Sections Archive

Module 1: Shaping the future of learning in your school

Module 1 is designed to assist senior leaders to gain a deep understanding of the the purpose and nature of the principles and practice of the approach. It offers you information, questions and activities to aid understanding and explains the innate potential of the approach when implemented in your school.

1. The big picture of making Building Learning Power happen.

Developing students as better learners is a long term innovation. It requires far more than an Inservice training day and ‘away you go’, it has implications not just for student learning, but for staff learning too. Teachers’ habits as learners have to become part of the picture; how they go about changing is as relevant as what changes they want to bring about.

Here’s a brief overview of how the development of staff mirrors the development of students as learners, involving not just new knowledge but changes in teaching habits.

Key Learning Question:

Why can’t we just have a training day and read a book?

a) What it takes to grow innovative practice

For the school to take on wholeheartedly the new roles and paradigms that minute-to-minute and day-by-day build better learning requires far more than just a quick exposure to its principles and methods. Development of this magnitude asks a lot of teachers. Teachers have to go through a process of un-knowing, re-learning, unpacking and re-adjusting.

The programme the school is about to embark on is a careful blend of:

online learning sessions….that faithfully disseminate the researched content for Building Better Learners;
professional learning team sessions ……actioned by the school that provide sustained, meaningful assistance; learning with and from colleagues;
trying things out for themselves in classrooms……because “learning by doing” is integral to the development of expertise and expertise cannot be developed quickly. It can only be developed if teachers have ample opportunity for practice, reflection, and adjustment.

This trio of learning opportunities work together to help teachers replace long-standing habituated practices with more effective ones.

This is how it works

Growing new practice

Have you learned with and alongside colleagues in this way before?
What excites you about the prospect?
What worries you?

b) Why online learning ?

There’s more to it than you think.

The first aspect of this carefully blended learning programme is the online learning. This provides the content of the Building Learning Power approach based on over 20 years of research and development in schools.

You might well wonder why such content merits online modules and why you can’t just read a book about it and get on with it. We’ve discovered over time that:

this level of innovation in classroom culture, which in some sense is working against the grain of current requirements, is harder, more complicated than it appears;
schools in the past have had a tendency to think of the approach as merely a few tweaks in classroom practice, to make light of its potential and translate lite versions of it in schools, that fizzle out;
research has revealed just what it takes to shift classroom cultures to being more learning friendly. This has given the approach a richer, more concrete vision of how to implement it across a school;
unique research into how learners grow and progress as learners…what the ‘better’ bit of better learners looks like at different phases. This has made the approach more purposeful. Not an approach but a way of being. All this new research has added purpose and rigour.

The rich ideas now embedded in Building Learning Power are far too extensive and deep to be dealt with in a single training day for a school. The different facets and levels need to be focused and grouped into digestible pieces to help schools take them on board and make the most of them in action.

So, what the online courses and sessions are attempting to do is:

to cut the big complex innovation into more bite size chunks for schools;
to order those chunks in a way that schools and teachers can make sense of and implement over time;
to faithfully offer the researched content in a do-able form i.e. so that schools only get the bits we know work which saves you time twiddling about with stuff that may sound good but doesn’t do the job;
coupling the researched online content with professional learning team sessions in schools because these are the best ways of supporting and delivering changes in classroom practice.

You see, there is:

no point in just knowing more stuff unless you can use it to change/improve your practice
AND
no point in changing your practice unless you know more about what sort of change is likely to work

The blended learning programmes will enable the school to build better learners right not lite, make a complex set of ideas work on a practical level and, achieve the outcomes you want for your learners efficiently and effectively.

Researched content to turn into practice

Have you tried learning online before?
If so, what was the experience like?
What time of day would be good for you to engage with the online element of the programme?
Can you appreciate the point of this online element of the programme?
If not online, what might be a better way for you to engage with the content of Building Learning Power?

c) Changing professional habits

The second aspect of this carefully blended programme is the professional learning team; designed to turn researched ideas into practice in classrooms.

When teachers want or need to improve it actually involves them in changing their teaching habits. 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……that’s why this learning programme is based on how adults learn and the researched professional development approach of teacher learning communities.

Changing practice takes time and effort

How are you feeling now about what you have read about Building Learning Power?
Does developing staff’s teaching around the characteristics of effective learners appeal to you?
What difficulties do you think there might be?

d) Why learning communities work

Professional Learning Teams, or more generically, teacher learning communities have the potential to provide teachers and support staff, with the information and support they need to develop their practice in deep and lasting ways. Furthermore these communities are designed to build school capacity to support individual and whole school change over time.

Teacher learning communities provide a forum for supporting staff in converting the information and ideas in the online learning sessions into “lived” practices within specific subjects and classrooms. They provide a safe forum in which to;

kick around ideas from the online content,
unpack it’s meaning when it’s unclear,
consider what’s do-able and appropriate for your students
make plans for what and how you might incorporate the ideas into your practice
share and unpack what you have tried in the classroom
relate your triumphs and tribulations
reflect on what you hope you might do differently

Because teacher learning communities are embedded in the day-to-day realities of classrooms they provide a time and place where staff can hear real-life stories from colleagues that show the benefits of adopting these techniques in situations similar to your own. They provide local reassurances. As staff adjust their practice, they are risking both disorder and less-than-accomplished performance on the part of their studets and themselves. Being a member of a community of teacher-learners, engaged together in a change process, provides the support they need to take such risks.

See section 2 for more detail about how teacher learning communities operate.

Essential support

What sort of picture do you have of teacher learning communities?
Do you like the sound of them?
What makes you say that?
Have you ever belonged to one before?
To what extent did you find the experience useful in helping to advance your teaching style?

e) A Professional Learning Team at work

Here’s a glimpse of a new learning team at work. It shows a short section of only the second monthly meeting of this Professional Learning Team. Here staff talk excitedly about how their students are responding to learning about how to persevere. The teachers are genuinely surprised about just how quickly and profoundly their young learners are responding, changing and improving. One story leads on to another.

Professional teams at work

Why might it be useful to share such stories about changes in how students are approaching learning?
How will these sorts of conversations help schools to become more learning friendly?
What question would you like to ask this team if you could?

f) The whole school learns together

Heathcoat Primary school in Tiverton embarked on the Stepping Stones course a while ago. Deputy Head Damelza Higginson talks about how the online sessions are enabling the whole school to learn together; something that has never happened to this extent previously. They organise the school’s development process like this;

The third week of a month staff are given time to work through the online material individually.

Team meetings take place during the fourth week.

This pattern continues throughout the year and everyone is clear about the expectations and commitments.

How one school is making it work

2. How does a Professional Learning Team work?

Changing the habits of a professional lifetime is not simple. It involves un-learning and re-learning; unpicking, readjusting, trying things out and seeing what works. It’s about staff using their own learning power to affect changes in themselves.

In this section we look at the nature of Professional Learning Teams; their purpose and typical agenda; their culture and their outputs.

Key Learning Question:

How can we make the most of being part of a learning team?

a) An overview

Changing or developing your working practices is hard and delicate work. 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 your 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.

Teacher learning communities are the engines of teacher development. They work best with 6-8 teachers and, in secondary schools with similar subjects or age groups, who meet for about an hour regularly over a period of a couple of years.

Professional Learning Teams in a nutshell

b) A typical learning team agenda

Team sessions are built into every unit of the online programmes. These sessions are carefully structured and timed to ensure the main purposes of the meeting are accomplished. This structure and timing isn’t a casual stab in the dark but is informed by significant research into such groups.

Introduction

Firstly the group members agree aims for the meeting, and quickly off-load irritations or frustrations about work that otherwise could hinder the progress and feel of the meeting.

Agreeing the agenda (5mins)

Although the agenda is usually fixed there is often discussion about particular things the group wants to achieve

Sharing classroom practice experiments… how things are going (20mins)

Each member gives a summary of what he or she has tried to achieve since the last meeting. Everyone is expected to report back to every meeting. The group question and probe their colleagues’ summaries to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as ‘What do you think is getting in the way? What would make this better? How could this technique be modified to make it work for you? What do you think made that work so well?’ This is not a simple show-and-tell session but rather a professional discussion based on concrete classroom reality.

Re-capping the latest online material.…new learning (20mins)

The middle section of the meeting is where the group explore new ideas that were introduced in the latest online session. These may include—the language of learning, classroom organisation, culture ideas, tracking progression—and the group works on these according to need. So this part of the meeting might include some discussion about where pupils are now according to the progression chart or whether to introduce visible thinking routines, or how to design activities to stretch the particular learning habit.

The discussion might also include identifying the ideas that are sufficiently strategic that they should be included in everyone’s plan; they become a whole school approach adopted in one form or another by all classes.

This changing middle section keeps the meetings fresh, but importantly aims to progress the breadth and depth of the approach.

Personal action planning (20mins)

In this part every member plans what they intend to try over the next month. This gives people time to think and discuss ideas perhaps with a partner. Then they design their enquiry questions and complete an action plan. Through this plan everyone is committing to do something. This part of the meeting is considered in more detail in sections d below)

Review of the meeting (5mins)

Finally the group reflect on the original objectives of the meeting to see if they have been achieved.

This structured meeting nevertheless offers you choice in what you do in your classroom and the flexibility to adapt ideas to meet the needs of your students.

A closely focused agenda

Would you be prepared to make time for supportive meetings like this?’
What would be likely to happen if such meetings didn’t have a focused agenda?
Which agenda item would you think is the most valuable?
What’s the point of everyone making a plan of action?

c) The culture of learning teams

The overall climate of the meeting has be described as ‘supportive accountability’ Emphasising these two concepts together, conveys that your ongoing learning as a teacher is worthy and necessary, that teachers are expected to work on improving their practice on an ongoing basis, and that they will be supported to do so. Supportive – to ensure you feel safe enough to share your data, tell your stories and be open to probing discussion. Accountability – to cover your commitment to undertake to develop your practice.

Hence, in the sharing practice part of the meeting:

The group is careful to follow their agreed ground rules which 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
- Maintaining an open mind

The group question and probe each other’s summaries of their classroom experiments in order to encourage analysis and deeper reflection. They use questions such as:

What do you think is getting in the way?
What would make this even better?
How could this technique be modified to make it work for you?
What do you think made that happen?

In this way they support each other in changing and developing their practice.

Supportive accountability

What else would you want to add to this list of ground rules?
Would such ground rules make you comfortable to share and probe your classroom experiments?

d) Creating learning enquiry plans

Building personal enquiry plans is a vital part of the meeting and the resulting Action Plans are important documents that can of course be used as evidence in Performance Management.

The creation of a learning enquiry plan has two parts:

creating your enquiry question;
deciding what to do to make it happen.

1. Creating an enquiry question consider
2. Deciding what to do to make things happen

1. When creating an enquiry question, consider:

Where your students are now in their development of the learning behaviour;
How you would like your students to be different;
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happen?;
Think of the practical ideas for ways of doing something different;
How you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.

Think of it like this:

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

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

Visualise how you want your students to be and think about what you might do, or say, or model, or value, or whatever…. differently to bring about this change in students.

Capture your learning enquiry as a question

Developing-an-enquiry-question-Questioning.pdf

2. Deciding what to do to make things happen

and record this in a short enquiry plan

Personal-Action-Plan-Questioning.pdf

The key to such plans is to:

keep them manageable;
focus on a small number of things in any one plan (3 is good);
always keep your goal (enquiry question) in mind;
think about things you could do less of to accommodate these changes;
make sure all aspects of the plan are completed;
structure your action over four weeks;
include what you will monitor…
- About yourself:
  - How your actions change;
  - How your motivation changes over the 4 weeks and why;
  - Challenges – anything that didn’t go to plan, things you are finding tricky etc.
- About pupils:
  - What they are doing/saying differently;
  - Any changes in their behaviour;
  - Any reactions, responses to new ways of working.

The online team session offers you a range of indicators to look out for and these can be used as part of your plan.

For example:

displaying increased curiosity;
increased attention to detail;
reduction in the ‘please tell me’ outlook;
greater inclination to find things out for oneself;
improved internet search skills;
more precise questions that uncover the required information;
reduction in ill-directed questions;
increased sensitivity to the likely impact of questions;
more ‘what if’ type questions;
others you may have observed…

AND… it’s a good idea to share plans with the whole group to make sure you are all on the right lines.

A do-able plan

e) A learning team in action

A group of eight teachers and two learning assistants are exploring what they have been doing in their classrooms over the last month to build students’ learning power. Each one relates a story of changing practice and its impact on students.

Kristina is excited by the wall display she has made with students about the learning muscles they are concentrating on in their split-screen lessons.
Arnie speaks movingly about how he is adapting the way he praises students and how this is having a positive effect on how his students see themselves as learners.
Henry speaks of his first attempts at using a split-screen approach in a couple of lessons and how he decided which learning muscle to couple with the content. He had felt a bit daunted by the prospect of teaching in a new way, but was relieved to find that students cottoned on quickly and seemed to benefit from concentrating on their individual learning habits.
Sheena, a learning assistant, talks hesitantly about how she is trying hard not to tell students what to do, but to ask questions like ‘How else could you do that? What else might you try? What would help you to get this better?’ She says it felt as though she wasn’t doing her job to start with but over a couple of weeks she has seen the children taking more control of their learning and becoming more interested.

And so it goes on, everyone taking the opportunity to share what’s been happening—triumphs and difficulties alike. Kirsten, who is facilitating the session, helps her colleagues to tease out some of the knotty issues and explore more deeply—not just what happened, but to mull over why and how and why not.

The session moves from a familiar ‘show and tell’ format to a deeper analysis of what makes practice work and what might be needed next. It is a spirited engagement of professional colleagues who are deeply interested in what helps them to adopt new habits of teaching. They move on to planning what they will do over the coming month, and commit to meeting again to share and explore their endeavours.

A stimulating and supportive hour.

3. What are the essentials of running a learning team?

Teacher learning communities have been described as the engine of change in staff development. Effective facilitation of such teams is critical in the early stages; causing the team to work harmoniously and to greater effect.

In this section we consider the role of the team leaders; those people who have been invited to facilitate a professional learning team. The success of the whole development enterprise is often invested in learning team facilitators hence this time and space to explore it.

Key Learning Question:

What are the key functions of a Professional Learning Team leader and what makes them effective?

a) The role of team leader

Well established learning teams can work perfectly happily without a leader, but in the early stages of forming a team the leader, or facilitator, sets the scene; the expectations, the ground rules, and the emotional climate.

There’s no blueprint for a leader’s job description but basically it is to guide the team through the sessions, making sure the agenda is covered, keeping team members emotionally engaged and cognitively stretched. But how the role is accomplished can mean make or break for individual and team success.

Characteristics of a person spec might include:

an interest in developing their own practice;
a belief that continuous change is the new normal;
a belief in the principles of the approach that’s being embedded into practice (whatever that might be);
an interest in how adults learn;
an open, inquisitive nature;
an experienced coaching approach.

Appointing team leaders will be a critical task and sight of the notes in this section may be useful to potential candidates.

And whoever ends up leading a team it’s very, very important for the team to constantly keep in mind the big moral imperative…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 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.

Over time, as the team absorbs the values and systems the role of leadership becomes more diffused. Everyone takes on those characteristics; there’s a feeling of shared responsibility to each other and the team. The learning culture of this team moves to a greater shared responsibility for learning just as classroom cultures have/are.

A key facilitator role

What sort of close knit teams have you been a member of previously?
What made that team(s) effective or ineffective?
What sort of characteristics do you think a team leader should have?
What do you think is the point of the team always re-connecting to the moral imperative of the innovation?

b) Managing the learning team agenda and culture

In section 2 we briefly considered the team agenda and what happens at each stage. Here we look at the same agenda through the role of the facilitator.

The agenda remains the same for all team meetings and it’s important to keep this rhythm. The length, the content, and the order of events etc. are all the result of research.

The culture can be described as ‘Supportive accountability’ where everyone should be supportive and feel supported. The accountability bit has to do with making the team feel serious and legitimate rather than casual, here today gone tomorrow. People need to feel accountable to themselves, to each other and to the school.

Session agenda

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

The flow of the meeting moves from ‘settling down'(1) to ‘ how have you been doing?'(2) to ‘what did we learn online that we can use?'(3&4) to ‘ what am I planning to do next?'(5) to ‘how did our meeting go?'(6) It’s a logical flow that scaffolds the work of the team.

In the first meeting agenda item 2 is replaced with discussing the role and function of the team, how it will operate and drawing up its ground rules. There is a short paper about this.

Paperwork for the meeting. It’s useful to ensure everyone has printed and brought along their Learning Enquiry Question and Action Plan formats to complete later in the meeting. (downloadable from the online materials.)

What-Why-How-of-PLT.pdf

A tight agenda to scaffold and focus change

1. Session objectives
2. Sharing classroom experiments
3. Recapping on-line materials
4. Deciding what's to be done
5. Personal action planning
5.2 Helping sort out enquiry questions
5.3 Do-able learning plans
6. Evaluate team session

1. Session objectives

In the initial part of the meeting the team thinks about what it wants to achieve in the time available and within the constraints of the agenda. For example:

Feel able to apply the on-line materials in the classroom;
Decide the strategic cultural issues that everyone needs to apply in their classroom;
Plan some do-able shifts in classroom practice.

Five minutes or less should deal with this part of the agenda. You will need to come back to them at the end to clarify if they have been met well enough, how this was achieved and how the meeting process could be improved.

Agendas item 1. Session objectives, what you want to achieve

3. Recapping on-line materials

This middle bit of the meeting is where the team discusses what they have learned from the online session and explore together the key tasks they were asked to complete in that online session. Discussion might include:

Where teachers feel students are secure on the learning behaviour progression chart;
Where could students be secure by the time they leave the school;
Classroom culture ideas;
Activities and talk ideas;

Exploring:

What was interesting?
- Was it understandable?
- What was tricky to understand?
How well did we understand the Progression chart?
- Where are most of our students?
- Share coloured-in Progression charts;
- What have we learned about our students that we hadn’t considered previously?
- Are some students off the scale?
- Does anything stand out?
What reactions did we have to the suggested Actions?
- Did we understand our role in nurturing the phases?
- Which activities feel possible/doable, impactful?
- Explore briefly which Actions we are each favouring.

It’s important to make sure that the ideas from the online materials have been understood conceptually and linked to one or more of the learning friendly classroom shifts…relationships, talk, construction, celebration.

Agenda item 3. Recapping on-line materials. Making sure it’s understood. Being excited by possibilities.

4. Deciding what’s to be done

This part of the meeting has two important functions:

Talking through ‘what I fancy trying with my students’ based on where students are at, the culture shifts that might help and any appropriate actions/activities from those suggested;
Decide which of the ideas will have most impact if they were done by everyone as a whole school approach? In other words they become strategic.

The point here is to recognise that some of the ideas are more strategic than others as they make more impact if they are adopted and adapted by everyone. For example in this early phase of establishing perseverance understanding being ‘stuck’ is a interesting place for a learner to be should become a strategic approach attended to in every classroom.

So the point is to decide which approaches you want to make strategic (everyone does it in some form), and those that will remain with particular teachers.

Making these discussions open ensures everyone has an idea of what people want to try and also has a hand in suggesting ideas that everyone should do. These ideas need later to be discussed with senior managers since putting them into practice across the school is a significant management decision and possibly a policy issue.

Agenda item 4. Deciding what’s to be done. Deciding what to do, personally and whole school.

5. Personal action planning

This item falls in to two parts:

creating an enquiry question;
making a learning plan.

Both of these items are dealt with in the next tab box section.

5. Personal action planning

5.1 Helping sort out enquiry questions

Rather than simply deciding to introduce something new into the classroom because it sounds interesting, the plan is given specific focus through the creation of a question. Why a question? Because this is an enquiry, you want to find out if something will change (student behaviour) if you change something specific.

The facilitator will guide team members through questions like:

Where are your studens now in their development of the learning behaviour?
How would you like your students to be different?
What aspects of your learning culture might be stopping this happen?
Think of the practical ideas for ways of doing something different
How you want your students to improve/develop/enhance in …………?.

Think of it like this:

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

This is the crunch question. Students are unlikely to change unless the teacher’s behaviour changes!

Suggest team members visualise how they want their students to be and then think about what they might do, or say, or model, or celebrate, or whatever…. differently to bring about this change in students. You could think of them as If/ THEN statements.

If I create stuck prompts with my class, then will their reliance on me be reduced ?
If I allow students to ask only one question of me in any lesson, then will their willingness to seek answers for themselves improve ?
If I unpack the meaning of ‘effort’, then will pupils adopt the ideas and make more effort?
If I re-frame mistakes as valuable aids to learning, then will their fearfulness diminish or disappear?
Learning enquiry questions can be captured in this format

5.1 Helping sort out enquiry questions to focus the plan.

5.2 Do-able learning plans

The learning enquiry plan creates a record of what will be done and as such is an important document.

Research has shown that it is important to allow teachers:

choice about what they do within the suggested range;
flexibility to adapt a suggested activity to meet the needs of their students;
make the 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 members what they are going to do less of in order to accommodate the changes.

The plan represents a promise to do it. This promise keeps the plan as a priority in the mind of the teacher.

The plan should also record what the teacher will watch out for over the next four weeks. What they will monitor about themselves as they change their practice and what they will monitor about changes in their pupils. Noting such change motivates teachers to continue with their experiments since the changes in pupils are almost always positive.

The learning enquiry plan can be recorded on this format.

5.2 Ensuring do-able learning plans

6. Evaluate team session

Finally at the end of the session the team needs to evaluate their team process.

did we meet the objectives?.
how well did we keep to the ground rules?
how could we have managed x or Y more productively?
is everyone feeling okay?
reminder of date of the next meeting.

Having this item ensures the team is itself managing its learning process.

6. Evaluate team session. Could we improve our team working practice?

Does the ‘flow’ of the meeting make sense to you?
Which agenda item will be the trickiest to facilitate?
Which agenda item will staff need most help with?
Which facilitation skills might you need to brush up on to support your colleagues effectively?

Can you prepare more ‘If I do XXXX will it improve/develop/enhance YYYY’ enquiry questions in order to better illustrate this aspect of the action plan?
How might you help colleagues who are finding it hard to develop their own enquiry question?

c) Learning teams at work

This Professional Learning team are thoroughly engaged in their second meeting as a team. They have been able to work productively by following the agenda. Here they are discussing agenda item 4. They are working out which whole school strategies they are already using and what more they have to add to improve things. They go on to sort out what they each want to try next before making more detailed plans.

A team at work

4. What does the blended learning programme consist of?

Guided by best practice thinking in professional development, the blended learning programmes support a consistent school-wide approach to developing students’ learning behaviours. The success of these core programmes depends on a genuine working partnership.

Our contribution is to organise learning research from schools into practical, do-able online sessions that teachers and support staff learn from to guide their changing practice. The school’s contribution is to recognise the need for culture change and to support regular Professional Learning Team sessions; offering staff time to discuss, share and plan learning enquiries and changing practice.

This section is about the content of the online course(s) and what we hope you will be able to achieve over time.

Key Learning Question:

How is the content organised and how can I make the most of it?

a) Content of the online Stepping Stones Phase 1 programme

This Stepping Stones programme attempts to solve the challenge of designing a professional development model that can faithfully disseminate the content of building better learners, while also providing sustained, meaningful assistance to teachers who are attempting to replace long-standing habituated practices with more effective ones. Hence it is a blended programme of online content and in-school support for learning teams.

The first phase of the programme is titled Stepping Stones Phase 1 Introducing Key Learning Behaviours. It consists of nine sessions and is expected to take about a year to complete. The programme aims to enable your pupils to make deep and solid progress in four key learning behaviours…perseverance, collaboration, questioning and revising[also known as refining]

The course covers;

learning friendly classroom cultures
four key learning habits
reviewing your progress

What is in Stepping Stones 1?

The course covers four key Learning Habits:

Perseverance

Perseverance is key to the learning journey. It is vital that pupils are able to get to grips with the knotty emotions of learning, and can view and use them positively as aids to the journey, not as setbacks.

Collaboration

At its least sophisticated, collaboration is little more than being cooperative. At its most sophisticated and complex levels it goes beyond learning ‘in a team’ and becomes learning ‘as a team’. It is an invaluable life skill.

Questioning

The desire to ask questions to satisfy innate curiosity is alive and well in very young children, as any parent of a 3 year old will readily confirm! Explore how we can ensure that questioning remains alive and builds into a full blown inclination to explore and learn about the world.

Revising

Pupils need to learn how to deal with change, emotionally and practically. With an inflexible frame of mind they are unlikely to recognise the need to change their ideas or the way they do something. They also need to know what ‘good’ looks like; how to keep an eye on how things are going and evaluate how things went against external standards.

How the online programme works

The Stepping Stones Phase 1 programme consists of nine online sessions, each expected to take about a month to implement in classrooms. Each online session is divided into four sections:

Three individual teacher sections
Teachers work their way through the materials at a time and place to suit them. Each session will usually take about 30-45 minutes to work through and think about. The materials introduce new thinking and practical ideas for staff to get their heads around prior to their team session.

A Professional Learning Team meeting section
This brings staff together as a learning team at monthly intervals (typically six to eight staff per team), convened and led by a learning champion from your school. Staff share and discuss how they have moved their practice to incorporate learning behaviours, consider new material introduced in the individual online learning sessions, and plan their learning enquiries to be implemented in the next month. Each team session is planned to last about an hour.

The online sessions consist of:

a) A Culture for building Powerful Learners

Best used as the first session, this module is designed to guide you through a process of understanding, assessing and improving your classroom learning culture; making it more learning friendly in order to build your students’ learning power. Unpick the meaning of classroom cultures; use a learning power culture instrument to assess where your classroom culture is now; ready your culture for learning.

Unpick the meaning of classroom cultures; use a learning power culture instrument to assess where your classroom culture is now; ready your culture for learning.

Learning cultures. A big shift? Unpick the meaning of classroom cultures, what they might consist of and the big shifts that may be needed to develop better learning. Use the culture tool to estimate where your classroom culture is now.
Learning friendly cultures; Lots of little shifts. Find out about the four big dimensions of culture and use the culture tool 2 to estimate the sorts of shifts your classroom culture would benefit from.
Your classroom culture. Some ideas to get you started. Look for ideas to strengthen your learner/learning classroom culture.
Team reflection and planning. Share the results of your culture analysis with colleagues. Make plans for what everyone needs to do and what you will each do individually.

b) Progress in Perseverance

This mini-unit is an information unit, it does not suggest practical ideas for improvement. As such it should be coupled with one of the four perseverance sessions below.

The Unit aims to:

help teachers to explore the components of the big picture of perseverance, how it’s made up
analyse where their students currently function in relation to progress in perseverance
look briefly at their own practice in developing a perseverant friendly culture

The following sessions delve deeper into Perseverance helping pupils to improve their attitudes to learning.

The following four sessions delve deeper into each aspect of perseverance, helping you to develop and grow pupils’ learning-friendly attitudes.

b1) Engage students in unsticking their learning.

This session aims to:

help teachers to analyse how their students’ behave and feel about being stuck;
help teachers to analyse how their students’ behave and feel about being stuck;
look at their own classroom practice in developing a ‘stuck’-friendly culture;
suggest practical strategies to increase students’ skill and confidence in dealing with being stuck;
assist teachers to adapt their practice using a learning enquiry method (Team reflection and planning).

b2) Engage students in rising to the Challenge.

This session aims to:

help teachers to analyse how their students feel and behave when faced with challenge
help teachers to analyse how their students feel and behave when faced with challenge
look at their own classroom practice in developing a learning-challenge-friendly culture
suggest practical strategies to increase students’ skill and confidence in dealing with challenge• assist teachers to adapt their practice using a learning enquiry method (Team reflection and planning).

b3) Engage students in Managing Distractions.

This session aims to:

help teachers to analyse their students’ awareness of and strategies for being distracted
help teachers to analyse their students’ awareness of and strategies for being distracted
look at their own practice in developing a learning culture that helps students to maintain focus
suggest practical strategies to increase students’ skill and confidence in dealing with internal and external distractions
assist teachers to adapt their practice using a learning enquiry method (Team reflection and planning).

b4) Engage students in achieving Goals.

This session aims to:

help teachers to analyse how their students’ think and feel about pursuing goals
help teachers to analyse how their students’ think and feel about pursuing goals
look at their own classroom practice in developing a goal friendly culture
suggest practical strategies to increase students’ skill and confidence in pursuing goals
assist teachers to adapt their practice using a learning enquiry method (Team reflection and planning).

The following sessions explore how build on and grow the key learning behaviours:

c) Putting Collaboration into Learning.

At its least sophisticated, collaboration is little more than being cooperative. At its most sophisticated and complex level it goes beyond learning ‘in a team’ and becomes learning ‘as a team’. It is an invaluable life skill.

This session is designed to guide you through a process of building the habit of Collaboration in your pupils. Sections 1 – 4 consider:

Collaboration and how it develops. Unpick the meaning of Collaboration, how it develops over time and use the Collaboration chart to plot where your pupils are now.
Taking Collaboration into classroom culture. An introduction to the classroom culture that nurtures Collaboration. Check what you do now.
Introducing activities and routines that will build Collaboration into learning activities/tasks.
Team reflection and planning. Share the impact of your experiments with colleagues and plan what you need to do next.

d) Putting Questioning into Learning

The desire to ask questions to satisfy innate curiosity is alive and well in very young children, as any parent of a 3 year old will readily confirm! Explore how we can ensure that questioning remains alive and builds into a full-blown inclination to explore and learn about the world.

This session is designed to guide you through a process of building the habit of Questioning in your pupils.

Questioning and how it develops. Unpick the meaning of Questioning, how it develops over time and use the Questioning chart to plot where your pupils are now.
Taking Questioning into classroom culture. An introduction to the classroom that nurtures Questioning. Check what you do now.
Introducing activities and routinesthat will build Questioning into learning activities/tasks.
Team reflection and planning. Share the impact of your experiments with colleagues and plan what you need to do next.

e) Putting Revising into Learning

Sections 1 – 4 consider:

Revising and how it develops. Unpick the revising chart and plot where your pupils are now
Taking revising into classroom culture. Think about how to improve your classroom culture to better support revising.
Teaching for learning; activities and talk. Look for ways of building revising into learning activities/tasks and the learning language.
Team reflection and planning. Share the impact of your experiments with colleagues and plan what you need to do next.

The final session in Phase 1 is designed to enable you to review your progress so far.

f) Reviewing our progress

A rich variety of tools help you review your progress in developing a learning culture in your classrooms. This review will provide you with relevant information on which to base your approach in the next phase of building pupils’ learning powers. Sections 1 – 4 consider:

Reflecting on your changing practice. Looking at what you have done and how your classroom has changed. This section answers the question “How far have you come?”
Giving pupils a voice. Finding out how your pupils have benefitted. This section answers the question “How well have the pupils taken to this way of learning?”
Learning with and from colleagues. Learning from learning walks and observations. This section answers the question “What are the variations on the theme and what can I learn from these variations?”
Team session: Learning together. Putting your heads together and thinking “what next?” This team session answers the questions “How are we doing, how are our pupils doing and where do we need to go next?”

As a result of working through these nine sessions you can expect your pupils to make solid progress in learning habits, have a working learning vocabulary, purposefully use their learning behaviours and have adopted some of the strategies of powerful learners.

The sessions vary slightly in amount or difficulty of content but you can expect to have to spend about an hour reading, thinking, absorbing and linking the content.

Each monthly session is divided into;

Three individual teacher sections

Section 1: How the learning habit develops
Section 2: A learning friendly classroom culture
Section 3: Teaching for learning; activities and talk

And one Professional Learning Team meeting section

Section 4: Team reflection and planning

Teachers work their way through the materials in sections 1 – 3 at a time and place to suit them. The material will usually take about 45-60 minutes to work through. They introduce new thinking and practical ideas for you to get your head around prior to the team session.

Here’s what you will find in the four sections:

Section 1: How the learning habit develops
Section 2: A learning friendly classroom culture
Section 3: Teaching for learning; activities and talk
Section 4: Professional Learning Team meeting

Section 1: How the learning habit develops

Section 1 introduces you to what the learning behaviour is about and what progress in that learning behaviour looks like, what a habit looks like in its early stages and what it looks like as it improves through time….given the right encouragement and culture. You are asked to plot where your pupils are now in their use of the behaviour.

This section offers a concise way of getting to grips with the learning behaviour and how it progresses. It’s likely to take about 20 mins to get your head around it.

Section 2: A learning friendly classroom culture

Activity 2 - Classroom Observation-Perserverance

This 2nd section invites you to think about your classroom culture and how you might shift it to making it more learning friendly for the particular learning habit. This section should take about 10 minutes.

Section 3: Teaching for learning; activities and talk

This 3rd section offers; ideas for lesson starters/quick wins; classroom activities; learning reflection tools; ideas for the appropriate learning language for each phase progression in the learning habit. You are likely to browse in this section for about 30 minutes in preparation for the team meeting.

Section 4: Professional Learning Team meeting

The final section gives a skeleton plan for the Professional Learning Team session (usually undertaken about a week after the individual online sessions) It includes downloadable enquiry question and planning formats. In team sessions you are invited to share the impact of your classroom experiments with colleagues, discuss the online materials, and plan how you might use these to change your classroom practice. All the activities are designed to help you bring the learning behaviour into active use in the classroom. The section also includes a range of indicators that you could start looking for to begin to measure the impact of teacher development across the school. The team sessions are timed to last about 75 minutes.

Free preview

You can actually view a session here

b) Content of the online Stepping Stones Phase 2 programme

The second distance learning programme in the Stepping Stones series again consists of nine online sessions, each expected to take about a month to put into practice. The sessions give easy to access information about one learning behaviour, suggestions for making classrooms learning friendly and lots of activities to try out. Staff are thus armed with ideas to support their efforts to develop a learning friendly culture and apply a more forensic approach to learning. This in turn helps learners to build their own learning habits.

The effect of phase two Stepping Stones is to;

deepen the learning positive culture the school established in phase 1
step up the change process through learning teams
strengthen the growing expertise across the school
ensure a focus on a proven right track
build pupils’ learning character across a broader range of behaviours.

How it works

The Stepping Stones Phase 2 nine online sessions, can be spaced out over a year, or more. The solid foundation and understanding the school established in Stepping Stones Phase 1 means that Phase 2 can move much more quickly and you can introduce a new learning habit into classrooms each month. You can also choose which order to do the sessions in, so teams can follow their own needs and ensure best fit with their pupils’ progress.

Going faster, going deeper

The sessions are about the following learning habits:

Listening

Reasoning

Making Links

Imagining

Resourcing

Me-Learning

Noticing

Planning

Reviewing
our progress

Each session is organised in exactly the same way as the Phase 1 sessions. This helps you to get your head around things more quickly without the need to sort out what’s what.

c) Making sure its working

Within each phase of the Stepping Stones course there is a session that is a little different. It is designed to help you review your progress in developing a learning culture in your classroom and the school more widely

There are a rich variety of tools and techniques to help you estimate the effect and impact of changing your practice. The review will provide you with relevant information on which to base your approach in the next phase of building pupils as better learners.

The Review session includes;

Reflecting on your changing practice, looking at what you have done and how your classroom has changed. This section answers the question “How far have you come?”

Giving pupils a voice Finding out how your pupils have benefitted. This section answers the question “How well have the pupils taken to this way of learning?”

Learning with and from colleagues Learning from learning walks and observations. This section answers the question “What are the variations on the theme and what can I learn from these variations?”

There are at least eight ways in which you might reflect on your changing practice and collect evidence to support or question your views. Of course you won’t be able to use all of these tools – time would prohibit this, but do we suggest that you look at all the ideas and consult with other members of your team before deciding which tools to select.

Key point…. look at some of the review tools before you start the online course. This will give you an idea of the sort of progress you should be making in the future.

Check out expectations of progress before you start.

1. Where are you now?

Key Learning Questions:

How goal focused are my students?

How goal friendly is my classroom culture?

How could I develop a more goal friendly classroom culture?

Goal Orientation

Goal oriented people can see the outcomes they are trying to achieve clearly and vividly in their minds and apply themselves vigorously to achieving them. A goal without the will is wishful thinking. The will without a goal means rapidly fading interest. Goals need motivation in order to be realised, motivation needs a goal if it is to remain focused.

Students are often able to apply themselves to their own projects, but can lack such purpose and motivation when it comes to learning in school. The same child who purposefully wrestles with a computer game one minute can become an uninterested ‘spectator’ in the next lesson – why? What makes us want to achieve something, glad to put in the effort, happy to spend hours of practise, or just content to keep going. What types of goals make the difference? Research shows that performance related goals are less likely to engage and motivate than are learning related goals. Goals that relate to knowing stuff or achieving particular outcomes (like a target grade) – performance related goals – are less motivating than goals that relate to being able to do something – learning related goals. Whereas performance goals provide hurdles to be overcome, leading to a focus on ability as defined by one’s hurdle jumping skills, learning related goals encourage effort where success is defined by the sort of effort deployed rather than the height of the hurdle that is cleared. So, how can we help students to engage with curricular challenges in such a way as they become their own learning goals.

The two questionnaires in this section aim to help you analyse:

How goal orientated your students appear to be, and what this reveals [Questionnaire 1 Goal Questions]
How learning goal friendly your classroom culture appears to be and what this might suggest. [Questionnaire 2 Culture Questions]

Results from these questionnaires will suggest a focused range of moving forward suggestions.

2. Ideas to Practise

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in working towards clearly defined goals?

In this section we explore a range of ideas, activities, ways to display, and things to say about goal orientation. The ideas aim to deepen your learning friendly classroom culture, helping to support and strengthen your students’ ability to work towards goals.

The ideas to practise are grouped in two ways –

In this section [2]:

The four phases of learner behaviour (we have left the most advanced one, ’embodies’, out):

Receives ( purple) Do as they are asked;
Responds ( blue) Acts more willingly;
Values ( green ) Values the behaviour;
Organises ( yellow) Organises themselves to use the behaviour effectively.

This grouping will enable you to look at all the ideas linked to a phase of development

In the following section [3] –

The ideas are grouped by the four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases

Most of the ideas to practise are not phase-specific and can be used, or readily be adapted for use, with students of any age. Have a rummage through the sections to see what you can find. As you do, keep in mind what your students do now in relation to identifying and pursuing goals. Think about, what do you want them to be able to do that they can’t or don’t do now?

3. The culture sort

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in realising the value of working towards goals?

The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases.

Have a rummage through the sections to see what you can find. As you do, keep in mind what your students do now when they are stuck. Think about, what do you want them to be able to do that they can’t or don’t do now?

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning
Talk for learning
Constructing learning lessons
Celebrate learning values

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns learning becoming a shared responsibility.

As a teacher you will be giving students more responsibility for their own learning by:

acting as a learning coach, gradually enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
focusing collaborative activity to help students to see each other as resources for learning;
offering students choices about what and how to learn;
enabling students to talk more, with you talking less;
modelling being a learner;
surfacing and promoting the processes of learning itself.

Shifting responsibility for learning ensures students recognise, use, understand and grow their learning habits.

The classroom gradually becomes a learning community where everyone is learning from each other and growing more confident as learners as a result.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been included for their effectiveness in helping to unhook teacher-student dependency and shift more responsibility for learning to students. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the progression phase the ideas might best secure.

#1 Getting started with a plan

Planning in its simplest form means we have something to do, we have thought about what we are going to do. Hence in teaching children how to plan we are teaching them to be thoughtful about what they are doing and to be best prepared to achieve success.

Plan, do, review.

Planning can begin at an early age. The High Scope pre-school/nursery programme has planning built in to daily activity.

Begin the day with children saying what their plan for the morning is…what activities in what order.
The children carry out their plan, do, including getting and returning the appropriate equipment.
The children are expected to review at the end of the session what they did and how their plan worked out.

#2 Learning Power Tools: equipping learners to achieve learning intentions

Learning-power tools to build and strengthen learning behaviours.

If we want young learners to strike out and achieve curriculum goals we need to alert them the tools to do just that. i.e. knowledge, understanding and improvement of their learning behaviours.

Younger learners need physical prompts or hooks for many invisible concepts including learning. Several schools use physical tools since tools are what adults use to help out with many jobs. Tools help children to connect with the idea of their learning powers in a tangible way.

Use real toolboxes from a DIY shop and gather items to represent just some of the learning capacities i.e. those that you are particularly wanting younger children to use each day. For example:

a blindfold for managing distractions
a magnifying glass for noticing details.
a plastic hammer for perseverance.
a giant key for collaboration.
a notebook for planning

Introduce the items to the children one at a time as the learning behaviour it represents fits with a part of the classroom culture you want to strengthen. Later ask children ‘Which learning tools will we need to help us today?’ They are soon able to go and fetch the notebook that represented planning before going outdoors to build a rocket.

#3 Sharing your real life problems

A powerful motivator

Telling your learners about some of your own real life problems becomes a powerful motivator and a useful tool for discussing alternative plans of actions.

One way to start off the week is to share with students one or two real life problems you had to deal with over the weekend. Your students will be fascinated. It helps them to see you as human and with problems and importantly that these problems could be shared and talked about.

#1 Use If/Then planning

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

Put ‘If-then’ planning into action in your classroom to make goal setting more effective

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 called ‘if-then’ planning.

‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. They are the triggers that stimulate the ‘Thens’

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

Research findings

Research on motivation and goals from Harvard University shows how our brains work to achieve our goals. Basically it says that goals need to be very clear and our brain ignores a goal if it’s unclear about what to do. Brains act on goals only when what to do is clear.

So, goals like ‘Lose weight’ or ‘Exercise more often‘ or even ‘Aim high’ are too nebulous. They beg the question ‘how’ or ‘what do I do?’

The how to ‘If-then’ planning

When setting a goal you need to specify not only what you will do but also where and when you will do it.

If (or when) [___situation__], then I will do [___behaviour__]
So going back to our goal about losing weight, we need to know much more about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ and the ‘how to’ of losing weight.
An If-then statement or goal might be ‘If I get the pudding menu, then I’ll ask for coffee’.

This may sound a bit cumbersome to start with but research suggests far more goals are achieved by using ‘if-then’ planning. And the clever bit is that this builds self-talk at the same time. You do what you are telling yourself to do.

The ‘if-then’ plan succeeds because the situation and the action become linked in the mind. The brain recognises the situation as an opportunity to advance the goal. When the situation is detected action is initiated automatically. “If-then’ plans become “instant habits”.

Examples:

If I’m not sure what my goal is, then I will try and picture it ( visualise) in my mind ( head)

If I’m am going to start working on a goal then I will think about what and how I need to do it. I’ll make a plan even just in my head.

If I’m getting confused about a goal ( outcome, objective) then I will look at the success criteria to help me get back on track..

#2: Introduce planning frames

Planning Frames

Establish a convention of shapes and colours linked to elements needed for a good plan, e.g. green arrow for your target, blue hexagon for resources, yellow star for the people to help you, brown footprint for steps to take, grey clock for deadlines or time-frames.

For group or whole-class work, use coloured card cut shapes to put together project plans.
Set up symbols on the network so that students can cut and paste these into word processed plans.
Create worksheets using the symbols.
Set criteria for what you expect in particular plans, and encourage pupils to use at least one frame of each colour/shape for every plan.

#3 Model your own planning strategies

Pursuing your own goals

Share something that you personally are trying to achieve, and how you are going about achieving it. Talk about plans, milestones, stumbling blocks, resources, time frames etc.

The key ideas to get over are:

that success usually results from effort and following a planned course of action, and rarely happens ‘by accident’;
that by thinking ahead we can influence the future.

#1 Making FAME plans

It’s important that plans provide a starting point. A clear beginning or focus shows a student where and how to start and what to do, and what steps or actions to take. The aim of the plan is to liberate the student from direct teacher assistance. Plans are not only a teaching device but aim to provide a means for independent learning.

A good plan contains;

an action component
a thinking component
a monitoring component, which means providing metacognitive steps to help make judgements about what they are doing
an evaluation component

Without the monitoring and evaluation components the plan remains just a set of directions for a given task. A good plan is strategic and includes skills that can be applied in a number of contexts.

FAME – Focus, Act, Monitor, Evaluate.

You can of course include more steps e.g. 2 for focusing or 3 for acting. Having too many steps becomes confusing. Keep the magic number 7 in mind

A good way to introduce this type of planning is for the teacher to do a very detailed one and then ask students to simplify the steps in their own words

#2 Allow students to select their own level of challenge and so set their own performance goals

Select own levels of challenge

For the same bit of curriculum content, provide tasks that are designed to offer low, medium and high challenge ( or mild, spicy, hot) and encourage students to decide on the level of challenge they wish to undertake. Use this as an opportunity to encourage them to set their own learning goals.

#3 Begin to share outcomes with a wider audience

To move beyond peer assessment towards whole group assessment:

Set this up with plenty of notice and make it clear to students that their work will be seen by an audience.

Agree with students a valid set of success criteria for their work. This could then be used to drive and sustain their progress through the unit.

Include opportunities to draft/edit/improve

Use Kind, Specific, Helpful critique for feedback (as in Ron Berger’s Austin’s Butterfly)

The audiences could be:

another teacher.
a visitor
members of SLT willing to come and witness the ‘performance’
all the school
- ‘performance’ becomes a ‘pop-up’ learning exhibition somewhere in the school
- students create and include QR code links to their displays and invite Kind, Specific, Helpful comments from all who see them
- students show their learning in silence to each other and provides KSH feedback on sticky-notes. Feedback is collated and acted on in silence

#4 Link goals to the real world

Here’s a simple, straightforward way of showing the purpose of learning objectives or goals…simply add SO THAT at the end of the objective. The SO THAT is similar to the why. It aims to offer a wider reason for pursuing the learning objective. So an objective becomes…

Be able to xxxxxxx So That. . . . add the wider purpose

#1 Self-monitoring of plans

Keeping goals on track

Require students to monitor how their plan is progressing AND assess whether the end goal is still achievable/relevant.

Make sure students understand that changing plans (revising) is an okay thing to do and that changing their plans in order to achieve their end goals is often necessary.

Sometimes of course the set back is such that the original goal becomes unattainable and needs re-casting in a more achievable form – this requires maturity and bravery. Changing an end-goal inevitably leads to having to revise, in the form of start from scratch, the original plan. Many people, let alone students, are reluctant to undertake such root and branch changes, and erroneously rely on minor amendments to plans in the hope that small tweaks will produce the necessary impact.

Constant monitoring of the plan and the goal can counteract this tendency.

#2 Students analysing their own performance

Self analysis of performance and creation of feedback

In order to reach the goals of progressing in their learning – be it content or process – students must be able to self-regulate their own learning. Teachers need to provide helpful feedback to enable pupils to do this.

Share assessment criteria with students and ask them to assess/comment on the (imperfect) solutions you provide. Invite them to produce improvements based on their own feedback.
Share assessment criteria with students and require them to assess/comment on their own work, and amend it if necessary, before submitting it.
Ensure that your written comments are framed as questions to which your students are required to respond. “What do you think you need to do to make this section more convincing?” is preferable to “This section needs more explanation”, as it moves responsibility to the learner to identify what more needs to be done.

#3 Modelling a skill

By Lori Yerdon

Whatever the subject modelling ‘how to’ is given added value when linked to the learning behaviours that make for successful performance. Take on the role of an intelligent novice and model performance at a slightly higher, more coherent and informed level than is characteristic of your students. Model your ‘think alouds’.

Try the following steps for whatever skill you are modelling;

introduce the skill e.g. how to find something in an index
explain the skill, explaining why the information is important
model the skill, showing how you do it
review what you have done, ask students to tell you what you did
reflect on the use of the skill, where else the skill can be applied.

Talk for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns using the language of learning,

As a teacher you will be:

using language to encourage perseverant, inquisitive, imaginative attitudes in students;
exploring learning as an explicit theme that runs across all subject matter;
talking about learning in terms of constant change; experimental, working towards, constant improvement, flexibility, could be;
prompting in the form of questions to nudge pupils into thinking for themselves. “That’s curious. What’s odd about that? What does that make you wonder?”
focusing questions on the process of learning, encouraging students to slow down, appraise the strategies and steps along the way, become more thoughtful and explore different strategies for making progress;
aware of positive and negative student self talk and building positive talk by giving them the knowledge and experience of the learning behaviours ( the tools) with which they learn.

The more richly children come to relate their own learning the more they see and take hold of their own role in it.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to surface the learning process and deepen the language of learning.

Talk to nudge visualising achievements.

Phrases to help students think about what they are trying to achieve.

Encourage students to develop the ability to articulate what they are trying to achieve and visualise end results. Use phrases like:

Tell your friend what you are going to do
Tell me what you are trying to achieve
What are you going to do?
What are you hoping to achieve?
What will it look like when you have done it?
Begin with the end in mind . . .
Let’s imagine what success will be like

#2 Written feedback encourging working towards a goal

Reinforce taking responsibility for learning with supportive marking comments

Well done – you thought carefully about what you were wanting to achieve and followed your plan.

#3 Talking about learning

Making learning personal

If we want children to take some responsibility for their learning we need them to relate to what they are learning and involve their personal interests. At this stage in the progression of goal setting, they are reliant on goals set by others – we need to sow the seeds for them to begin to set their own. One way that has proved effective is to ask “you-questions’ which aim to help students identify with the subject matter. Such questions should be addressed to the student and relevant to their personal interests, feelings and experiences. They should invite opinion, knowledge and experience.

What do you know about it?
What do you want to know?
Have you ever been to…?
Have you ever heard about…?
What do you think it feels/felt like…?

#4 Guided Visualisation.

Using your mind’s eye to rehearse the future

Encourage students to develop the ability to articulate what they are trying to achieve and visualise end results. This technique is useful for students of any age.

Visualisation or mental imagery is a way of conditioning your brain for successful outcomes. The more you mentally rehearse your performance, the more it becomes habituated in your mind.

Think of visualisation as a pre-activity walk-through, helping you to think through what you will be doing and what you want to achieve in advance of actually doing it. It can be used to eliminate some of the unknowns and allows the student to rehearse the future in their mind’s eye.

Talk students through what they are going to be doing.
Some students find it helpful to close their eyes as you guide them through what they will be doing and achieving.
As they get the idea, encourage them to talk each other through it for themselves.
The point is to slow the learning down and give students the time to think in advance of committing to action.

How to use visualization for successful performance:

Visualise the outcome you want – When you mentally rehearse your performance in your head, make sure you see the event as how you want it to unfold. If your mental images turn negative, stop the mental tape, rewind and restart then visualise again see the performance you want to see.
Use all your senses from a first-person perspective – Visualise your performance in detail. What would you see, hear, feel, smell and taste. Feel how your body would feel as you go through the motions of your performance. Try adding in some physical movements that coincide with the visualised images. Feel the excitement of successfully fulfilling your performance goal.
Practise frequently – Mental rehearsal is a skill that becomes better with repetition. Practise your visualisation or imagery daily.

#1 Talk about the future

For many students, the future is something that just ‘happens’. It is a future that they are consistently surprised by and so are at the mercy of these ‘unexpected’ events. It is a facet of learned helplessness due to an inability to see beyond the here and now.

Try the following simple ideas to get students thinking and talking about the future:

Have a daily routine which is consistent and discussed – ‘What do we do after lunch?’
When reading a story, or watching a film etc, stop and ask what they think will happen next.
Ask what they are going to be doing this weekend / tonight / after school.
Encourage talk about tomorrow / next week.

#2 Involve everybody in asking why.

‘Why are we doing this?’

is a question that children rarely know the answer to. The most common answer is ‘because my teacher told me’. Children do things on the whole without knowing why. They inhabit a classroom environment whose purpose is activity but don’t know the reason for the activity.

If we want our students to take on learning goals as their own we need to broaden their thinking about why they are doing something. Broaden their perception by seeking to identify the purpose of our thinking and learning.

Discuss things like;

what are we trying to do
what do we want to end up with?
why are we doing this?
what is its purpose?
what else will it help us to do?
would it matter if we couldn’t do this? Why?

Then move into planning mode

Develop the willingness to accept and attempt externally generated goals with language like:

I think you can do this – will you have a go?
Your challenge is to . . . .
Do you accept this challenge?
This is achievable – give it a try, see what happens

#3 Teacher talk to nudge students to decide what they are trying to achieve

As they are deciding what they are going to do and how they are going to do it, use phrases like:

What are you trying to do?
What do you hope to achieve.
What will it be like when you have finished it?
Maybe you need to reconsider what you are trying to achieve.
Is that possible, or might you need to try something else?
Is that realistic, or are you aiming too high / too low?

#4 Written feedback: linking use of learning behaviours to successful outcomes

Use feedback to link learning behaviours to curriculum success.

Your well-reasoned argument is well researched and convincing. A couple of other sources would be useful.

Reinforce taking responsibility for learning with supportive marking comments

You thought carefully about what you were hoping to achieve, followed your plan and succeeded.

#1 Written feedback

Supportive marking comments

I want you to look critically at this piece of work. Is it good ? Is it good enough ? How could it be even better ?

#2 Use the language of expectation

From hope to expect.

What I hope students will do as a result of this lesson

becomes

What I expect students to be able to do as a result of this lesson

When you ask students to set their own goals ahead of the lesson ask them to think through the frame

I expect to complete….
I expect to achieve….
I expect to be able to….

In this way they can begin to own their ambition

Other expectant language could be:

As a result of today’s lesson (learning outcome) I can.………..so that I will.………

#1 Talk to nudge reflection on progress towards goals

Enabling pupils to become reflective and thoughtful about goals.

To evaluate progress towards the goal, use phrases like:

Do you think that’s coming along well.
Have you checked your emerging outcome against your original goals?
Are you still on track?
What would make you change track?
Did you have to amend your goals part way through? Why was that?
What are you going to do about . . . . . ?
Do you think there’s anything you could have done better, differently?
How might you get better at that? What would be a better/alternative way of doing it.
Are you satisfied with how it is going?

#2 Talk to nudge the skill of analysing their own performance

Enabling students to become reflective and thoughtful about learning.

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

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

#3 Talk to nudge evaluation of learning behaviours

Enabling pupils to become reflective and thoughtful about learning.

To monitor and evaluate learning, use phrases like:

What learning power have you used/improved in this learning project? How do you know?
What are you keeping an eye on in this learning project?
How do you think it’s going?
Are you on track/time.
How are you improving the way you monitor your learning?
If it’s not going well what do you do to keep yourself going?
What have you been really good at doing in this learning project?
What bits could you have done better?
Is this something you already recognised in yourself?
What one thing might you need to work on?

#4 More ideas for If – Then prompts

Enabling pupils to become reflective and thoughtful about learning.

An If – Then suggestion.

If I am finishing a piece of work, then I will reflect on how I did it and how I could have done it even better.

If I am near to finishing something, then I will stop and ask myself whether it will meet my expectations.

If I complete a piece of work, then I will ask myself what I have learned from the way I chose to tackle it.

#5 Written feedback on pursuing self-imposed standards

Supportive marking comments

Are you happy that this meets the standards that you have set for yourself? Does it accomplish what you intended ? How would you assess the piece against your own criteria ?

Constructing learning lessons

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns how you design learning episodes/lessons/projects.

As a teacher you will be:

building reflection on learning and reviewing learning as key features in the rhythms of the classroom;
designing learning activities with a dual focus; to explore content and stretch ability to use learning behaviours;
making conscious choices about:
- which habits/learning behaviours to introduce and stretch;
- how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging;
adding a third dimension to your teaching:
- 1. Subject matter;
- 2. Assessment;
- 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn the content.

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

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping surface the learning process. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the phase of development and the order in which they might best be introduced.

#1 Sorting the language of goals.

Every good teacher is in the habit of planning lessons around the delivery and development of subject specific learning objectives. Too often, what pass for learning objectives are no more than statements of what will be covered during the lesson and what students will have been required to do.

Learning objectives should be concerned with the statement of what will have been achieved and understood by the end of the lesson or unit of learning. In other words, what students will be able to do as a result of their own efforts and the teacher’s effective management of learning.

Rather than presenting learning objectives aridly to students at the beginning of lessons, enable them to realise what the objectives are and how they apply specifically to their individual learning needs. Many of the suggestions in this unit aim to do just that.

Learning objectives are sometimes called goals or outcomes or learning intentions. Whichever word is used learning objectives are about what is to be learned, the bit of the curriculum that’s being focused on.

Learning objectives are:

Broad statements
General intentions
Describe what is to be learned
Connect to “big ideas” and prior learning
Often not measurable

But how will we know we have achieved the goal or outcome or objective?

● What shall we count as success ?

● How shall we know we are on the way ?

● What detectable difference do we expect to see ?

These questions point to the need for success criteria or ‘what a good one looks like’. Success criteria describe and illuminate the learning objective and can be used to assess progress; they put flesh on the bare bones of a learning objective. Identifying ‘what a good one looks like’, enables students to glimpse the future and think about the upcoming learning journey. Whereas learning objectives tend to outline what is going to be learned, success criteria should describe how well you will be able to do once the learning objective has been achieved.

Success Criteria are:

Specific
Concrete
Describe what success looks like when the learning goal is reached
Measurable

#2 Flipping the emphasis in how goals are expressed

Getting student buy-in to goals

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

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

Putting the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

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

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

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

#3 Explore planning through stories

Many stories that we share with children have a planning element in the plot.

Use the following questions to explore this in almost any story;

What problems did the heroine/hero face?
What was her/his plan to solve the problem in the story
Did the plan work? Why?

Extend this to asking the children what plan they could think of if they were, for example, one of the three little pigs.

#4 Plan a picnic

Planning together (for young children)

This activity is about children planning something together, the subject, though enjoyable, is irrelevant. The activity is also a strong collaborative activity and will lead into revising when plans have to be changed.

#5 Beginning to think about achievement

Amongst all this planning activity it’s important to start children thinking about achievement too.

What is real achievement in learning?

Invite your students to brainstorm their own definitions and come up with a list.

An achievement is something;

you can be really proud of
you have never done it before
that you kept trying to do and finally succeeded
you have done that you found difficult
you have worked hard to finish
you have done what teachers tell you is good

Notice that all these are aimed towards a growth mindset. Make sure your praise matches these statements. You could use any one of these to group children’s learning on a wall display. See #3 below.

#1 Building learning goals into lessons: shift your own thinking

Setting goals with learning in mind

Lessons have two key purposes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#2 Predict the next learning focus

Use this as a plenary session.

Ask students to predict what the next lesson will focus on, based on their learning from this and previous series of lessons.

Answers could be given in as the students leave the lesson and the answer revealed at the start of the next. You could even introduce a regular ‘predict-the-learning’ segment in your teaching.

Extend this idea by asking students to connect and sequence a series of lessons together

#3 We’ve got a problem

A group planning activity for use with older students.

Taken from TLO’s online BLP Activity Banks.

#1 Build in expectation for students to establish their own success criteria

Creating Success Criteria

Success Criteria, which should be closely tied to the learning objectives / intentions, are specific, concrete and measurable. They describe what success will look like when the learning goal has been reached.

In earlier phases (Purple, Blue) success criteria are generally determined by teachers and shared with learners. By this phase the learners themselves can be entrusted, on occasion, to determine their own.

Encourage students to design their own success criteria, and assess their own learning against these criteria.

It is dependent on students having a reliable sense of standards – it is unlikely to be within the grasp of a learner who does not as yet have a secure sense of ‘what a good one looks like’, or a learner who is happy with ‘good enough’.

#2 Thinking ahead of action

‘What will it look like when it’s finished?’ (WWILLWIF)

Set a task — physical, dramatic, written, practical, spoken, visual — that has clear parameters.
Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action.
Ask students to determine WWILLWIF for themselves and in conjunction with others.
Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.

#3 Build in opportunities for students to self-check their work

Monitoring checklists

Construct checklists with students itemising the important things to check before they consider something is finished. Use such checklists as they work through something, and use it again as a final check before they submit work for assessment.

#1 Closer coupling of the ‘how’ and the ‘what; planning for learning

Infusing learning with content in lesson design

Learning in school has two key purposes;

to enable learners to acquire some knowledge, skills or understanding
to enable them to optimise the use of their learning behaviours in order to acquire knowledge/understanding or skills.

The ‘what’ of learning – knowledge, skills and understandings are determined by the curriculum with little latitude. The ‘how teachers teach’ bit is less closely prescribed, although there are standards of classroom practice coupled with expectations of ‘what good teachers do’ that combine to determine teaching behaviours.

Designing split-screen lessons

Designing a ‘full blown’ split-screen lesson involves a number of considerations, some of which may be a little unfamiliar to start with. Planning might start with the normal question: what do I want all / most/ some of the pupils to know / understand / be skilful in by the end of the lesson? But then comes the learning power thinking:

• How do I want my students to be learning? What learning habits do I want them to stretch in this lesson?

• What sort of learning challenge [at the heart of the lesson] will extend or expand their learning in ways that will intrigue and challenge them?

• How competent are these students already in using this learning habit—do I need to warm up the relevant learning muscle at the beginning or during the lesson?

• How can I really stretch this muscle so that we build on past experience?

• When will I build in moments of reflection to evaluate how effectively they are or have been learning?

As teachers get used to asking ‘What would this lesson on forces or poetry or positive and negative numbers look like if I coupled it with listening or imagining or noticing or capitalising?’, a whole new world of lesson design comes into view. Lessons on the same familiar content can be transformed when viewed as opportunities to stretch a wide variety of different learning capacities. Once the unfamiliarity wears off, we have found that this way of looking at classroom learning captures teachers’ interest and renews their creativity.

#2 Try ‘planning in reverse’ (future based planning)

Future-Based Planning

Basically this is about asking students to envisage what their goal will look like when they have achieved it and planning back from that achievement to now. This is a powerful technique because it is about planning from the strength and confidence of achievement rather than from uncertainty of just starting out. It’s harder than you might imagine but worth the effort. Take students through the following steps:

Step into the future. Imagine you have achieved your goals
Bring back to mind your ideas about goals, and describe them as though they are happening now
Describe how it is: –
- what is in place
- what is happening
- how are you feeling
- how are you behaving
- what can you do
Establish a picture of success – think it, feel it, see it.
From your viewpoint in the future, think about what you did to get there:
- What did you do the day before handing it in?
- What did you do the day/week before that?
- What did you do the day/week before that?
- When were different ideas introduced and finished?
- What resistors were overcome, when and how ?
Plot the broad path of each aspect of your plan backwards from the future, take each aspect in turn.
- researching
- building lines of argument
- drafts
- illustrations/maps
- monitoring points
- revising points
Look across the aspects:
- Is there coherence?
- Does it make sense?
- Are some things dependent on others and is the ordering right?
- Have you thought about resisting factors?
- Is this manageable, where are the possible overload points?
Amend the timing of these aspects accordingly.
Record this broad outline of action.

Write or draw it on a flipchart sheet with a target date.

#3 Build in planning for consequences

Encourage deeper thinking about consequences

By this stage students will be familiar with planning and organising their learning but may not yet have considered the consequences. In considering a course of action we need to consider the consequences because it invites students to predict along a timeline into the future.

Things to discuss;

what may happen as an immediate consequence of this?
what may happen in the short period of time as a consequence?
what may happen after some time when things have settled down?
What might be the long term consequence of this action now?

Important concepts like possibility, probability and certainty are involved in considering questions like;

What outcome are you sure about?
Will it always turn out like this?
What else could it be like?
Do we know what will happen?
What do you think will happen? Why?

#4 Planning for research

A useful first step on any research activity can be to ask some key questions.

On a chosen topic invite students to make lists under the headings;

What do we know about this topic?
What do we need to know?
How can we find out?
Where?
Who might help us?

#5 Planning for risk

In this organising phase students should be planning for risk and asking themselves questions such as;

What are the dangers?
What might go wrong?
How can that be avoided?
What’s the worst thing that could go wrong?
How do I make sure it doesn’t happen?
What’s the ideal outcome?
What’s the most likely outcome?

Celebrate learning values

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns what is valued, recognised, praised, displayed about goals.

As a teacher you will be:

showing attention to learning, rather than performance;
recognising, praising, displaying aspects of pursuing and achieving clearly defined goals;
acknowledging/recognising/ praising when goals /success criteria are achieved;
attending to the growth of learning habits associated with becoming goal orientated.
prizing aspects of self-regulation
prizing risk taking, trying new ways, and being flexible
prizing collaborative activity as a way of co-constructing knowledge
prizing the generation of intriguing ideas, making interesting connections, and forming well reasoned arguments over ‘right’ answers
recognising good (insightful and generative) questions as more worthy than good answers
prising self review and evaluation the learning process as essential for understanding learning and becoming a self regulating, independent learner.
Focus is on the learning rather than performance. By concentrating on the learning the performance takes care of itself.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to show how you value the opportunities that working towards clearly defined goals offers the learner. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the phase of development and the order in which they might best be introduced.

#1 Displaying our ‘plan for today’

Another obvious way of introducing the need to plan is to have a daily programme.

What should we do?
When should we do it?
When should we stop?
Why should we do it that way?

Find ways of documenting and displaying some of the following;

the daily planned timetable
the weekly planned timetable
long term plan of major events of the year
weekend plans, how they plan to spend it
study plans for older students, homework or study plan for a project
holiday plans

#2 Celebrating ( reinforcing) learning behaviours

Here’s an interesting story from Nayland Primary school in Suffolk.

We use circle time to discuss our learning each week and to positively identify children who have done well. Initially the children who were seen as being traditionally successful were selected; good students as opposed to good learners. However, as discussion gradually changed through modelling from the teacher, the children began to realise that just because someone didn’t get it ‘right’ didn’t mean they weren’t a good learner. We talked about Karl who had really persevered with his learning in a science investigation by repeating the test when it had gone wrong. We also thought about Sophie who had imitated the process her friend had used to solve a Maths problem, showing that copying how it had been done was fine. The children now value how they learn and are beginning to take greater notice of how others learn too.

#3 Displaying valuable types of achievement

Here a teacher has made a weekly display of outcomes related to the ideas children came up with when they thought about achievement.

Look at our achievements this week;

Things we are really proud of
Things we have never done before
Things that we kept trying to do and finally succeeded
Things that we found difficult
Things that we worked hard on to finish

#1 Putting learning behaviours into curriculum plans

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

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

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

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

#2 Displaying the how of learning

Our plan for learning to spell

Here is a public prompt showing just one way (memorisation) this class is getting to grips with spelling. The subject (spelling) itself isn’t the point here. What’s important is that students are being offered reminders about the how of learning, e.g. having a simple plan to help remember spellings.

#1 Display planning prompts: FAME

Another example of public prompts related to the ‘how’ of learning.

#2 Goals and public recognition for growing learning behaviours

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

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

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

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

#1 Display questions for possibility, probability and certainty.

3. The culture sort

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in realising the value of remaining focused and avoiding unnecessary distractions?

The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases.

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning
Talk for learning
Constructing learning lessons
Celebrate learning values

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns learning becoming a shared responsibility.

As a teacher you will be giving students more responsibility for their own learning by:

acting as a learning coach, gradually enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
focusing collaborative activity to help students to see each other as resources for learning;
offering students choices about what and how to learn;
enabling students to talk more, with you talking less;
modelling being a learner;
surfacing and promoting the processes of learning itself.

Shifting responsibility for learning ensures students recognise, use, understand and grow their learning habits.

The classroom gradually becomes a learning community where everyone is learning from each other and growing more confident as learners as a result.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been included for their effectiveness in helping to unhook teacher-student dependency and shifting more responsibility for learning to students. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the progression phase the ideas might best secure.

#1: Introduce the idea of distraction

Quick ways in to introducing managing distractions

For older students.

Here are a couple of ideas for introducing the idea of distractions to students in the transition years. They need not be used in the ‘worksheet’ format of course! If these don’t suit there are plenty of other ideas later in this section.

For younger students.

Here is a story about managing distraction in everyday life. Take a look at the sort of questions the text calls for….both the content and the underlying process being unpacked.

#2 Explore the idea of managing distractions.

Exploring what it feels like

AIM To enable students to recognise;

What distractions are
What it feels like when being distracted
A range of distractions
What distracts them.

Set up the Learning Challenge

Pair up students — Student A, Student B.
A to describe a complicated process, e.g. tying a shoelace or tie.
B to try to distract by –
- butting in –
- looking bored –
- looking elsewhere –
- talking about how they would do it –
- and so on 2 minutes.
Swap roles.

Plenary Discussion Explore:

What happened?
How were you distracted?
What did being distracted feel like?
How could you avoid or manage the distractions better?

Record Distractions

As a whole group, or in pairs, construct a list of things that distract people: – in the classroom – at home.
Prompt: Distractions may not be outside us, but in our heads …
Compare the lists. Draw out interesting / mundane distractions.
- (Could be done using Post-its as a scan and focus exercise.)

#3 Model being distracted

Model distractions (ages 4-8)

A quick starter activity to illustrate the meaning of distraction.

Explore the effects of distractions on pupils.

#4 Start students self-monitoring their distractions

Am I a ☆☆☆ manager?

Work with students to describe different degrees of the ability to manage distractions.For example:

A 3-star manager might

always keep focused on what s/he is learning
support other learners by helping them to manage their distractions

Use language appropriate for the age of the students.

Comment on behaviour in order to recognise and value the management of distractions.

Ask students to help each other with ideas about how to earn more stars as distraction managers.

#5 Classroom layout: managing the learning environment

An environment that’s their’s to manage

Being concerned with classroom layout in dealing with distraction may seem strange bedfellows, but if we think of distraction in the wider context of managing the learning environment it begins to make more sense.

Just have a look around your classroom and ask yourself:

Does it feel a calm place to be?
Are there different habits within the classroom? e.g.A quiet thinking place, An editor’s table and chair
Is the layout quickly adaptable?
What about the walls? Do they celebrating the classroom values? Too busy/congested?
Are learning resources accessible by students? Do they know where things are? Can they get what they need, when they need it?
Do you expect students always to sit at tables? Are there any other work spaces?
Is it a distracting environment? Does it aid quiet reflection?
Is the environment their’s to manage?

Classrooms that feel like homely places to be, where there’s freedom of movement, a choice of learning spaces a sense of calm and where students feel they belong all seem to help concentration levels, lessen stress and focus effort.

Read about another ...

The Saints’ Way MAT in Cornwall decided to fundamentally challenge their thinking about educational spaces and provision. They wanted to enable learning, not necessarily direct learning.

‘I do not teach anyone I only provide the environment in which they can learn.’
Albert Einstein

The classroom environment became their starting point. It just so happened that they had a new classroom that needed to be equipped for the coming year – a blank canvas. The brief they set themselves was to create a flexible, neutral space that would facilitate learning. They had already equipped a number of classrooms with furniture from Ikea so returned to the catalogue for inspiration.

The first decision was to put all the furniture on casters to maximise flexibility within the space, they centralised the resources so that they could put large whiteboards at child height on every wall. These were to enable pupils to think about, explore, plan and reflect upon their learning, they would become the Working Walls, ensuring that all information was current and relevant. They arranged several work and break out spaces including tables and chairs, bar tables and stools, sofas, bean bags, an architect’s desk. This variety of work spaces has enabled every child to feel comfortable and find their element. Some prefer tables, other work alone, some like being perched high up, others snuggle into sofas. Higher up display boards were minimised, but those that remained were covered in neutral backing paper in order to maintain a calm space where the pupils’ work would provide the colour.

It may not look like a conventional classroom but it’s a space where learners feel able to move about, find what they need and learn in a variety of positions. There’s less fidgeting, more comfort and less stress and more focus.

The new classroom layout

#1 Introduce how to focus effort

Explore the meaning of effort

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

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

See Celebrate learning values #2 below for a poster of Effort prompts.

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

Targeted effort is effort that has direction and purpose. It is underpinned by clear guidance and the specific goal to be achieved.

What you are doing here is giving effort a size and direction. What students need to understand is that their effort has a size and a purpose.

#2 Use ‘If-then’ statements to strengthen focusing effort

Put ‘If-then’ planning into action in your classroom to make effort more specific and focused

‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. In this case focusing effort it’s useful to list all the sorts of places this is needed.

‘Thens’ are what you will do about something; the action you will take. In this case the ways of focusing effort as introduced in #1 above.

The how of ‘If-then’ planning and a relevant example:

When setting a goal, for example ‘make more effort’, you need to specify not only what you will do but also where and when you will do it.

If (or when) [___situation__], then I will do [___behaviour__]
An If-then statement linked to the ‘make more effort’ goal might be
‘If I lose focus at the start of a task, then I’ll look at the success criteria to give me direction ‘.

This may sound a bit cumbersome to start with but research suggests far more goals are achieved by using ‘if-then’ statements. And the clever bit is that this builds self talk at the same time. You do what you are telling yourself to do.

#3 Model effort

Give students an idea of what effort looks like in practice.

Demonstrating a task which you expect them to complete later in the lesson.
Explain what you are doing, in terms of effort, as you go along.
Your commentary might include:
- referring to success criteria to plan and direct your actions
- using an unsticking strategy when you come across something tricky
- looking for feedback from the class on your efforts, and adjusting your course in the face of that feedback
- reminding yourself to refocus when a distraction comes along

#4 Introduce the idea of being absorbed

Introduce students to the idea of being absorbed

Try this starter activity to introduce students to being absorbed. Useful at the start of any lesson.

Contains

Use it to extend the language of focusing on learning.

#1 Introduce ideas about working memory

Help for working memory

Working memory is what we use for processing information in real-time. It is particularly exercised when we are learning new things, performing tasks, cogitating, questioning and so forth. Your students are using it all the time during lessons. But working memory is limited to about 7 items at a time – any more than that and the brain starts to freeze up, and engagement drops. We sometimes say ‘I don’t have the head space for that’. Students will need to know when they are reaching capacity, and how to cope when they do.

Ways to free up thinking space

Fortunately, freeing up working memory is relatively simple.

jotting things down as notes,
talking through a process out loud,
creating a mind map
making a set of lists to group disparate pieces of information into larger lumps
splitting a task down into smaller tasks

are all good techniques for giving the brain more thinking space.

#2 Three strategies for refocusing effort: nudging not telling

Model it: for the student who is well and truly stuck, or who has taken a path that leads to a dead-end and is withdrawing from learning, try modelling the process for them. Narrate as you go, highlighting the thinking processes you are using, what you plan to do next, how you are getting yourself unstuck, and so on.

Nudge it: For students who are more resilient to becoming stuck or encountering difficulty, try using gentle nudges to get them out of the mud. “Can you think of something we did earlier that might help you?” “How have you tackled this sort of problem before?” “Would the instructions help you here?” This is far from a full-blown model of what to do, but rather prompting to a way back in to the learning.

Give clues: Some students will enjoy the added brain tease of a clue to nudge them in the right direction. “I think Newton had the right idea here…what about you?” “Perhaps it is a bit like hibernation…?” “Chapter 4 has some interesting things to say on this”

#3 Introduce ideas for overcoming hard slog of practice

Embracing the hard bits

It’s the hard parts in learning that can cause demotivation in students accompanied by a greater likelihood of distraction. Students and teachers need to learn how best to cope with them.

Good work on the hard parts is a structural challenge for teaching as well as learning. We need to build in versions of ongoing assessment but assessment that is not concerned with marks /grades or evaluating the the how of learning. This is assessment designed to feed into the learning process and make the learning stronger. It’s possible to organise the rhythm of learning so that it embraces;

deliberate practice
assessment focused on understanding
peer and self assessment
communicative feedback

Teachers need to anticipate where the sticking points in the content are likely to be, the troublesome knowledge, and then ask;

what standard ritual ways of thinking might get in the way?
what do students know already that they might not have linked to this topic/knowledge/task?
what is getting in the way of them thinking differently about this content to be able to assimilate it?
what might they need to unlearn in order to relearn this content?
which aspect(s) of the content is conceptually difficult

Here are researched ways of structuring work on the hard parts into the rhythm of the learning.

Vary practice activities and conditions
Interleave rather than block practice
Break down complex problems
Use low stake tests/quizzes with students
Encourage students to self test
Offer clues rather than solutions

You can read a little more on each of these below.

1. Introduce variety and unpredictability into classroom environments

Making learning easier boosts retrieval strength in the short term and this leads to better outcome performance. This feels good and produces a sense of cognitive ease. When something feels comfortable and familiar, it makes us feel good. And when we feel good, we’re relaxed, not thinking. BUT because the deeper processing that encourages the long-term retention is missing, that retrieval strength quickly evaporates. The very weird fact of the matter is that forgetting creates the capacity for learning.

Remember though, learning happens when we think hard, so we need to create conditions which induce cognitive strain. Strain is unpleasant and stressful. We’re wary of the unfamiliar so we concentrate. When we’re forced into situations where we have to pay attention and make an effort, we have to think. Visual and verbal information can be processed simultaneously without overloading working memory.

2. Interleave/mix topics together instead of presenting them in neat termly blocks

Practice should be distributed (spacing & interleaving) over extended periods of time. Spacing – exploits the cycle of forgetting and relearning (more strongly) by revisiting topics repeatedly over the course of a term or a year. Interleaving – what topics will you teach whilst you are waiting for students to forget what you have just taught before revisiting it?

Blocking / massed practice– review the basics, complete a few related practice examples, reach an acceptable level of proficiency, and then move to the next topic. Blocking leads to compelling short term gains, but interleaving the curriculum leads to deeper understanding by the end of the course.

3. Complex problems should be broken down into constituent parts and students required to practise these smaller elements before being asked to solve complex problems independently.

4. Test pupils’ ability to retrieve information instead of simply showing it to them again.

Regular low stakes tests or quizzes taps into the effect (that trying to remember something helps us with the long-term memory for that material). Quick questions on the board, quizzes, self-tests. If students have drawn mindmaps, get them to try redrawing them from memory. If using flashcards, make sure they are testing themselves by jotting down their contents from memory, rather than simply looking at them (recognition vs recall). Students often mistake familiarity with material for the ability to recall it. We can help students from more accurate judgements of learning by encouraging a delay between studying and self-testing

5. Self testing

We are more accurate at predicting later performance when there is a delay between studying material and making a judgement about how much we can securely recall. Encourage students to test that judgement by attempting tasks or quests from memory.

6. Give clues rather than complete solutions so that pupils have to generate rather than simply repeat answers.

BUT When teaching new material, ensure pupils are not overloaded – more inductive discovery methods require pupils to juggle a lot of information at once in order to perceive the relationships or patterns we want them to understand. Providing an element of explicit instruction, using carefully considered explanations, worked example and accurate analogies, is almost certainly a better bet than providing relatively little guidance using problem-solving or open inquiry methods. Students should be provided with worked examples and exemplar answers as well as partially completed sample problems

#1 Putting targeted effort in plans

Plan for targeted effort

Expect students to plan for their targeted effort.When devising project plans with students, ask them to come up with;

their own idea for what they want to focus on
What that will mean they are looking out for (monitoring) as they undertake the work.
What they will focus on when revising in their work.

For example, a Y1 student might decide to focus on using capital letters at the beginning of sentences when writing a passage. When they read their work through at the end, they would focus their effort on the same criterion – are there any sentences that still need capital letters? And possibly ask themselves ‘I wonder how/why I missed that one?’

Or a Y10 student might aim to focus their effort in science on coming up with a really tight method for an experiment. They would monitor how things are going and whether they need to adjust anything. This will also provide the focus for the conclusion section of the process, as they can suggest refinements to their original method to gain more meaningful results in future experiments.

It’s all about where the effort needs to be focused. One bit at a time.

#2 Introduce attentive noticing

Now that your students are familiar with and in control of distractions it’s a good time to deepen their attentiveness. This activity offers an informal introduction to relaxed noticing rather than focused concentration.

Here you will find a small set of ideas for introducing and discussing the noticing capacity. Useful for younger students.

Both of these activities are part of the BLP Transition Activity Bank

#3 Extend understanding of distractions to beyond the classroom.

Build awareness of students’ distractibility across life more generally by using a learning log for recording everyday distractions and their reactions to them.

Discuss ideas about how to reduce distractions.

Extends the language of learning

Talk for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns using the language of learning,

As a teacher you will be:

using language to encourage perseverant, inquisitive, imaginative attitudes in students;
exploring learning as an explicit theme that runs across all subject matter;
talking about learning in terms of constant change; experimental, working towards, constant improvement, flexibility, could be;
prompting in the form of questions to nudge pupils into thinking for themselves. “That’s curious. What’s odd about that? What does that make you wonder?”
focusing questions on the process of learning, encouraging students to slow down, appraise the strategies and steps along the way, become more thoughtful and explore different strategies for making progress;
aware of positive and negative student self talk and building positive talk by giving them the knowledge and experience of the learning behaviours ( the tools) with which they learn.

The more richly children come to relate their own learning the more they see and take hold of their own role in it.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to surface the learning process and deepen the language of learning.

#1 Talk to extend understanding of distractions

Sometimes we are distracted by people, sometimes things can get in the way.

Have a discussion about these two types of distractions (people and things) and come up with lists of the different ways we can be put off by people and by things e.g. when we break a pencil, when we don’t have the things we need etc. Talk about what we could do in different situations.

#2 Talk to nudge the skill.

Managing distraction phrases

Encourage students to become more aware of distractions and how they might deal with them. Use phrases like:

What might put you off?
What might get in your way?
Do you sometimes distract others?
How might they feel when you do that?
What could you do to avoid being distracted?
Where are you now on our distractions scale?
How well have you managed your distractions today?

#3 Written feedback on managing distractions

Reinforce taking responsibility for learning with supportive marking comments

You have been successful because you avoided being distracted. Well done!

#1 Talk to extend understanding of ‘distractions’

To build up students’ understanding of distractions, use phrases like:

How did you keep going?
What could we do when we feel we are losing focus?
What sorts of things distract you most?
When are friends a distraction – or a source of inspiration?
What sorts of learning environment might be appropriate for different types of learning?
What internal distractions might we have? (tiredness, emotions, hunger, failure).
How could you let us know if we are distracting you?
You’re doing well with avoiding that distraction.

#2 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.

#3 Using distractions positively

Sometimes when we are stuck, becoming distracted is our brain’s way of saying “I need to take a break”. Often, moving away from the problem at hand and doing something different for a while, or simply gazing out of the window, can help new ideas bubble to the surface, it gives the subconscious time to work on a problem that has previously seemed uncrackable.

Consider having a quiet break-out area for students to use when they need a break, but make sure it isn’t being used too frequently or improperly!

Use ‘gazing out of the window’ positively.

When you see a student doing this ask them ‘What’s bubbling up in your mind? What new ideas are you imagining?’ rather than referring negatively to an apparent loss of focus or concentration.

#4 Written feedback on managing distractions

Giving feedback on the learning process; make it a habit of yours.

The story of Lemar and his distractions

Lemar was in Yr 6, registered SEN and always distracted. He looked here and there, talked to other children and sometimes wandered around the classroom when he should have been absorbed in learning.

His teacher decided that the place to start with Lemar was managing his distractions. After talking with all the class about what distractions were the pupils came up with all manner of ways they could use to try and avoid them. One idea was a simple line on a page to record when distractions happened.(Self monitoring)

The next day the teacher drew such a line at the top of Lemar’s page and asked him to try it out. You can see the line on the first picture and how Lemar marked it throughout the lesson. Although one could argue that the line itself was a distraction what it was actually doing here was making Lemar aware of being distracted.

On seeing his writing at the end of the lesson the teacher was astonished by the amount Lemar had managed in the time. The lines he had written represented 100% increase in volume. Note the teacher’s comment at the bottom. She acknowledges that he has indeed managed his distractions well.

A couple of days later Lemar had more writing to tackle. This time he created his own line at the top of his page….a significant breakthrough because he had seen the value of using this tactic. Here again he marks when distractions happen and even mentions his distractor Jordan! Furthermore he has completed yet more writing.

Hannah Moore Primary School

Here again the teacher comments on the writing and acknowledges that it is good work, but unfortunately she doesn’t comment on his obvious effort on managing his distractions.

If we are going to help pupils to build their own learning habits a single written comment won’t be enough, habit formation needs far more encouragement and reinforcement.

Wow! using your distraction line today has really helped you to focus well. Feel pleased with yourself for this good effort.

#1 Talk to focus effort

Effort focusing questions

What strategies will keep you going here?
What are the things you can do to keep yourself on track?
Can you show me what really good effort looks like?
What could you look at to see if you are on the right lines?
When did you target your effort effectively?
What could you focus on next?
If you had to pick one thing to focus your effort on, what would it be

#2 Written feedback to maintain interest

Supportive marking comments

Well done on keeping focused – this was a hard slog, but your effort was worthwhile and enabled you to produce a really good piece of work.

#3 Questions to focus reflection on effort

How did that effort help you learn more?
How did you manage to keep your effort up when there was a lot of distraction?
Where in that piece of work did effort play a really big part?
Which effort strategies have you found most useful?
How would you change your tactics next time?
Are there certain times in learning when effort becomes indispensable?
What does it feel like when you are really targeting your effort?

#1 Feedback to nudge the skill

Process-Level Feedback Prompts (adapted from Nuckles et al, 2009)

What strategies are you using?
Are there more efficient strategies you could use?
What other Qs could you ask about this task?
Do you grasp the concept underpinning this task?
Have you done anything similar to this before?
How could you use that information to target your effort?
Has making this effort made you want to learn more?
What could you focus on next?

#2 Written feedback on overcoming negative pressures

Supportive marking comments. Keep them coming to support habit formation

It would have been easy to have given up on this, but you stuck to your guns despite the doubts of others. You should be proud of what you have achieved.

Constructing learning lessons

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns how you design learning episodes/lessons/projects.

As a teacher you will be:

building reflection on learning and reviewing learning as key features in the rhythms of into the classroom;
designing learning activities with a dual focus; to explore content and stretch ability to use learning behaviours;
making conscious choices about:
- which habits/learning behaviours to introduce and stretch;
- how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging;
adding a third dimension to your teaching:
- 1. Subject matter;
- 2. Assessment;
- 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn the content.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to show how you value the process of maintaining focus. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the phase of development and the order in which they might best be introduced.

#1 Nurture the capacity to manage distractions

Sliding doors

Have some fun by thinking about what might have happened if characters in familiar stories had been distracted e.g. suppose someone distracted the prince each time he wanted to ask Cinderella to dance?

We’ll let you have fun finding other ideas.

#2 Build in break states

Break States.

Change the mental and physical state of the class by using music, quick games (Fizz-Buzz, Simon Says), guided relaxation, Brain Gym (Dennison, 1992), change of partner/desk/lighting, breathing exercises, or a refreshment break. Such activities refresh and relax pupils, enabling a greater degree of focus afterwards. Discuss their impact on concentration and how pupils could use them in other contexts to keep themselves on track with their learning.

Break states are a positive distraction.

#3 Build in ways to recognise distraction

Keeping count

For students aged about 4 to 8

Encourage your students to recognise when they are becoming distracted.

At the start of an activity give each student a number of counters, beads, bricks etc. Each time they find themselves distracted they put one counter etc. into a pot.

Groups of individuals can compare outcomes and talk about the different ways they had been distracted.

#1 Practise using defined effort

Tight effort

Set your students a task that requires them to focus their effort very tightly. For example:

Produce a piece of writing on the topic of ‘squirrels'( or indeed on anything relevant/current),

using only 10 words.

you have five minutes.

You can of course change the topic, word limit, and time limit, or add further constraints like ‘no lists’, to give almost infinite variations on this theme. Changing these criteria will have the effect of broadening or narrowing your students’ effort/focus.

#2 Use ‘brink’ targets and ‘flow’ tasks

Being in a ‘state of flow’ is about an ideal state of being totally involved with or absorbed by something you are doing. How might we try to achieve that state in the classroom? The secret to designing what we might term “Goldilocks ‘ tasks is to make sure they are exciting ( arousing the interest of the learner) with just the right level of challenge; where the student is on the brink of being able to achieve something (challenging but within reach)

#1 Targeting effort in self-assessment

A refinement of Austin’s butterfly.

Ask your students to copy a picture of a teapot (or something relevant to current learning) as best they can in 10 minutes.
At the end of the allotted time ask them to swap pictures with a partner.
Now provide students with a list of criteria against which to review the picture they have been given, but require them to select and focus their review against only one of the criteria. The list, in this case, might include: handle, spout, pattern, outline, lid. Stress that the feedback must be helpful enough to enable their partner to improve their drawing.This keeps feedback tight, focused and meaningful. It also helps students move on from potentially vague and ambiguous feedback.

#2 Scaffold tasks to focus effort

Looking 10 x 2

Give students 30 seconds to look at a picture relevant to your topic.

Ask them to list ten things they noticed about the picture.

Repeat the process, seeing if they can list 10 more things about the picture.

This process can be repeated until no new ideas come forth.

Focusing effort has now engaged the learning behaviour known as attentive noticing

#3 Go with the flow

Go with the learning and follow absorption. Where possible, don’t stop a lesson arbitrarily because of the time or a projected move to the next topic. Make sure there’s time to explore and to allow the students to develop their interest fully.

#1 Blending managing distractions seamlessly into a lesson

A a school in Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire teachers have extended the usual idea about classroom distraction (losing focus) by using the same idea to encompass looking out for red herrings/distracting or irrelevant information in texts.

A literacy lesson revolved around a writing activity. The stimulus was a video clip of Gavin Henson, the Welsh fly-half, taking a successful kick in a famous rugby match. This was used to stimulate a deep discussion about managing distraction and how this was possible in such a public setting. What had Gavin got to do to make sure the kick was successful?

The students were then invited to write a short piece for a newspaper using the the following information. They were asked to be aware of what they thought to be the key pieces of information. But of course irrelevant information was also included.

There were 3 layered targets for this piece of writing which different groups of students understood had to be incorporated into the writing.

The following task was to consider what advice Gavin Henson would offer a learner about managing distraction. This again led to a very profitable discussion which was then captured in writing.

Throughout the lesson students recorded their thoughts about managing distraction using this format.

Needless to say this teacher is Welsh and a passionate Rugby supporter.

#2 Blending attentive noticing into lessons

This activity arouses an appreciation of noticing skills.

Students will be able to:

Recognise that noticing can be fun
Appreciate the value of noticing
Appreciate noticing as a way into greater interest
Appreciate noticing as a precursor to making links

The following resources provide coaching notes, DIY resources and an observation tool.

You could try the activity without as much scaffolding. E.g. use a VTR, ask: – “What do you notice?” – “What’s happening here?” – “What makes you say that?” Then explore feelings about not being told where to look and what to look for, etc.

#3 Reflect on effort related strategies

Self-Regulation-Level Feedback questions (adapted from Nuckles et al, 2009)

What would be the best way of checking your work?
How could you reflect on these answers?
What happened when you …?
How can you account for …?
What learning goals have you achieved?
How have your ideas changed?
What aspect of this work could you now teach to others?

Celebrate learning values

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns what is valued, recognised, praised, displayed about managing distractions.

As a teacher you will be:

showing attention to learning, rather than performance;
recognising, praising, displaying aspects of remaining focused and bouncing back after distractions. For example:-
- recognising losing focus is something over which we have some degree of control;
- having a clear description of what focus means and how best to achieve it.
acknowledging/recognising/ praising when overcoming distractions is used more skilfully
attending to the growth of learning habits associated with retaining focus.

Learning powered environments build confident uncertainty. Managing distractions and remaining on task is celebrated as an interesting place where real learning begins.

Organisation of ideas below

#1 Display ☆☆☆ managers

Display and celebrate achievement of managing distractions

Ensure that your display walls include pictures and explanations that illustrate what you have been exploring about distraction and how to avoid it.

Here we see a ☆☆☆ Distraction manager ( explained in activity #4 Relating)

Encourage students to write on a separate note how they managed their distractions, and display the note with the 3* managers.

Make this a constant feature of your classroom

#2 Photograph and display students focusing on learning

Have your camera at the ready and capture moments where you see students focusing intently on what they are learning. Make a big fuss of this focused behaviour, explore with the students what they have been learning and what ‘focusing’ felt like. Regularly encourage students to think about a moment when they became really absorbed and how it felt. Celebrate the unusual ones by displaying them on a ‘focus or absorbed wall’. Students will develop an interest in their ability to become absorbed.

#1 Display students’ self monitoring of distraction

A learning powered primary school near Milton Keynes captured student’s own assessment of managing distractions each week
They have developed a 5 point scale describing different levels of distraction
Each student crafted a personal logo, known only to them and the teacher. Each week they would stick their logo on the level of distraction they estimated they had achieved across the week.
These assessments were recorded by school and set against progress data
Perhaps not surprisingly strong positive correlations were found…being able to manage distractions better positively correlates with increases in progress! Now there’s a surprise.

#2 Display an Effort checklist.

Create a prompt checklist of the ways you have introduced that will help focus effort.

This display list links to #1 Relating. Introduce how to focus effort

#1 Ways to help your memory: a checklist

This Working Memory checklist does the same job as a Stuck prompt…it reminds students about what they could do when their heads are in danger of getting confused; too full of ideas or too much to do or …….

#1 Develop a Raptometer

Switch the thinking from managing distraction to becoming absorbed and attentiveness

Raptometer.

Make a scale on the classroom wall to indicate degrees of absorption. Students or adult observers (e.g. Teacher Training student, Teaching Assistant) observe groups and/or individuals as they are working and move a label with a students’s name or picture up and down the scale according to how absorbed they perceive individuals are.

Use as a prompt for discussion about:

how students have become absorbed at different stages of a lesson,
what the characteristics of absorption are
what it feels like to be absorbed
how to be more absorbed in the flow and how to avoid distractions.

2. Ideas to Practise

Key Learning Question:

What could I do differently to engage students in managing their distractions and becoming more focused?

In this section we explore a range of ideas, activities, ways to display, and things to say about understanding distraction and becoming more focused. The ideas aim to deepen your learning friendly classroom culture and help to support and strengthen your students’ relationship with focus: how to enjoy it; what to do about it if disrupted.

Much of being able to be focused involves your feelings; your emotional responses to learning. Being emotionally robust is a pre-requisite for powerful learning. Hence looking out for students who have lost focus (they are not usually hard to spot !) and offering them ways to maintain focus is one small, but essential, way of moulding them into powerful lifelong learners.

The ideas to practise are grouped in two ways;

In this section (2)

The four phases of learner behaviour (we have left the most advanced phase, ’embodies’, out):

Receives ( purple) Do as they are told, but need assistance, ‘Show me. Tell me’;
Responds ( blue) Act more willingly, prepared to try, ‘I’ll try’;
Values ( green ) Values the behaviour, does it more frequently, ‘I see why’;
Organises ( yellow) Organises themselves to use the behaviour effectively, ‘I’ll make sure’.

This grouping will enable you to look at all the ideas linked to a phase of development

In section 3 The culture sort

All the activities linked to the four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases

Most of the ideas to practise are not phase-specific and can be used, or readily be adapted for use, with students of any age. Have a rummage through the sections to see what you can find. As you do, keep in mind what your students do now when they become distracted and move off-task. Think about, what do you want them to be able to do that they can’t or don’t do now?

1. Where are you now?

Key Learning Questions:

How do my students deal with distractions? How focus friendly is my classroom culture? What might I do to develop a more focus friendly classroom culture?

Managing Distractions

Losing focus or getting distracted is an inevitable part of learning, it happens to all of us. As learners we come across distractions, both internal and external. If we are hungry, tired or anxious we find it hard to concentrate. Equally if there is too much going on around us or something unexpected happens, we may lose our focus or get side-tracked. But unless students are assisted to cope positively and practically with such situations their deep engagement with learning may be in jeopardy.

Being able to avoid distractions or get ourselves re-focused is as much about how we react emotionally as it is about having the practical strategies to work out what to do. Being able to manage distractions is a critical part of persevering.

Why is managing distractions difficult?

Being totally absorbed and focused isn’t always the best strategy. Total immersion, however valuable, may mean that you miss whatever else is going on, be it a new opportunity or a looming threat. Our ancestors would have been vulnerable were they not continually checking for potential danger, and so to a lesser extent are we. In reality some students are preoccupied with what they perceive to be more important calls on their attention than the learning topic in hand. This isn’t because they are wilfully off task, but because they simply cannot help it. The ability to maintain concentration on longer-term goals, in the face of more immediate attractions, isn’t finally developed until quite late adolescence. Nevertheless, calling attention to distraction, exploring ways to overcome it, being clear about what effort means, and devising activities that are likely to minimise distraction are all part of a learning friendly culture.

The two questionnaires in this section aim to help you analyse:

Where your students are now in their journey to managing their distractions. [Questionnaire 1 Distraction Questions]
What you do to help students minimise their distractions and what this might suggest. [Questionnaire 2 Culture Questions]

Results from these questionnaires will take you to a focused range of moving forward ideas.

1. Where are you now?

Key Learning Questions:

How do my students deal with difficulty? How challenge friendly is my classroom culture? What might I do to develop a more challenge friendly classroom culture?

Rising to the challenge vs taking the easy way out

Wrestling with difficulty is a natural part of learning, we all find lots of things hard, it’s a constant part of learning. Blocks and obstacles, just not ‘getting’ something, going into blind alleys, misremembering, getting flummoxed by having too much to think about, making little or even fatal mistakes are all things we may fear from taking the risk of trying difficult stuff. It feels as though there’s a lot at stake.

Being willing to ‘have a go’ or work through something we perceive to be difficult is as much about how we react emotionally as it is about having the practical strategies to press on, make an effort and work out how to overcome it. Being able to manage an effective way of rising to challenge is a critical part of persevering.

Re-framing challenge and mistakes

Most students, quite understandably, make great efforts to avoid making mistakes. After all, the culture of classrooms across the centuries has prized being right over being wrong. Examinations likewise! So it shouldn’t surprise us that our students have detected and absorbed this and hence do their best to avoid them.

Little wonder then that they often opt for ‘easy stuff’ to improve their chances of ‘getting it right’ – it seems a very sensible strategy to adopt in the face of the pressure to ‘be right’.

But never having a go at difficult stuff, succeeding at the easy option, avoiding the possibility of making a mistake, doesn’t bode well for real learning. It may well mean you are just coasting along – going through the motions, doing exercises, rather than learning. But avoiding challenge is just postponing the day when you’ll need to embrace real learning. The longer you leave it the harder and more disastrous it will be. Helping learners to make the most of challenge, make mistakes, put in the effort involves thinking of it anew: as an interesting place to be; with mistakes being valuable; and effort needing purposeful focusing. It’s about making challenge an adventure rather than a dispiriting chore.

The two questionnaires in this section aim to help you analyse:

What your students do now when they face difficulty and what this reveals [Questionnaire 1 Challenge Questions]
How challenge friendly your classroom culture appears to be and what this might suggest. [Questionnaire 2 Culture Questions]

Results from these questionnaires will take you to a focused range of moving forward ideas.

2. Ideas to Practise

Key Learning Question:

What could I do differently to engage students in confidently tackling challenging materials, making mistakes, and learning from them?

In this section we explore a range of ideas, activities, ways to display, and things to say about tackling challenge. The ideas aim to deepen your learning friendly classroom culture, helping to support and strengthen your students’ relationship with challenge; how to enjoy it; what to do about it; how to overcome it; when to give up on it.

Much of being able to deal with challenge involves your feelings; your emotional responses to learning. Being emotionally robust is a pre-requisite for powerful learning. Hence making sure students can face and manage difficulty is one small, but essential, way of moulding them as powerful lifelong learners.

As one teacher said to us recently: “I became a better teacher the day I stopped thinking ‘Have I made it easy enough for them to understand’ and started thinking ‘Have I made it hard enough to stretch them?'”

The ideas to practise are grouped in two ways:

In Section 2 (this section)

The four phases of learner behaviour (we have left ’embodies’ out):

Receives ( purple) Tell me, Show me, where their tendency is to do as they are told.
Responds ( blue) I’ll try, where they act more independently
Values ( green ) I see why, where they come to value the behaviour
Organises ( yellow) I make sure I do, where they organise themselves to use the behaviour effectively

This grouping will enable you to look at all the ideas linked to a phase of development

In Section 3: The culture sort

The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students
how you talk to students
how you construct learning opportunities
how you celebrate learning

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases.

Most of the ideas to practise are not phase-specific and can be used, or readily be adapted for use, with students of any age. Have a rummage through the sections to see what you can find. As you do, keep in mind what your students do now when faced with difficulty. Think about, what you want them to be able to do that they can’t or don’t do now?

3. The culture sort

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in realising the value of facing up to difficulty ?

The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases.

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning
Talk for learning
Constructing learning lessons
Celebrate learning values

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns learning becoming a shared responsibility.

As a teacher you will be giving students more responsibility for their own learning by:

acting as a learning coach, gradually enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
focusing collaborative activity to help students to see each other as resources for learning;
offering students choices about what and how to learn;
enabling students to talk more, with you talking less;
modelling being a learner;
surfacing and promoting the processes of learning itself.

Shifting responsibility for learning ensures students recognise, use, understand and grow their learning habits.

The classroom gradually becomes a learning community where everyone is learning from each other and growing more confident as learners as a result.

Organisation of ideas below

#1: Introduce the idea of challenge

Explore challenge and stuck (ages 4- 11)

A whole-class activity set up to explore the nature of challenge, the difficulties encountered and how they work to overcome them

Contains

#2: Reframe challenge

Tell students about how the brain works and what happens when we learn. It helps students to understand why challenge can be difficult and uncomfortable i.e. that challenge leads to new neural connections being formed and existing ones being reinforced and developed.

#3 Model tackling difficulty

Challenge demo

Show students how you personally tackle things you find difficult, and what strategies you have for doing so, by demonstrating a piece of tricky learning. The idea is that sharing these experiences encourages students to imitate your approaches.

#4: Shift responsibility for monitoring the level of challenge to students

Monitoring challenge in action

Little strips of laminated card and a peg can put children in charge of their learning a little more. Labelled ‘Easy learning’, ‘Challenging learning’ and ‘Too hard’ on one side, pupils use them to let you know whether you are meeting their learning needs or if they could do with more extension or support. It is powerful when learners realise that challenge is an essential element of their learning; that finishing easy tasks quickly does not signal cleverness but indicates time-filling rather than real learning.

Make use of this type of resource routine in your classroom. It helps shift the responsibility for learning to the learner.

Idea taken from Learning Power Heroes, by Raegan Delaney, Leanne Day and Maryl Chambers

#1 Introduce the link between challenge and mistakes

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

Putting a focus on mistakes includes:

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

Here’s a good big idea to introduce and discuss:

Challenges are food for the brain.

Mistakes are the building blocks of understanding

#2 Introduce deeper ways of rising to challenge

Put ‘If-then’ planning into action in your classroom to target challenge and mistakes.

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 called ‘if-then’ planning or, perhaps more precisely, mental contrasting.

‘Ifs’ are the situations you want to remind yourself about. In the case making mistakes 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. Brainstorm a list of the ‘what we might do in response to the Ifs’.

This helps to sketch a path between where you are now and where you want to be.

Try If/Then statements/targets like:

If I think there’s too much to do here → then I will break it down into small steps.

When I am choosing what to do I will choose something a bit harder than last time.

If we are going to challenge ourselves today then.……..

If I make a mistake today then I’ll…….think about why/notice more about it/ talk it through with a friend/ ask for feedback from my teachers….and so on.

After introducing the approach to students you could use it in several ways.

Let the students think up their targets own based on their assessment of where they are.
You set the Ifs, they complete the thens
Use at the start of a lesson to frame what students are going to do.
Make sure you discuss these targets again at the end and keep a watch out for them being implemented during the lesson.
Offer feedback on students’ work using ‘If you want to improve XXX then you might think about YYY.

If you haven’t met this before here’s some background

So, goals like ‘Lose weight’ or ‘Exercise more often‘ or even ‘I want to try harder questions‘ are too nebulous. They beg the question ‘how’ or ‘what do I do?’

The how of ‘If-then’ planning

When setting a goal you need to specify not only what you will do but also where and when you will do it.

If (or when) [___situation__], then I will do [___behaviour__]
So going back to our goal about losing weight, we need to know much more about the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ and the ‘how to’ of losing weight.
An If-then statement or goal might be ‘If I get the pudding menu, then I’ll ask for coffee’.

This may sound a bit cumbersome to start with but research suggests far more goals are achieved by using ‘if-then’ planning. And the clever bit is that this builds self talk at the same time. You do what you are telling yourself to do.

Goal: I want to feel okay about having a go at things I don’t understand

If…

…I I don’t know what to do next…

…I think I have made a mistake…

…I am feeling overwhelmed…

Then…

…I will (Some specific statements to move them forwards)

#3 Reframe making mistakes

Re-framing mistakes means putting them into a different, positive, light.

You’re not just putting a positive spin on mistakes, you are giving students a different way to think about them. It’s about turning all the negative connotations of mistakes into being positive and useful. Thus it leads to improvement and development in both learning outcomes and students’ learning behaviours.

In making this shift think about:

how you would talk about mistakes
how you would offer feedback on mistakes
how you would change students’ views of themselves as learners
how you would display and show that you value mistakes
how you would describe the purpose of mistakes
how you would change students’ language about mistakes

#4 Model being a learner

Tell your own learning stories

The attitudes, values and interests that you display in the classroom, knowingly or not, constitute arguably the most powerful medium through which the messages of learning rub off on students. To encourage students to engage in the effort necessary in rising to challenge, you need to:

demonstrate the habit and inclinations of a good learner;
talk about the challenges you have faced and how you overcame them;
show that you too have to put in effort to be successful;
show interest in the mistakes you make.

Read an extract from Building Learning Power, by Guy Claxton

An aspect of their teaching on which BLP teachers will want to focus is what they themselves are modelling to their students about being a good learner. Modelling refers to all the ways in which teachers demonstrate to their students the presence or absence of learning power in their lives, as well as its nature. They can ask themselves:

‘How much do I “learn aloud”—externalise my own exploratory thinking—in front of the students?’
‘How do I react when things do not go according to plan?’
‘To what extent do I reveal to the students the thinking that went into organising a lesson one way rather than another?’
‘How do I respond to questions I can’t answer—am I thrown by them?’
‘How much could I reveal about my own learning projects—with all their ups and downs?’

A BLP teacher’s job is as much to demonstrate the habits and inclinations of the good learner as it is to be knowledgeable and in control. Traditionally it has been the teacher’s role to demonstrate mastery of the subject, and to be able to answer any questions which the students may throw out. Teachers still tend to worry that they will lose respect from the students (and maybe from senior teachers and parents too) if they do not ‘know their stuff’ through and through.

But the professionalism of the BLP teacher must allow them to show students what it is to be a confident ‘finder-outer’ as well as a ‘knower’.

And if students or their parents need to have their attitudes and expectations changed somewhat, then that becomes part of the teacher’s and the school’s responsibility.

#1 Model dealing with challenge

Model how you might think about challenges:

What you think
- what is the challenge about?
- what is it asking me to do?
- have I seen one like this before?
- how did I do that one?
- were there any tricky bits?
- can I remember how I tackled them
How you feel
- do I feel I can do this?
- will it matter if I get this wrong?
- no, I can always try again
- how will I make sure I stay positive?
- I don’t need to feel negative about this because I am learning how to do this
What you need to do to make the challenge work
- can I spot the key words or symbols here?
- what might the end result look like?
- what’s the first step?
- and what’s the next step?
- what should I do if/when I get stuck?
- what’s the best way round this tricky bit?
- I could do…….
- or I could try….
- which would be best?
- Oh! I remember this idea from…
- and so forth
Turn it into a story

#2 Create a challenge checklist

Create a Challenge checklist based on #1 above. For example it could be:

a set of steps for students to go through
a set of questions to ask themselves
a set of key words to trigger ideas for tactics

#3 Differentiate mistakes

In the first place redefine all mistakes as good mistakes, since they help us to understand why we ‘failed’ and how to get closer to being successful.
Later you could redefine a particular subset of mistakes as Good. Here you choose to rename only some mistakes. Usually good mistakes means misconceptions.

#1 Build expectation that students analyse their own mistakes

Expect students to analyse their own mistakes and create their own feedback

Share assessment criteria with students and ask them to:

assess/comment on the (imperfect) solutions you provide. Invite them to produce improvements based on their own feedback.
require them to assess/comment on their own work, and amend it if necessary, before submitting it.

Frame your written comments as questions to which your students are required to respond.

“What do you think you need to do to make this section more convincing?” is preferable to “This section needs more explanation”, because it moves responsibility to the learner to identify what more needs to be done.
Essentially, this is about helping feedback to enable students to self-regulate their own learning.

#2 Coaching: Strategically withdraw the scaffolding

Letting students ‘get on with it’

Experiment with intervening only when absolutely necessary – stand back, listen and watch, and let the learning happen.

Talk for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns using the language of learning,

As a teacher you will be:

using language to encourage perseverant, inquisitive, imaginative attitudes in students;
exploring learning as an explicit theme that runs across all subject matter;
talking about learning in terms of constant change; experimental, working towards, constant improvement, flexibility, could be;
prompting in the form of questions to nudge pupils into thinking for themselves. “That’s curious. What’s odd about that? What does that make you wonder?”
focusing questions on the process of learning, encouraging students to slow down, appraise the strategies and steps along the way, become more thoughtful and explore different strategies for making progress;
aware of positive and negative student self talk and building positive talk by giving them the knowledge and experience of the learning behaviours ( the tools) with which they learn.

The more richly children come to relate their own learning the more they see and take hold of their own role in it.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to surface the learning process and deepen the language of learning.

#1 Talk to reframe challenge

Help students to change their talk about challenge

From ‘Challenge’ to ‘Interesting challenge’.

From ‘It’s hard’ to ‘It’s tricky’.

‘Tricky learning builds my brain.’

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

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

#2 Talk to nudge improvement in the skill

Useful Phrases

Encourage students to become more interested in doing something more challenging and in viewing failure positively. Use phrases like:

Are you finding this too easy?
How is it too easy?
What does easy mean?
That activity could be a waste of your time.
Can you see why it would be?
Let’s find something more useful, more challenging.
How could you challenge yourself a bit more?
You will really enjoy the struggle.
Don’t take the easy way out!

#3 Talk to reflect on challenge

‘What was your biggest challenge today?’

‘How did you overcome it?’

‘What does it feel like when you are thinking hard?’

‘What did/does it feel like when you overcame/got through the challenge?’

#4 Feedback to reinforce challenge

Reinforce taking on difficult tasks with supportive marking comments

This was difficult, but you gave it a really good go. Well done for not taking the easy way out! OR I like the way you took up the challenges today. I can see you really enjoyed it.

#1 Talk to explore handling uncertainty and taking on more challenge.

Use phrases like:

Finding it hard is the most interesting place to be. It’s where real learning begins.
Mistakes can be the signposts to success
How will you feel when you finish that?
What can you learn from that little mistake?
You look as though you are really enjoying puzzling over that

#2 Talk to nudge improvement in the skill: keeping going with challenging material

Use the ‘support to continue’ technique: questions not answers

If students freeze when they are wrestling with something they find tricky, offer supportive questions not answers. A basic support to continue is ‘What might you do next?’, and when this has been done simply ask the question again.

To extend the ‘support to continue’ approach, try using phrases like:

What have you already tried? What else might work?
Why is this proving difficult? What is it that you can’t do?
What did you do last time?
I wonder what you did to move on?

Coaching approaches

‘Support to continue’ prompts are seen as helpful by pupils. You are encouraging them to take over the job themselves and reminding them that uncertainty shouldn’t lead to paralysis.

The advantage of asking questions over telling is that you are in a better position to monitor how students are learning when they are doing the explaining. Ask students how they might check their answers or why they think they are right or wrong. Have them work with each other on this to encourage a learning community rather than just teacher-student dialogues.

“Expert tutors often do not help very much. They hang back, letting the student manage as much as possible. And when things go awry, rather than help directly they raise questions: ‘Could you explain this step again? How did you… ?’” (Mark Lepper)

When we are curious we are genuinely interested in learning. Curiosity lies at the heart of coaching, hence coaches are effective listeners and ask questions to open dialogue without sounding like an interrogation. Coaching aims to enable people to see what they are doing more clearly and discover their own ways to improve. A coaching approach:

helps people to explore their challenges, problems and goals
provides an objective view of people’s actions to enable them to see things as as they really are
enhances motivation and raises self esteem
builds curiosity and encourages learning

Above all, coaches resist offering solutions. Offering solutions does little to secure learning as the pupil hasn’t been allowed to confront and engage with the problem and find their way forward. Learning powered teachers adopt a coaching role.

#3 Offer feedback on rising to challenge

I know that this was a big stretch for you, but you worked through the uncertainty and were successful. Well done!

#1 Talk to nudge the skill

In order to secure the ability to approach challenge with clarity and flexibility, pose questions like:

What is this challenge really asking you to do?
What will success look like?
How are you planning to go about it?
What might go wrong?
Do you have any fall-back plans?
What could you do if it goes wrong?

#2 Feedback to promote interest in mistakes

Supportive marking comments

There is only one mistake here. Can you find it ?

#1 Talk to nudge the skill

Enabling pupils to become reflective and thoughtful about learning.

To secure an understanding of and relish for challenge, ask:

How would you increase the level of challenge here?
How could you make this better even though it looks finished?
If things get tough what are some of the different ways you can respond?
Is this both challenging and enjoyable?
What makes you say that?
Try to find something that you are not sure you can succeed with
Why does it have to be challenging to be enjoyable?
How do mistakes link to challenge?
Are you brave enough to give this a go?
Is this difficult enough?
How could you inject further challenge?
What advice would you give to someone who thought they couldn’t do it?
Can you tell me how you would try to solve a problem you haven’t seen yet?

#2 Written feedback on engaging with difficulty

Supportive marking comments

You really excelled yourself here. The difficulties were immense, but you used effective strategies to unpick and resolve them. It must feel pretty good.

Constructing learning lessons

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns how you design learning episodes/lessons/projects.

As a teacher you will be:

building reflection on learning and reviewing learning as key features in the rhythms of into the classroom;
designing learning activities with a dual focus; to explore content and stretch ability to use learning behaviours;
making conscious choices about:
- which habits/learning behaviours to introduce and stretch;
- how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging;
adding a third dimension to your teaching:
- 1. Subject matter;
- 2. Assessment;
- 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn the content.

Organisation of ideas below

#1 Coupling content and process

Use it to explore how different tasks present different challenges to individuals:

what would panic some would be comfortable for others
the negative feelings of learning and overcoming them

Helps to prepare for stretch and challenge as a natural part of learning

download as a pdf

#2: Build reflection on challenge into lessons

Reflecting on challenge after the event

Draw a thermometer on the wall, with a scale from overstretched to low or coasting. Work with the class to describe the various levels. High might read “I took the step to try something just a bit harder than before. I worked on it until I could do it and understood it clearly” and Overstretched might be “This was a few steps too far … next time I will chose a more manageable task.” Talk to children about the degree to which they have felt stretched and ask them to move photos of themselves up and down the scale. Use it to stimulate discussion about sticking with tasks and understanding when it is not wise to do so.

This activity helps students understand risk and challenge. It is worth routinising this until students get the measure of it

#1 Offer choice

Enable students to select their own levels of challenge

Provide tasks that are designed to offer low, medium and high challenge (or cool, spicy, hot.) Allow students to decide on the level of challenge that they wish to undertake, and use it as an opportunity to encourage them to aim high.

#2 Coupling content and process

Plan to ensure students make mistakes

Start some lessons with something like:

In this lesson I expect you to make a couple of mistakes.
If you get half-way through and haven’t made mistakes move to more challenging activities.
When you make a mistake make a note and try to explain to yourself why you made the mistake at that point.
Later in the lesson we will spend a few minutes reflecting on what we learned from being stuck and decide which strategy worked best.

#3 Reflection: Use the learning pit to explore the nature of learning

The Learning Pit: understanding that struggle and effort are a natural aspect of learning

Use the ‘Learning Pit’ as a means of opening up a conversation around the feelings involved in learning, how effort is required, how the going will frequently be tough, and how mistakes are both inevitable and learning opportunities. It is essential that students know:

that the ‘pit’ is only one staging post on the learning journey
they can expect to recover/ get out by using positive self talk and tools
mistakes are inevitable
that it will require focused effort

It is also worth noting that the pit is not necessarily inevitable for all students in all learning – some will fly over the pit in some topics or curriculum areas.

#1 Up the level of challenge

Lift the level of challenge in lessons

Ask yourself what would happen if your lessons were constructed with the intention of making it hard enough to stretch students, rather than easy enough for them to understand?

#2 Coupling content and process: build trial and improvement into lessons.

Trial and Improvement; promote the idea that being stuck is okay. If students know we expect them to try things out, make slip-ups and have another go, their perception of being stuck is likely to turn to curiosity. Weave trial and improvement into lessons by, for example: –
- Include a trial and improvement success criterion when asking students to complete an activity or create a piece of work. For example: I want to see evidence that you have tried and improved at least a couple of different layouts before settling on…
- Include a designated focused trial and improvement time in lessons; time to test out ideas. Use scrap paper, mini whiteboards or rough books. Include opportunities for discussion to encourage editing, refining and clarifying of thinking.
Mark the working out that students do. Extend this common in maths idea across the curriculum.

#3 Keep challenges interesting and worthwhile

Design ‘stretching’ challenges

A useful list of questions to ask yourself when you are designing a ‘stretch challenge’. Notice how the teacher role is changing from ‘telling’ to coaching.

When you design what we might call ‘stretch challenges’—ones that are designed to build your students’ relish for difficulty— it’s useful to ask yourself the following questions:

How can I construct a problem-solving activity to enable students’ understanding of xyz content without telling them?
How can I intrigue them with something that is open to several interpretations?
What could I say/do/show to stimulate their curiosity?
How can I make this grab their attention…visually and aurally?
How long shall I allow them to stay stuck before I ask them how they are thinking?
If they are well and truly stuck, what can I offer as a nudge to get them thinking differently that doesn’t give the answer away?
Will I leave it as a problem hanging in the air to which we will return later?
When will I ask them to make links between the challenge, and what and how we are learning in this lesson?

#4 Encourage curiosity about mistakes

Spot the mistake.

Offer students examples of written work with different numbers of mistakes in them. Challenge students to work in pairs to correctly identify the mistakes in each example. When complete tell pairs if they have found the right number of mistakes but if not don’t discuss which, if any, they have overlooked.

#1 Expect students to create plans to manage challenging material

Require systematic plans for major projects/essays

Discuss with students the components of a systematic plan, what it might need to contain, how to build in contingencies, and strategies for monitoring progress.
Make time available for students to create plans before they spring into action.
Build in review points to assess how their plan is progressing and how they might need to change it.
Require students to submit their plans in writing as the first step in undertaking a major project.
Make it clear that the quality of the plan and subsequent amendments will form part of your final assessment.

#2 Expect students to analyse risks and strategies for achieving ‘high level’ work

Anticipating possible risks (or obstacles) and considering how to manage those risks requires a clear sense of what is to be done and where the sticking points might occur. It requires students to consider the points at which a plan might go wrong, and what they could do about it. Suggest they:

Look at their existing plan and ask the question ‘what could possibly go wrong?’.
List all potential risks to success
Suggest a possible strategy to overcome/counteract each risk.
Require students to add a risk assessment to all plans that they create in the future.

#3 Encourage flexibility in goal revision in the context of setbacks

Encourage flexibility because:

Sometimes students need to change their plans in order to achieve their end goals.
Sometimes set backs are such that the original goal becomes unattainable.
The goal then needs re-casting in a more achievable form.
Facing this possibility requires maturity and bravery.
The change of end-goal then means a revision of the original plan.

Many students are reluctant to undertake such root and branch change, preferring to rely on minor amendments to their plans in the hope that a number of small tweaks will produce the necessary impact. To counteract this tendency, make sure students repeatedly consider not only how their plan is progressing, but also whether the end goal is still achievable/relevant.

#4 Reflect on dealing with challenge

Reflection while still doing something

What’s happening ?
What am I seeing /noticing?
How am I feeling / thinking about that?
What else is happening?
What’s changing?
What’s going best?
Do I need to do anything about any of this?

Reflection during the review phase:

What’s the most important thing that’s happened? Why?
How was it significant?
What difficulties did I meet?
How did I resolve/ sort them?
Which strategies seemed effective?
What else could we/ I have done? How might it have been different?

Celebrate learning values

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns what is valued, recognised, praised, displayed about rising to difficulty.

As a teacher you will be:

showing attention to learning, rather than performance;
recognising, praising, displaying aspects of facing up to difficulty with optimism and determination. For example:-
- recognising mistakes as interesting learning opportunities
- ensuring mistakes are learned from
- having a clear description of what challenge means and how best to engage with it
- recording / celebrating ‘personal bests’ rather than high attainment.
acknowledging/recognising/ praising when rising to challenge strategies are used more skilfully
attending to the growth of learning habits associated with rising to challenge.

Learning powered environments build confident uncertainty. Facing up to difficulty and making mistakes is celebrated as an interesting place where real learning begins.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to show how you value the opportunities challenge offers the learner. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the phase of development and the order in which they might best be introduced.

#1 Recognise, praise, acknowledge overcoming challenges

One of the greatest motivators is a bit of success and celebrating success is an important part of a learning culture. Many primary schools have changed their celebration assemblies so that students not only decide on the criteria for class awards but have shifted the setting of criteria to the ‘how’ of learning.

Thus the learning behaviours are given due attention and are seen by the students themselves to be more worthy of recognition and celebration than high achievement in content.

#2 Display growth in confidence in dealing with challenge

Ensure that your display walls include early drafts of work which show where students felt challenged. Encourage students to write on a separate note how they got unstuck, and display the note with the work.

Make this a constant feature of your classroom

#1 Display and celebrate mistakes

Give mistakes high status, a key role in learning:

Say that you expect pupils to make, for example, 3 in a lesson. If they haven’t made the quota of mistakes they are to ask for harder work.
Make a ‘Mistakes of the Week’ display.
Identify ‘Good’ mistakes – as misconceptions and discuss them.
Offer a range of examples of good mistakes as lesson starters for pupils to find and discuss.
Model making mistakes and how you learn from them.

#2 Display

Sharing mistakes

Make mistakes useful. Create a ‘Beware board’ in the classroom and invite pupils to share their mistakes on Post-its. Talk about why the mistake was made, what thinking led to the confusion and how it could be avoided in the future. Bringing mistakes into the open and discussing them helps other students to avoid them while recognising their value.

#3 Celebrate growth in dealing with challenge

Self reporting

Younger learners talk freely about their learning when encouraged to by adults. Here we hear about how Hannah persevered to make a pattern. This may sound like a simple everyday occurrence, but for Hannah this was a challenge worth celebrating. It’s useful to have a camera to hand to capture small triumphs, talk about them and display them for everyone to celebrate.

#1 Create a challenge wall

Make the Challenge wall the focal point for your challenge culture. Make sure you add and refer to it frequently. For example;

Invite students to post up the most challenging questions they can think of. Allocate time to discuss them. The wall becomes a challenging talking point.
Cover the wall with challenges. questions, extension tasks, riddles, puzzles etc. These could be used by students who have finished their tasks early. Alternatively, set aside lesson time to for the whole class to discuss a challenge they select.
Display students’ work which shows mistakes they have learned from. This would include problems which students have persisted with or work that has been revised and edited to improve it.

#2 Celebrate growth in the skill

Many schools have found intriguing ways of celebrating and depicting the growth in learning habits. The display shown here is actually about the growth of questioning skills. Each aspect of the learning behaviour is explained on a leaf and students put a small picture of themselves onto the leaf when they feel they are using this skill effectively. In this way students become aware and conscious of their development and their next step.

#1 Display

Challenge plan

Students 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? It 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
Hand in on time!

3. The culture sort

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in realising the value of

stuck?

The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases.

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning
Talk for learning
Constructing learning lessons
Celebrate learning values

Aids to help shift responsibility for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns learning becoming a shared responsibility.

As a teacher you will be giving students more responsibility for their own learning by:

acting as a learning coach, gradually enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
focusing collaborative activity to help students to see each other as resources for learning;
offering students choices about what and how to learn;
enabling students to talk more, with you talking less;
modelling being a learner;
surfacing and promoting the processes of learning itself.

Shifting responsibility for learning ensures students recognise, use, understand and grow their learning habits.

The classroom gradually becomes a learning community where everyone is learning from each other and growing more confident as learners as a result.

Organisation of ideas below

#1:

Talk for learning

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns using the language of learning,

As a teacher you will be:

using language to encourage perseverant, inquisitive, imaginative attitudes in students;
exploring learning as an explicit theme that runs across all subject matter;
talking about learning in terms of constant change; experimental, working towards, constant improvement, flexibility, could be;
prompting in the form of questions to nudge pupils into thinking for themselves. “That’s curious. What’s odd about that? What does that make you wonder?”
focusing questions on the process of learning, encouraging students to slow down, appraise the strategies and steps along the way, become more thoughtful and explore different strategies for making progress;
aware of positive and negative student self talk and building positive talk by giving them the knowledge and experience of the learning behaviours ( the tools) with which they learn.

The more richly children come to relate their own learning the more they see and take hold of their own role in it.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to surface the learning process and deepen the language of learning.

#1

Constructing learning lessons

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns how you design learning episodes/lessons/projects.

As a teacher you will be:

building reflection on learning and reviewing learning as key features in the rhythms of into the classroom;
designing learning activities with a dual focus; to explore content and stretch ability to use learning behaviours;
making conscious choices about:
- which habits/learning behaviours to introduce and stretch;
- how best to couple these with content so that lessons become more interesting and challenging;
adding a third dimension to your teaching:
- 1. Subject matter;
- 2. Assessment;
- 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn the content.

Organisation of ideas below

#1

Celebrate learning values

This dimension of the learning friendly classroom concerns what is valued, recognised, praised, displayed about being stuck.

As a teacher you will be:

showing attention to learning, rather than performance;
recognising, praising, displaying aspects of becoming and undoing being stuck. For example:-
- recognising being stuck as an interesting – not shameful – place to be.
- ensuring mistakes seen as being valuable in learning.
- having a clear description of what effort means and how best to use it
- Good questions being as important as good answers.
acknowledging/recognising/ praising when overcoming stuck strategies are used more skilfully
attending to the growth of learning habits associated with being and overcoming stuck.

Learning powered environments build confident uncertainty. Being stuck is celebrated as an interesting place where real learning begins.

Organisation of ideas below

The ideas below have been selected for their effectiveness in helping to show how you value the opportunities being stuck offers the learner. The coloured lines bounding each idea suggest the phase of development and the order in which they might best be introduced.

#1

1. Where are you now? Copy

Key Learning Questions:

How do my students deal with being stuck? How stuck friendly is my classroom culture? What might I do to develop a more stuck friendly classroom culture?

Stuck and unstuck

Being stuck is a natural part of learning, we all get stuck. We come across blocks and obstacles, go into blind alleys, get flummoxed by a vast range of possibilities, or simply don’t know enough to decide what to do next.

Being able to get ourselves unstuck is as much about how we react emotionally as it is about having the practical strategies to work out how to overcome it. Being able to manage an effective way out of being stuck is a critical part of persevering.

Re-framing being stuck

But never being stuck or unsure doesn’t bode well for learning. It may well mean you are just coasting along; going through the motions, doing exercises rather than learning. Getting the most out of being stuck involves thinking of it anew; as an interesting place to be; being on the brink of learning; almost, but not quite understanding something new or different.

The two questionnaires in this section aim to help you analyse:

What your students do now when they get stuck and what this reveals [Questionnaire 1 Stuck Questions]
How learning friendly your classroom culture appears to be and what this might suggest. [Questionnaire 2 Culture Questions]

Results from these questionnaires will take you to a focused range of moving forward ideas.

2. Ideas to Practise Copy

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in realising the value of stuck?

In this section we explore a range of ideas, activities, ways to display, and things to say about being stuck. the ideas aim to deepen your learning friendly classroom culture, helping to support and strengthen your students’ relationship with stuckness; how to enjoy it; what to do about it; how to overcome it, when to give up on it.

Much of being able to deal with being stuck involves your feelings; your emotional responses to learning. Being emotionally robust is a pre-requisite for powerful learning. Hence making sure students become stuck and coaching them to get unstuck is one small, but essential, way of moulding them as powerful lifelong learners.

The ideas to practise are grouped in two ways;

The four phases of learner behaviour (we have left ’embodies’ out):
- Receives ( purple) Do as they are told;
- Responds ( blue) Acts more willingly;
- Values ( green ) Values the behaviour;
- Organises ( yellow) Organises themselves to use the behaviour effectively.

This grouping will enable you to look at all the ideas linked to a phase of development

2 The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students;
how you talk to students;
how you construct learning opportunities;
how you celebrate learning.

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases

4. Make your plan Copy

[NB Teachers who are following the Building Resilient Learners module will be undertaking this aspect of the learning cycle (planning) in the scheduled team meeting]

Key Learning Questions:

Which aspects of my practice do I want to change?

What do I want to accomplish over the next x weeks?

So far you have looked at;

how your students currently deal with being stuck; their level of sophistication (Section 1a)
how your classroom culture supports getting unstuck; the stuck friendliness of your classroom (Section 1b)
practical ideas for ways of dealing with stuckness.( Sections 2)

This section is about sorting out what you want to achieve and drawing up a do-able enquiry plan. Learning enquiry plans create a record of what will be done and as such are important documents. Research has shown that it is important to: make your own choice about what you do within the suggested range; know that you have the flexibility to adapt a suggested activity to meet the needs of your students; make the plan specifically focus on development; concentrate on a small number of actions (3 is good); shrink overblown plans to keep the change manageable.

You might also think about what you are going to do less of in order to accommodate the changes.

The plan represents a promise to yourself and your colleagues to do something. This promise should help keep the plan as a priority in your mind.

5. What’s changed ?

Key Learning Question:

What effect have my actions had on my students and myself?

In this section we look at evaluating your learning enquiry actions and their effect on students. In other words how your action plan played out. This is an important part of the enquiry learning cycle; finding out what you have learned about yourself and your changing practice and considering the impact this has had on students. Such an evaluation will help you to decide whether to continue with the changes, whether to adapt or ditch them, or even whether to recommend that such changes would be useful for other staff to adopt across the school.

There are two parts to the evaluation, a self reflection stage and a team reflection stage. The team reflection stage can only be accessed by those schools that are using these Units as part of a whole school Professional Learning Programme.

A maths lesson in action

Key Learning Questions:

What does a maths lesson using learning behaviours look like?

Intro text about the lesson and the 3 parts of this section.

The lesson in full

The lesson deconstructed into episodes with explanations of what to look for

Key questions about the lesson explored.

How learning powers work

Key Learning Questions:

What are the learning behaviours being used in this lesson? How do they work?

Not sure about this section. Thought we might need to explain habits like noticing, distilling, making links, questioning, etc ie the ones that are at play in the tasks

This could be a relatively short section especially for people who have not come across these learning behaviours previously. layout something like

#1: The learning behaviour…noticing

Explanation of this behaviour

Similarly for the other behaviours

How to link content and skills

Key Learning Questions:

How could I link maths content with key learning behaviours? What fits with what? How could I design tasks to make use of the behaviours to bring about mastery?

Unpack the essence of this section

Leanne I’m not sure of the order here and this is the key section; It might go something like

Fitting learning behaviours into medium term plans

Planning the flow of a lesson

Designing ‘towards mastery’ tasks (this is the heart of it)

How to gear up learning power skills

Key Learning Questions:

How might I introduce the learning behaviours to students and enable them to practice them in other contexts?

General intro to this section…about the learning behaviours have to be introduced, surfaced, trained. Teacher has to make interventions so kids know the language, understand what they are doing when using them, why they are important,

noticing

distilling

making links

reasoning

there could be more but its getting quite complex with just these.

4. How can teachers ensure learners improve as learners?

3. How do students improve as learners?

2. How do learners like to learn?

1. How do you like to teach?

2. Ideas to practise

Key Learning Questions:

What could I do differently to engage students in realising the value of stuck?

In this section we explore a range of ideas, activities, ways to display, and things to say about being stuck. The ideas aim to deepen your learning friendly classroom culture, helping to support and strengthen your students’ relationship with stuckness; how to enjoy it; what to do about it; how to overcome it, when to give up on it.

Much of being able to deal with being stuck involves your feelings; your emotional responses to learning. Being emotionally robust is a pre-requisite for powerful learning. Hence making sure students actually become stuck and coaching them to get unstuck is one small, but essential, way of moulding them as powerful lifelong learners.

The ideas to practise are grouped in two ways;

In section 2 (this section)

The four phases of learner behaviour ( we have left ’embodies’ out):

Lacks (grey) ‘I can’t. I won’t’, can be a reluctant or fearful learner
Receives ( purple) ‘Tell me’. ‘Show me’, where their tendency is to do as they are told.
Responds ( blue) I’ll try. where they act more independently
Values ( green ) I see why. where they come to value the behaviour
Organises ( yellow) I make sure I do.where they organise themselves to use the behaviour effectively

This grouping will enable you to look at all the ideas linked to a phase of development

In section 3 (The culture sort)

The four shifts in teacher behaviour:

how you relate to students
how you talk to students
how you construct learning opportunities
how you celebrate learning

This grouping will enable you to look at one type of teacher behaviour shift across all student development phases. Basically it shows the subtle behaviour changes you will need to make in order to build your students’ behaviours.

Most of the ideas to practise are not phase-specific and can be used, or readily be adapted for use, with students of any age. Have a rummage through the sections to see what you can find. As you do, keep in mind what your students do now when they are ‘stuck’. Think about, what you want them to be able to do that they can’t or don’t do now?

1. Where are you now?

Key Learning Questions:

How do my students deal with being stuck? How stuck friendly is my classroom culture? What might I do to develop a more stuck friendly classroom culture?

Stuck and unstuck

Re-framing being stuck

The two questionnaires in this section aim to help you analyse:

What your students do now when they get stuck and what this reveals [Questionnaire 1 Stuck Questions]
How learning friendly your classroom culture appears to be and what this might suggest. [Questionnaire 2 Culture Questions]

Results from these questionnaires will take you to a focused range of moving forward ideas.

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Sections Archive

Why can’t we just have a training day and read a book?

a) What it takes to grow innovative practice

This is how it works

Growing new practice

b) Why online learning ?

There’s more to it than you think.

Researched content to turn into practice

c) Changing professional habits

Changing practice takes time and effort

d) Why learning communities work

Essential support

e) A Professional Learning Team at work

Professional teams at work

f) The whole school learns together

How one school is making it work

How can we make the most of being part of a learning team?

a) An overview

Professional Learning Teams in a nutshell

b) A typical learning team agenda

A closely focused agenda

c) The culture of learning teams

Supportive accountability

d) Creating learning enquiry plans

1. When creating an enquiry question, consider:

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

Capture your learning enquiry as a question

2. Deciding what to do to make things happen

The key to such plans is to:

A do-able plan

e) A learning team in action

A stimulating and supportive hour.

What are the key functions of a Professional Learning Team leader and what makes them effective?

a) The role of team leader

A key facilitator role

b) Managing the learning team agenda and culture

Session agenda

A tight agenda to scaffold and focus change

1. Session objectives

Agendas item 1. Session objectives, what you want to achieve

2. Sharing classroom experiments [ learning enquiries]

Agenda item 2. Sharing classroom experiments. Learning with and from each other

3. Recapping on-line materials

Exploring:

Agenda item 3. Recapping on-line materials. Making sure it’s understood. Being excited by possibilities.

4. Deciding what’s to be done

Agenda item 4. Deciding what’s to be done. Deciding what to do, personally and whole school.

5. Personal action planning

5. Personal action planning

5.1 Helping sort out enquiry questions

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

Learning enquiry questions can be captured in this format

5.1 Helping sort out enquiry questions to focus the plan.

5.2 Do-able learning plans

5.2 Ensuring do-able learning plans

6. Evaluate team session

6. Evaluate team session. Could we improve our team working practice?

c) Learning teams at work

A team at work

How is the content organised and how can I make the most of it?

a) Content of the online Stepping Stones Phase 1 programme

The course covers;

learning friendly classroom cultures

four key learning habits

reviewing your progress

What is in Stepping Stones 1?

The course covers four key Learning Habits:

Perseverance

Collaboration

Questioning

Revising

How the online programme works

The online sessions consist of:

a) A Culture for building Powerful Learners

b) Progress in Perseverance

The following sessions delve deeper into Perseverance helping pupils to improve their attitudes to learning.

b1) Engage students in unsticking their learning.

b2) Engage students in rising to the Challenge.

b3) Engage students in Managing Distractions.

Reviewing
our progress