and research behind learning to learn and why it is so important for 21st Century learners.

Schools today need to be educating not just for exam results but for a life of learning. To thrive in the twenty-first century, it is not enough to leave school with a clutch of examination certificates. Students need to have learnt how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self-disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.

The core purpose of education is to prepare young people for life after school; to get them ready, as Art Costa, an American educator with similar views, says, ‘not just for a life of tests, but for the tests of life’.

Section 1C. Uncover the mysteries of learning behaviours

‘Uncover the mysteries of learning behaviours’ explores 12 important learning behaviours and introduces teachers to how these behaviours might grow. It is the first step in moving from Learning Power to Building Learning Power.

Now that we have moved beyond seeing learning as a performance to it being an interesting process going on in our brains, we turn towards the growth of this supple learning mind. The whole point of building learning powers is to do just that, to build the learning behaviours, not simply to name them.

To help schools make the collection of learning data more manageable we have selected 12 of the original 17 characteristics for teachers to take a closer look at over time. In this section teachers can find out more about these fascinating learning characteristics and how they grow under the influence of a learning friendly environment.

Section 1D. Up close and personal with learning

‘Up close and personal with learning’ pulls together the growth trajectories introduced in the previous section into one progression chart covering all 12 learning behaviours.

Perhaps the best way of really getting to grips with the growth of learning power is to take a personal look at yourself as a learner and the learning behaviours you tend to use. What might you learning profile look like; where are your strengths, what are the behaviours you find tricky; which would you like to improve?

Having got the idea we then invite teachers to look at just a couple of their students; a low and a high attaining student. This should give teachers a glimpse of what it is that makes the difference in how students approach and achieve in learning.

Section 1E. Finding learning characteristics

‘Finding learning characteristics’ invites teachers to turn their attention to their class and to build learning profiles for each of them individually.

And once these profiles are completed, to begin to explore patterns:

How do girls’ profiles differ from boys’ profiles?
More able profiles with less able profiles?
Pupil premium profiles with others?
Which learning behaviours appear most secure across my class?
Which are least secure?

It is a key step in seeing their students through the lens of learning power and understanding their strengths and relative weaknesses.

Team meeting 1

This is the first of 7 team sessions that are built into the online programme. The first meeting is scheduled to take place after completing Section 1E.

The agenda is carefully structured and timed to take an hour although this first meeting will take longer because the team will need to discuss the ground rules for how they want the meeting to work.

The agenda structure thereafter aims to ensure the main purposes of the meeting are accomplished. It’s a structure informed by significant research into teacher learning groups.

Unit 2. Classroom culture.

The intention of this Unit is to..

explore three aspects of the Teachers’ Palette framework – Relating, Talking and Celebrating and their impact on classroom culture.
deepen understanding of the 4 key learning behaviours – Perseverance, Questioning, Collaboration, Revising . .

This content builds on what teachers discovered about their students’ learning characteristics in Unit 1 and suggests interventions tailored to particular levels of learner development.

The best way of tackling this Unit is to..

Read sections 2A, 2B and 2C to gain an overview of the Teachers’ Palette and the 3 aspects – Relating, Talking and Celebrating. As they read, teachers consider which of these aspects of classroom culture are already in evidence in their classroom.

Then explore the interactive navigation grid in section 2D. Start with the dark green ‘Discovering’ cells, before homing in on the suggestions for their own students’ levels of learning development (this is informed by their research in finding your students’ learning characteristics in Unit 1, section 1E, Finding Learning Characteristics).

As they read, try to pick out several little shifts your classroom culture might benefit from. Plan to put one into action every couple of weeks and note the positives or negatives of making such a change.

Timing. While reading and exploring sections 2A, 2B and 2C may take an hour or two, the bigger task is to begin to integrate some ideas into everyday practice. It’s worth taking a term or three months over this ‘integrating’ phase, as teachers trial ideas, undertake small enquiries, evaluate impact, talk with colleagues, and slowly begin to make their classroom increasingly learning-friendly. Remember – culture shift takes time!

Unit 2, Team Meeting 1. (One month after starting unit 2)

Unit 2, Team Meeting 2. (Two months after starting unit 2)

As a result it should have the following impact.

Classrooms will be well on the way to being able to cultivate learning behaviours – it is about readying the classroom culture for intentionally blending content and with learning behaviours, which we tackle in Unit 3.

Read about the contents of Unit 2

Section 2A. Relating for learning

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

Aspects of Relating for Learning

Devolving responsibility – by shifting the emphasis towards learners taking increasing responsibility for their own development. It includes a shift towards students asking more of the questions, monitoring their own learning, doing more of the work, making more choices, pursuing their own lines of enquiry.
Using a coaching approach – by moving away from ‘telling’ whenever possible. It is one of the hardest of balancing acts: knowing when to coach and when to tell requires the teacher to have a deep understanding of both the subject matter and the learner.
Modelling the learning process – by showing ways in which teachers, too, are learners. It’s a shift away from teachers being ‘all-knowing subject specialists’ to displaying uncertainty, to sharing their own learning stories, to learning ‘aloud’, to learning alongside their students.

The teachers’ palette to build classroom culture.

Section 2B. Talking for learning

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

Aspects of talking for learning

Aspect 1 Nudging the process. Turn each of the learning behaviours into sets of casual prompts or nudges to move students along in learning.
Aspect 2 Encouraging reflective self-talk. Encourage students to pay attention to how they are learning, to slow down and notice steps they are using along the way.
Aspect 3 Offering feedback. Angle feedback prompts at three levels…about the task, about the process, about self-regulation.

Section 2C. Celebrating learning

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

Aspects of Celebrating

Aspect 1: Growing Learning habits – finding ways to notice, track, record and celebrate learning behaviour growth. In the same way that attainment is routinely tracked, recorded and celebrated, so is learning itself.
Aspect 2: Re-defining failure – turning the lens around: mistakes become learning opportunities; difficulty is when learning happens; struggle is to be expected; asking questions shows curiosity, not a lack of intelligence; effort not just talent is what leads to success.
Aspect 3: Displaying values – the process of learning (as opposed to the finished outcomes of learning) are on display. What teachers choose to display tells students a lot about what they truly believe: displaying/praising only the finished article suggests that whatever they might say, they are more interested in the outcome than the process.

Section 2D. Readying your classroom culture

At the heart of Section 2D lies a catalogue of ideas, organised around the 4 foundational learning habits, differentiated by 4 stages of learning growth development.

It enables teachers to target their interventions based on what they discovered about their students’ learning behaviours in Unit 1.

The interactive table is made up of four columns of;

Four foundational learning habits;

perseverance, questioning, collaboration, revising.

And four rows of;

Four stages of developing students’ learning attitudes;

Lacks to Receives (grey to purple)
Receives to Responds (purple to blue)
Responds to Values (blue to green)
Values to Organises (green to yellow)

Within each cell teachers find ‘how-to’ ideas;

organised into three aspects of teaching;

relating, talking, celebrating

Clicking on any one of the sixteen light green cells will take teachers into the corresponding package. The pattern of these activities is consistent across all sixteen packages, so they will quickly become familiar with the approach.

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

So far teachers have been developing their understanding of learning power and their students’ learning behaviours. Here they begin to create action plans for developing their practice in order to make their classroom increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable teachers to:

Share responses to their reading thus far in Unit 2, and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on their exploration of section 2D in light of what they have already learned about their students’ learning behaviours in Unit 1.

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

So far teachers have been developing their practice to ensure that their classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans, relating to classroom culture, that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share responses to their further reading in Unit 2, section 2D and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the catalogue of ideas in section 2D.

Unit 3 – Constructing Learning

The intention of this unit is to..

alert teachers to the transition from content-only planning, through to planning that weaves together the content to be acquired, the planned activities and the learning behaviours that are being developed and grown (Section 3A);
explain how teachers might begin to integrate learning behaviours into units of work and lessons (Section 3B);
introduce teachers to descriptions of different groups/types of learning activities (Section 3C);
offer a huge number and range of teaching ideas that will help teachers to blend the 4 key learning behaviours into their curriculum planning (Section 3D).

The best way of tackling this Unit is to..

Read sections 3A, 3B and 3C. Each looks at a different aspect of how teachers construct learning experiences.

3A looks at 5 different ‘depths’ of planning for learning, from content-only planning through to planning that weaves content and learning growth together;

3B explores both medium term planning and individual lesson planning to support content delivery and learning behaviour development;

3C considers different types of learning activities, and how each requires / develops a different blend of learning behaviours.

Then explore the interactive navigation grid in section 3D. Here teachers will find over 100 teaching ideas, grouped by the 4 foundation learning behaviours, containing visible thinking routines, activities, monitoring tools and exemplar lessons.

Timing. While reading through and exploring sections 3A, 3B and 3C may take a couple of hours, the bigger task is to begin to integrate some of these planning ideas into everyday practice. It’s worth taking a term or three months over this ‘integrating’ phase, as teachers trial ideas, undertake small enquiries, evaluate impact, talk with colleagues, and slowly begin create lessons that intentionally teach content and stretch learning behaviours.

Unit 3, Team Meeting 1. (One month after starting unit 3, after teachers have worked through Sections 3A, B & C)

Unit 3, Team Meeting 2. (Two months after starting unit 3)

As a result it should have the following impact – teachers will . .

have recognised the importance of weaving content and learning behaviours into their planning;
have explored alternative ways of planning units of work and individual lessons to include learning behaviours;
have a heightened awareness of the activities they tend to gravitate to, and an understanding of how they might broaden their repertoire;
be able to intentionally blend activities that trigger, support or extend the 4 key learning behaviours into their curriculum planning.

Read about the contents of Unit 3

Section 3A. The big picture of curriculum planning

Absorbing learning habits into the whole curriculum

The level of detail in curriculum plans varies in part due to the time-frame of the plan. A yearly plan for a subject or year group will necessarily be more broad-brush than a medium term plan for a unit of work, which in turn will be less detailed than an individual lesson plan. All such plans identify what is to be taught, and most will indicate how it will be taught and assessed, but fewer identify and plan for the learning behaviours that students will require to access this content, nor for the development of those learning behaviours.

In section 3A we consider the transition from content-only planning through to curriculum planning that integrates progression in content with progression in learning behaviours.

Section 3B. Designing units and lessons

Absorbing learning habits into units of work and lessons

In this section we look at how teachers might plan a unit of work and then just one lesson to ensure learning behaviours are firmly embedded. In fact without the use of learning behaviours the plan would be unsuccessful. What are the stages of filling in blank unit plans like the one shown here? What are the must haves and top tips to planning a worthwhile lesson? We offer tips, formats and examples to get them going.

Section 3C. Activity types to stimulate learning habits

Absorbing learning-rich activities into lessons

Activities come in all shapes and sizes – some are highly structured by the teacher, while others encourage learners to engage in independent enquiry; some are brief events in a part of a lesson, while others may extend over a period of days or weeks. No activity type is particularly ‘better’ than any other as each serves a different purpose and requires/activates different levels of learner independence. As with most things, variety is key and planning should range across all activity types over a period of time/unit of work.

In section 3C we explore different types of learning activities and the learning behaviours that they stimulate.

Section 3D. A catalogue of activities

Absorbing the foundational four learning behaviours into lessons

Here we offer a unique catalogue to explore. It has over 100 ideas that teachers might blend into their lesson designs.

These ideas are organised into 4 categories for each of the 4 foundational learning behaviours. The 4 categories are:

Visible Thinking Routines – Some visible thinking routines to activate each of these learning behaviours;
Classroom Activities – Some activities to strengthen each of these learning behaviours;
Monitoring Strategies – Some strategies for checking how each of these learning behaviours are developing;
Exemplar Lessons – A lesson plan that integrates each of the four learning behaviours into a complete lesson.

It’s the must-have pick and mix. Expect to come back to it frequently.

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 1

So far teachers have been developing their practice to ensure that their classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly. This meeting begins the process of how they can construct curriculum plans that blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable teachers to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 2, classroom culture that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share responses to their reading in Unit 3, sections 3A, 3B and 3C and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3A/B and C.

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 2

This meeting explores the activities that teachers can use to blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 3, sections 3A, B and C, that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share responses to their reading in Unit 3, section 3D.
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3D.

Unit 4 – Broadening the range

The intention of this unit is to..

…introduce and encourage teachers to branch out and play with building some of the next 8 learning behaviours, just to get the feel of them in preparation for Phase 2 of the programme.

The best way of tackling this unit is to..

Skim read a couple of the sections to understand the shape of them. Consider which of the eight behaviours, according to students’ progression charts, appear to be most needed.

Timing. If you have kept with suggested timings you should reach here by May or June. This gives teachers several weeks to try two or maybe three of these learning behaviours in their classrooms.

Unit 4, Team Meeting 1. (One month after starting Unit 4)

Unit 4, Team Meeting 2. (Towards the end of Unit 4)

As a result it should have the following impact.

There is no expectation for teachers to activate all eight of the behaviours but we hope they will be inspired to try two or three and be set up in readiness for Phase 2 of the programme.

Read about the contents of Unit 4

Unit 4 offers teachers an opportunity to spread their wings and begin to work across another 8 of the learning behaviours.

What does Unit 4 contain?

It has 8 small sections, each based on one learning behaviour – Noticing; Making links; Reasoning; Imagining; Capitalising; Listening; Planning, Meta Learning.

There is no prescribed order for tackling these sections, and teachers are invited to decide for themselves which one(s) they wish to explore. They may:

start by looking at those behaviours that apply more generally and are linked to students’ attention...(perseverance), noticing, listening, refining. These alone may account for any under-performance.
look particularly at imagining. Imagining motivates students to explore and engage, whereas students lacking imagination maybe more rigid, having fewer ideas to play with in their learning.
remember too, that it’s well-researched that students with well-developed meta-cognitive skills attain more highly than those who don’t. So maybe think hard about including meta learning too.
consider data that suggests an area of under-performance – for example suppose that outcomes for Maths and for Science are causing concern across the school. This might well lead teachers to begin with Reasoning and Making Links, key behaviours for Maths/Science.
alternatively, teachers concerned about creative writing may choose to start with Imagining.
Select three or four behaviours that seem most appropriate to work on first for your students.

How are the sections structured?

The section for every learning behaviour is structured in the same way:

a short description of the learning behaviour;
an invitation to reflect on the classroom culture that encourages the behaviour and to consider the extent to which the teacher’s classroom culture already has features that will encourage the behaviour to flourish;
and a staged way to introduce the behaviour.

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

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

This meeting invites teachers to share their explorations of the 8 new learning behaviours in Unit 4.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable teachers to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 3 that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share responses to their reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

This meeting invites teachers to share their explorations of the 8 new learning behaviours in Unit 4, invites them to look back over their learning over the course of the Playing the Learning Power Game programme, and offers a glimpse of what might come next.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable teachers to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 4 that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share responses to their reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Playing the Learning Power Game Unit by Unit	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

Meetings and Timings

Meetings – and suggested timings

There are 4 Units, with 7 meetings in total, spread over around 13/14 months.

Unit 1, one end of unit meeting, 6 to 8 weeks after starting Unit 1.
Unit 2, two meetings, one meeting 4 weeks after starting Unit 2, and a further meeting 4 weeks later. There is no meeting scheduled for the end of Unit 2, which should take around 3 months in total to complete.
Unit 3, two meetings, one meeting 4 weeks after starting Unit 3, and a further meeting 4 weeks later. There is no meeting scheduled for the end of Unit 3, which should take around 3 months in total to complete.
Unit 4, two meetings, one meeting 4 weeks after starting Unit 4, and a further meeting towards the end of Unit 4, maybe 6 weeks or so after the first meeting. Unit 4 should take around 2 or 3 months in total to complete.

If a school starts Playing the Learning Power Game in September, the programme will play out something like this, assuming no time ‘slippage’:

Unit 1, first half Autumn term, meeting around October half term;
Unit 2, second half Autumn term and first half of Spring term, meetings around end November and mid January;
Unit 3, second half Spring term and first half of Summer term, meetings around end of March and middle of May;
Unit 4, second half Summer term, probably spilling over into the following Autumn term, meetings around end of June and final meeting around end of September.

Meeting Agendas. These agendas appear in the Units at the appropriate timing points, but are collected together here for your reference, and to give you a sense of when the meetings need to be scheduled throughout the year.

Unit 1, Team Meeting Agenda

[Give sufficient time for people to engage with Unit 1 and to complete their learning profiles in section 1E. Schedule this meeting around 6 to 7 weeks after starting Unit 1. Unit 1 needs sufficient time for teachers to create learning profiles, but not so long as to risk losing momentum – hence we think that you should aim to complete Unit 1 in 6/7 weeks – ie one half term.]

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Agree ground rules for this and following Learning Team meetings;
Discuss your responses to your reading in Unit 1, section 1A, the Warp and Weft of Learning (the guiding frameworks of the approach)
Discuss your findings and reactions arising from Unit 1 sections, 1B to 1E.( developing your students’ learning profiles)

NB. As this is the first such meeting the agenda below is unique in the Learning Team meeting series.

Learning Team meeting 1 agenda

Unit 1, Section 1E, First Team Meeting Agenda

Agree ground rules, objectives and agenda (15 mins only for 1st meeting)
Discuss your first impressions of Unit 1, section 1A, the Warp and Weft of Learning (10 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the online materials from Unit 1, sections 1B to 1E (20 mins)
Consider possible strategic consequences across the school (5 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Reading in advance of the meeting.

[As this is the team’s first meeting please read these guidelines beforehand]

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.

What-Why-How-of-PLT.pdf

NB. This first meeting does not follow all the aspects of Learning Team meetings as described in this paper. The full meeting pattern will be in operation at the next meeting. Unit 2 Section 2D.

Item 1. Ground rules and objectives.

What ground rules should we adopt and what do we want to achieve? (15 mins)

This first item invites you to explore how you want to be as a learning team. See download above for some suggested ground rules

Meeting objectives might include:

learn from how our actions have worked;
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
plan further personal developments in classroom practice.

Outcome. You have decided how your learning team will operate henceforth.

Item 2. Reports from the Warp and Weft of Learning (15 mins)

Explore together your initial understanding of and reaction to the two foundational frameworks… the Supple Learning Mind and the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 1 section 1A)

what were your first impressions?
what do you still need to get your head around?
what excites you about this?
what worries you?
speculate on how these 2 models might change your teaching.

Outcome. You will have a clearer understanding of the foundational thinking behind the ideas of Learning Power.

Item 3. Reports from class profile data (30 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; making your own experience a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each experienced in completing each student’s learning profile. i.e. trying to implement Unit 1, section 1E, Finding Learning Characteristics
how the process worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
what you have discovered about your learners
what surprised or baffled you
how valuable you think this information to be i.e. the point of collecting and recording it
whether you feel there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other. At this stage it’s valuable to note which of the foundational four learning behaviours your own class need to work on. Which stage from grey to green do most of your students work at?

Outcome. You will have begun to understand your learners’ deeper behaviours and challenges. This will focus your looking when you start Unit 2, Classroom culture.

Item 4. Consider what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Think about;

As a result of recording and analysing the learner profiles consider;

Are there easier ways of doing this?
Are there ways of doing it we could all learn from and adopt?
Do we feel confident about our results
Should this idea be woven into school policies/directed time?

At this stage it’s valuable to note ideas arising from this discussion. Those relating to the final point could be passed to school managers just for discussion at this point.

Outcome. You will have a considered view of how such student data might be collected and stored.

While there are many ideas suggested in the on-line materials that will make a greater impact if they were adopted by everyone across the school the actual collection and storage of student data remains a school organisation issue. But the use of student learning profile data is a key factor in shaping the programme’s central idea of building students’ learning power. Without this data you’d never know how best to select activities. However, even at this early stage, you may be realising that your students’ learning profiles will need to be kept up to date so that they can act as a transfer document when they move on next year. It might be an area to raise tentatively at this point.

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

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

We suggest that you schedule two team meetings now for your work in Unit 2 about classroom culture. You will find their agendas in Unit 2 Section 3C and Section 3D

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

[We anticipate that Unit 2 may well take around 3 months to complete. Two meetings are to be scheduled, this meeting one month after starting Unit 2, and a second one a month later. There is no ‘end of unit’ meeting, although the outcomes from Unit 2 will be explored during the first of the Unit 3 meetings.]

So far you have been developing your understanding of learning power and your students’ learning behaviours. Here you begin to create action plans for developing your practice in order to make your classroom increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Share your responses to your reading thus far in Unit 2, and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on your exploration of section 2D in light of what you have already learned about your students’ learning behaviours in Unit 1.

Learning Team meeting agenda 1

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at and trialled in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what has already been trialled in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

This is an opportunity to check out what you have been reading and absorbing from the on-line materials. It’s a chance to share or check out your understanding. It is these ideas that will be absorbed into your next Action Plan.

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

what was understandable or tricky to understand;
how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture;
which ideas are front runners and why?
which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

Item 3. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make more impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school. For example, if someone has already trialled an idea from section 2D that worked really well (for example, the introduction of a ‘Stuck’ poster), it may be worth everyone agreeing to give it a go with their own class. Of course they don’t need to look the same in every classroom but the ideas they contain need to ‘grow up’ through the age ranges. What do you expect students to be able to try for themselves as they grow up through the school.

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement over the next few weeks.

A. It starts with a question

The key to developing your practice, is to think first of the need (what needs to change in students) and then think what could be done to achieve it. The knack lies in developing enquiry questions to sort out what you want to do.

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example, if you were planning to have a go with the ‘Stuck Poster’ idea above, your enquiry question could be:

If I develop ‘Stuck’ prompts with my class, will it reduce my students’ dependency on my help?

Try the planning sheet opposite

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are reading in Unit 2.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Noting such changes will motivate you to continue with your experiments because the changes in students are almost always positive. The plan represents a promise to do it. This promise helps you to keep the plan as a priority in your mind.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

The level of critical analysis which is part of small research projects has been designed/built into the Enquiry Question and Action Planning forms. In other words their very design helps you to develop effective research focused questions and provoke evidenced based reflection.

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

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

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

[Schedule this meeting about one month after the previous Unit 2 meeting.]

So far you have been developing your practice to ensure that your classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans, relating to classroom culture, that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your further reading in Unit 2, section 2D and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the catalogue of ideas in section 2D.

Learning Team meeting agenda 2

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

This is the first time this item has appeared on the agenda. It will remain for the rest of the series.

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 2 Classroom Culture
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

Item 3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

what was understandable or tricky to understand;
how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language;
which ideas are front runners and why?
which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make more impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school. If we want students to change their behaviour we need to help them to think much more closely about the ‘hows’ and the ‘whats’. Motivation research proposes an effective solution to this called ‘if-then’ planning. ‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. In the case getting unstuck it’s useful to list all the sorts of places this tends happen‘Thens’ are what you will do about something; the action you will take. This simple approach (shown in Perseverance, Receives to Responds) would have a far greater impact if it were replicated in every classroom; it’s a strategic approach that can be calibrated for different ages and stages.

Item 5. Personal action planning. What am I going to do? (20 mins)

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement over the next few weeks.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example:

If I help my students to talk about why they are stuck, will it help them to identify how they might move forward?

Try the planning sheet opposite.

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 2.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

Item 6. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)

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

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 1

[We anticipate that Unit 3 may well take around 3 months to complete. Two meetings are to be scheduled, this meeting one month after starting Unit 3, and a second one about a month later. There is no ‘end of unit’ meeting, although the outcomes from Unit 3 will be explored during the first of the Unit 4 meetings.]

So far you have been developing your practice to ensure that your classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly. This meeting begins the process of how you can construct curriculum plans that blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 2, classroom culture that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit 3, sections 3A, 3B and 3C and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3A/B and C.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 3, sections 3 A, B and C (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 2, section 2D, a catalogue of ideas
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 3, sections 3A, 3B and 3C: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

The materials in these sections concentrated on the stages before actually teaching i.e. giving learning behaviours recognition and value by embedding them ever more skilfully into curriculum and lesson plans.

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the different task types would suit your students as learners
which task types of curriculum planning ideas are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your planning and classroom culture
which ideas are front runners for you and why?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make greater impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school. For example if you all decide to begin planning learning behaviours into lesson plans, it may be necessary to adapt the school’s existing planning proforma to ensure a consistency of approach.

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 3 Sections A.B.C. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it as an If:Then problem.

If I introduce more manipulating tasks will it this develop my students’ understanding of themselves as learners?

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 2

[Schedule this meeting about one month after the previous Unit 3 meeting.]

This meeting explores the activities that you can use to blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 3, sections 3A, B and C, that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit 3, section 3D.
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3D.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 3, section 3D, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 3D (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to change or try out in your lesson planning
how it worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 3, section 3D: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

You will have been looking at and using the Catalogue of activities for a month or so now. What have you been trying out? What more do you want to experiment with?

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture and the students view of themselves as learners
which ideas are front runners and why?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make greater impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school. For example, you could all agree to adopt 2 or 3 Visible Thinking Routines that appear to be making an impact and trial them with all classes as and when appropriate.

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are learning from section 3D, but also linked to what you discovered in sections 3A/B/C. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it as an If:Then problem.

For example:

If I make frequent use of the VTR ‘See, Think, Wonder’, will it develop my students’ attentive noticing as a springboard into improving their thinking skills?

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

[We anticipate that Unit 4 may well take around 2/3 months to complete – as such it will probably spill over into year 2 even if you have been able to stick to our anticipated timings for Units 1,2 and 3. Two meetings are to be scheduled, this meeting one month after starting Unit 4, and a second one about 5 or 6 weeks later.]

This meeting invites you to share your explorations of the 8 new learning behaviours in Unit 4.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 3 that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Learning Team meeting agenda 1

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 4 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to change or try out in your lesson planning and delivery, the activities you designed/used, the VTRs that worked . . . .
how they worked
what you could/did change to make them work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

Item 3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 4: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

You will have been exploring the 8 new learning behaviours for around a month or so. What have you been trying out? Why did you choose to start with those? What was of particular interest? What more do you want to experiment with?

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture and the students view of themselves as learners
which ideas are front runners and why?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

Item 4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make greater impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school. For example, if some of you are having great success working with the materials in the ‘Making Links’ section, would it be a good idea for everybody to focus there?

Item 5. Personal action planning. What am I going to do? (20 mins)

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are learning from Unit 4 and how your students are responding to the changes you are trialling.

Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it as an If:Then problem.

For example, if you are intending to focus on Making Links:

If I encourage my students to create mindmaps, will it develop their ability to understand how ideas are linked together?

Or, if you are intending to focus on Reasoning:

If I make frequent use of the VTR ‘What makes you say that?’, will it develop their ability to support their thinking with evidence?

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

Item 6. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)

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

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

[Schedule this meeting about 6 weeks after the previous Unit 4 meeting, towards the end of Unit 4. The meeting looks back over the whole programme and looks forward to what might come next.]

This meeting invites you to share your explorations of the 8 new learning behaviours in Unit 4, invites you to look back over your learning over the course of the Playing the Learning Power Game programme, and offers a glimpse of what might come next.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 4 that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Learning Team meeting agenda 2

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of progress in introducing new learning behaviours from Unit 4 (20 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Discuss what the school should do next to further secure and grow student learning behaviours (10 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what has already been trialled in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 4
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

Item 3. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they:

should be adopted by everyone as part of a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Think back over the past year as you have engaged with Playing the Learning Power Game.

Some of the ideas have been trialled and found favour with particular teachers, but others seem to have had widespread interest from teachers due to their impact on student learning.

What are these ‘stand out’ ideas? How will they become ‘how we all do things here’?

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement as the programme draws to a close.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example, if you were planning to introduce another one of the 8 behaviours to your class, your enquiry question could be:

If I introduce my students to the idea of meta learning, will they become more aware of their learning behaviours, strengths and weaknesses?

Try the planning sheet opposite

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are reading in Unit 4.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

5. Discuss what we might do next (10 mins)

The programme Playing the Learning Power Game is phase 1 of Building Learning Power. The next phase takes you much deeper into all 12 learning behaviours, allowing you to build on the excellent foundations that you have already laid. Are you, as a school, ready to begin phase 2, The Professional Learning Power Game?

Items 6. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)

Did we achieve our objectives?
Are we happy with what we have achieved?
Will we continue to learn together like this in the future?

Getting started

Am expecting this to be the ‘things you must decide on / do’ in advance of launching JG to staff.

Need this updated but put in somewhere

Because change takes time, and because students changing their learning behaviours only happens as a result of teachers changing their teaching habits, expect the school to take a considerable time working through the ‘Playing the Learning Power game’. It would be impossible to do all sections justice in 6 months. It may well take a couple of terms for the ideas to begin to embed and be ready for deeper work thereafter.

In making a start it’s important that;

staff do not feel that this drive for better learning is in any way due to inadequate or poor teaching
everyone feels that such an approach to learning will benefit children both in school and beyond (i.e. the bigger educational game) and feel proud to be involved
people appreciate this as long term innovation, not an initiative
staff believe they will be supported in making, what may be seen at first as, risky changes in practice
everyone feels that they want to be involved and have a contributory role to play in transforming the culture
staff know what to expect in and from the online materials of the programme
staff feel familiar with the two basic frameworks – the supple learning mind and the learning friendly culture shift.

I’ve always liked this one but not sure where we could put it.Schools find it vey helpful. I updated the diagram not long before lockdown but it may need updating again.

Wherever it goes, it must not be in this section. This section is about leading/managing Playing the LPG (ie phase 1). Nothing to do with the 2 other phases. Also the phase 1 description risks muddying the big ambition for PtLPG cos it also describes (but differently) what key players will be doing in phase 1.

6. Phases in the innovation process

Building powerful learners is a serious innovation that takes time and as such can be staged through several phases. Below you will find the essence of each phase and what happens at:

the school leadership level;
staff and classroom practice level;
pupil understanding and use level.

The three levels work in concert, each influencing the other.

Phase 1

Phase 1 is about finding your feet, understanding what it’s all about and getting the change process in gear. This will include the preparatory vision work of the senior team, the sharing of the ideas with staff, the setting up of Professional Learning Teams and the tentative, then strengthening, development in classrooms. Hence this phase concentrates on securing a strong beginning by limiting the learning behaviours being identified and strengthened in classrooms to four: perseverance, because without this emotional engagement little will be learned; collaboration, because it is a ubiquitous method of teaching which could benefit students far more by knowing how to do it well; questioning which is the driving behaviour of learning and which benefits from knowing how to do this well; revising, which is about being a flexible learner, willing to rethink, monitor and try things differently.

By concentrating on these key behaviours teachers polish their use of a learning language and blend this into making the classroom more learning friendly. Although this phase deals with fewer learning behaviours it is the phase of greatest change.

The important aspects towards the end of the phase is the review of progress in the classroom and in students themselves. An analysis of this data shapes the development of the following phase.

Big shifts

Vision for learning
Professional learning teams
Attention to 4 key learning behaviours
Learning language established
Classrooms become more learning friendly
Learning behaviour data collected and acted on

Download phases as a pdf

Phase 2

Phase 2 picks up the pace on the introduction of learning behaviours. Building on the solid based of phase 1 learning behaviours are added quickly and in an order that suits the school. A school might start with imagination because it recognises that students need more exposure to this flavour of thinking. It may go on to listening and empathy because again this seemed to be a need. So the ordering structure is in the hands of the school. The main shifts in teaching here is in split-screen or dual focused lessons. Now the behaviours are not simply signalled or noticed or talked about or celebrated but they are infused into how the lesson or a piece of content is structured and delivered.

Senior leaders start to look at how different learning behaviours fit best with aspects of the curriculum and how this grows through the years. Another shift in this phase is that the school now begins to report to parents on the development of pupil’s learning behaviours.

Big shifts

Rapid introduction of wide variety of learning behaviours
Ordering the introduction of learning behaviours to meet the needs of the school
An emphasis on dual focus designed teaching
Learning language deepened
Infusing developing learning behaviours into the curriculum
Reporting to parents on the growth of learning behaviours

Phase 3

Phase 3 is about consolidation. Greater fluency of the learning language. More purposeful infusion of learning behaviours into the curriculum and individual learning episodes. Involvement of parents not just in knowing about how their children are progressing in learning behaviours but offering them ways of supporting such behaviours at home. Students come to value their use of such behaviours in a way that they are likely to sustain using them in less supportive milieux, their learning powers have become portable. Furthermore aspects of the school’s infrastructure are adapted to support the culture shift long term; policies such as Learning and Teaching, Assessment, Recording and Reporting, Professional Development, Performance Management and Classroom observation. Classroom observation, the what and the how, undergo a radical rethink to put the spotlight on learning rather than the teacher.

Big shifts

Purposeful infusion of learning behaviours across the curriculum
Pupils consciously valuing the use of the behaviours
School policies adapted to support the approach
Classroom observation looks for learning
Learning becomes visible across the school from hour to hour and day to day

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Team Meeting 1 month after starting unit 2

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to Unit 4 that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of progress in introducing new learning behaviours from Unit 4 (20 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Discuss what the school should do next to further secure and grow student learning behaviours (10 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what has already been trialled in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 4
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

3. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they:

should be adopted by everyone as part of a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Think back over the past year as you have engaged with Playing the Learning Power Game.

Some of the ideas have been trialled and found favour with particular teachers, but others seem to have had widespread interest from teachers due to their impact on student learning.

What are these ‘stand out’ ideas? How will they become ‘how we all do things here’?

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement as the programme draws to a close.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example, if you were planning to introduce another one of the 8 behaviours to your class, your enquiry question could be:

If I introduce my students to the idea of meta learning, will they become more aware of their learning behaviours, strengths and weaknesses?

Try the planning sheet opposite

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are reading in Unit 4.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

5. Discuss what we might do next (10 mins)

THIS NEEDS A DOWNLOAD ABOUT PHASE 2, SIMPLER AND EASIER TO ACCESS THAN THE STUFF ON OUR WEBSITE

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

Did we achieve our objectives?
Are we happy with what we have achieved?
Will we continue to learn together like this in the future?

——————-

Team Meeting 2 months after starting unit 2

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

So far you have been developing your practice to ensure that your classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to classroom culture that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit 2, section 2D and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of the catalogue of ideas in section 2D.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 2 Classroom Culture
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

what was understandable or tricky to understand;
how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language;
which ideas are front runners and why?
which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make more impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school. For example in the early stages of encouraging perseverance, students are enabled to understand ‘being ‘stuck’ as an interesting place for a learner to be. This simple approach would have a far greater impact if it were replicated in every classroom; it’s a strategic approach.

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement over the next few weeks.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

ADD SUGGESTED SPECIFIC QUESTION HERE

Try the planning sheet opposite

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 2.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

Unit 1. Understanding Learning and Cultures

You are now in Unit 1 Introduction

A. The intention of this unit is to..

..introduce the two foundational frameworks of Learning Power..the Supple Learning Mind, and the Teachers’ Palette.. the warp and the weft of learning.

..introduce you to the intriguing prospect of growing and developing learning habits

…offer you a chance to explore yourself as a learner and complete your own learning profile

…start you on a journey of understanding your students’ learning by compiling and analysing their learning profiles

Sections 1D and 1E are vitally important because the results will shape your practice thereafter.

B. The best way of tackling this unit is to..

Read through Section 1A to explore the big ideas that underpin Learning Power

Read through Section 1B just to give you confidence about the approach

Settle down, maybe one evening, and explore your own learning habits (Section 1C)

Undertake the fascinating exercise of completing a learning profile for each of your students. You might do 3 or 4 a day over a couple of weeks (Sections 1D and 1E)

Slowly unpack what the data in the profiles is telling you.

Timing. We suggest you give yourselves a couple of months to understand, collect and analyse this data. Your view of your students learning behaviours will henceforth influence and shape your practice. If your programme started in Sept you should aim to complete this unit by the end of the first half term. (e.g. Sept to end Oct)

Team Meeting 1 is scheduled for the end of Unit 1, Section 1E

C. As a result it should have the following impact.

You will have become familiar with the underlying concepts of Learning Power

You will have gained interesting insights into yourself as a learner.

Your student learning profiles will be giving you some of the most influential data you’ve ever had to shape your classroom practice.

Unit Navigation Bar

Overview: ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

Here is a quick rundown of the contents of Unit 1 Understanding Learning and Cultures

1A. The warp and weft of Learning Power…

.. is a tapestry of activities on the part of both teachers and learners. The warp of Learning Power is made up of the learning behaviours you want students to develop. And these are being developed and woven together by the weft of all the different methods that you, as a teacher, have at your disposal: the language you use and the explicit attention you pay to the ‘how’ of learning; the activities you make available, and the way these are framed for students; and the aspects of learning power that you model in a dozen different ways, throughout the school day.

This section introduces and explores the 2 models that underpin Learning Power:

The Supple Learning Mind – the key learning behaviours that were and are judged to be of the highest value in helping students to learn and thrive in a complex world;
The Teachers’ Palette – the ways that teachers: shift responsibility for learning towards students; talk about the process of learning; plan lessons that consciously develop positive learning behaviours; celebrate the growth of learning.

1B. Why learning habits matter

‘Why learning habits matter’ explores the background, heritage and research behind learning to learn and why it is so important for 21st Century learners.

1C. Uncover the mysteries of learning behaviours

‘Uncover the mysteries of learning behaviours’ explores 12 important learning behaviours and introduces you to how these behaviours might grow. It is the first step in moving from Learning Power to Building Learning Power.

To help schools make the collection of learning data more manageable we have selected 12 of the original 17 characteristics for you to take a closer look at over time. In this section you can find out more about these fascinating learning characteristics and how they grow under the influence of a learning friendly environment.

1D. Up close and personal with learning

‘Up close and personal with learning’ pulls together the growth trajectories introduced in the previous section into one progression chart covering all 12 learning behaviours.

Perhaps the best way of really getting to grips with the growth of learning power is to take a personal look at yourself as a learner and the learning behaviours you tend to use. What might your learning profile look like; where are your strengths, what are the behaviours you find tricky; which would you like to improve?

Having got the idea we then invite you to look at just a couple of your students; a low and a high attaining student. This should give you a glimpse of what it is that makes the difference in how students approach and achieve in learning.

1E. Finding learning characteristics

‘Finding learning characteristics’ invites you to turn your attention to your class and to build learning profiles for each of them individually.

And once these profiles are completed, to begin to explore patterns:

How do girls’ profiles differ from boys’ profiles?
More able profiles with less able profiles?
Pupil premium profiles with others?
Which learning behaviours appear most secure across my class?
Which are least secure?

It is a key step in seeing your students through the lens of learning power and understanding their strengths and relative weaknesses.

Team meeting 1

This is the first of 7 team sessions that are built into the online programme. The first meeting is scheduled to take place after completing Section 1E.

The agenda is carefully structured and timed to take an hour although this first meeting will take longer because the team will need to discuss the ground rules for how they want the meeting to work.

The agenda structure thereafter aims to ensure the main purposes of the meeting are accomplished. It’s a structure informed by significant research into teacher learning groups.

You are now in Unit 1 Introduction

Use the Section Navigation Bar below to find your way around the sections of unit 1.

Return to: ‘Understanding learning and cultures’	Section 1A: ‘The Warp and Weft of Learning’	Section 1B: ‘Why learning habits matter’	Section 1C: ‘Uncover the mysteries of learning behaviours’	Section 1D: ‘Up close and personal with learning’	Section 1E: ‘Finding learning characteristics’

TEMP PLT STUFF

Unit 1 / Section 1: ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Unit 1 / Section 2: ‘The Warp and Weft of Learning’	Unit 1 / Section 3: ‘Finding Learning’	Unit 2 : ‘Classroom Cultures’	Unit 3 : ‘Constructing Learning’	Unit 4 / Section 1: ‘Is it working?’	Unit 4 / Section 2: ‘Broadening the range’

Team Meeting 1 is situated at the end of Unit 1 – around half a term into the programme.

1E9. Team Meeting 1

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Agree ground rules for the meetings
Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to XXXXXX that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Discuss your responses to your reading in Unit XXX, section YYY and devise personal action plans for what you will do next.

Learning Team meeting agenda

[As this is the team’s first meeting please read these guidelines beforehand]

What-Why-How-of-PLT.pdf

Unit 1, Section 3D, First Team Meeting Agenda

Agree ground rules, objectives and agenda (15 mins only for 1st meeting)
Re-cap and reflect on the online materials from Unit 1 Section 3A-D (15 mins)
Consider possible strategic consequences across the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Ground rules and objectives.

What ground rules should we adopt and what do we want to achieve? (15 mins)

Example ground rules might include:

No group member can ‘pass’;
Listening between the lines when it’s not your turn;
Actively discussing everyone’s input;
Using only constructive criticism – developmental not judgemental;
Everyone fully engaged in the group;
What is said is confidential to the group;
Respecting others’ views and encouraging others’ ideas;
No-put downs;
Keeping an open mind.

Objectives might include:

learn from how our actions have worked;
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
plan further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from class profile data (30 mins)

Explore together your initial understanding of and reaction to the two foundational frameworks… the brain and palette… and

ADD IN SOMETHING ABOUT REVIEWING WARP/WEFT?

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each experienced in completing each student’s learning profile. i.e. trying to implement Unit 1, section 3D, Finding Learning Characteristics
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
What you have discovered about your learners
What surprised or baffled you
how valuable you think this information to be i.e. the point of collecting and recording it
whether you feel there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Consider what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Think about;

As a result of recording and analysing the learner profiles;

Are there easier ways of doing this?
Are there ways of doing it we should all adopt?
Do we feel confident about our results
Should this idea be woven into school policies/directed time?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from your students’ learning profiles. At this first stage we suggest you create a plan of your own but with a partner.

Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

From my growing awareness of student growth in learning power I will focus early efforts on…

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxxx?

At this stage it’s valuable to note which of the foundational four learning behaviours your class need to work on. Which stage from grey to green do most of your students work at?

Use this first plan to focus your looking when you get to Unit 2 Classroom culture

Developing an enquiry question – download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

Please note suggest you schedule two team meetings as you work through Unit 2 about classroom culture

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

So far you have been developing your practice to ensure xxx

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable you to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress you have made with your personal action plans relating to XXXXXX that you devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share your responses to your reading in Unit XXX, section YYY and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how you will take your practice forward based on further exploration of xxxx.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 1, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

For example:

learn from how our first Action Plan influenced how we looked for ideas i.e. linked to student growth needs;
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
propose actions might be worthy of becoming school policy;
plan further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (20 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice i.e. what you each tried to implement using the Unit 2 Classroom Culture

This is a valuable source of learning for everyone. Include:

how they worked;
what you could/did change to make it work better;
how students reacted;
What you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How could the technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What made it work so well?
What mistakes were made?
What was learned from them?
What are the next steps?

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language;
which ideas are front runners and why?
Which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Decide

Are there any ideas that we should all adopt as whole school strategies?
Should such ideas be woven into school policies?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 2. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

Developing an enquiry question – download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

For example:

learn from what and how our Action Plans have worked in classrooms;
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
plan further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to implement using the Unit 2 Classroom Culture
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language;
which ideas are front runners and why?
Which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

And in deciding what to do you could try this decision making pentagon.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Consider whether;
- there are any ideas that we should all adopt as whole school strategies?
- this means the ideas must be woven into school policies or procedures?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 2. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

Developing an enquiry question – download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

THIS IS IN THE NEW FORMAT BELOW

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

xxxx

For example you might want to:

learn from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
plan further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 2 Classroom Culture
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?’

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

what was understandable or tricky to understand
how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language;
which ideas are front runners and why?
Which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try .

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement over the next few weeks.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

ADD SUGGESTED SPECIFIC QUESTION HERE

Try the planning sheet opposite

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 2.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

3C Agenda

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 3, section 3C, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

For example;

learn from what and how our Action Plans have worked in classrooms
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice
plan further personal developments in classroom practice

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to implement using the Unit 2 Classroom Culture
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 3 Section A.B and C: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the different task types would suit your students as learners
which task types of curriculum planning ideas are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your planning and classroom culture
which ideas are front runners for you and why?

And in deciding what to do you could try this decision making pentagon.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Consider whether;
- are there any ideas that we should all adopt as whole school strategies?
- this means the ideas must be woven into school policies or procedures?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 3 Sections A.B.C. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it as an If:Then problem.

If I introduce more manipulating tasks will it this develop my students’ understanding of themselves as a learner?

Developing an enquiry question – Download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

3D Agenda

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 3, section 3D, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 3, section 3D, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 3D (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

For example;

learn from what and how our Action Plans have worked in classrooms
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice
plan further personal developments in classroom practice

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to change or try out in your lesson planning
IS THE ABOVE WHAT YOU WANT HERE? ok now?
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 3 Section D: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

You will have been looking at and using the Catalogue of activities for a month or so now. Wht have you been trying out. What more do you want to experiment with?

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture and the students view of themselves as learners
which ideas are front runners and why?

And in deciding what to do you could try this decision making pentagon.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Consider whether;
- there are any ideas that we should all adopt as whole school strategies?
- this means the ideas must be woven into school policies or procedures?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 3 Sections A.B.C. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance students’ xxx?

Developing an enquiry question – Download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

——————————————————————————–

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

At the end of every meeting you’ll have a Learning Enquiry Plan. It creates a record of what will be done and so it’s an important document.

Research has shown that it is important that you:

~~choice about what you do within the suggested range~~; MEANING ?
are flexible and adapt a suggested activity to meet the needs of your students;
make your plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on a small number of actions (3 is good);
shrink overblown plans – keep the change manageable.

It’s useful to ask each other what they are going to do less of in order to accommodate the changes. The plan represents a promise to do it. This promise helps keep the plan as a priority in your mind.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 4 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

For example;

learn from what and how our Action Plans have worked in classrooms
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice
plan further personal developments in classroom practice

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

NOT SURE THESE ARE THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

what you each tried to implement using the Unit 4 section 1
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 4 Section 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

ADD MORE ABOUT THE MATERIALS in the extended Catalogue
Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language
which ideas are front runners and why?

And in deciding what to do you could try this decision making pentagon.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Consider whether;
- there are any ideas that we should all adopt as whole school strategies?
- this means the ideas must be woven into school policies or procedures?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 4 section 1. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance students’ xxx?

Developing an enquiry question – download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

Team Meeting . . . .

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

It’s very important for the team to constantly keep the big moral imperative in mind…the why you are all doing this….i.e. to benefit children by building their learning habits, so as to improve their real life chances and enable them to contribute more effectively to society. While it is important for you, as teachers, to develop and recognise small changes in students’ behaviour week by week, it really helps to turbo charge the change by keep re-connecting to the moral imperative. If you don’t you’ll lose sight of the bigger picture that is inspiring the approach and that’s when a lack of focus and lethal mutations can creep in.

Learning Team meeting agenda

Unit 4, section 2, Team Meeting Agenda

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 4 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

For example;

learn from what and how our Action Plans have worked in classrooms
feel confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice
propose actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice
plan further personal developments in classroom practice

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to implement using Unit 4 section 2, Broadening the range
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 4 Section 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

ADD MORE ABOUT THE MATERIALS in the extended Catalogue
Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language
which ideas are front runners and why?

And in deciding what to do you could try this decision making pentagon.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

Consider whether;
- there are any ideas that we should all adopt as whole school strategies?
- this means the ideas must be woven into school policies or procedures?

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 3 Sections A.B.C. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance students’ xxx?

Developing an enquiry question – download

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Download MS Word version

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

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

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

plan

Planning – Thinking ahead

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.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Planning? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Planning?

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Planning

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for planning… by exploring more sophisticated planning tools
Talk about planning…by exploring planning for goals through talk
Give students opportunities to practise planning…by allowing time to do so in lessons
Celebrate planning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for planning

Structure an extended project

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

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

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

2. Talk for planning

Growing the inclination to plan before taking action

To give time to planning

Take time to decide what you are going to do
With a good plan of action, you can do this
Your last plan was really successful. So you could use that way of doing it again.

To believe in the value of planning ahead

What’s it going to be like when you’ve finished?
Why is it good to plan ahead?
Which jobs require people to make plans?
Fail to plan, plan to fail

To set realistic goals

What do you want to have at the end?
How do you want to express that as a goal
Is that going to be possible ?
Is your goal SMART ?
What’s the difference between success criteria and objectives

3. Give students opportunities to practise planning

Visible Thinking Routine

How long will it take ?

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

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

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

4. Celebrate planning

Use Learning Mats

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

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

Download

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

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

Learning Log

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for planning… by introducing short term planning tools
Talk about planning…by expecting them to set their own goals
Give students opportunities to practise planning…by giving students experience of ordering and resourcing short term plans
Celebrate planning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for planning

Introduce planning

Jumbled up planning

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

2. Talk for planning

Extend the language of planning

Collect words that tell you how people plan.

Relate planning to well-known sayings …

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

3. Give students opportunities to practise planning

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

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

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

4. Celebrate planning

TASC Wheel

Display, and use, the TASC Wheel.

A graphic organiser that is much used in primary schools to help students plan their approach to an investigation or problem. The TASC wheel, derived from Thinking Actively in a Social Context, helps develop thinking and problem-solving skills. With TASC, learners can think through a problem to the best outcome – and understand why it’s the best outcome.

But you could display this graphic organiser to celebrate how well it has been used in the task. Replace the standard words in each segment with answers to questions such as;

What was tricky about…?
What we found out about..,
How we would do it differently next time
What we are proud of.

And so on.

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for planning… by introducing the idea of planning
Talk about planning…by exploring with students what they want to achieve
Give students opportunities to practise planning…by having students follow and complete a short given plan
Celebrate planning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for planning

Planning events

A picnic for teddies

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

Or, for older students . .

A party for pensioners

Tell students that they are going to plan an upcoming event, perhaps a party for pensioners or the like. Obviously lots of things need to be planned to make sure it goes well.

Discuss together and record the things that might need doing.
Assign groups a particular aspect of the event to plan.
Gallery the completed plans.
Is one plan, or planning format, particularly effective? Why is that?

2. Talk for planning

Discuss planning

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

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

3. Give students opportunities to practise planning

Clapping a pattern

Planning a short rhythm

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

Follow a treasure map

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

4. Celebrate planning

Display timetables …

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

Click to enlarge

listen

Listening – Listening carefully

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’ or ‘now listen carefully’.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Listening? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Listening?

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Listening

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for listening… by helping students to show empathy for others’ views when they may not agree with them
Talk about listening…by encouraging students to paraphrase what is being said to check understanding
Give students opportunities to practise listening…by allowing time to think about the quality of messages and check for evidence
Celebrate listening… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for listening

Centring Activities

Use centring activities at the beginning of lessons to focus minds before the learning begins. Play music and ask students to focus on the associations that it conjures about places, people, moods and atmospheres.

2. Talk for listening

Practice paraphrasing

Research has suggested that paraphrasing has a positive effect on listening skills especially when used several times over a few weeks.

Try these versions with the whole class:

Give directions and ask various students to retell those directions to the class or to their neighbour.
Ask students to paraphrase stories read to the class
Show movies clips to the class and require students to paraphrase the action. Helped by introducing note-taking skills.
Use a longer term version of story-telling by requiring students to paraphrase the stories later in a reflection journal.

Have students form groups and share and assess their paraphrasing efforts.

3. Give students opportunities to practise listening

Use Visible Thinking Routines

What did (s)he say ?

This routine helps students to listen carefully for and to understand important factual information. It also encourages them to distil key points as they listen for key messages. The routine has two questions:

What are the big ideas ?
What are the big ideas in your own words ?

The natural place to use this routine is before students are about to listen to something – it could be a video, a You Tube clip, or even teacher exposition. The routine works just as well with small groups or individually.

Silent Film Show

Play a two-minute scene from a film, without the visuals.

Listen for clues in sound effects, voices, soundtrack.

Predict / speculate what is happening.

Show the film and attend to the way in which sounds contributed to meaning.

4. Celebrate listening

Adapt and use the list below as:

A Wall display
A learning mat (self-monitoring tool)
A focus for a discussion on listening
A meta-cognitive listening checklist
A university/workplace preparation-interview observation checklist.

What does a well-formed listening habit look like?

- Being genuinely interested in what other people are saying – engaging with them with curiosity and engagement
- Being comfortable with silence and patiently attending to what is being said
- Making well-judged interventions to elucidate, probe or challenge
- Managing distractions constructively and focusing on the current moment
- Attending to visual cues and atmospheres
- Noticing details and nuances
- Making links with other experiences and contexts
- Hearing between the lines of what is being said – drawing inferences
- Being socially aware – respecting and valuing the contribution of other individuals.

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for listening… by offering opportunities for students to show curiosity in what people say
Talk about listening…by exploring how to show/indicate that they care about the speaker
Give students opportunities to practise listening…by listening for the key messages of information
Celebrate listening… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for listening

Discuss listening and tone of voice.

Model different tones of voice. Start with ones that are easy to recognise and understand, like a cross voice or a scared one. Gradually build up this repertoire of voices and use them in stories and songs. Talk about when we use these different tones of voice and why. Ask the children to listen carefully to the way people talk at different times and spot their feelings.

Expand further by inventing voices that you can use for different activities: imagine the voices for different toys or puppets you may have in the classroom; count like robots of a day; recite a rhyme like the big bad wolf. The children will have fun inventing a wide and wonderful assortment of voices whilst refining their listening skills.

2. Talk for listening

Expand the listening vocabulary

Collect words that tell you how people learn to listen attentively.

Relate listening to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Being all ears
Listening between the lines

3. Give students opportunities to practise listening

Practice listening for inference and understanding

A) Explore sentences spoken with different stress, tone, pace and emphasis, to yield different meanings.

For example:

‘I don’t know why you didn’t go.’
‘How can I answer that?’

B) Play recordings of, for example:

One end of a telephone conversation: Who’s on the other end… What’s being said… How do you know?
A dialogue: What’s just happened… What happens next… How do you know?
Recognisable people: Who are they… What’s the evidence… How do you know?
Unknown individuals talking: What do you know… Who could they be… How do you know?

C) Read a sentence or statement without expression, then read it again, once, with changes; no further repetition. Students have to spot the changes.

Listen and Draw

A short and enjoyable task that can only be achieved through careful explanation and attentive listening. Use it to stimulate a discussion about jumping to conclusions based on partial information.

Learning Challenge

Coaching Notes

Build active listening – so that students listen for themselves

Individuals are assigned an active listening role before an input. After the input, participants with the same role meet to discuss their findings. Groups are then reorganised to contain one person of each role. The groups then review the input from various angles. Individuals could be challenged to do one of:

summarise any new information;
clarify – ask questions for clarification;
identify and prioritise – identify key points and put them in order of priority;
apply the information – give examples of practical applications;
relate information to what they already know;
identify areas of disagreement – in order to open discussion.

4. Celebrate listening

Make reflecting on listening part of everyday lessons

Learning Mats

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

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

Download

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for listening… by introducing the idea of listening
Talk about listening…by exploring the habit of checking that they heard what was intended
Give students opportunities to practise listening…by establishing the social conditions that make listening work
Celebrate listening… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for listening

Encourage good listening skills

Who said “Sausages”?

An activity to encourage good listening skills.

First, try a quiet activity to help students focus on the physical sensation of intent listening.
Ask the students to move round to sit in a circle.
Ask them to close their eyes and clasp their hands gently on their laps.
Tell them you are going to chime an Indian bell and that they should listen as carefully as they can and only open their eyes when they can no longer hear the sound.
Ask them to be very, very quiet so that they do not disturb each other.
Now move on to a simple listening game.
Students remain sitting in their circle. They take turns to sit blindfolded in the middle.
Point to a student in the circle who then says “sausages.” The blindfolded student has to guess whose voice it is.
As they become more familiar with this game, they will deliberately alter their voices and it can be a lot of fun.
Regularly remind them of the skills they are using and reward really good listening!
After playing this game, you may be able to agree some good listening tips with the students.

2. Talk for listening

Volume control

Introduce the concept of volume and demonstrate to the students with a radio, CD player or musical instrument.

Now relate it to speaking and listening. Model a quiet voice and whisper a rhyme or poem.
Ask the students to use their quiet voices.
Model a speaking voice and talk at a moderate level and ask the students to imitate you.
Finally model a loud voice, projecting well but not shouting and again get the students to do the same.
‘Using’ the 3 voices ask students to respond with different actions or movements for each voice.
Discuss with the students when they need to use the different voices and why.

In the days following this session, regularly refer to these 3 voices and ask the students to use them at different times. Use them yourself at different times and remind the students about them. Try occasionally using the “wrong” voice deliberately and discuss this with the students.

3. Give students opportunities to practise listening

Offer ways to focus on listening

a) What Can You Hear?

A short listening activity to help students to recognise that attentive listening enables them to centre themselves, focus on what is really happening and take possession of themselves as learners.

Coaching notes

b) Listening for purpose

Listening for a purpose is about sharing the reason for or purpose of listening. At this stage it’s about making the distinction between hearing and listening; saying why we are listening and what we are listening for.

With younger students this may just involve talking about what we do when we listen rather than just hear.

For older students it’s about being clear about the specific purpose of listening…what to listen for as part of the learning objective. For example, you may give students specific questions at the start of a lesson, expect them to listen for the answers in the lesson input and require them to answer the questions later in a reflection journal.

4. Celebrate listening

Develop good listener prompts

Have the students 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. This is an example from a group of 9 year olds.

capitalise

Capitalising – Using resources

Effective resource users learn with the help of many different sources –other people, books, the internet, music, the environment, experience…and making intelligent use of all kinds of strategies and things to aid learning. In the early stages, it means selecting and making the best use of known strategies and classroom resources but this swiftly moves on to embracing a much wider and varied range of possibilities. This involves being able to seek novel ways of solving problems by exploiting the potential of known strategies and what is around them including things they may never have thought of as a resource.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Capitalising? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Capitalising?

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Capitalising

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are trying to help students to achieve

In the Values (green) phase, students are fully aware of the purpose and usefulness of different strategies and resources. Here they become more skilled in selecting the right one for the job in hand. They become more skilled in using expertise and they know when they need other strategies or resources to help them further. Importantly they now select ideas or behaviours from others and combine these with their own to make/achieve new understandings.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for capitalising… by expecting students to select their own strategies appropriately
Talk about capitalising…by exploring through talk how to use each other as a legitimate resource
Give students opportunities to practise capitalising…by offering plenty of opportunities to gather internet resources safely, efficiently and with discernment
Celebrate capitalising… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for capitalising

Learn from experts

Interviews

Set up interviews with people who can do something really well. Develop a series of questions with students to uncover exactly what the ‘expert’ does. E.g. What sort of preparation is there? What resources are needed? What does it feel like? What sort of thinking, habits of mind, values or beliefs are helpful?

Create a checklist of key aspects to imitate.

Extend with students in the role of real or imaginary expert, encouraging them to assess their own subconscious knowledge of how to succeed.

2. Talk for capitalising

Talk about how to tackle things

How might we tackle this?

At the beginning of a session talk with the students about the strategies and things they might use to help them with their learning.

Talk to students frequently about where they might find information or help.

Offer students a rich and varied curriculum so that they can start to appreciate that they are learning from lots of different sources using a range of learning strategies.

3. Give students opportunities to practise capitalising

Build familiarity with possible resources

Icarus All-Sorts

Show a painting or picture or passage of text or diagram.
Don’t give its title.
Ask students to examine the picture/passage/score etc, and notice and make observations.
Accept observations from paired discussion – encourage curiosity – take all offers at face value.
Ask class to consider “What could we find out about this picture/object etc. ?”
“Where could we find out about it?”
Capitalise on using resources available in the school (internet, library, the relevant department …)
Develop by offering the artist’s/composer’s name and encourage further research possibilities.
Offer, or allow the discovery of, the object’s title. Ask: “What does the title mean? How can we find out …?”
As suggestions and realisations occur prompt curiosity about subject (e.g. Icarus – as the myth emerges)
[Encourage enquiries into what the myth has to do with the picture … and what the artist may have had in mind.]
Distil all of the resources – from memory, to other people, to books and the internet, that have been used or could be used to fully explore what challenges are offered by the picture/diagram/score.
Go on to discuss… internal capacities students drew and the external resources they turned to?
How were external resources used – by being selective – skimming for information – going deeper to find out more – linking ideas and information?
What are the first things to do when set a challenge that requires you to capitalise on all possible sources? We have an image, but we do not know what it is called. Where might we look? How might we find out?

The activity leads to a recognition of the range of resources that can be called upon when seeking to acquire new knowledge, understand the unfamiliar and respond to challenges.

Click to enlarge

4. Celebrate capitalising

Make reflecting on Capitalising part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

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

Download

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

In the Responds (blue) phase, students have become aware of many classroom strategies and resources although have yet to learn to select them carefully for a specific need. They now begin to use other sources of expertise such as books or the internet but again their approach lacks precision.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for capitalising… by gradually reducing the scaffolding and encourage students to select the best strategy/resource for the job
Talk about capitalising…by exploring the use of resources through talk
Give students opportunities to practise capitalising…by allowing time for using books and internet tools for learning
Celebrate capitalising… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for capitalising

Learn to capitalise imaginatively

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.

2. Talk for capitalising

Extend the language of capitalising

Collect words and phrases that tell you how people learn to Capitalise on what is around them.

Relate capitalising to well-known sayings

There is more than one way to skin a cat
Making the best of a bad job
A bit ‘Heath Robinson’

click to enlarge

Extend the language of learning (capitalising vocabulary)

Noticing learning

Spend time with your class just noticing learning, talking about how it feels and when it’s best. Then ask the class to talk about what helped their learning, the ingredients of learning.

Capture what students say and make lists of:

Doing words such as
- sharing
- focusing
- listening
- talking
- practising
- quiet thinking
Feeling words such as
- energy
- support
- happy
- patient
Words relating to things such as
- number lines
- computers
- TV
- books
People words such as
- brothers
- sisters
- parents
- doctors

You will be pleasantly surprised by the number of words offered for processes, and the great range of items that students find helpful when learning. Make the lists into posters and display in the classroom, as a public support to continuing the dialogue about learning. It’s also worth reviewing and developing the lists at a later date.

3. Give students opportunities to practise capitalising

Ideas Factory

Invite students to become 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. Celebrate capitalising

Use display to share 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.

Set up a Helpful Habit board for tips from students to others about habits which might help them to achieve their long or short term goals. 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.

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

In the Receives (purple) phase, students begin to use the things and strategies they are given to help with their learning. The concept of resourcing learning is beginning to form. They become aware that it might be useful to watch and listen to others and that this can be useful in their own learning. They see their teachers as a source of expertise and can become too dependent on this unless supported to broaden their range of strategies and resources.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for capitalising… by introducing the idea of resourcing learning
Talk about capitalising…by exploring capitalising through talk.
Give students opportunities to practise capitalising…by making particular ranges of resources available for students to use
Celebrate capitalising… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for capitalising

Organise the classroom for easy access to resources

The obvious starting point is to organise classrooms in such a way that students are able to select, get and return the resources they need.

Design tasks that require the use of a range of resources and gradually expect the children to select what they need.

At the beginning of a session talk with the children about the things they might use to help them with their learning.

As the students’ understanding grows introduce the idea of “learning tools” and start filling a plastic toolbox with things like a ruler, calculator, notepad and pencil. Keep asking the children for new ideas and regularly look through it together.

Explore imitation

A quick way to start students thinking about and reflecting on the nature of imitation.

Linking Ideas

2. Talk for capitalising

Discuss capitalising

Use language to encourage thinking about capitalising. Build these into your learning language:

Have you thought about what would help you to do this?
Just think about all the things we have in the classroom that might be useful.
How else might you do it?
What is everyone else doing?
Is there anything else that you could use?
There may be other people who could help you with this.
Who do you think might know something about this?
Where could you find out more about this?
Which of the things you used did you find the most useful?
If you had to do this again is there anything else you might use to help you?

3. Give students opportunities to practise capitalising

Build appreciation of how things might be used

What is it ?

Help students to appreciate / recognise that:

objects can be used in different ways
sometimes we need to free up thinking — not seeing things as functionally fixed.

Set up the Activity by dividing students into groups of four. Each group selects an object in the room. The aim is to develop as many strange uses as possible for each object.

Each person in the group uses the object in a different way (e.g. the chair becomes a wheelbarrow, horse, cart, etc.)
Group members to guess what the objects have become.
Debrief and Discuss

4. Celebrate capitalising

Use a Learning Log to alert students to Capitalising across subjects

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

We have coupled imitation with capitalising here because imitating others is a powerful way of resourcing our own learning.

When you use this learning muscle, you …

are ready to learn from others
notice the approach and detail of how others do things
improve physical skills, and absorb ideas, strategies and thinking patterns, by observing other people.

Learning Log

imagine

Imagining – Thinking differently

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.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Imagining? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Imagining?

Here is a selection of features which might begin to shape the emotional climate of the classroom to encourage Imagining.

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Imagining

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for imagining… by encouraging students to think laterally and create their own worlds
Talk about imagining…by encouraging students to respond empathetically to others’ different views
Give students opportunities to practise imagining…by allowing time to visualise outcomes
Celebrate imagining… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for imagining

Introduce mental rehearsal

The prediction game

Show video clips of e.g. rugby or football heroes preparing to kick a ball, as well as other sports and entertainment people rehearsing ahead of action.

Discuss what they are doing to ‘play the movie’ in their heads before they act.

Explore occasions when this could be useful in students’ own lives. Identify the triggers and habits required when anticipating the right action.

2. Talk about imagining

Capture interesting ideas

Encourage students to brainstorm or mind-map and keep notebooks or Post-its of interesting ideas to feed their creativity. Do this collectively and individually.

Elect one student as ‘Plant of the Day’, whose job it is to suggest unlikely ideas.

3. Give opportunities to practise imagining

Trigger imagination with ‘What if …’ challenges

Provoke students to think ‘What if… we ran out of oil in 25 years… we lived in a two-dimensional world… we all lived for exactly 70 years… tennis balls were heavier… we had two moons…’

Encourage students to build collaborative spider diagrams that explore the possible ramifications of such eventualities. Extend the imagining in creative presentations using a variety of media.

4. Celebrating imagining

Make reflecting on Imagining part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

Download

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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, 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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for imagining… by offering opportunities to engage students in a fantasy world
Talk about imagining…by helping students to explore other worlds
Give students opportunities to practise imagining…by incorporating imagination across the curriculum
Celebrate imagining… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for imagining

Switch perspectives

Ask students to imagine something and then try to see it from different perspectives.

Sit down quietly, close your eyes, and think about one of your pets. (If you don’t have any, try to imagine a pet you would like to have.) Now, try to take on your pet’s point of view. Don’t just try to become a human being in an animal’s body. Try to think and interpret things the way an animal really would. This can be a lot of fun, because many of the things we humans do probably appear confusing and silly to animals. Or…

How would a bird flying overhead view your garden?
How did the sinking of the Spanish Armada appear to the fish in the North Sea?
What might a flower look like when seen through the multi-faceted eye of an insect?

2. Talk about imagining

Talk about how things might look, feel, sound.

Give students a familiar object – a pencil, hairbrush, scissors, toilet roll, cushion – whatever comes to hand.

Then pose the question: ‘What else could it be?’ or ‘What could this become’

Discuss and praise the most imaginative ideas.

What you are trying to develop in young learners is:

An awareness of the power of imagination;
The ability to use their imagination to picture how things might look, sound, feel or be;
The willingness to talk imaginatively about situations, events, characters, etc.

3. Give opportunities to practise imagining

Use Visible Thinking Routines

Creative Questions

Creative Questions is a visible thinking routine that encourages students to create interesting questions and then imaginatively mess around with them for a while in order to explore their creative possibilities:

Pick an everyday object or topic and brainstorm a list of questions about it.

Look over the list and transform some of the questions into questions that challenge the imagination. Do this by transforming questions along the lines of:

What would it be like if…
How would it be different if…
Suppose that …
What would change if …
How would it look differently if …

Choose a question to imaginatively explore. Explore it by imaginatively playing out its possibilities. Do this by: Writing a story or essay, drawing a picture, creating a play or dialogue, inventing a scenario, conducting an imaginary interview, conducting a thought experiment . . . .

Reflect: What new ideas do you have about the topic, concept or object that you didn’t have before?

For more detail on Creative Questions, visit the visible thinking website

Practice using the senses to imagine

Imagining through all of the senses . . .

What has happened here? Good guy or bad? Can we see any colours? Hear any sounds? Imagine being there….

A quick way to activate the Imagination and explore how we use our senses to imagine.

What you are trying to achieve:

To support students to use their imaginations using all of their senses,

How might you use the technique?

As a starter for creative writing
As a prelude to reading a book – start with the B&W copy of the dust jacket.
To build empathy
To scaffold the use of all of the senses
To trigger the imagination

Download guidance for the activity

Click to enlarge

4. Celebrating imagining

Stimulating the imagination

Use music to create atmosphere and stimulate imaginative thinking.

Provide varied, unexpected and ever-changing visual experiences — on whiteboards, classroom walls, in ideas banks, through web-links, etc.
Read vivid prose and poetry that captures details, moods and atmospheres.

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

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. Their 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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for imagining… by introducing the idea of imagining
Talk about imagining…by encouraging students to talk about what they are imagining
Give students opportunities to practise imagining…by organising many opportunities to imagine
Celebrate noticing… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for imagining

Introduce the idea of imagination

The Mind’s Eye

Introduce students to the idea of the mind’s eye: Talk about the fact that we all have 2 eyes which we use all the time but that everyone also has a third, hidden, mind’s eye. Talk about how we can use this secret third eye to imagine and create pictures and ideas inside our minds.
Invite students to close their eyes and imagine they are using their third eye. Describe something in great detail and ask them to try and see it with their third eye.
For example: Close your eyes tightly and imagine my alien. It has a large, round, green body with lots of arms and legs. On the top of the round, green body is a huge pink and purple head with spiky yellow hair and 4 great big blue eyes. It has long, pink fingers on its hands and short, purple toes on its big feet. When it walks along it makes a high squeaky sound and it smells just like fish and chips!
You could ask students to draw their idea of the alien, concentrating on their ideas rather than an exact representation of your description.
Ask students to imagine something for themselves- unprompted by you. Invite them to describe what they are imagining.
Talk about what seems to happen in their mind when they imagine.
Talk about when our ability to imagine can be useful.
Ask, “When do you use your imagination?”

2. Talk about imagining

Extend imaginative thinking by telling stories

Provide a stem statement…

A man walks into a room with a suitcase in his hand…

Invite one student to carry it on. Each student continues from where the previous one left off.

Or . .

Create a scenario…There are no windows, water drips into a bucket, two people are seated back to back…what might be happening? What might happen next? Can you improvise the dialogue between the people?

3. Give opportunities to practise imagining

Use guided visualisation

Invite students to visualise, for example, a snowy mountain peak until the image fades – discuss how long this could be sustained.

Now visualise hovering over the mountain and exploring the terrain by helicopter – the experience will have lasted longer.

Now provide students with a guided visualisation of the mountain that triggers their imaginative faculties – discuss the features of this experience.

Enable students to identify the ways of triggering their own imaginations when provided with stimuli. Invite them into a city at night, or the alimentary canal.

Imagine together

Use this activity for encouraging students to pool their imagination with a partner but scaffolded by a given range of pictures.

Upgrade the activity using the blank beanstalk leaf sheet (see resources) but use words, rather than pictures to write a story. You could also add smaller leaves with connectives written on them. You could also draw a different set of pictures connected to your current topic.

Try this strategy for helping students to create imaginative story lines.

Resources Starter activity

4. Celebrating imagining

Create settings that engage students’ imagination and wonder

Often students have little conception of imagination as being an essential part of ‘good learning’. They think ‘good learning’ means neat, correctly spelled and done on time, while imagination ‘is when you think about stuff and see pictures in your head’—but they don’t get the connection.

It has long been a feature of primary classrooms that areas are designated for a particular purpose, whether it be for reading, imagining, improving work, noticing detail etc. Rarely is it seen in secondary classrooms – too often the physical constraints of the classroom and the rotation of students from class to class make such arrangements impossible. Or is it? If we are serious about developing the imagination of younger students, we may need to be imaginative ourselves and seek a creative solution to this problem. Where could such an ‘Imagination Space’ go? Does it even have to be in the classroom? Could it be in a public circulation area? The library? What would the Imagination Space be like if it is to trigger imaginative thinking?

reason

Reasoning – Thinking logically

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.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Reasoning? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Reasoning?

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Reasoning

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are helping your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for reasoning… by encouraging the idea of finding the truth and looking for evidence
Talk about reasoning…by encouraging students to explain why they think they are right
Give students opportunities to practise reasoning…through deductive reasoning the use of symbols and diagrams to express what they have found/proved
Celebrate reasoning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for reasoning

Brain Teasers

Use brainteasers to stimulate logical, deductive reasoning. For example:

Marie, Claude, and Jean are in a competition. Here are their results:
- The youngest person received the least points.
- Claude got half of the points of the eldest.
- Jean received as many points as both others combined.
Who is the eldest?
In the debrief, focus in particular on how the problem was solved, rather than on the correct solution. See

More brain teasers

2. Talk about reasoning

Explore the meaning of reasoning

Collect words that tell you how people learn to Reason.

Relate reasoning to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

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

3. Give opportunities to practise reasoning

Use code-breaking

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

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

4. Celebrating reasoning

Make reflecting on Reasoning part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

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

Download

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

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

Learning Log

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

In the Responds (blue) phase, students have more confidence in their reasoning although their answers 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’.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for reasoning… by introducing reasoning tools
Talk about reasoning…by encouraging the use of ‘because’ when explaining their reason
Give students opportunities to practise reasoning…by encouraging the use of questions ‘what might that be?’, ‘What if I did…?’
Celebrate reasoning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for reasoning

Get a feel for thinking logically

Using Mazes

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

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

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

2. Talk about reasoning

Debate relevance by ranking

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

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

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

importance
appeal
relevance
how controversial
any other appropriate criterion.

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

Also good for making links.

3. Give opportunities to practise reasoning

Use Visible Thinking Routines

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

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

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

4. Celebrating reasoning

For most learning behaviours, we have offered a learning mat, usually at the ‘Green’ phase when students will be beginning to take control of and reflect on their own learning.

Here we offer you a blank one so that you can create one of your own, tailored to your own students’ learning needs, at this phase of development.

Since it is designed to help students to move their Reasoning from Purple to Blue, you might include . . .

Some nudges to remind them of reasoning behaviours that are already secure at the Purple level that you expect them to continue using:

I thought about why . . . . . happened
I spotted an important difference in . . . . .
I spotted a similarity between . . . .

And some that indicate the reasoning behaviours they are seeking to secure at the Blue level:

I explained what I was thinking to . . . .
I told my friend why I think that . . . . .
I spotted a pattern in . . . .

The same strategy, could of course be applied to any of the 12 learning behaviours, at any phase of development.

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students to achieve

In the Receives (purple) phase, students 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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for reasoning… by introducing the word and concept
Talk about reasoning…by encouraging students to talk about what they are finding
Give students opportunities to practise reasoning…by allowing time on compare and contrast
Celebrate reasoning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for reasoning

Explore reasoning through stories

Hide and Seek

In this story about Aneeta and Nanda, Aneeta loses her very special doll, Maya. The whole family has to do some good thinking to discover where she is. This story is a reminder that the best thinking is done when we are calm and focused. To find out where Maya is, dad starts everyone thinking logically by working backwards, step by step. We see how that approach helps Aneeta, Nanda and their mum to remember what was going on, so that eventually they are able to find Maya. Clear thinking and this ‘step by step’ approach can help us solve all kinds of problems.

Story Guide & Story: ‘Hide and Seek’

2. Talk about reasoning

Draw out reasoning in Strategy Games

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

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

Draw out the language of reasoning through jigsaws

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

3. Give opportunities to practise reasoning

Practice making an intelligent guess

Get in the habit of requiring pupils to make estimates and to predict what should happen. This is quite different from asking them to say what might or could happen – that’s closer to speculation and Imagining. Here you are asking pupils to use what they already know to make a prediction. Often referred to as hypothesising in Science, this is about using logic to make an intelligent ‘guess’.

Once they have made their prediction, encourage them to explain why they think that – it helps to move their thinking from describing what they think will happen to explaining why they think it will happen. It is the ‘giving reasons’ bit of Reasoning that will in time mature into justification and proof.

Work out logical orders

Sequencing

Cut up;

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

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

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

4. Celebrating reasoning

Create a wall display . . .

of reasoning-specific ‘if/then’ statements to nudge / remind students how to think and behave logically. You might include statements like:

If I am thinking something through, then I will explain to my friend what I am thinking
If I decide to do something, then I will ask myself why I chose to do it
If I am explaining what I think to my friend, then I will use words like ‘because’ to help me to give my reasons for thinking it.
If I am writing down what I am doing/thinking, then I will make sure that I show my reasons for doing/thinking it.

link

Making Links – Making connections

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. 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.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Making Links? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Making Links?

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Making Links

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are aiming to help students achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to introduce students to the ideas of:

Devolve responsibility for making links… by encouraging students to think of analogies to aid understanding
Talk about making links…by exploring how knowledge adapts and changes
Give students opportunities to practise making links…offering problem solving activities to enable link making
Celebrate questioning… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for making links

Encourage making connections using Odd One Out

Identify four ‘things’ related to your own subject area – this could be 4 images, 4 words, 4 techniques, or anything else that links to your own subject and/or what students are currently learning about.

Invite them to identify the odd one out, and to explain why they think this.

When you can, construct lists where it is possible to justify that each of the items are, in fact, the odd one out.

2. Talk about making links

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a well-known approach as the first step in exploring possibilities. Make the objectives crystal clear from the start. What are you trying to find/solve? Then uphold four rules:

go for quantity over quality.
withhold criticism
welcome wild ideas
combine and improve ideas

Problems arise when groups filter out the good ideas from the not-so-good ones out of a fear of rejection or judgement or when most of the input comes from only 60% of participants which prevents other good ideas from coming to light.

Language links

Find words that sound similar in different languages, eg. words ending -ation (pronounced -ayshun in English, -asseeong in French) and -acion (Spanish, -atheeon). Use colour to highlight similar sounds. Work from a Greek or Latin word to find English words that might be related to it. Discuss how languages spread and the links created between cultures when the people who use those languages move around.

3. Give opportunities to practise making links

Match Them Up

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

It might be:

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

[The ‘Thinking Through’ series edited by David Leat has individual books for Geography, History, RE, MFL, English, Maths, Science and PSHE which all contain subject specific examples.]

And or So

An activity to encourage students to make imaginative links between seemingly unconnected objects. Who can find the most novel / humorous / unexpected link? Are some objects not linked in any way at all?

Use to explore how most things can be linked together in some way, and how making the links helps us to remember things and maybe see things in new ways.

4. Celebrating link making

Make reflecting on Making Links part of everyday lessons

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

Learning Mats

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

Download

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are aiming to help your students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for making links… through building the vocabulary and terminology of different disciplines
Talk about making links…by paraphrasing and summarising their learning
Give students opportunities to practise making links…by checking students’ link of facts and ideas are valid
Celebrate making links… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for making links

Use mind maps to encourage link making

Use mind maps to encourage students 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 a ‘thought shower mind map’ at the outset of a lesson to connect with prior learning and activate link making. Use in the middle to monitor shifts in understanding. Use at the end of a module of learning as a synthesising tool.

2. Talk about making links

Extend the language of Making Links

Collect words that tell you how people learn to make links.

Relate link making to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Chain reaction
Cause and effect
Seeing the wood and the trees

3. Give opportunities to practise making links

Use Visible Thinking Routines

Connect, Extend, Challenge

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

Connect: How are the ideas and information presented connected to what you already know?

Extend: What new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?

Challenge: What is still challenging you or confusing for you to get your mind round? What questions, wondering or puzzles do you now have?

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

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

My Grandma went shopping . . .

Recommend group of no more than 12-15

Start by saying “My grandma went shopping and she bought…” and say an item. Let students take turns and each time one of them adds another item, they have to explain their link to everyone else.
Encourage the students to think of lots of different ways of linking items and reward their ingenuity.
To take the learning a little bit further, it could be useful to share a real shopping list with your students and discuss the links that help you when actually shopping.
For example, perhaps you list all the fruit and vegetables first, if they are found in the first aisle etc. Or perhaps you list all the breakfast foods together…

4. Celebrating link making

Make links across their lives

This Learning Log alerts students to Making Links across various aspects of their learning lives

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

Learning Log

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are aiming to help students to achieve

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.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for making links…by introducing the concept to students
Talk about making links…by encouraging students to talk about new experiences
Give students opportunities to practise making links…by encouraging them to link past and present learning
Celebrate making links… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for making links

Encourage simple link making

Think and Link

Organisation: For groups of 5/6 children.

Print out and photocopy the Odd One Out series of pictures. (see resource).

Each row has 5 pictures in it. Four can be linked together easily but one doesn’t fit readily with the others.
Encourage the children to find an odd one out and perhaps invent a reason or story about how/why the odd one could be made to ‘fit’.
Spend plenty of time discussing why the pictures fit together and what the links are. It’s fine if the children can think of different ways to link them as long as they can explain their rationale to you and the other children.
Keep praising and rewarding the ‘making links’ bit of the activity rather than focusing on getting it right.
To extend this activity a little and assess their understanding, ask the children to devise a row of pictures of their own and give them to each other as a fresh challenge.
Join in yourself and model your link making by thinking aloud.

2. Talk about making links

Discuss making links

Gather together a really good assortment of shapes: 2D and 3D shapes and different sizes and colours. Using small hoops or different coloured paper circles ask students to take turns to sort the shapes by putting them in the hoops and explain their reasoning for sorting them this way. It should be possible to rearrange the shapes in several different ways as different students take a turn. This can help the students understand that there are often many different ways to link things together.

Building stories

Collect several objects in a bag, the less obviously connected the better. The challenge is to create a story that links all of the objects together in some way. This could be done orally, or in writing. You could reveal all of the objects at once, or bring them out one at a time to build the story. Discuss and reward inventive links or unusual connections.

3. Give opportunities to practise making links

Reconnect with prior learning

In this phase, pupils find it difficult to relate what they are doing / learning to what they have done / learned in the past. Begin lessons with an invitation for pupils to tell you what they were doing in the previous lesson so that they re-connect for themselves. Be prepared to nudge or remind them if they are struggling to do this. Resist the temptation to tell them what they did last lesson – it is they who need to make the link, not you!

Keep asking ‘What does this remind you of?’, ‘When have you seen something like this before?’ etc.

Home in on similarity and difference

Find two images with both similarities and differences. Invite students to work in pairs to identify at least 5 of each, and then work as a four to decide the 3 most important similarities and differences.

Timings could be around 1 minute for the pair work, and 2 minutes for the work in fours.

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

4. Celebrating link making

Help students to remember . .

Help students to organise information to assist them to remember it. Suggest structuring their own notes in a logical linked manner, highlighting key ideas. E.g. clustering information into different sections/ groups, with some bullet points and highlighting to amplify/ explain/ illustrate.

notice

Noticing – Looking carefully

Noticing involves being ready, willing, and able to: be attentive to details and subtleties in seeking to understand things; seek underlying patterns patiently, understanding that connections may take time to emerge; actively use all the senses to gather information to build understanding of the world around; gain a clear sense of the ‘what’ of something before considering the ‘why’ and ‘how’; recognise that learning is often complex and difficult and takes time and effort to accomplish. So students need to learn how to focus their attention; to look patiently beyond the obvious to see detail and subtlety; to be able to identify the relative importance of what they are observing; to develop the ability to see detail in the context of the bigger picture; and to develop the ability to explain, hypothesise about and explore what is being noticed. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing noticing moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘look carefully’.

How well does your classroom climate encourage Noticing? ⬇️

Does my classroom climate encourage Noticing?

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

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

Download as a pdf

Bridging the gaps – teaching ideas to cultivate Noticing

Teaching ideas to move learners from Blue to Green ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students achieve.

In the Values (green) phase, students come to understand what attentive noticing is really about. They know that it takes slow seeing and when they get distracted they can bring themselves back to focusing quickly. The more they notice the more fascinated they become. Now they are seeing or hearing or feeling not just the obvious or the differences but the unexpected, the unusual; the things that seem slightly odd in that context. Through this they are able to explore new possibilities.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for noticing… by offering opportunities to notice beyond the obvious/different/same to the curious, unusual or even absurd
Talk about noticing…by exploring through talk what is being noticed.
Give students opportunities to practise noticing…by allowing plenty of time for noticing
Celebrate noticing… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for noticing

Give time to think … and share ideas

What do experts notice? – A painter will notice subtle differences in colour, shape or texture. What about other experts … gardeners, doctors, musicians, drivers, sports-people, actors, cooks, mechanics?

Choose a couple of experts from the list or from your own ideas and think about what they notice and how and why they might have learned this.

2. Talk about noticing

Using ‘Could be’ language

‘Could-Be’ language is well researched. It encourages more genuine engagement with what is being taught; how students will question and solve problems more readily if knowledge is presented as provisional. Could be language shifts the tone to more tentative, less cut and dried. The opposite is ‘Is’ language which positions the learner as knowledge consumers where their job is to try and understand and remember. ‘Could be’ language immediately invites students to be more thoughtful, critical or imaginative about what they are hearing or reading and to explore other possibilities.

Could be language includes phrase like;

- In most cases
- may include
- may on occasion
- some people think that…
- on the other hand…
- wide variety
- could be
- probably
- possibly
- most often
- there are other ways
- one of which….

Alert students to noticing across subjects

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

Download as a pdf

3. Give students opportunities to practise noticing

Use a Visible Thinking Routine

See, Think, Wonder:

Invite students to make an observation (see) about an object (artwork, image, artifact) or topic.
Follow up with what they think might be going on. Encourage backing up their interpretation with reasons.
Ask students to think about what this makes them wonder about the object or topic.
The routine works best when a student responds by using the three stems together at the same time, i.e., “I see…, I think…, I wonder…”. If not you need to scaffold each response with a follow up question for the next stem.

This routine encourages careful observations and thoughtful interpretations. It helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry. Use it at the beginning of a new unit to motivate student interest. Try it with an object that connects to a topic during the unit of study. Use the routine with an interesting object near the end of a unit to encourage students to further apply their new knowledge and ideas. Go to visible thinking website for more examples and information about thinking routines.

4. Celebrate noticing

Learning Mats

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

Download

Teaching ideas to move learners from Purple to Blue ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students achieve.

In the Responds (blue) phase, students know more about distractions and what in particular distracts them. They know their distraction triggers and take steps to divert or diminish them. Their focus now is on the task in-hand, usually one set by teachers or parents. They strive to notice what is required and look for first, differences, and then similarities in what they know about. Such noticing usually causes them to ask questions as their interest grows.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Devolve responsibility for noticing… by exploring their distraction triggers
Talk about noticing…by offering opportunities to raise questions linked to what is being noticed
Give students opportunities to practise it…by assisting them to focus attention on the task requirements
Celebrate noticing… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Devolve responsibility for noticing

Reinforce familiarity with distractions by ranking them

Work with students to identify distractions in the classroom and to come up with strategies for reducing them. Encourage them to think about:

Straightforward concepts – e.g. people, objects, the weather, the environment.
Issues which are not clear cut, such as friends who are both a distraction and a source of inspiration, and whether fiddling is a distraction or an aid to concentration
Different learning environments that might be appropriate for different types of learning, both in school and at home
Internal distractions, such as hunger, tiredness, emotions, failure.

Once you have identified various potential distractions, ask students to rank the distractions and match them against ideas for managing these distractions. Remember to address the emotional content of internal distractions. Examples might include:

Using their imagination to take themselves to a different place, a happy place, where they can block out the distraction
Discussing how to deal with the situation with a friend so that the worry does not go round and round in their minds
Giving themselves time to laugh or cry about a situation if necessary before settling back into a task.

2. Talk about noticing

Teacher talk…a range of approaches to unlock similarities and differences ( see 3 below)

How is this different from that?
Can you see how these two … are alike?
Can you agree which are the 3 most important differences / similarities?
What made you notice that?
How did you scan both pictures?
Is there a good way of doing that?

3. Give students opportunities to practise noticing

Use Viewing Frames:

Use sets of interesting pictures together with cards with a viewing window cut into them. Students place the viewing card over the picture in seeking a range of different features. E.g. something red, made of xx, something denoting happiness, something which suggests what might happen next. It’s a good idea to look firstly for concrete features before moving on to abstract features. You could:

use a poem. Use the viewer to find the stanza that is most descriptive, that makes them happy, that uses the best simile…
or use a geometrical image, use the viewer to find corresponding angles, perpendicular lines, a reflex angle…
or an image of the water cycle, use the viewer to find where water vapour is rising, where water is moving downwards, where it would be best to site a farm, a village, a wind turbine…
or . . .

Focus on Similarities and Differences

Use pairs of objects, images, sounds or concepts etc.

Invite pupils to identify as many similarities and differences as they can.
Challenge them to find at least 10 of each and to find one that nobody else has noticed.
Encourage pupils to represent these similarities and differences on a Venn diagram (similarities in the overlap, differences outside), or in other ways they feel appropriate.

4. Celebrate noticing

Discuss Noticing Others

Set up a display area where students share strategies or ‘top tips’ that they have found particularly helpful in their own learning. For those offering the ‘top-tip’ this is a distilling activity; the resulting gallery of ‘top tips’ invites students to notice (and adopt) the successful strategies of others.

Teaching ideas to move learners from Grey to Purple ⬇️

What you are trying to help your students achieve

In the Receives (purple) phase, students need help to notice attentively. They readily see the familiar or obvious but need help to go further. They can describe what they have seen but this too lacks detail. Students know that being distracted isn’t helpful to noticing attentively and do try to ignore common distractions.

Your role as a teacher in this phase is to:

Make students aware of noticing… by formally introducing the idea of Noticing
Talk about noticing…by asking students describe what they see/hear/smell/feel
Give students opportunities to practise it…by helping students to better focus their noticing
Celebrate noticing… by reflecting on, praising or displaying its use

1. Make students aware of noticing… by formally introducing it

Find shapes

Offer students a random set of dots (or picture of the night sky). Invite them to seek items such as:

A letter of the alphabet
An animal
A regular shape
A face
Or something linked to the content of the forthcoming lesson

Introduce games that require noticing behaviours

For example… use the familiar Kim’s game where students have to look carefully for a given time and then try to remember the group of articles. This simple format has numerous variations…what’s missing, what’s been added, what’s the odd one out?

2. Talk about noticing

Collect words that tell you how people learn to notice detail.

Relate noticing to well-known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Eagle-eyed.
I’ve gone through it with a fine-tooth comb.
Keep your eyes peeled

3. Give students opportunities to practise noticing

Notice what’s not quite right

Use intriguing images

For example have an intriguing picture ready on the whiteboard before the lesson starts. Students look forward to looking carefully at pictures where all is not as it seems.

4. Celebrate noticing

Use noticing daily to establish it

Make a noticing wheel; a circle of card, divided into five segments each with a picture of one of the five senses. Add a cardboard arrow. Get into the habit of using it before any activity and ask the students which of their senses they think they might use most in the session and point the arrow to it. You could also point the arrow to the ‘sense’ that you want the students to exercise for each activity or even use it to reflect on which one they did use.

Section 1: Planning and how it develops

1a) What do we mean by Planning?

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

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

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

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 move 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:

Download grid as a pdf

1c) Unpicking the columns; what contributes to a readiness to Plan?

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

Overview
1) Planning tools
2) Attitude to planning
3) Self-talk
4) Setting intentions
5) Planning Actions
6) Flexibility

Overview of the grid

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 out 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.

Overview
Lacks
Receives
Responds
Values
Organises
Embodies

Meaning behind the phases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lacks: Minded to 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.

Responds: Minded to have a sense of short-term purpose.

Values: Minded to value the efficiency of Planning

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 students now?

Take a look at the Planning progression chart in your Learning Diary or
Download grid to colour in here
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

Section 2: Building Planning friendly classroom cultures

Teachers as habit formers

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

Creating a Planning-friendly classroom culture

As a result of section 1 of this module . . .

You have learned about Planning and how it grows. You have met the planning progression chart (opposite) and considered the skills that your students have already mastered and those that might need some further attention.

This section offers a catalogue of teaching ideas, organised in relation to the phases of development in the progression chart, that you can use to sharpen your students’ planning skills.

But before you dip into the catalogue, let’s take a moment to consider whether your existing classroom culture is sufficiently planning-friendly to allow students’ planning skills to flourish and develop.

Is your classroom culture ready for Planning?

Let’s go back to a diagram you may have met in the latter stages of Phase 1 Playing the Learning Power Game.

It is a reminder of what a planning-friendly classroom culture looks like in terms of the 4 aspects of classroom culture (Relating, Talking, Constructing, Celebrating).

A planning-friendly classroom culture

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

The diagram has 4 sections:

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

Take time to download the diagram and consider which of these aspects are already a regular feature in your classroom, and which could easily be introduced to make the culture even more planning-friendly.

Download as a pdf

Blending these ideas

Ask yourself:

How might you harness some or more of the ideas in the planning-friendly culture diagram . . .

to ready your classroom for building your students’ planning skills

As you begin to explore the teaching ideas for each phase of development, keep these big 4 ideas in mind. Ask yourself – how might you:

Slow the pace of lessons to ensure there is enough time for students to plan for themselves;
Enable and encourage talk about planning to ensure students understand the how and why of planning;
Design activities that exercise and develop students’ planning skills, and ensure they reflect on how it is developing;
Display, praise and reward the use and growth of planning.

And if you do embed these 4 big ideas . . .

A quick look back to progression in classroom culture.

You have met this diagram in various formats during Phase 1, Playing the Learning Power Game. It charts progression in the 4 aspects of classroom culture (Relating, Talking, Constructing and Celebrating) from a teacher-focused classroom culture at the bottom to a fully-fledged learning-focused culture at the top.

If you are able to keep these 4 big ideas above in mind and embed them in your classroom culture, you will see that your classroom culture is around the fourth row, well on the way to being learning-friendly.

Download

Now take a look at the Learning Chart sections where you will find plenty of ideas to try.

Section 3: Blending Planning with content

So far, you have:

Looked at your students 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 students with Planning

Now we look closely at how to blend improving students’ 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 students are aware of them, realise their value and strive to improve them. The curriculum through its lessons provides the rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits.

A. The principles behind any learning powered lesson

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

Open Me

The SIX principles that lie behind teaching for learning power

1: Visible learning…Surfacing learning

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

For example:

Praise, display and recognise.

Key ideas for encouraging students 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 students about planning the course of the day
Prompt students to think about what they might do next
Review how students’ 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 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:

‘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 students 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 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:

A Thinking Routine. How long will it take ?

Get into the habit of asking students ‘how long do you think it will take ?’

This requires students 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 students to learn how to handle increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.

For example:

Challenge plan

Enable students 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 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:

Planning together

- Set students 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 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:

Monitoring planning

Use Learning Mats at the start of this process to prompt the use of and reflection on planning.

Learning-about-Planning.pdf

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.

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.

Open Me

Prelude

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

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

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

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

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

A turn-around in lesson design

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

Or put another way

Think to yourself;

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

Lesson design questions… one by one

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

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, planning, 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 planning. Most of my students 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 students need to achieve xxx. At this stage we could get closer to this content by using planning. Most of my students 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 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 planning.
most of my students 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 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:

Planning will help students 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 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, planning focused, task.

How do we design lessons that stretch Planning and assist students 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;

Open Me

1. A reminder about planning

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 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 mindsets moves well beyond encouraging a student 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 students. 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 students 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. Students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students until after they have done their own thinking. So the question about planning behaviours is posed and students think back to the previous activity and venture ideas. One of the students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students 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 students. Notes are given under each slide.

In-search-of-a-planet_Presentation

Please find below the PPt presentation of the pictures you have been looking at above which show how the lesson is constructed.

Lesson plan_In-search-of-a-planet

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 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. 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, 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.

Section 3: Blending Planning with content

Section 4: Team reflection and planning

Session agenda

1. Session objectives

What do we want to achieve? ( 5 mins)

2. Sharing classroom experiments

How did our experiments go? ( 20 mins)

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

Probe

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

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 progression grid
Where students are secure
Where students could be secure when they leave our 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?
How you want to consolidate/develop your classroom culture for 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!

Capture your learning enquiry as a question

Developing-an-enquiry-question-Planning.pdf

5b.Put a short enquiry plan together

Personal-Action-Plan-Planning.pdf

5c.Discuss which of these possible impacts on students have been observed;

Purple (Show me. Tell me)

prepared to follow a given plan of action
willingness to work towards given goals
is able to talk about what they have to achieve (of a given goal)

Blue (I’ll try)

increased inclination to think before taking action
increased frequency of talking about what needs to be done
preparedness to set their own goals

Green (I see why)

use of a wider range of planning / organising tools
realisation that planning leads to successful outcomes
greater inclination to monitor how their plan is progressing against criteria
shows a willingness to amend plans to fit new circumstances

Yellow (I’ll make sure I do)

their plans take account of possible setbacks
are able to use a range of planning tools to help streamline the planning process
increasing skill in setting their own goals, success criteria and milestones

6. Evaluate team session

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

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

Misc if needed

In order to make the most of the ‘Playing the learning power game‘ programme you’ll need to think about not only its potential in the classroom but how, at an operational level, it will best marry with the school’s beliefs and operating systems; it’s about managing the why, how, where and when questions across the school.

A helpful model

The ‘Playing the learning power game’ programme is packed full of interesting and often new ideas for many teachers. As such it’s designed to be investigated and consulted collaboratively by the teachers across a school. Taking the programme on board throws up some vital leadership questions:

how will the school benefit from this programme?
what impact will it have on students?
what sort of time and effort will staff need to make?
what changes to the school’s operations will need to be accommodated?

To help structure these leadership and management issues we have borrowed the successful McKinsey 7-S Change Management Model which is often used to plan and implement organisational change.

The McKinsey 7-S Model combines seven components of an organisation that must work together for effective change management, namely its : Structure, Strategy, Staff, Style, Systems, Shared Values, and Skills.

Senior leaders will want to be sure that any organisational changes won’t act in adverse ways across their concerns in the school. A useful way of doing just that is by running the adoption of the ‘Playing the learning power game’ programme through the 7- S model, focusing on making the most of the resource.

It’s worth saying here that while each aspect of the 7-S model should be attended to, each will vary in size of importance depending on the nature of the organisational change being considered.

Below we describe the 7-S and how they interface.

Successful change means aligning Shared Values, Structures, Strategy, Staff, Style, Systems, and Skills.

1. Shared Values

Shared values govern an organisation’s health. While implementing a change, schools often expect their teachers to change their teaching behaviours but this is only possible where there’s a strong change culture and real, lived school values. Shared values links all the aspects of the 7-S model. Whatever is decided as a result of considering the other 6 parts of the model, they should all be seen to fit with the school’s values. Shared values is not so much a place to start but the one that has a guiding influence over the other 6.

2. Strategy

The purpose and organisation of the change

The strategy element of the 7-S model is a detailed plan that organisations e.g. schools, create to implement change successfully and gain improved outcomes, e.g. for students. A well-crafted strategy draws together the other six elements of the 7-S model and is reinforced by the organisation’s strong vision, mission, and values.

Without a clear organisational strategy describing the purpose of the change and how you expect it to work in the school, it can be difficult to convince your staff or governors that changes, in general, are absolutely necessary.

3. Style

Leadership and Management behaviour patterns

This element refers to the leadership / management style that’s prevalent in an organisation. Indeed it is this style that often decides the level of staff productivity and satisfaction in an organisation. Hence its importance.

4. Structure

Task distribution

Structure or organisational structure refers to having a clear chain of command to avoid chaos & confusion. Structure is a simple yet crucial element because it creates a sense of accountability within the school.

5. Systems

Systems refer to the school processes and operational procedures used to complete a school’s routine activities. These are the school’s standard operating procedures, the instructions for how staff need to go about completing certain tasks and processes in the organisation that are there to ensure all runs smoothly.

When thinking about changing your school’s systems, it might be necessary to assess the different types of project management and workflows which are currently in place.

6. Skills

Competencies

Skills refer to the abilities of employees to complete tasks. There are many studies that suggest that skill gaps cause a loss of productivity and overburden experienced colleagues who have to pick up the slack of inexperience. It’s thought to be essential to identify skill gaps and shape development programmes to bridge these gaps.

7. Staff

Human resources

This element of the 7-S model represents the talent pool the organisation needs, the size of the existing workforce, and their motivations. It also considers how they are trained, developed and rewarded within the organisation.

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Successful change requires that these 7 aspects are aligned, that each complements the other, that none of the 7 S act in opposition to the others. Neglect any of them, and change becomes at best problematic, and at worst impossible.

Structures, Strategy and Systems are seen as the ‘hard elements’ of the 7-S. They generally refer to ‘things’ and as such are easier to control and change if necessary. They require precise management.

Shared Values, Staff, Style and Skills are seen as the ‘soft elements’ of the 7-S. They generally refer to ‘people’ and as such are harder to control and change. They require leadership that offers direction, leadership that wins hearts and minds.

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Leading Unit 4, Broadening the range

This section covers key leadership issues:

What Unit 4 is about and why it’s important
Detail about putting a further 8 behaviours into lessons
Strategic concerns you might need to consider
How support for staff is built into Unit 4
Monitoring progress

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

1. The intentions of Unit 4 – Broadening the range

The intention of this unit is to:

introduce and encourage teachers to branch out and play with building some of the next 8 learning behaviours, to get the feel of them in preparation for Phase 2 of the programme.

As a result it should have the following impact:

teachers will be inspired to explore two or three new learning behaviours of their choosing in anticipation of Phase 2 of the programme.

2. Tackling Unit 4 over two months

Unlike previous units that had a clear flow through the materials, Unit 4 is more an invitation to explore new learning behaviours of interest to the teacher.

Their first task will be for teachers to make a decision on where they want to start. They might:

look at their students’ learning profiles and target perceived areas of weakness;
focus on learning behaviours that link well with particular curriculum areas (ie Reasoning with Numeracy);
agree together to focus on the same behaviours that are considered cross-school priorities;
agree to tackle different behaviours so that all 8 new behaviours get explored;
or senior leaders may suggest a behaviour to start on as it is a perceived weakness based on their observations over the past months.

The next stage is to explore 2 or 3 of these behaviours over the next two months. They should plan to explore a new behaviour every 2/3 weeks, but there is no expectation of using all the materials shown in Unit 4.

There are 2 meetings scheduled for Unit 4, about one month after the start, and a final meeting at the end of the year. Both are times when teachers will share, compare and contrast the outcomes of their experiments.

If the programme started in Sept and you have managed to stick to our suggested timings, you should aim to begin Unit 4 late in year 1, possibly around Summer half term (end May)

3. Strategic concerns for leaders

What might leaders be doing?

During the online reading stage: keep the conversation going informally, show an interest in which behaviours teachers are thinking of focusing on, and why they are choosing those ones.
Before Meeting 1: As teachers begin to trial some ideas, go into classrooms to support and encourage. Look in particular to link up teachers who are exploring the same additional learning behaviour(s).
After Meeting 1 and through to the end of Unit 4: Support teachers implementing their personal action plans derived from Meeting 1. Look out for teachers trialling similar ideas and pair them up. Share ideas that are working well.

What leaders will be thinking about

What has gone well; what has gone less well; where the examples of best practice lie and how these ‘hot-spots’ can be shared more widely; what still needs consolidating; how to maintain momentum and build on these foundations.

4. Supporting development

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

This meeting invites teachers to share their explorations of the 8 new learning behaviours in Unit 4.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 3 that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share their responses to their reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

[Schedule this meeting about 6 weeks after the previous Unit 4 meeting, towards the end of the school year. The meeting looks back over the whole programme and looks forward to what might come next.]

Teachers are invited to share their explorations of some of the 8 new learning behaviours in Unit 4, invites them to look back at their learning throughout the Playing the Learning Power Game programme, and offers a glimpse of what might come next.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable teachers to:

Discuss the progress they have made with their personal action plans for Unit 4 devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share responses to their reading in Unit 4, Broadening the range.
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in Unit 4.

Find the agendas for the meetings in the toggle boxes below.

Unit 4 - Learning Team Meeting 1 Agenda ⬇️

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 4 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

(NB. based on material from Unit 3)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to change or try out in your lesson planning and delivery, the activities you designed/used, the VTRs that worked . . . .
how they worked
what you could/did change to make them work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

Item 3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 4: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

You will have been exploring at least some of the 8 new learning behaviours for around a month or so. What have you been trying out? Why did you choose to start with those? What was of particular interest? What more do you want to experiment with?

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture and the students view of themselves as learners
which ideas are front runners and why?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

Item 4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Some of the ideas suggested in the on-line materials are likely to make greater impact if they were to be adopted by everyone across the school.

Item 5. Personal action planning. What am I going to do? (20 mins)

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are learning from Unit 4 and how your students are responding to the changes you are trialling.

Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it as an If:Then problem.

For example, if you are intending to focus on Making Links:

If I encourage my students to create mindmaps, will I notice any improvement in their ability to understand how ideas are/can be linked together?

Or, if you are intending to focus on Reasoning and promote evidence based reasoning:

If I use the VTR ‘What makes you say that?’ fairly frequently, will I notice any development in students’ ability to support their thinking with evidence?

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

Item 6. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)

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

Unit 4 - Learning Team Meeting 2 Agenda ⬇️

Unit 4, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of progress in introducing new learning behaviours from Unit 4 (20 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Discuss what the school should do next to further secure and grow student learning behaviours (10 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what has already been trialled in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 4
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

Item 3. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they:

should be adopted by everyone as part of a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Think back over the past year as you have engaged with Playing the Learning Power Game.

Some of the ideas have been trialled and found favour with particular teachers, but others seem to have had widespread interest from teachers due to their impact on student learning.

What are these ‘stand out’ ideas? How will they become ‘how we all do things here’?

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement as the programme draws to a close.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example, if you were planning to introduce another one of the 8 behaviours to your class, your enquiry question could be:

If I introduce my students to the idea of meta learning, will they become more aware of their learning behaviours, strengths and weaknesses?

Try the planning sheet opposite.

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are reading in Unit 4.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

5. Discuss what we might do next (10 mins)

Items 6. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)

Did we achieve our objectives?
Are we happy with what we have achieved?
Will we continue to learn together like this in the future?

5. Resources for bringing staff onboard

Here we offer a short powerpoint with delivery notes to introduce Unit 4, Broadening the Range, to staff.

Introducing Unit 4 content to your teachers

This short slide presentation aims to help teachers understand Unit 4 and how it builds naturally on from the work they have been doing thus far.

The slide deck could be used to introduce teachers to the key ideas behind Unit 4. In total it might take around 30 minutes to work through with your staff.

You might use this slide deck:

just as it is to introduce the ideas to staff;
to help structure a learning conversation amongst/in teams;
added to strategic presentation of your own to ensure staff gain a holistic picture.

Brief explanatory notes can be found under each slide.

Download the ppt Presenter notes

You are now in Leading Unit 4, Broadening the range.

Use the navigation bar to move from section to section

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

Leading Unit 3, Constructing Learning

This section covers key leadership issues;

What Unit 3 is about and why it’s important
More detail on the in’s and out’s of curriculum and lesson design
Strategic concerns you might need to consider
How support for staff is built into Unit 3
A short powerpoint to help you to introduce Unit 3 to teachers

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

1. The intentions of Unit 3 – Constructing Learning

The intention of each section in this unit is to:

Section 3A – alert teachers to the transition from content-only planning, through to planning that weaves together the content to be acquired, the planned activities and the learning behaviours that are being developed and grown;
Section 3B – explain how teachers might begin to integrate learning behaviours into units of work and lessons;
Section 3C – introduce teachers to descriptions of different groups/types of learning activities;
Section 3D – offer a huge number and range of teaching ideas that will help teachers to blend the 4 key learning behaviours into their curriculum planning.

As a result of working through Unit 3, teachers will:

have recognised the importance of weaving content and learning behaviours into their planning;
have explored alternative ways of planning units of work and individual lessons to include learning behaviours;
have a heightened awareness of the activities they tend to gravitate to, and an understanding of how they might broaden their repertoire;
be able to intentionally blend activities that trigger, support or extend the 4 key learning behaviours into their curriculum planning.

2. Tackling Unit 3 over three months

Staff will need time to;

read sections 3A, 3B and 3C. Each section presents key ideas that will be utilised when exploring section 3D.
reflect on what each section means for how the curriculum, medium term plans, individual lessons and activities are currently planned with learning in mind. A meeting is scheduled once 3A/B/C have been explored.
explore the interactive navigation grid in section 3D – it opens up a catalogue of teaching ideas, clustered around each of the 4 key learning behaviours, each with visible thinking routines to try; activities to build into lessons; suggestions for monitoring and self-monitoring of learning; plus a fully worked up lesson for each behaviour. It is a rich resource with over 100 ideas to weave into teachers’ planning.
pick out and trial several of these suggestions. They should plan to put a couple into action every couple of weeks and note the positives or negatives of making such a change.

Leaders should be aware that one of the outcomes from exploring these sections may be the need to overhaul planning frames and consider time frames for transitioning towards building learning behaviours into existing curriculum plans.

If the programme started in Sept you should aim to begin Unit 3 around February half term with the intention of completing it around Summer half term.

3. Strategic concerns for leaders

What might leaders be doing?

While teachers are at the online reading stage of sections 3A, 3B and 3C: keep the conversation going informally, show an interest in what they are reading, thinking and maybe even worrying about.
Leaders will be reading sections 3A/B/C alongside teachers – these sections raise significant issues that may need to be resolved at the whole-school level.
Before Learning Team Meeting 1: As teachers begin to trial some ideas, go into classrooms to support and encourage. Look in particular for teachers who are trialling linking content with learning behaviours (sections 3A and 3B) and for teachers who are trialling the use of different task types (Section 3C ).
After Meeting 1 and through to the end of Unit 3: Support teachers implementing their personal action plans derived from Section 3D. Look out for teachers trialling similar ideas and pair them up. Share ideas that are working well.

What leaders will be thinking about?

In relation to Section 3A: do we have any examples of teachers beginning to plan at the level of 3A4 and/or 3A5? (This is where teachers are beginning to link learning behaviours with content in their planning).

In relation to Section 3B: are our curriculum / lesson planning proformas fit for purpose?

In relation to Section 3C: which types of activities are usually designed, and are we seeing a wider, more imaginative range developing?

In relation to Section 3D: which VTRs, Activities and Monitoring tools appear to be having the greatest impact?

And for all 4 of these sections, how long might it take to phase in these planning ideas so that they become fully embedded? [Think in multiple months.]

4. Supporting development

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 1

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 2, classroom culture that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share their responses to their reading in Unit 3, sections 3A, 3B and 3C and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3A/B and C.

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 2

[Schedule this meeting about one month after the previous Unit 3 meeting.]

This meeting explores the activities that teachers can use to blend content and learning behaviours.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans relating to Unit 3, sections 3A, B and C, that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share their responses to their reading in Unit 3, section 3D.
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the ideas in 3D.

Find the agendas for the meetings in the toggle boxes below.

Unit 3 - Learning Team Meeting 1 Agenda ⬇️

Unit 3, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 3, sections 3 A, B and C (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 2, section 2D, a catalogue of ideas
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 3, sections 3A, 3B and 3C: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the different task types would suit your students as learners
which task types of curriculum planning ideas are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your planning and classroom culture
which ideas are front runners for you and why?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 3 Sections A.B.C. Gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it as an If:Then problem.

If I introduce ‘Mystery object in a bag’ will it strengthen my students’ tendency to question?

(Find this activity in the Unit 3, Section 3D, Catalogue of Activities, Activities to strengthen Questioning)

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

Unit 3 - Learning Team Meeting 2 Agenda ⬇️

Unit 3, section 3D, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 3D (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

what you each tried to change or try out in your lesson planning
how it worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 3, section 3D: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

You will have been looking at and using the Catalogue of activities for a month or so now. What have you been trying out? What more do you want to experiment with?

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

how the ideas would suit your students as learners
which are realistic both for you and your students
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture and the students view of themselves as learners
which ideas are front runners and why?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what to do you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

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

Think about what you are trying to achieve.

For example:

If I make frequent use of the VTR ‘See, Think, Wonder’, will it develop my students’ attentive noticing as a springboard into improving their thinking skills?

(See this VTR in Unit 3, Section 3D, Catalogue of Activities, VTR Questioning)

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

As part of your plan it’s important to record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

5. Resources for bringing staff onboard

Here we offer a short powerpoint with delivery notes to introduce Unit 3, Constructing Learning, to staff.

Introducing Unit 3 content to your teachers

This short slide presentation aims to help teachers understand Unit 3 and how it leads naturally on from the work they have been doing on Unit 2.

The slide deck could be used to introduce teachers to the key ideas behind Unit 3. In total it might take around 30 minutes to work through with your staff.

You might use this slide deck:

just as it is to introduce the ideas to staff;
to help structure a learning conversation amongst/in teams;
added to strategic presentation of your own to ensure staff gain a holistic picture.

Brief explanatory notes can be found under each slide.

Download the ppt Presenter notes

You are now in Leading Unit 3, Constructing Learning.

Use the navigation bar to move from section to section.

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

Leading Unit 2, Classroom Cultures

This section covers key leadership issues;

What Unit 2 is about and why it’s important
More detail on the in’s and out’s of classroom culture
Strategic concerns you might need to consider
How support for staff is built into Unit 2
A range of resources designed to help you introduce Unit 2 to staff

Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

1. The intentions of Unit 2 – Classroom Cultures

The intention of the second unit is to:

explore three aspects of the Teachers’ Palette framework – Relating, Talking and Celebrating and their impact on classroom culture;
deepen understanding of the 4 key learning behaviours – Perseverance, Questioning, Collaboration, Revising.

The content builds on what staff discovered about their students’ learning characteristics in Unit 1 and suggests classroom culture interventions tailored to particular levels of learner development.

As a result it should have the following impact:

Classrooms will be well on the way to being able to cultivate learning behaviours – it is about readying classroom culture for intentionally blending content and with learning behaviours, which we tackle in Unit 3.

2. Tackling Unit 2 over three months

Staff will need time to;

read sections 2A, 2B and 2C to gain an overview of 3 aspects of the Teachers’ Palette – Relating, Talking and Celebrating.
consider which of these aspects of classroom culture are already in evidence in their classrooms.
this exploration may take an hour or two, but the real point is to begin to integrate some ideas into their everyday practice.

The next step is to;

explore the interactive navigation grid in section 2D.
Start with dark green ‘Discovering’ cells first.
Select ideas to try based on the analysis of students’ progress in learning habits.

Over the next three months staff are expected to pick out several classroom culture ideas that will benefit their students. They should plan to put a couple into action every couple of weeks and note the positives or negatives of making such a change.

If the programme started in Sept you should aim to begin Unit 2 around October half term with the intention of completing it around February half term. (England)

3. Strategic concerns for leaders

What might leaders be doing?

During the online reading stage: keep the conversation going informally, show an interest in what staff are reading, thinking and maybe planning
Before Meeting 1: As teachers begin to trial some ideas, go into classrooms to support and encourage.
After Meeting 1 and through to the end of Unit 2: Support teachers as they implement their personal action plans derived from Section 2D. Look out for teachers trialling similar ideas and pair them up. Share ideas that are working well.

What leaders will be thinking about?

Were our preliminary views about classroom culture accurate (see the activity in ‘Leadership Questions, 2b)?
Can we sense a shift in classroom cultures beginning to take place?
Are there any ideas that seem worthy of everybody adopting?
Which areas of the school / teachers are ‘on fire’ and can act as beacons for others?
Which areas / teachers are struggling and may need additional support?

4. Supporting development

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Share their responses to their reading thus far in Unit 2, and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on their exploration of section 2D in light of what they have already learned about their students’ learning behaviours in Unit 1.

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

[Schedule this meeting about one month after the previous Unit 2 meeting.]

So far teachers have been developing their practice to ensure that their classroom culture becomes increasingly learning-friendly.

This meeting is positioned and designed to enable them to:

Look back over and discuss with colleagues the progress they have made with their personal action plans, relating to classroom culture, that they devised at the previous meeting, and . . .
Share their responses to your further reading in Unit 2, section 2D and…
Draw up a personal action plan for how they will take their practice forward based on further exploration of the catalogue of ideas in section 2D.

Find the agendas for the meetings in the toggle boxes below.

Unit 2 - Learning Team Meeting 1 Agenda ⬇️

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at and trialled in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what has already been trialled in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

what was understandable or tricky to understand;
how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture;
which ideas are front runners and why?
which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

Item 3. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

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

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement over the next few weeks.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example, if you were planning to have a go with the ‘Stuck Poster’ idea above, your enquiry question could be:

If I develop ‘Stuck’ prompts with my class, will it reduce my students’ dependency on my help?

(Find ideas in Unit 2. Section 2D. Perseverance, Lacks to Receives)

Try the planning sheet opposite.

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you are reading in Unit 2.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

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

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

Unit 2 - Learning Team Meeting 2 Agenda ⬇️

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Agree objectives and agenda (5 mins)
Share reports of how learning powered lesson plans have worked (20 mins)
Discuss the online materials that people have looked at in Unit 2 (15 mins)
Consider possible policy issues for the school (5 mins)
Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
Review the meeting process (5 mins)

Item 1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)

Objectives should include:

learning from what and how our Action Plans have worked in different classrooms;
feeling confident to take forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
proposing actions that would benefit if everyone applied them in their practice;
planning further personal developments in classroom practice.

Item 2. Reports from classroom enquiries (15 mins)

This is the first time this item has appeared on the agenda. It will remain for the rest of the series.

Share and discuss teachers’ practice; a valuable source of learning for everyone.

This involves thinking back to what you have been putting into practice over the last few weeks from your last Action Plan. It covers;

what you each tried to implement using ideas from Unit 2 Classroom Culture
how they worked
what you could/did change to make it work better
how students reacted
whether there may be longer term benefits for students

Ask each other questions, offer suggestions and learn from each other.

Remember…everyone is supposed to report back to every meeting.

This isn’t a simple show-and-tell session but one where the group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries of what they have done to encourage analysis and deeper reflection.

Questions to encourage deeper thinking include:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this better?
How did students react to that change?
How could this technique be modified to make it work better for you?
What do you think made that work so well?

Item 3. Recap on-line materials in Unit 2: What the materials made us think (15 mins)

Try a PMI (Plus, minus, interesting) routine to help sort out your thinking.

Think about:

what was understandable or tricky to understand;
how the ideas would suit your students as learners;
which are realistic both for you and your students;
how the ideas would impact on your classroom culture for developing the language;
which ideas are front runners and why?
which aspect of relating, teacher talk or celebration seems the place to start?

Use this decision making pentagon in deciding what you might try.

Note down a couple of:

things you want to start doing
things you think you need to stop doing (that’s harder)
things you want to keep doing
things you want to do more often
things you want to do less

4. Propose what may be needed across the school. (5 mins)

The point here is to identify ideas that are sufficiently important that they;

should be included in everyone’s action plan
- i.e. you are sufficiently keen on some of the ideas that you all want to try them in one form or another
should be adopted by everyone as a whole school strategy
- i.e. when discussions over time have concluded that some ideas have proved so useful across the school they should be woven into school policies or procedures.

Item 5. Personal action planning. What am I going to do? (20 mins)

This is the point when everyone in the team makes an action plan which they will implement over the next few weeks.

A. It starts with a question

Why a question? Because this is an enquiry! You want to find out if something (student behaviour) will change/improve if you change something specific.

Research suggests that you’ll gain more value from your plan by creating it around a question. Think of it like this:

If I do/plan, try xxxx will it improve/develop/ secure/ enhance xxx?

For example:

If I select and implement 5 ideas about ‘learning on display’ will this provoke curiosity and make learning more visible to my students?

(Find ideas for Learning on Display in Unit 2, Section 2D. Perseverance, Responds to Values, Things to Display 3.)

Try the planning sheet opposite.

B. Now think about a plan

But remember what you are trying to achieve.

Plans at this stage should be linked to what you learned from Unit 2.

The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. Remember:

you can choose which aspect(s) of classroom practice to focus on;
think about the aspect that is likely to have the greatest benefit for your students;
make the plan specifically focus on development;
concentrate on no more than two or three actions;
decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
it’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.

See format alongside to help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.

Also record what you will monitor over the weeks.

Changes you expect to see in your classroom practice. For example what do you expect to:

see yourself doing differently?
hear yourself saying more often, with greater commitment, more effectively?
look out for in order to find out which approach best suits most students?
feel less stressed about? What will indicate that?
monitor to make sure that the changes you are making are having an impact of your students?

Changes you expect to see in your students. For example do you expect students to:

begin to take greater responsibility for their own learning;
be more inclined / better able to talk about learning;
be better able to recognise/ describe how they are learning;
show a deeper understanding of the process of learning;
other.

Developing an enquiry question – download

You could talk yourself through ‘THINKS’ like:

How would you like your students to be different?
How do you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happening?
Which practical ideas from the online material might improve these circumstances.

Download MS Word version

Item 6. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)

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

5. Resources for bringing staff onboard

Here we offer resources you may need to introduce Classroom Cultures to staff. This isn’t a simple show and tell session. It’s designed to provoke deep thinking about classroom culture and how it impacts on student learning. You’ll find all the background notes and resources in the toggle box below.

Introducing Unit 2 content to your teachers

This 24 slide presentation aims to help teachers explore the Teachers’ Palette, the second of 2 models central to building learning powers. The 3 types of classroom culture are explained, explored and reflected upon, and consideration is given to strategies to make classroom cultures ‘learning friendly’.

The slide deck and associated resources could be used to introduce teachers to the key ideas behind finding out more about classroom culture. In total it might take around 60 / 75 minutes to work through with your staff.

You might use this slide deck:

just as it is to introduce the ideas to staff;
to help structure a learning conversation amongst/in teams;
added to strategic presentation of your own to ensure staff gain a holistic picture.

Brief explanatory notes can be found under each slide. Fuller supporting resources are offered as downloads in the toggle box below.

The slides in the presentation cover the following key issues:

different types of classroom culture;
the Teachers’ Palette, the second key model of Learning Power;
how the Palette relates to classroom cultures.

In doing so you are encouraging staff to use their own learning behaviours such as making links to their current classroom culture, reflecting on what happens now, and imagining what a learning focused classroom might look like.

Download the ppt

Resources for the introductory session ⬇️

1) Download a copy of the ppt with presenter notes.

Presenter notes

2) If the school is using the presentation as a basis for a whole staff training session to introduce classroom culture, staff will find these 4 images helpful to have as hard copy.

Download key images

3) If you need a little help with how you might talk to slide 21 . . .

Slide 21 presenter notes

You are now in Leading Unit 2, Classroom Cultures.

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Return to Leading ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’	Leadership Questions	Leading Unit 1: ‘Understanding Learning and Cultures’	Leading Unit 2: ‘Classroom Cultures’	Leading Unit 3: ‘Constructing Learning’	Leading Unit 4: ‘Broadening the range’

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C. Lesson planning in action – an exemplar, link making, task.

1. A description of the Connect / Extend / Challenge thinking routine

2. A lesson that has uses Connect / Extend / Challenge to support curriculum understanding.

Overview of lesson plan:

[Previous Episodes – Learning some curriculum content

Episode 1 – How are the ideas and information presented CONNECTED to what you already knew?

Episode 2 – What new ideas did you get that EXTENDED or pushed your thinking in new directions?

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 do you think?

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

Essential leadership considerations – laying the foundations of success.

1. How does this programme chime/fit with our school values?

Question – How does Playing the Learning Power Game fit with our school’s ethos?

Question – Will this programme strengthen our values and organisation?

Remain aware that changing practice is hard and takes both time and deliberate practice.

Question – How will we ensure stakeholders buy in to it?

2. What sort of skills/competencies would the programme enhance?

Question – What are our students’ learning behaviours like now?

To get you going – Have a discussion about the students in your school.

Question – What are our classroom cultures like now?

To get you going – Have a discussion about the prevailing classroom culture in your school.

3. How could we accommodate the staff development approaches suggested?

Question – What’s the best way to organise the development of staff across the school?

Question – How will we achieve high levels of engagement with the programme?

Working together to ensure success

Learning Team Meetings

A quick look at learning together.

Professional Learning Teams

The typical session agenda follows this pattern;

4. How do we prevent it becoming a workload issue?

Question – How will we prevent Playing the Learning Power Game becoming a workload issue for teachers, support staff, the programme lead, and senior leaders?

Question – What will need to be changed to create the necessary directed time for ongoing engagement with the online learning aspects of the programme?

Question – What will need to be changed to create the necessary directed time for the 7 programme related meetings?

5. Who will lead it and what accountability may be needed?

Question – Who will lead this change strategy and what accountability may be needed in the system?

Question – How will the programme leader keep senior leaders informed of developments? How will senior leaders support the programme leader?

6. How are we going to support the programme?

Leadership and Management behaviour patterns

Question – How will leaders create the conditions where teachers are encouraged to take risks, to try things out, to fail in safety?

Question – How will leaders demonstrate an ongoing interest in the enquiries that teachers are undertaking?

7. How do we expect it to work? How will we create a plan to pull all this together?

The purpose and organisation of the change

Question – What is our strategy for implementing ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’?

Question – Is the plan sufficiently detailed to show time frames, responsibilities of key players, monitoring checkpoints, contingencies, funding/time implications?

You are now in ‘Leading . .Playing the Learning Power Game’.Leadership questions.

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Unit 1 – Understanding Learning and Cultures

The intention of Unit 1 is to..

The best way of tackling this unit is to..

Team Meeting 1 is scheduled for the end of Unit 1, after Section 1E

As a result it should have the following impact.

Section 1A. The warp and weft of Learning Power…

Section 1B. Why learning habits matter

Section 1C. Uncover the mysteries of learning behaviours

Section 1D. Up close and personal with learning

Section 1E. Finding learning characteristics

Team meeting 1

Unit 2. Classroom culture.

The intention of this Unit is to..

The best way of tackling this Unit is to..

Unit 2, Team Meeting 1. (One month after starting unit 2)

Unit 2, Team Meeting 2. (Two months after starting unit 2)

As a result it should have the following impact.

Section 2A. Relating for learning

Aspects of Relating for Learning

The teachers’ palette to build classroom culture.

Section 2B. Talking for learning

Aspects of talking for learning

Section 2C. Celebrating learning

Aspects of Celebrating

Section 2D. Readying your classroom culture

The interactive table is made up of four columns of;

And four rows of;

organised into three aspects of teaching;

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 1

Unit 2, Team Meeting Agenda 2

Unit 3 – Constructing Learning

The intention of this unit is to..

Make a note of…