Units Archive

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

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

What do you think?

How does this extended progression chart connect with what you have already learned about Perseverance?
How does this chart extend your thinking?
What challenges and questions does this raise for you?

Make a note of…

Which column(s) your students are most secure in.
Which column(s) are most in need of further development.

Find out more about progression in Questioning ⬇️

Overview of the full Questioning progression chart

We tend to think of questioning as a common everyday skill that we all use and indeed it is. But questioning is rooted in curiosity and is therefore a big driver of learning. But as with any learning behaviour it can wither and atrophy if left unattended. If children are made to feel stupid for asking questions, or told that questioning is cheeky, or that questioning is time wasting they are more than likely to give it up…it has little value to them. So this grid draws together all the aspects of learning that might contribute to questioning becoming a vital, well-honed skill for navigating life. It deals with the details of questioning skill but also touches on search skills and indeed how we ask questions of others such that it’s accepted and generously answered.

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

Column one is about how we actually attend to being curious; what is it that piques our curiosity and how we keep it going. In the early phases this might involve looking carefully for the issues or details that our questions raise, using this information to go deeper, becoming fully involved/absorbed in a quest to uncover possibilities or answers. The more we ask, the more we find out, and the more curious we become to find out yet more. In the later phases we might become more picky about the information we are uncovering/seeking, making sure it is valid for our purposes. We become fascinated by both the big picture as well as the small details of an enquiry and seeking new experiences and information becomes a way of life.

Column two is about we go about being curious, finding things out, seeking information requires the ability to search effectively. This may start with asking questions of others or using a book index and library skills or reading a map. But these days searching rapidly embraces the internet and a whole new range of focused questioning skills come into play. Finding information may have become rapid and simple but discerning relevant, reliable and robust information calls for yet more new skills. How we seek, question and capitalise on a variety of resources, from books, to the internet, to physical tools is a vital aspect of any ‘finding out’ quest.

Column three is about what we say to ourselves as we learn. The statements capture what someone in each phase of the grid might be thinking. Students may use some of these phrases when talking with you, or in writing from time to time, but mostly self-talk goes on inside their heads. We have shown a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. How might we talk to ourselves in shaping our questioning behaviour? How does this talk move from the ‘need for help’, to enjoying the challenge of finding out, to taking a questioning approach to everything we do.

The deeper questioning chart.

Growing questioning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Column four is about the types of questions, and in this case the type of questions that are designed to seek more detail and depth. Here the questioning is more focused moving from simply knowing about closed questions and using them to find things out; to developing questions that will sift and filter information; to being about to use question frameworks purposefully; to being able to construct incisive and generative questions to probe the essence of something. In brief, how adept are we at posing questions that will uncover specific details and converge on and get to the heart of the matter.

Column five is about a different sort of questioning; that of opening possibilities (divergent). Here our questioning approach gets braver as we move from opening possibilities when prompted, probing for more expansive information, to asking ‘what if’ questions. This expansive questioning leads to exploring possibilities, thinking about things differently, stimulating new ideas, daring to be different, exploring hunches, being creative. It’s a line of questioning that leads us into the unknown.

The last column is about the aspect of asking questions of others. Questioning others, even through the lens of being curious, is a skilful business. It’s easy to upset people without realising it. It might be by using the wrong tone, or putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Building rapport with people is a really important aspect of being able to ask questions, especially when, for one reason or another, the questions have to be tough. In the later phases of developing this skill we learn how to prepare a set of questions that will make an argument/case, or uncover a problem, or develop a story (much as you may do in preparing a set of questions for guiding a lesson). Eventually we become skilled enough to know just what sort of question to ask, in the right way, in the appropriate setting. Thus we have become sensitive to the potential impact of posing questions as much as to the quality of the question itself.

What do you think?

How does this extended progression chart connect with what you have already learned about Questioning?
How does this chart extend your thinking?
What challenges and questions does this raise for you?

Make a note of…

Which column(s) your students are most secure in.
Which column(s) are most in need of further development.

Find out more about progression in Collaboration ⬇️

Overview of the full Collaboration progression chart

Collaboration involves knowing how to learn with others, as part of a team, in situations where no one person knows all parts of the puzzle. This complicated yet essential learning habit develops in several different ways. First of all it hinges on social interaction; how well we get on together, whether we are patient with others and respect their views. Then how we are able to bounce off others to build ideas; making the most of several brains rather than one. Next, how we learn to be part of a team and to perform different roles when needed. Fourthly, how we talk to ourselves about learning with others, where our real understanding of the process is revealed. Fifthly, how we contribute to the process of actually getting things done. Not just being there but doing something helpful. And lastly how we contribute to improving team performance by evaluating not just outcomes but the process of getting there.

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

Column one is about how we interact socially in learning and working with others. The way in which we learn the social conventions of behaving in a group; taking turns to speak and contribute, listening to understand others; being patient with others and not hogging the limelight; stepping outside our own concerns and building the confidence of others and respecting their views; being able to manage and overcome the inevitable controversy as teams work creatively together; and thus being able to become a valuable sociable member of any team.

Column two is about how just being good mates in a team doesn’t lead to success. Teams have to understand how to build ideas together; to draw on the ideas of others, to be able to graciously set aside ideas that wouldn’t work, to spark off others to ensure new and better ideas get an airing. And somehow, in all this ‘togetherness’ people are able to retain their independent judgement and avoid being drawn into group think. Teams share and build ideas together; growing and improving possible solutions in order to reach their goals.

Column three is about how working as a team is rather different to working in a team. It’s all about ‘teamness’ or ‘togetherness’. In order to work as a team people need to understand team roles, to find out what role they are particularly good at, to take on a range of roles when needed and eventually be willing to play any role in a team to ensure the goal is reached. Being able to work as a team is influenced by how our self-perception and confidence grow, how we learn to trust, and how we recognise the need for each other.

The deeper collaboration chart.

Growing collaboration; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

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

Column five is about how teams achieve their goals by using the well-known learning process of Plan Do Review. Good teams have people who know that the first job is to be clear about what the task is really about. They are skilled in considering/creating/agreeing realistic goals to be achieved and which everyone has bought in to. Then the team has to plan how they will achieve the goal, how they will monitor their progress and methodology and how they will make sure the job is well done.

The last column is about how teams learn how to improve. It’s the aspect of teamwork that is frequently left out altogether or given short shrift. But it’s the aspect of teamwork that helps teams build themselves into better teams. It includes evaluating how they performed as individuals in contributing to the work of the team and how/whether the team process worked to achieve the team goal. Importantly such reflection leads to serious re-planning of their ways of working. It’s meta learning at a team level. Good teams will be looking for what has become known as marginal gains, those little things we can do better/improve that will impact on the overall performance.

What do you think?

How does this extended progression chart connect with what you have already learned about Collaboration?
How does this chart extend your thinking?
What challenges and questions does this raise for you?

Make a note of…

Which column(s) your students are most secure in.
Which column(s) are most in need of further development.

Find out more about progression in Revising ⬇️

Overview of the full Revising progression chart

Revising is about the way we work on something to improve it. Whether it be icing a cake, solving a tricky maths problem or creating a well-crafted essay, all require effort, retries and determination to satisfy ourselves that the result pleases us. How we tackle such a job isn’t just a case of monitoring as we go along or reviewing the result: it will be influenced by other qualities. Our attitude to change, whether we have a sense of quality and what sort of validation we need. The grid intertwines these important contributors to our growth in the habit of Revising.

The learning guru Royce Sadler put it like this: “Students need to be able to judge the quality of what they are producing and be able to regulate what they are doing during the doing itself”.

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

Column one is about how we relate to the change process. For many of us, doing things differently is scary and only for the bold and confident. But if we want students to enjoy achieving their best learning outcomes, we need to scaffold that process by building confidence – helping students move beyond their comfort zone and becoming more flexible as a learner. In the early phases students adapt what they are doing because they are being told and/or supported to do so. But this support pays off at the ‘value’ phase (green) when students feel positive about their efforts and realise learning is all about rethinking and adjusting and redoing, rather than getting it right first time. By the ‘organises’ phase (yellow), students are ready, willing, and able to move beyond making relatively small changes to making wholesale changes or starting again on a different tack.

Column two is about how we relate to standards of excellence, quality, and correctness. The next contributory factor in revising what we are doing has to do with how we view quality; whether we have a sense of standards; our view of what’s good, bad or indifferent. In the early phases students accept what they are told about by teachers; what something needs to look like, be like, feel like. Schools are full of them – objectives, criteria, steps to success, outcomes – and constantly trying to achieve them can be dispiriting. But with support and encouragement students are able to begin to think for themselves what makes something good and determine their own standards.

Column three is about what we say to ourselves as we learn. The statements capture what someone in each phase of the grid would be thinking. Students may use some of these phrases when talking with you, or in writing from time to time, but mostly self-talk goes on inside their heads. We have shown a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. Some relate to standards, others to self-monitoring, or flexibility. All such self-talk is important in building a revising habit.

The deeper revising chart.

Growing revising; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Column four is about checking how things are going, about reflection in action. This column is about how we monitor what’s happening as we go along; keeping a weather eye on how things are going. Students need help to do this well. They need to know what they are looking for, what they are tracking. Should they look for good things or bad, for feelings, for whether they understand…? It’s a minefield. The early phases shown here relate to monitoring what you are doing against known criteria, and checking the process of doing something itself. Students need these props in the early phases. It’s only in the ‘valuing’ (green) phase that they become skilled at editing as they go along, having had practice with checklists and criteria in earlier phases. Look particularly at the difference between ‘value’ and ‘organised’. In the ‘value’ phase the amends, revisions, and re-tries are being done with the original aim/goal/objective in mind. In the ‘organised’ phase students are prepared to ditch the original plan, ask hard questions, change the rules and change direction. It’s a big and important shift in becoming an independent learner.

Column five is about the inclination to reflect on what we have achieved, about reflection on action. This is the essence of learning from experience although sadly it is not a common inclination. The key here is not simply reflecting on what happened and whether we could have improved, but whether we take heed of such lessons and behave differently next time. This is not a natural skill and will need careful structuring and nurturing. Notice that the early phases are about what happened and are heavily scaffolded. By green students are asking why they did it that way, and by yellow they are challenging those familiar ways of working and rethinking the how in order to achieve better outcomes. It’s a breakout moment.

The last column is about how we relate to external validation. The last constituent of revising has to do with how we need and use external validation – the need for a legitimate authority source to confirm that what we are doing is right. When we are chasing facts we need to be sure they are correct. When we are using standards we need to be sure they are sound. In the early phases this authority normally comes from parents and teachers. As students move through the phases there is a move to seeking out experts, dictionaries and original sources. (The internet invariably plays a role here but while it might be a great place to start it’s a terrible place to finish! It needs to be used with discernment.) Sources of legitimate authority play into how we revise and improve our learning.

What do you think?

How does this extended progression chart connect with what you have already learned about Revising?
How does this chart extend your thinking?
What challenges and questions does this raise for you?

Make a note of…

Which column(s) your students are most secure in.
Which column(s) are most in need of further development.

8 shortened HYLTs

Noticing

When you use this learning muscle, you …

notice how things look, what they are made of, or how they behave
are patient, knowing that details may take time to emerge
can identify significant detail
get a clear sense of what, before starting to think why or how

See below to find out more about Noticing . . .

Find Out more about Noticing ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Noticing? Read more about Noticing, explore what a good noticer does, and reflect on the noticing behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Noticing. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the Noticing habit.
How does Noticing grow? Explore a progression chart for Noticing, and consider how your students’ Noticing skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Noticing frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Noticing to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Noticing activity.
Develop your learning language for Noticing. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Noticing behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Noticing?

This is a skill that can be strengthened with practice. We often pick up this skill from people around us. Babies very soon learn to work out what their mother is focusing on, and to ‘share joint attention’ with her. It helps to be around people who are demonstrating this ability to watch carefully and turn their observations into accurate descriptions. Getting a really clear sense of what, before starting to think about how or why, is very useful.

What does being a good Noticer involve?

If you have a well formed Noticing habit you will be ready, willing, and able to:

be attentive to details and subtleties in order to understand things;
seek underlying patterns patiently, understanding that connections take time to emerge;
actively use all your senses to gather information to build understanding of the world around;
gain a clear sense of the ‘what’ of something before considering the ‘why’ and ‘how’;
recognise that learning is often complex and difficult and takes time and effort to accomplish.

Spot the Noticers in your classes

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

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Noticing

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

But don’t worry you are not expected to be there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does Noticing grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Noticing is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are oblivious to detail in every circumstance, and equally few are hugely attentive to detail in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Noticing may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current noticing behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Noticing frame of mind.

In the early stages of building your students’ learning power your role is to; make them aware of the behaviour; talk about it (what, how, why, when, if); celebrate its use; give opportunities to practise it, both in lessons and elsewhere; reflect on it to improve it. This staged start is reflected below…

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of noticing…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore noticing a little more through the language of noticing
Try… using noticing as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Noticing

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

Younger students

Give noticing a high profile

For example, create a Noticing table with magnifying glasses and interesting objects …. shells, coins, dead insects, flowers …… and lots more! Spend a few minutes each day for children to report on what new things they have noticed about the objects.

Older students

Give time to think … and share ideas

What do experts notice? – A painter will notice subtle differences in colour, shape or texture. What about other experts … gardeners, doctors, musicians, drivers, sports-people, actors, cooks, mechanics?

Choose a couple of experts from the list or from your own ideas and think about what they notice and how and why they might have learned this.

Younger students

Introduce games that require noticing behaviours

For example… use the familiar Kim’s game where students have to look carefully for a given time and then try to remember the group of articles. This simple format has numerous variations…what’s missing, what’s been added, what’s the odd one out?

Older students

Introduce intriguing pictures to provoke noticing

4b. Explore the language of Noticing

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Younger students

Discuss noticing others

Invite some students to be Learning Detectives. Task them with watching how children play team games. Their job is to watch out for how to do the activity best, what works and what doesn’t work. You will need to model this regularly, it won’t matter whether they are throwing bean bags into buckets, jumping through hoops or balancing on bars, the noticing and coaching will make a real difference to their learning. If possible capture examples of effective learning on camera / video. Build the outcomes into a display that helps all students to become more aware of the effective habits of others.

Older students

Extend the language of noticing

Collect words that tell you how people learn to notice detail.

Relate noticing to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Eagle-eyed.
I’ve gone through it with a fine-tooth comb.
Keep your eyes peeled

4c. Use Noticing as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their noticing behaviour.

Younger students

Intriguing Images

For example have an intriguing picture ready on the whiteboard before the lesson starts. Students look forward to looking carefully at pictures where all is not as it seems.

Older students

Finding shapes

Offer students a random set of dots (or picture of the night sky). Invite them to seek items such as:

A letter of the alphabet
An animal
A regular shape
A face
Or something linked to the content of the forthcoming lesson

5. Develop your learning language for Noticing

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Noticing. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on noticing gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Noticing

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What do you notice about the way… is doing that?
Just watch/listen for a while. What’s happening? Wait a little longer. What’s really going on?
Be patient for a bit longer. Do you notice any patterns here?
Great! Your patience is rewarded. You noticed some (unusual) patterns/really useful details there.
Do you notice any differences between xxx and yyy?
Is there more to this than you are seeing now?
Had you noticed that before?
What seems to be going on here?
Do you notice [something different/unusual] about this?
Have you missed anything?

Reasoning

When you use this learning muscle, you …

engage in disciplined thinking
create logical arguments
spot flaws in other people’s arguments
deduce what might happen next
look for valid evidence

See below to find out more about Reasoning . . .

Find Out more about Reasoning ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Reasoning? Read more about reasoning, explore what a good reasoner does, and reflect on the reasoning behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Reasoning. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the reasoning habit.
How does Reasoning grow? Explore a progression chart for Reasoning, and consider how your students’ Reasoning skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Reasoning frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Reasoning to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Reasoning activity.
Develop your learning language for Reasoning. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Reasoning behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Reasoning?

Reasoning—the kind of logical, analytical, explicit disciplined thinking that schools often focus on. There is a lot of interest at the moment in ways of teaching thinking, and in building students’ Learning Power, such ‘Show your working’ kinds of thinking are a very important part of the good learner’s toolkit, although not the be-all and end-all of learning. In fact, research suggests that secondary schools have not been very successful at developing students’ ability to think logically in real life.

It turns out to be quite difficult to free any kind of thinking or learning skill from its ties to the particular setting and subject matter in which it was originally practised.

Nevertheless, being able to construct logical arguments or make practical use of Venn diagrams, for example, is very useful, and good learners need practice at using such tools in the context of their real-life concerns.

What does being a good Reasoner involve?

A well formed Reasoning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Resist jumping to conclusions;
Seek justifiable evidence to shape sound, well-honed arguments;
Scrutinise your assumptions;
Seek evidence and counter evidence, look for false steps and carefully draw conclusions;
Remain suspicious, doubting and self-doubting in order to avoid unwarranted certainty;
Convey your logical thinking clearly, through dialogue, symbols, analogies, prose and pictures.

So, at a less abstract level, students need to learn the inclination to resist impulsive responses; to respond logically and thoughtfully; to apply logic by explaining, justifying and, ultimately, proving what they think; to utilise a range of reasoning tools; and to develop strategies for presenting their reasoning to others persuasively. When looked at from these diverse angles growing reasoning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think it through’.

Spot the Reasoners in your classes

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

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Reasoning

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. But don’t worry, you’re not there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully. Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does Reasoning grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Reasoning is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are consistently illogical in every circumstance, and equally few are always totally logical in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Reasoning may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current reasoning behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

Story Guide & Story: ‘Hide and Seek’

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Reasoning frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of reasoning…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore reasoning a little more through the language of reasoning
Try… using reasoning as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Reasoning

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

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

Primary

Get a feel for thinking logically using Mazes

Have a go at solving some simple mazes with small groups of children. Finding the way through a maze is a fun approach to helping young children with logical thinking.

You could also ask your Y5 or Y6 colleagues to engage their children in planning and designing 3D mazes for the younger children to solve. This would be an excellent open ended design DT project guaranteed to need lots of planning and revising!

You might also be lucky enough to find real mazes near enough for a visit with your class.

Secondary

Draw out reasoning in Strategy Games

Use games that require strategy and logical thinking. From noughts and crosses to chess, from hangman to backgammon, such games help to develop and refine reasoning skills.

Many appear in the form of maths investigations and problems: Frogs; Tower of Hanoi; Nim; Connect 4; etc.

Primary

Explore reasoning through stories

Hide and Seek

Secondary

Code Breaking

Present students with coded messages and require them to work them out using their deductive skills.

Start with simple substitution codes where, for example, each letter is replaced by the one after it in the alphabet. (i.e. b replaces a, c replaces b etc. etc.) Increase difficulty by using more complex ciphers.

4b. Explore the language of Reasoning

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Draw out the language of reasoning through jigsaws

Sit at the jigsaw table with groups of children and work on the jigsaws together. Model your reasoning out loud to the children explaining what you did first second, third, etc. so that they begin to understand a methodical, step by step approach. Explain why you put a piece in a certain place and why it couldn’t go elsewhere. Develop conversations around…What can we see? Why does this fit here? What tells you it is right? Does this make sense? and so on.

Secondary

Explore the meaning of reasoning

Collect words that tell you how people learn to Reason.

Relate reasoning to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

On the one hand . . .
One step at a time
It adds up

4c. Use Reasoning as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up the Reasoning behaviour

Primary

Sequencing

Cut up;

a cartoon,
series of pictures of a production process,
a flow diagram,
a mathematical proof,
a story line,
a musical score,
a poem,
a sequence of events, and so on.

Invite students to reassemble the pieces in what they think is a viable order and explain their reasons for this. Model and listen for the language of reasoning to strengthen the process.

[Lift the level of challenge by omitting one or two of the pieces, or by including a red herring or two, or by interleaving two sequences that need to be separated before the sequencing can be completed.]

Secondary

Ranking

Offer students pieces of information or ideas or pictures or statements as a set of separate items, usually on cards.

The subject could be: possible causes of global warming; the sayings of a religious leader; discoveries of the last 20 years; the music of Gershwin; causes of WW1; poems of Sylvia Plath; healthy lifestyle indicators; famous people etc.

The criterion for ranking the cards is given or negotiated with students. For example rank the cards in order of;

importance
appeal
relevance
how controversial
any other appropriate criterion.

The point of the activity is to debate the relative merits, place them in rank order according to the chosen criterion, and to be able to explain and justify the ranking based on evidence rather than opinion.

5. Develop your learning language for Reasoning

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Reasoning. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on reasoning gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Reasoning

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What assumptions are you making? Are they sound?
Can you think it through in clear steps from start to finish?
How many reasons can we find for that?
Can you spot the false step there? Is the argument water tight?
What evidence can you find to support your case/argument? What’s the counter evidence?
How have you reached that conclusion? What are the implications?
Which thinking tool would help us solve this?
Are you convinced?
One the one hand . . . , but on the other . . .
Why do you think that?

Imagining

When you use this learning muscle, you …

picture how things might look, sound, feel, be
let your mind explore and play with possibilities and ideas
build up stories around objects, facts, theories or other stimuli
rehearse things in your mind before doing them for real

See below to find out more about imagining . . .

Find Out more about imagining ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by imagining? Read more about imagining, explore what a good imaginer does, and reflect on the imagining behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for imagining. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the imagining habit.
How does imagining grow? Explore a progression chart for imagining, and consider how your students’ imagining skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a imagining frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of imagining to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a imagining activity.
Develop your learning language for imagining. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ imagining behaviours.

1) What do we mean by imagining?

Imagination is not just a cute faculty that children use to weave fantasies: it is one of the most effective tools in the learner’s toolbox. Scientists, designers and executives need a powerful imagination just as much as painters and novelists, and it can either be developed, through appropriate experience and encouragement, or left to shrivel up. Good learners are ready and able to look at things in different ways. They like playing with ideas and possibilities, and adopting different perspectives (even though they may not have a clear idea of where their imagination is leading them). They use pictures and diagrams to help them think and learn.

There are two kinds of imagination: active and receptive. In active imagination, you deliberately create a scenario to run in your mind’s eye. Sports people use this kind of mental rehearsal, and experiments have shown it to be very effective at improving their level of skill.

The second kind of imagination is more receptive, like daydreaming: letting a problem slip to the back of your mind, and then just sliding into a kind of semi-awake reverie, where the mind plays with ideas and images without much control on your part. Successful learners and inventors know how to make good use of this kind of creative intuition. They are interested in inklings and ideas that just bubble up into their minds.

What does being a good Imaginer involve?

If you have a well formed Imagining habit you will be ready, willing, and able to:

Use the mind as a theatre in which to play out ideas and possible actions experimentally;
Use a rich variety of visual, aural and sensory experiences to trigger creative and lateral thinking;
Explore possibilities speculatively, saying ‘What might …’, ‘What could …’ and ‘What if …?’ rather than being constrained by what is;
Retain a childlike playfulness when confronted with challenges and difficulties;
Be aware of intended outcomes whilst adopting a flexible approach to realising goals;
Rehearse actions in the mind before performing them in reality.

Spot the Imaginers in your class

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

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

2) Creating a classroom culture for imagining

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

But don’t worry, you are not expected to be there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does imagining grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, imagining is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners lack imagination in every circumstance, and equally few are hugely imaginative in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how imagining may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current imagining behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a imagining frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of imagining…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore imagining a little more through the language of imagining
Try… using imagining as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of imagining

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

Primary

The Mind’s Eye

Introduce pupils to the idea of the mind’s eye: Talk about the fact that we all have 2 eyes which we use all the time but that everyone also has a third, hidden, mind’s eye. Talk about how we can use this secret third eye to imagine and create pictures and ideas inside our minds.
Invite pupils to close their eyes and imagine they are using their third eye. Describe something in great detail and ask them to try and see it with their third eye.
For example: Close your eyes tightly and imagine my alien. It has a large, round, green body with lots of arms and legs. On the top of the round, green body is a huge pink and purple head with spiky yellow hair and 4 great big blue eyes. It has long, pink fingers on its hands and short, purple toes on its big feet. When it walks along it makes a high squeaky sound and it smells just like fish and chips!
You could ask pupils to draw their idea of the alien, concentrating on their ideas rather than an exact representation of your description.
Ask pupils to imagine something for themselves- unprompted by you. Invite them to describe what they are imagining.
Talk about what seems to happen in their mind when they imagine.
Talk about when our ability to imagine can be useful.
Ask, “When do you use your imagination?”

Secondary

Guided Visualisation

Invite students to visualise, for example, a snowy mountain peak until the image fades – discuss how long this could be sustained.

Now visualise hovering over the mountain and exploring the terrain by helicopter – the experience will have lasted longer.

Now provide students with a guided visualisation of the mountain that triggers their imaginative faculties – discuss the features of this experience.

Enable students to identify the ways of triggering their own imaginations when provided with stimuli. Invite them into a city at night, or the alimentary canal, . . .

Stimulating the imagination

Use music to create atmosphere and stimulate imaginative thinking.

Provide varied, unexpected and ever-changing visual experiences — on whiteboards, classroom walls, in ideas banks, through web-links, etc.

Read vivid prose and poetry that captures details, moods and atmospheres.

Primary

Capture ideas

Encourage pupils to brainstorm or mind-map and keep notebooks or Post-its of interesting ideas to feed their creativity. Do this collectively and individually.

Elect one pupil as ‘Plant of the Day’, whose job it is to suggest unlikely ideas.

Secondary

Play the prediction game, emphasise mental rehearsal

Show video clips of e.g. rugby or football heroes preparing to kick a ball, as well as other sports and entertainment people rehearsing ahead of action.

Discuss what they are doing to ‘play the movie’ in their heads before they act.

Explore occasions when this could be useful in students’ own lives. Identify the triggers and habits required when anticipating the right action.

4b. Explore the language of imagining

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Talk about how things might look, feel, sound.

Give pupils a familiar object – a pencil, hairbrush, scissors, toilet roll, cushion – whatever comes to hand.

Then pose the question: ‘What else could it be?’ or ‘What could this become’

Discuss and praise the most imaginative ideas.

What you are trying to develop in young learners is:

An awareness of the power of imagination;
The ability to use their imagination to picture how things might look, sound, feel or be;
The willingness to talk imaginatively about situations, events, characters, etc.

Secondary

Expand the vocabulary of imagining

Click to enlarge

Collect words that tell you how people learn to imagine.

Relate imagining to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

In my mind’s eye
Thinking outside the box

4c. Use imagining as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their imagining behaviour

Primary

Extend imaginative thinking by telling stories

Provide a stem statement…

A man walks into a room with a suitcase in his hand…

Invite one student to carry it on. Each student continues from where the previous one left off.

Or . .

Create a scenario…There are no windows, water drips into a bucket, two people are seated back to back…what might be happening? What might happen next? Can you improvise the dialogue between the people?

Secondary

Trigger imagination with ‘What if …’ challenges

Provoke students to think ‘What if… we ran out of oil in 25 years… we lived in a two-dimensional world… we all lived for exactly 70 years… tennis balls were heavier… we had two moons…’

Encourage students to build collaborative spider diagrams that explore the possible ramifications of such eventualities. Extend the imagining in creative presentations using a variety of media.

5. Develop your learning language for imagining

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge imagining. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on imagining gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage imagining

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What would happen if …
Try to picture … in your mind. Tell me about . . . .
Can you use your mind’s eye to see what that might look like?
Are there any other possible explanations?
Close your eyes – what can you see? Hear? Feel?
What do you feel might be happening?
What could this be?
How might you do this differently?
Imagine yourself doing it before you do it for real.
Can you imagine how xxx feels now even though you disagree with their views?

Making Links

When you use this learning muscle, you …

look for connections between experiences or ideas
find pleasure in seeing how things fit together, make patterns
connect new ideas to how you think and feel already
look for analogies in your memory that will give you a handle on something complicated

See below to find out more about Making Links . . .

Find Out more about Making Links ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Making Links? Read more about Making Links, explore what a good Link Maker does, and reflect on the Link Making behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Making Links. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the Link Making habit.
How does Making Links grow? Explore a progression chart for Making Links, and consider how your students’ Link Making skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Link Making frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Making Links to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Link Making activity.
Develop your learning language for Making Links. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Link Making behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Making Links?

Making links is about integrating or making connections between different things. It comprises not only the ability to see or make relationships but also the inclination to look for them.

Trying to hook up new experiences with what you already know is what some people call ‘making meaning’.

New ideas become meaningful to the extent that we can incorporate them within our own mental webs of associations and significances. Good learners get pleasure from seeing how things fit together. They are interested in the big picture, and how new learning expands it.

Good learners can make all kinds of different links. They can link together this lesson’s physics topic with what they were doing in maths last week. They can look for links to their own goals and interests, to discover the relevance of the new learning to their own lives. They find links to their own real-life experience—using new ideas or theories to make sense of past impressions. They weave new events into their developing autobiographical story relating them to their sense of self. They can connect new learning with their own opinions and beliefs, so that they come out not just knowing something new, but looking at the world in a different way. And—very importantly for creativity—they may look for analogies in their own memory that give them a handle on a complicated new domain. ‘What’s it like?’ they ask themselves.

What does being a good Link Maker involve?

A well formed Making Links habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Connect new ideas to what you know and feel already;
Match and categorise ideas, techniques and concepts to ones that are already understood;
Link ideas across different academic disciplines and in varying contexts;
Looking for similarities, differences, the unusual and absurd;
Seek novel and inventive ways of connecting apparently unconnected ideas, events or techniques.

Spot the Link Makers in your class

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick think about ‘Link Makers you may know’. Make a note of students you know who display these characteristics.

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Making Links

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

But don’t worry, you’re not expected to be there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does Making Links grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Making Links is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are adept at spotting connections in all aspects of their learning, and equally few are unable to sense links in any situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Making Links may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current Making Links behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Making Links frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of Making Links…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore Making Links a little more through the language of Making Links
Try… using Making Links as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Making Links

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

Primary

My Grandma went shopping . . .

Recommend group of no more than 12-15

Start by saying “My grandma went shopping and she bought…” and say an item. Let pupils take turns and each time one of them adds another item, they have to explain their link to everyone else.
Encourage the children to think of lots of different ways of linking items and reward their ingenuity.
To take the learning a little bit further, it could be useful to share a real shopping list with your children and discuss the links that help you when actually shopping.
For example, perhaps you list all the fruit and vegetables first, if they are found in the first aisle etc. Or perhaps you list all the breakfast foods together…

Secondary

Mind Maps for link making

Use mind maps to encourage students to link and explain how information and ideas seem to be associated.

Use mind mapping at the beginning, middle and end of a unit of study to show how links and understanding change as knowledge grows.

Use a ‘thought shower mind map’ at the outset of a lesson to connect with prior learning and activate link making. Use in the middle to monitor shifts in understanding. Use at the end of a module of learning as a synthesising tool.

Primary

Think and Link

Organisation: For groups of 5/6 children.

Print out and photocopy the Odd One Out series of pictures. (see resource).

Each row has 5 pictures in it. Four can be linked together easily but one doesn’t fit readily with the others.
Encourage the children to find an odd one out and perhaps invent a reason or story about how/why the odd one could be made to ‘fit’.
Spend plenty of time discussing why the pictures fit together and what the links are. It’s fine if the children can think of different ways to link them as long as they can explain their rationale to you and the other children.
Keep praising and rewarding the ‘making links’ bit of the activity rather than focusing on getting it right.
To extend this activity a little and assess their understanding, ask the children to devise a row of pictures of their own and give them to each other as a fresh challenge.
Join in yourself and model your link making by thinking aloud.

Secondary

Match Them Up

Offer students a set of cards that need to be matched up or linked in some way.

It might be:

a set of pairs of cards like ‘It has been raining’ and ‘The river is flowing fast’ where the student is challenged to decide whether there Must be a connection between the two events, Could be a connection, or No possible connection;
a problem to select a substance (metal, clay, wax, salt, ice, …) and a change (freezes, dissolves, melts, burns, …) and decide if the change is Reversible or Irreversible;
a set of cards that students are required to match into pairs – it could be 5 graphs and 5 equations; 5 characters and 5 attitudes; 5 words and 5 definitions etc.

[The ‘Thinking Through’ series edited by David Leat has individual books for Geography, History, RE, MFL, English, Maths, Science and PSHE which all contain subject specific examples.]

4b. Explore the language of Making Links

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Discuss making links

Gather together a really good assortment of shapes: 2D and 3D shapes and different sizes and colours. Using small hoops or different coloured paper circles ask pupils to take turns to sort the shapes by putting them in the hoops and explain their reasoning for sorting them this way. It should be possible to rearrange the shapes in several different ways as different children take a turn. This can help the children understand that there are often many different ways to link things together.

Secondary

Extend the language of Making Links

Collect words that tell you how people learn to make links.

Relate link making to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Chain reaction
Cause and effect
Seeing the wood and the trees

4c. Use Making Links as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their Making Links behaviour.

Primary

Similarity and Difference

Find two images with both similarities and differences. Invite students to work in pairs to identify at least 5 of each, and then work as a four to decide the 3 most important similarities and differences.

Timings could be around 1 minute for the pair work, and 2 minutes for the work in fours.

This will also support the skills of noticing, collaborating, and distilling.

Secondary

Odd One Out

Identify four ‘things’ related to your own subject area – this could be 4 images, 4 words, 4 techniques, or anything else that links to your own subject and/or what students are currently learning about.

Invite them to identify the odd one out, and to explain why they think this.

When you can, construct lists where it is possible to justify that each of the items are, in fact, the odd one out.

5. Develop your learning language for Making Links

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Making Links. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on Making Links gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Making Links

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What do you know already that might help?
Can you say how . . is like . . .?
What conclusions can you draw?
Does the analogy… help us to get a handle on this?
Now that you know… has it changed how you think about…?
Can you see a link between what we did in… and what you do…?
How can you apply what you know about xxx to this problem?
Have you seen/done/felt something like this before?
Do you need to re-think ‘X’ in light of ‘Y’?
Can you relate this information to what you know already?

Capitalising

When you use this learning muscle, you …

learn from many different sources — people, books, the Internet, music, the environment, experience …
make intelligent use of all kinds of strategies and things to aid learning
notice the approach and detail of how others do things
adopt and adapt the successful strategies of others

See below to find out more about Capitalising . . .

Find Out more about Capitalising ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Capitalising? Read more about Capitalising, explore what a good Capitaliser does, and reflect on the Capitalising behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Capitalising. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the Capitalising habit.
How does Capitalising grow? Explore a progression chart for Capitalising, and consider how your students’ Capitalising skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Capitalising frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Capitalising to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Capitalising activity.
Develop your learning language for Capitalising. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Capitalising behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Capitalising?

Capitalising on resources means being on the lookout for strategies, materials, resources and forms of support in the environment that can help you in your current learning or problem- solving. Traditional schooling assumes that intelligence is all in the head. But recent studies show that it is much fairer and more accurate to see good learners as people who are ready and able to make intelligent use of all kinds of things around them – books, phones, social media, e-mail, the internet, and, of course, a range of learning strategies and other people. Everyone needs to be good at finding and using the learning resources available in the world, so it is obviously a good idea to start developing this habit at school.

The forms of assessment we use in schools have a powerful influence on the kinds of learning that students do, and the kinds of teaching their teachers use. If the good learner is essentially the person plus their resources (and their ability to draw on them), our methods of testing should encourage teachers and students to value and practise capitalising. In today’s world, it makes as much sense to sit 15-year-olds down at solitary desks and ask them to display their knowledge and skill as it would to take away Lionel Messi’s football and tell him to perform.

What does being a good at Capitalising involve?

A well formed Capitalising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Recognise that we learn from many different sources – other people, books, the internet, music, the environment, experience…
Select appropriately from a range of learning strategies;
Keep a purposeful look-out for useful learning aids;
Adapt and adopt the successful habits and values of others into their own learning repertoire;
Make intelligent use of all kinds of things to aid learning;
Use resources in novel ways to solve problems.

Spotting the Capitalisers in your class

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

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Capitalising

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so its worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully. Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does Capitalising grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Capitalising is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are totally dependent on others to tell them what to do and how to do it, and equally few are enterprising and resourceful in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Capitalising may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current Capitalising behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Capitalising frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of Capitalising…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore Capitalising a little more through the language of Capitalising
Try… using Capitalising as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Capitalising

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

Primary

Organise the classroom for easy access to resources

The obvious starting point is to organise classrooms in such a way that pupils are able to select, get and return the resources they need.

Design tasks that require the use of a range of resources and gradually expect the children to select what they need.

At the beginning of a session talk with the children about the things they might use to help them with their learning.

As the pupils’ understanding grows introduce the idea of “learning tools” and start filling a plastic toolbox with things like a ruler, calculator, notepad and pencil. Keep asking the children for new ideas and regularly look through it together.

Secondary

Learn from expert interviews

Set up interviews with people who can do something really well. Develop a series of questions with students to uncover exactly what the ‘expert’ does. E.g. What sort of preparation is there? What resources are needed? What does it feel like? What sort of thinking, habits of mind, values or beliefs are helpful?

Create a checklist of key aspects to imitate.

Extend with students in the role of real or imaginary expert, encouraging them to assess their own subconscious knowledge of how to succeed.

Primary

Use display to share key learning

Set aside an area of display where students are asked to share any strategies or ‘top tips’ that they have found particularly helpful in their own learning.

Set up a Helpful Habit board for tips from students to others about habits which might help them to achieve their long or short term goals. For those offering the ‘top tip’ it is a distilling activity, but the resulting gallery of ‘top tips’ invites students to adopt the successful strategies of others.

Secondary

Explore how things can be used

Collect a pile of unrelated objects, or ask students to bring in one object each and mix them in random groupings – eg a copper tube, piece of cloth, felt pen, blu-tack.

Challenge students to make as many things as they can from the objects, using all of them but nothing else.

Discuss examples of particularly imaginative / effective use of materials and whether these ideas can be used in another context.

4b. Explore the language of Capitalising

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Discuss capitalising

Use language to encourage thinking about capitalising. Build these into your learning language:

Have you thought about what would help you to do this?
Just think about all the things we have in the classroom that might be useful.
How else might you do it?
What is everyone else doing?
Is there anything else that you could use?
There may be other people who could help you with this.
Who do you think might know something about this?
Where could you find out more about this?
Which of the things you used did you find the most useful?
If you had to do this again is there anything else you might use to help you?

Secondary

Extend the language of capitalising

click to enlarge

Collect words and phrases that tell you how people learn to Capitalise on what is around them.

Relate capitalising to well known sayings

There is more than one way to skin a cat
Making the best of a bad job
A bit ‘Heath Robinson’

4c. Use Capitalising as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their Capitalising behaviour.

Primary

How might we tackle this?

At the beginning of a session talk with the children about the strategies and things they might use to help them with their learning.

Talk to the children frequently about where they might find information or help.

Offer the children a rich and varied curriculum so that they can start to appreciate that they are learning from lots of different sources using a range of learning strategies.

Secondary

How many uses for . . . .

To get students thinking about how resources can be used in many different ways.

5. Develop your learning language for Capitalising

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Capitalising. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on Capitalising gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Capitalising

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What could we use to help us with this?
What led you to choose to use that?
Look very carefully at someone you think is doing …… really well and think about how you can do it like that
Could you tackle this by imagining someone who does it really well?
What sort of reference / resource do you need here?
Look around. See what is available to help. How could you use it?
Could you work this out for yourself first before looking for more information?
Who could you turn to for help?
Think through the strategies you might use.
Which is the best learning strategy for this job?

Listening

When you use this learning muscle, you …

pay attention to other people
show you are listening by eye contact and body language
reflect back the main points that someone has said
stay quiet while the other person speaks

See below to find out more about Listening . . .

Find Out more about Listening ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Listening? Read more about Listening, explore what a good Listener does, and reflect on the Listening behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Listening. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the Listening habit.
How does Listening grow? Explore a progression chart for Listening, and consider how your students’ Listening skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Listening frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Listening to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Listening activity.
Develop your learning language for Listening. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Listening behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Listening?

Understanding how to listen effectively is an essential skill that benefits everything from family life to business. It’s one of the most critical skills for working effectively in teams. Hearing and listening are different. There’s all sorts of faulty listening. Sometimes we fake it or pretend to listen; sometimes we only respond to the remarks we are interested in and reject the rest. Sometimes we listen defensively and take innocent remarks as personal attacks. Or, we listen to collect information to use to attack the speaker, or we avoid particular topics, or we listen insensitively and can’t look beyond the words for other meanings, or we turn the conversation to ourselves. So, listening is hard and requires effort. To be a good listener you need to be able to listen for information, listen to judge the quality of the information and listen empathetically to build a relationship and help solve a problem. When looked at from these diverse angles growing Listening moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘do good listening’.

What does being a good Listener involve?

A well formed Listening habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Be genuinely interested in other people and what they are saying;
Focus on the current moment, being attentive and responsive to visual cues and atmosphere;
Notice subtle details and nuances in what is being said;
Know when to make well-judged interventions to elucidate, probe or challenge;
Manage distractions constructively;
Be comfortable with silence and attend actively to what is being said.

Spot the Listeners in your class

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

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Listening

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does Listening grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Listening is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are unable to listen attentively in most circumstances, and equally few are sufficiently skilful learners who listen in order to develop understanding and empathise with the speaker in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Listening may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current Listening behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Listening frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of Listening…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore Listening a little more through the language of Listening
Try… using Listening as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Listening

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

Primary

Make pupils aware of listening

Who said “Sausages”?

An activity to encourage good listening skills.

First, try a quiet activity to help the children focus on the physical sensation of intent listening.
Ask the children to move round to sit in a circle.
Ask them to close their eyes and clasp their hands gently on their laps.
Tell them you are going to chime an Indian bell and that they should listen as carefully as they can and only open their eyes when they can no longer hear the sound.
Ask them to be very, very quiet so that they do not disturb each other.
Now move on to a simple listening game.
Children remain sitting in their circle. They take turns to sit blindfolded in the middle.
Point to a child in the circle who then says “sausages.” The blindfolded child has to guess whose voice it is.
As the children become more familiar with this game, they will deliberately alter their voices and it can be a lot of fun.
Regularly remind the children of the skills they are using and reward really good listening!
After playing this game, you may be able to agree some good listening tips with the children.

Now think about how you could extend this into other listening activities.

Secondary

Offer ways to focus on listening

What Can You Hear?

A short listening activity to help students to recognise that attentive listening enables them to centre themselves, focus on what is really happening and take possession of themselves as learners.

Coaching notes

Primary

Listening for Inference and Understanding

Explore sentences spoken with different stress, tone, pace and emphasis, to yield different meanings.

For example:

‘I don’t know why you didn’t go.’
‘How can I answer that?’

Secondary

Become aware of the effect of sounds

Silent Film Show

Play a two-minute scene from a film, without the visuals.

Listen for clues in sound effects, voices, soundtrack.

Predict / speculate what is happening.

Show the film and attend to the way in which sounds contributed to meaning.

4b. Explore the language of Listening

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Discuss listening and tone of voice.

Model different tones of voice. Start with ones that are easy to recognise and understand, like a cross voice or a scared one. Gradually build up this repertoire of voices and use them in stories and songs. Talk about when we use these different tones of voice and why. Ask the children to listen carefully to the way people talk at different times and spot their feelings.

Expand further by inventing voices that you can use for different activities: imagine the voices for different toys or puppets you may have in the classroom; count like robots of a day; recite a rhyme like the big bad wolf. The children will have fun inventing a wide and wonderful assortment of voices whilst refining their listening skills.

Secondary

Expand the listening vocabulary

Collect words that tell you how people learn to listen attentively.

Relate listening to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Being all ears
Listening between the lines

4c. Use Listening as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their Listening behaviour.

Primary

Centring Activities

Use centring activities at the beginning of lessons to focus minds before the learning begins. Play music and ask students to focus on the associations that it conjures about places, people, moods and atmospheres.

Something wrong here ?

Read a sentence or statement without expression, then read it again, once, with changes; no further repetition. Students have to spot the changes.

Secondary

Listen for inference and understanding

Play recordings of, for example:

One end of a telephone conversation: Who’s on the other end… What’s being said… How do you know?
A dialogue: What’s just happened… What happens next… How do you know?
Recognisable people: Who are they… What’s the evidence… How do you know?
Unknown individuals talking: What do you know… Who could they be… How do you know?

5. Develop your learning language for Listening

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Listening. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on Listening gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Listening

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What does the tone of voice tell you about the person?
Close your eyes and let the sounds wash over you.
Can you hear what she’s really saying?
Listen for the main messages. Can you summarise the key points of what you’ve just heard.
How does what he’s saying make you feel?
Wait for your turn to talk.
How can you help XXX to say what they are thinking?
Do you think there’s a deeper meaning in what is being said?
How can you show empathy for the speaker in your responses?
Do you understand the mood and beliefs of the speaker?

Planning

When you use this learning muscle, you …

think about what you want to get out of learning
assess which resources you may need
estimate how long it will take you
plan the steps you might take
anticipate what might get in the way

See below to find out more about Planning . . .

Find Out more about Planning ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Planning? Read more about Planning, explore what a good Planner does, and reflect on the Planning behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Planning. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the Planning habit.
How does Planning grow? Explore a progression chart for Planning, and consider how your students’ Planning skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Planning frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Planning to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Planning activity.
Develop your learning language for Planning. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Planning behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Planning?

A well formed Planning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Identify end goals or objectives before considering possible action;
Consider timescales and possible obstacles in drawing up a realistic plan;
Make use of a wide variety of skills and tools to gather ideas and information;
Sequence activity in order to decide what needs to be done;
Think laterally as well as logically so that the task benefits equally from creative and rational thought;
Be open-minded and flexible about how things might happen so that opportunities can be seized and fresh directions taken.

Being able to think ahead isn’t the whole story of Planning. Becoming an effective Planner of your own learning needs you need to know something about yourself as a learner, your interests, your needs, your wishes. Training the process of thinking ahead often starts simply by asking students to find the resources they will need to carry out a task. But planning your own learning is a sophisticated task. It involves a personal, silent assessment of your learning skills (‘What can I feasibly achieve? What am I capable of doing? What resources would bolster my chances of success?’) The more timid, less confident or lower achieving students may find such planning a daunting prospect. Introducing and requiring students to work learning out for themselves will take time and careful planning on the part the teacher. When looked at from these diverse angles growing planning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think ahead’

Spotting the Planners in your class

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

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Planning

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. But don’t worry, you are not expected to be there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

3) How does Planning grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Planning is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners think ahead and plan how they are going to proceed in all circumstances, and equally few are impulsive and lacking forethought in every situation. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Planning may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current Planning behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Planning frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of Planning…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore Planning a little more through the language of Planning
Try… using Planning as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Planning

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

Primary

Plan a picnic for teddies

Ask children to suggest things that might need doing and record on flip chart using picture prompts. They may well come up with ideas like food, games, music, invitations…
Have different groups to plan each part. Support each group in turn
Discuss what needs doing for one aspect of the picnic and act as their scribe. Summarise their plan back to them when everything is agreed.
Bring everyone back together and share each aspect of the plan.
Ask the children how they think they can work together to get everything ready for the party. Keep referring to the plan.
This is also a very good exercise in collaboration and will offer lots of opportunities for revising as well when things need changing from the original idea.

Secondary

Jumbled up planning

click to enlarge

Can you put these jumbled aspects of planning into a sensible order? Could you use the outcomes to create a planning flowchart with your class to guide future planning?

Primary

Timetables . .

Click to enlarge

Ask the children to think of other things that need a timetable or plan. Start a display table and board of anything the children suggest or collect. You could find some bus and train timetables, a plan of the school and playground or a dinner menu for the term and so on.

Follow a treasure map

Plan a treasure hunt around the school. This could have a seasonal theme or simply be a fun one. Use a small area of the school and make a very simple large scale plan. Attach photographs or drawings to help the children follow the plan. Take them on the treasure hunt in small groups and regularly refer to the Treasure Map as a plan.

Secondary

Structure an extended project

Give students a pack of cards that describe the 10 or so sections in an extended project based on the Driving Question: Where’s the safest place to live? Ask them to sequence the material to make clearest sense. Ask them to give each section a generic heading.

Challenge students to prepare the outline structure for a response to other Driving Questions, for example, ‘Is Planet Earth injury prone?’ ‘Where did the dinosaurs go?’ ‘Why don’t people stay at home?’ ‘Should we choose to end a human life?’ ‘Is the idea of God more trouble than it’s worth?’

Agree with the class the generic headings for an extended piece of work – display it as an aide-memoire in the future.

4b. Explore the language of Planning

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Discuss planning

Design a planning sheet to use with the children when you are planning an activity with them. You might include these and other headings:

What are we trying to achieve? (agreed goal, outcome)
How will we know we have been successful? (success criteria)
What do we need to do? (actions, jobs)
What will help us? (resources)
What might be a problem? (traps, obstacles)
What will we do about it? (What- if or contingency plans)
Who will do what? (roles) [Simplify according to age range.]

Secondary

Extend the language of planning

Collect words that tell you how people plan.

click to enlarge

Relate planning to well-known sayings …

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Hit the ground running.
Cross that bridge when you come to it.

4c. Use Planning as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their Planning behaviour.

Primary

Clapping a pattern

Planning a short rhythm

Sit pupils in a circle. You are going to clap a short rhythm for them, but first of all you are going to plan it.
Think aloud as you plan what you are going to do. Mention “Beginning”, “Middle” and “End”. Then clap the pattern you have planned.
Ask if they want to listen again and then have a go with you. Explain you remember it because you planned.
Pupils to work in pairs to plan a short clapping pattern of their own. Practise with their fingertips on their palms so that they don’t disturb each other too much.
Ask them to perform their rhythm in pairs for everyone to listen to. Some may also like to try to teach it!
The emphasis is on planning what they are going to clap rather than just clapping straight off.
You may want to encourage pupils to make some kind of paper plan with a mark for every clap.

Secondary

‘What will it look like when it’s finished?’

Too often students start a task without giving thought to what it will look like when it has been completed, what a good one will look like. Some find it easier to plan ‘in reverse’ – working backwards from the finished article to where they are now to establish a sensible plan of action.

Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action. Ask students to determine WWILLWIF for themselves in conjunction with others. Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.

5. Develop your learning language for Planning

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Planning. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on Planning gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Planning

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What will your end product look like?
How will you judge the success of what you have done?
Look at what you have done so far – do you need to make any changes?
Are you on track to meet your deadline?
What needs doing? In what order will you tackle it?
Do you have a contingency plan if that does not work?
Keep a weather eye on how it is going.
Are any particular planning tools appropriate here?
Is the goal manageable?
How can you make this plan more efficient?

Meta Learning

When you use this learning muscle, you …

are interested in how you learn as an individual
can talk about what skills you need to make progress
can talk about how learning works for you
know your strengths and weaknesses as a learner
are interested in becoming a better learner

See below to find out more about Meta Learning . . .

Find Out more about Meta Learning ⬇️

Below are 5 short sections:

What do we mean by Meta Learning? Read more about Meta Learning, explore what a good Meta Learner does, and reflect on the Meta Learning behaviours of your students.
Creating a classroom culture for Meta Learning. Take time to think about the aspects of classroom culture that encourage the Meta Learning habit.
How does Meta Learning grow? Explore a progression chart for Meta Learning, and consider how your students’ Meta Learning skills are growing.
Some teaching ideas to encourage a Meta Learning frame of mind. Explore some teaching ideas to introduce and extend the language of Meta Learning to students, and some ideas for starting a lesson with a Meta Learning activity.
Develop your learning language for Meta Learning. Explore how you might talk in ways that stimulate your students’ Meta Learning behaviours.

1) What do we mean by Meta Learning?

Becoming a meta-learner involves drawing out of your learning experience a more general, explicit understanding of the process of learning, and specific knowledge about yourself as a learner. Let’s take these two aspects of meta-learning in turn.

There is a wealth of research which shows that good learners know a lot about learning.

They possess a vocabulary for talking about the process of learning itself, and are able to articulate how learning works.

Good readers, even quite young ones, are often able tell you half-a-dozen things they can do when they come across an unfamiliar word: they sound it out, break it down into bits, re-read the previous sentence, read on to see if the meaning becomes clear, look at the picture and think about it, and so on. And so, more generally, for good learners. The more able they are to talk about their learning, the more likely they are to be able to apply their knowledge to new domains too: meta-learning increases generalisation.

And good learners also need an accurate sense of themselves as learners. Being a good learner means being able to take your own strengths and weaknesses into account as you are weighing up a learning challenge, or deciding on a course of ‘professional development.’ In the business world, it is common now for people to take a job (if they are lucky enough to have a choice) partly on the basis of what they hope to learn from it. To make that decision well, they need not only to be able to plan their learning career, but also to base their decision on a realistic assessment of what they need and are ready to learn. Again, plenty of practice in thinking and talking about oneself as a learner at school is good preparation for the future.

The skills and dispositions of meta-learning can be cultivated simply by a teacher’s persistent use of questions such as ‘How did you go about finding that out?’ or ‘How would you go about teaching that to other people?’

What does being a good Meta-Learner involve?

A well formed Meta-Learner’s habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Use a well-formed vocabulary to talk about the process of learning and how learning works;
Understand how you learn, playing to your strengths and improving areas of weakness;
Learn from learning itself, mulling things over, and learning from experiences in order to avoid mistakes in the future;
Reflect on and draw out useful lessons from experiences and identify key features that might be useful elsewhere.

Spotting the Meta-Learners in your class

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick think about ‘Me learners you may know’. Make a note of students you know who display these characteristics.

Becoming a teacher who develops students’ learning power means developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

2) Creating a classroom culture for Meta Learning

Cultivating learning habits ultimately involves:

Providing rich and varied occasions for exercising learning habits;
Infusing learning habits into lessons to enhance content understanding;
Recognising and celebrating the use and growth of learning habits;
Expecting students to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning habits;
Exploring the development of learning habits with students over time.

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so need to be mindful of how you help students form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits.

But don’t worry, you’re not there yet. It takes most teachers between 2 and 3 years to become really fluent with this way of teaching. So, go easy on yourself. Feel determined because small steps often prove to be big levers for change. Have a think about what you might do…

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Look first at the Stop/avoid ideas. Some of these are far from trivial but it’s best to try to remove them before starting on the Start/do more of, Start slowly and Experiment with ideas.

3) How does Meta Learning grow?

Get a handle on progression

As with all learning behaviours, Meta Learning is not a case of ‘either you do, or you don’t’. Few learners are completely unaware of how they learn, and equally few have a complete understanding of learniing and their own learning strengths and weaknesses. Most lie somewhere between these 2 extremes.

The chart below offers a glimpse of how Meta Learning may grow. Column 1 identifies 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

Which colour best describes the majority of your students’ current Meta Learning behaviours? What do they? What can they not yet do?

4) Some teaching ideas to encourage a Meta Learning frame of mind.

Firstly… make students aware of the use and importance of Meta Learning…when, where, why, how they are or could be doing it
Then… explore Meta Learning a little more through the language of Meta Learning
Try… using Meta Learning as a lesson starter to tune students into using it

4a. Make students aware of Meta Learning

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

Primary

Give pupils a practical understanding of tools for learning

Discuss learning behaviours and link each one with a practical tool, following children’s ideas about the links. Display pictures of the tools labelled with the behaviour they represent. Collect real tools to be handled in class. When talking about learning behaviours ask pupils which tool would help them to learn something and why.

They will soon able to go and fetch say, a notebook representing planning, before going outdoors to build a rocket, or the mirror of imitation if they were going to learn by watching someone else first.

Secondary

Find out what students know about themselves as learners

A learning fitness quiz

Use this quiz to get students thinking about the process of learning and how they are as learners.

Story Guide & Story: ‘Our Learning Friend’

Primary

Introduce learning through story

Our learning friendThe purpose of this story is to introduce thinking about learning. It doesn’t by any means introduce all the learning ‘muscles’ but it begins to focus thinking about how we learn and what it is that good learners do. It offers a way to introduce the idea that there are very particular things that we can learn how to do that will help us to become better learners.

Does your class need a ‘learning friend’?

Secondary

Create opportunities for reflection

Pay equal attention to what has been learned and how it has been learned in plenaries and review points. Encourage students to describe and discuss the learning behaviours they have been employing. Build in such moments for reflection whenever possible.

You might use a Rating Wheel to capture their thinking – colour in the segments according to how much they feel they have used the learning behaviour.

Rating Wheel

4b. Explore the language of Meta Learning

How you might extend the language and understanding of this behaviour

Primary

Encourage pupils to see themselves as learners

Invite pupils to make themselves a ‘Things I have Learned in my Life’ scroll or book.

Encourage them to get as much help as they can from friends and family in order to make the most comprehensive list they could.
Give them time to share their lists with one another so that one idea inspires another until they feel their list is as complete as it can be.
Each time they learn something new, in or out of school, they add it to their list.
This can prove be a super weekly celebration to hear about, talk about and congratulate additions.

Secondary

Explore successful learning

Time to think … and share ideas

In a small group — Think of something that one of you is good at that the others would like to learn … could be a sport or a school subject, playing an instrument, playing a game, making a drawing.

Interview this person about what goes on in their head when they are practising the skill.

Try questions like;

“ What have you tried that didn’t work? ”
“ Can you describe what ‘better’ means? ”
“ What goes on in your head when you are doing it? ”
“ Do you talk to yourself whilst you are learning? – What do you say? ”
“ How do you get better at this? ”
“ What different ways do you try?”
” When is it best?”
“What hinders your learning?”
“What helps you to learn?”

4c. Use Meta Learning as a lesson starter

Use a quick starter to key your students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson. i.e. here you are starting up their Meta Learning behaviour.

All students

Linking ‘Learning Objectives’ and ‘Learning Behaviours’

Rather than telling students how they will need to be as learners to be successful, share your Learning Objectives / Success Criteria and invite them to discuss and agree the types of learning behaviours that they expect they will need to use in the upcoming lesson / activity.

Ask:

Why did they choose those particular behaviours?
Have they missed any key ones?
How precisely will they use these key behaviours?
How will they monitor the use?
What are their Success Criteria for the use of these key behaviours?
What are my own?

5. Develop your learning language for Meta Learning

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge Meta Learning. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach; encouraging students to think for themselves. Using such statements encourages your students to:

imitate you
start to think in this way
become conscious of these phrases and their meaning.

Gradually you will hear some of the statements pop up in students’ self-talk….in speech or even in writing from time to time, but mostly this will go on inside their heads. As your work on Meta Learning gathers pace see if you can detect students who talk, or think, in these ways.

Learning-talk nudges that encourage Meta Learning

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What are the most important things you have found out about yourself as a learner?
Build in a moment to review what you have done and how you have done it
Where else could you use this skill/knowledge/idea?
Think back to when you. . . What did you learn from that?
What went well? What could be improved? What can we learn from this?
How can you / do you plan your learning in advance?
Ask yourself: what you need to know and then how are you going to come to know it?
How do you get through the boring/difficult bits?
Are you getting better at regulating your learning environment?
Can you / do you talk about your learning?

BPL 2: Culture – Celebrating Learning

Building a classroom culture that celebrates learning

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This four unit online programme looks at how your development as a teacher can enable and strengthen the development of a learning-friendly classroom culture.

The programme combines three types of action to help you to experiment, analyse and understand how you can create an increasingly learning-friendly classroom culture.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information.

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

This unit explores how your development can create a classroom culture that celebrates learning and the growth of learning behaviours.

What are the key aspects of celebrating learning? (Essential and Extended Read about 1)
With regards to celebrating learning, is my classroom currently more teacher focused, or more learning focused? (Find out 1)
How are my students responding to the changes I have made in my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches will be useful in moving this forward? (Try out 1 to 4)
Take a deeper look at the anticipated outcomes for learners of developing a celebrating-friendly classroom culture (Find out 3)
Find out about 8 further learning behaviours that will, in time, be added to the key behaviours of Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising (Find Out 4)

Structuring and using the ideas below in your classroom over the next few months or so will edge your classroom culture towards celebrating the growth of learning.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Celebrating Learning

From this…

In many classrooms responsibility for learning rests almost exclusively with the teacher. Teachers decide the what and how of learning, but also what is valued as useful. Failure, making mistakes, being stuck or applying effort in learning tend not to be seen as opportunities to learn how to learn. The main focus is on students getting things right, and without any emphasis on ‘how to’. Hence students come to believe and accept that responsibility for learning lies with their teacher and thus become increasingly dependent on them.

To this …

The Celebrating aspect of learning is about making learning itself the object of attention. This includes what you, as a teacher, attend to, what you recognise, what you praise, what you display and celebrate. In learning friendly classrooms failure, mistakes, being stuck and applying effort are re-framed so that learners come to view these old adversaries as valuable, interesting and essential. What is considered worthy of display or praise speaks volumes about the underlying, unspoken, classroom culture so the growth of learning behaviours themselves is given attention, praise and recognition.

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

In short:

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

Extended Read about Celebrating Learning. ⬇️

There are three aspects to celebrating learning:

growing learning habits;
re-defining failure;
putting learning on display.

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

Growing learning habits

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

Teachers look out for and celebrate three dimensions of progress:

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

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

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

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

Ask yourself:

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

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

Re-defining classroom learning: new ways to view learning

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

Mistakes or errors

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

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

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

Stuck

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

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

Effort

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

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

Praise

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

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

Ask yourself:

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

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

Learning on display

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask yourself:

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

Find out 1

How do teachers celebrate the growth of productive learning behaviours and so change their classroom culture?

The chart alongside shows how the classroom culture for the three aspects of Celebrating Learning:

growing learning habits
re-defining failure
putting learning on display

may grow as the culture moves from being teacher centred towards being learning centred.

Download and print a copy.

Look over these trajectories. For each of the 3 columns, ask yourself the key question:

Which cell in each column do you think best describes your current classroom culture?

It is worth taking your time over this. The outcomes from this self-reflection, coupled with the outcomes from Find Out 2, will help to identify the teaching strategies that will move your current classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Growing learning, from a teacher centred classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Which cells best describe your classroom culture now?

Find out 2

How are your students responding to changes in classroom culture?

Culture is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner; it’s always all too evident to learners. Culture is sometimes seen as your enacted values in the classroom – what you do and what you do not do, what you say and do not say, what you believe and do not believe, what you value and do not value.

How are your students reacting to the learning climate of your classroom? How are they reacting to the changes you are making celebrate and display their growth as learners?

Download and print a copy.

Look over these three groups of statements.

The first 5 statements are about Growing learning habits, the second about Redefining failure, and the third about Displaying learning.

For each of the 3 groups, ask yourself the key question:

Which statement in each set do you think best describes the majority of your learners at this time?

It is worth taking your time over this. The outcomes from this, coupled with the outcomes from Find Out 1, will help to identify the teaching strategies that will move your current classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Teachers are in the habit forming business

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

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Begin with the ‘stop/avoid’ box – if any of these teaching behaviours are still in evidence in your classroom it would be worth thinking through how they can be eliminated, since failure to do so will undermine the changes you are hoping to achieve for your learners

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for growing learning habits;

Try Out 3 focuses on re-defining failure;

Try Out 4 focuses on celebrating learning through display.

Explore ideas for understanding the growth of learning habits here

Try out 2

Build the growth of learning behaviours into classroom culture

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to celebrate the growth of learning behaviours. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Try out 3

Re-defining failure in the classroom

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start on redefining failure. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for re-defining failure here

Try out 4

Displaying the learning values of the classroom

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start on displaying the learning values of your classroom. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for displaying learning values here

Find out 3

Developing a deeper understanding of how learner behaviours may respond to the changes you have made in your classroom culture.

We have thus far, with the exception of Find Out 2, focused on changes you can make to your classroom culture, focusing on the three ‘Means’ of Celebrating Learning:

Growing learning habits;
Re-defining failure;
Learning on display.

Here we turn our attention to the two ‘Ends’, the anticipated outcomes for learners, and how these are linked to the changes you are making / have made:

Growing self-awareness;
Growing a growth mindset.

Ask yourself:

Which cell in each column best describes my learners at present?
Is there a good match with the Steps I have been working on in Try Outs 2/3/4?
Are they responding in the ways anticipated?
Are they ready to be challenged to become increasingly self-aware as learners and increasingly positive, or is there a need for a period of consolidation while the changes you have made take full effect?

And critically – what next? You should probably choose to turn your attention to one of the other units so as to maintain a degree of consistency of approach across the four aspects of classroom culture (Relating, Talking, Constructing, and Celebrating).

But, do not forget – you can always return to this unit in the future with the intention of further progressing your classroom culture and their responses.

Growing Celebrating Learning: the anticipated outcomes for learners.

Find out 4

Finding out about 8 further learning behaviours to broaden the range of behaviours you are actively promoting in your classroom.

This Find Out, which appears in all units, is a reference tool to be accessed when / if you need it.

It gives a short introduction to 8 additional learning behaviours: Noticing; Reasoning; Imagining; Making Links; Capitalising; Listening; Planning; Meta Learning.

Each contains 5 short sections:

What do we mean by this learning behaviour?
How do teachers create a classroom culture for it.
How does the behaviour grow?
Some teaching ideas to encourage the behaviour.
How to develop your learning language to support the behaviour.

You will find these introductions most useful as you begin to tackle Steps 2 and 3 in the Try Outs (above).

Review and Evaluate

Suggested termly review activity

Suppose that your main focus over the Spring term was on Celebrating Learning:

You were working mostly on Step 3, with a focus on developing and displaying some learning trajectories and on using the displays to stimulate target setting;
You worked with a colleague to simplify the progression charts for Reasoning and Imagining and make the language age-appropriate;
You are encouraging students to reflect on which behaviours they do and do not do, and to consider how they might improve their learning behaviours;
You may well also have had some associated actions in the other 3 aspects of classroom culture;
You have noticed that students have a deeper understanding of their own Reasoning and Imagining behaviours, and are better able to talk about these learning behaviours;
And in the future you suggest that the school should agree trajectories for all 12 learning behaviours so that they can be used consistently across all classrooms.

Your review and evaluation sheet might well look like the one opposite.

Download and complete your own review and evaluation sheet. Keep it as an ongoing record of what you have done, and pass a copy to senior leaders so that they can keep an eye on developments across the school.

BPL 2: Culture – Constructing Learning

Building a classroom culture that supports students to learn about learning

The programme combines three types of action to help you to experiment, analyse and understand how you can create an increasingly learning-friendly classroom culture.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information.

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

This unit explores how your development can create a classroom culture to develop students’ ability to learn from their own learning.

What are the key aspects of Constructing Learning? (Essential and Extended Read about 1)
With regards to constructing learning, is my classroom currently more teacher focused, or more learning focused? (Find out 1)
How are my students responding to the changes I have made in my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches will be useful in moving this forward? (Try out 1 to 4)
Take a deeper look at the anticipated outcomes for learners of developing a constructing-friendly classroom culture (Find out 3)
Find out about 8 further learning behaviours that will, in time, be added to the key behaviours of Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising (Find Out 4)

Structuring and using the ideas below in your classroom over the next few months or so will edge your classroom culture towards supporting students to learn about learning.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Constructing Learning

From this…

In most classrooms responsibility for organising learning rests almost exclusively with the teacher. It’s the teacher who decides the what and how of learning, and undertakes its review. The main focus is on student performance and many tasks are undertaken individually. Hence in these classrooms it’s the teacher who assumes responsibility for assessment and adopts a ‘fount of knowledge’ role. So it is that students come to believe and accept that responsibility for learning lies with their teacher and hence become increasingly dependent on them.

But does it have to be like this? What if learners are enabled to understand how to learn and take responsibility for their own learning? How would the management and organisation of the curriculum and individual lessons change?

To this…

Gradually enabling students to take responsibility for their own learning involves careful orchestration of how learning is organised; where activities are designed to stretch and challenge not just in outcome terms but in the very nature of ‘doing’ a task. Students’ emotional engagement is a prerequisite when learning is organised in these ways, and the value of learning is in pushing yourself so that your capacities are stretched and strengthened.

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

In short:

Make learning, rather than performance, the object of exercise;
Build reflecting on, and reviewing learning into the learning model used in the classroom;
Design learning activities to stretch and challenge students’ use of their learning behaviours;
Make conscious choices about which learning behaviours to introduce and couple these with content to make lessons more interesting and challenging;
Add a third dimension to teaching: 1. Subject matter, 2. Assessment, plus 3. The learning behaviours being used in order to learn.

Extended Read about Constructing Learning. ⬇️

The three aspects of constructing learning:

Linking learning behaviours with lesson content;
Offering rich and challenging activities;
Building reflection on both content and learning behaviours into lessons.

Aspect 1: Lessons with a dual focus – lessons are designed intentionally to deliver content and to exercise learning behaviours, and students are made aware of both. The learning behaviours drive the content acquisition, the content is the exercise regime for the learning behaviours, each enhancing the other.

Linking content with learning behaviours

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

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

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

Ask yourself:

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

Aspect 2: Lessons with rich and challenging activities – increasingly open-ended activities are designed to engage, to stretch and to challenge. The learning is not over-scaffolded, and the inherent difficulties are not avoided or diluted by overly-helpful teachers. The activities stretch and challenge both content understanding and learning behaviours.

Rich, challenging activity

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

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

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

(Hattie, Visible Learning)

Ask yourself:

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

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

Models of learning

Active Learning cycle

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

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

1 In the DO phase

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

2 In the REVIEW phase

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

3 In the LEARN/SO WHAT phase

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

4 In the APPLY/ NOW WHAT phase

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

Meta cycle

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

Ask yourself:

To what extent do I use Reflection, on either content or process as a consistent feature in my classroom?

Find out 1

How do teachers construct learning to create a learning-centred classroom culture?

The chart alongside shows how the classroom culture for the three aspects of Constructing Learning:

Creating lessons with a dual focus on learning behaviours and on lesson content
Creating rich and challenging activities
Creating lessons with in-built reflection

may grow as the culture moves from being teacher centred towards being learning centred.

Download and print a copy.

Look over these trajectories. For each of the 3 columns, ask yourself the key question:

Which cell in each column do you think best describes your current classroom culture?

Growing Constructing Learning, from a teacher centred classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Which cells best describe your classroom culture now?

Find out 2

How are your students responding to changes in classroom culture?

Culture is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner; it’s always all too evident to learners. Culture is sometimes seen as your enacted values in the classroom – what you do and what you don’t do, what you say and don’t say, what you believe and don’t believe, what you value and don’t value.

How are your students reacting to the learning climate of your classroom? How are they reacting to the changes you are making to build learning behaviours into lesson design?

Download and print a copy.

Look over these three groups of statements.

The first 5 statements are about linking learning with content, the second about creating rich, challenging activities, and the third about building reflection into learning.

For each of the 3 groups, ask yourself the key question:

Which statement in each set do you think best describes the majority of your learners at this time?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Teachers are in the habit forming business

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for linking content with learning behaviours;

Try Out 3 focuses on ideas for creating rich and challenging activities;

Try Out 4 focuses on building reflection on learning into lessons.

Explore the teaching ideas for creating lessons with a dual focus here

Try out 2

Build lessons with a dual focus

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start in linking content with learning behaviours. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Try out 3

Build rich and challenging activities

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start on creating rich and challenging activities. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for creating rich and challenging activities here

Try out 4

Build reflection on learning into lessons

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start on building reflection into lessons. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for building reflection into lessons here

Find out 3

Developing a deeper understanding of how learner behaviours may respond to the changes you have made in your classroom culture.

We have thus far, with the exception of Find Out 2, focused on changes you can make to your classroom culture, focusing on the three ‘Means’ of Constructing Learning:

Linking content with learning behaviours;
Rich,challenging activity;
Reflective model for learning.

Here we turn our attention to the two ‘Ends’, the anticipated outcomes for learners, and how these are linked to the changes you are making / have made:

Growing reflection;
Growing an appetite for challenge.

Ask yourself:

Which cell in each column best describes my learners at present?
Is there a good match with the Steps I have been working on in Try Outs 2/3/4?
Are they responding in the ways anticipated?
Are they ready to be challenged to become increasingly reflective and ready for challenge, or is there a need for a period of consolidation while the changes you have made take full effect?

But, do not forget – you can always return to this unit in the future with the intention of further progressing your classroom culture and their responses.

Growing Constructing Learning: the anticipated outcomes for learners.

Find out 4

Investigate a further 8 learning behaviours to broaden the range of behaviours you can actively promote in your classroom.

This Find Out, which appears in all units, is a reference tool to be accessed when / if you need it.

It gives a short introduction to 8 additional learning behaviours: Noticing; Reasoning; Imagining; Making Links; Capitalising; Listening; Planning; Meta Learning.

Each contains 5 short sections:

What do we mean by this learning behaviour?
How do teachers create a classroom culture for it.
How does the behaviour grow?
Some teaching ideas to encourage the behaviour.
How to develop your learning language to support the behaviour.

You will find these introductions most useful as you begin to tackle Steps 2 and 3 in the Try Outs (above).

Review and Evaluate

Suggested termly review activity

You may well be working hard at trying to develop your students’ use of valuable learning behaviours but in your enthusiasm simply forget to keep any sort of record or track of it. So here’s a simple form for you to either use as is or adapt to fit your circumstances. Capture your significant shifts in teaching and your students’ shifts in learning.

Suppose that your main focus over the Spring term was on Constructing Learning:

You were working mostly on Step 3, with a focus on developing a wider range of activity types and blending VTRs into everyday classroom practice;
You explored the hierarchy of activity types and reflected on your ‘default’ activity types;
You have explored and integrated a range of Visible Thinking Routines into everyday classroom conversations and have realised that the VTRs can point the way to expanding the activity types you employ;
You may well also have had some associated actions in the other 3 aspects of classroom culture;
You have noticed that the majority of the activities you design are of the Listening / Practising types and have begun to integrate Manipulating and Assembling type activities into project work; that students are engaged by these activity types; that it takes time and repeat use for VTRs to become established;
And in the future you intend to work on creating a ‘Finding’ type activity that can be used in the upcoming summer term project on xxxx.

Use this or design your own format to capture your actions and their impact.

BPL 2: Culture – Talking for Learning

Building a classroom culture that extends students’ language for learning

The programme combines three types of action to help you to experiment, analyse and understand how you can create an increasingly learning-friendly classroom culture.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information.

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

This unit explores how your development can create a classroom culture to develop students’ learning language and understanding of the learning process.

What are the key aspects of talking for learning? (Essential and Extended Read about 1)
With regards to talking for learning, is my classroom currently more teacher focused, or more learning focused? (Find out 1)
How are my students responding to the changes I have made in my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches will be useful in moving this forward? (Try out 1 to 4)
Take a deeper look at the anticipated outcomes for learners of developing a talk-friendly classroom culture (Find out 3)
Find out about 8 further learning behaviours that will, in time, be added to the key behaviours of Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising (Find Out 4)

Structuring and using the ideas below in your classroom over the next few months or so will edge your classroom culture towards developing a rich learning language that enables students to better understand the process of learning.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Talking for Learning

Talking about learning is about the sort of language content and style that enhances learning, making learning itself the object of conversation. The way you express yourself in the classroom creates a powerful linguistic environment that teaches young people the best of what we know about learning. Using the language of learning helps students to discuss, understand, and become conscious of using and improving their learning behaviours.

From this…

In most classrooms responsibility for talking about learning rests almost exclusively with the teacher. Teachers decide what and how to talk about learning, and they undertake most of the questioning. The main focus of teachers’ classroom talk is on how students are performing and what they have to show as a result of their learning So students hear very little about how they are learning or how to improve how they are learning

To this…

In classrooms where the aim is to build better learners the vocabulary and tone become quite different. Teachers begin to coach students in the how of learning and this gradually enables their students to take responsibility for their own learning. Students are enabled to talk about their learning behaviours, such as perseverance or revising. They are enabled to improve their use of, say, questioning or planning their learning. Thus talk about improving the ‘how’ of learning becomes a crucial dimension to classroom discourse enabling students to take far greater control of their learning.

In short:

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

Extended Read about Talking for Learning. ⬇️

There are three main aspects to this cultural language shift:

Creating and sharing a language for learning;
Stimulating discussions that explore the process of learning;
Offering learning related feedback.

Aspect 1: Creating a language for learning – helping learners to understand and use a language of sufficient precision and subtlety that enables them to describe, discuss and understand the learning process. The learning language begins with naming the learning behaviours of the four strands of a supple learning mind. (emotional, cognitive, social and strategic) It moves on to exploring what these are, when we use them, how we might get better at using them and how we can become a better learner.

Creating a language for learning

click to enlarge

Building a language of learning will enable your students to:

name
recognise
talk about using
select for use when appropriate
become skilled in using
evaluate the effect of using their learning habits

Using and extending the language of learning adds breadth and depth to how you and your learners talk about, understand and improve learning.

Emotional language – how we feel
The first aspect of the language framework is about helping students to lock onto learning; to resist distraction; to become absorbed and to stay engaged despite the ebb and flow of learning.
Learning behaviours include; absorption, managing distraction, attentive noticing, perseverance.

Cognitive language – how we think
The second aspect of the supple learning mind is about being able to draw on and use a wide range of learning methods or ways of thinking.
Learning behaviours include; questioning, making links, imagination, reasoning, capitalising.

Social language – how we relate
The next aspect of the supple learning mind is about being able to make use of relationships in the pursuit of learning.
Learning behaviours include; interdependence, collaboration, empathy and attentive listening, imitation.

Strategic language – how we manage our learning
The fourth aspect of a supple learning mind is about building the ability to be reflective, to manage the learning process, to think profitably about learning and ourselves as learners; to become meta-learners.
Learning behaviours include; planning, revising or refining, distilling, meta-learning.

Use of the language becomes essential in what people notice about learning. Using it abundantly makes learning visible and public.

Ask yourself:

How fluent is your own talk about learning?

Aspect 2: Exploring learning as a process – the ways in which you enable learners to explore and reflect on the process of learning. It’s a shift away from talking about the ‘what’ of learning and broadens classroom discourse to include conversations about the process of learning, the ‘how’ of learning.

Exploring learning as a process

Deep talk about learning is what sets learning powered classrooms apart. Learning and how it works isn’t just talked about at the beginning of a term or year but is embedded in the everyday conversations of the classroom.

Conversations will include noticing things about learning:

What do we mean when we say learning?
When and where is it best?
What helps you to do it?
How does it feel? What hinders your learning?

It goes on into encouraging students to talk about their learning:

What made it so good?
What did you contribute?
How did you make sense of that?

And later learners can be nudged towards becoming meta-learners with questions such as:

How do you plan to go about learning?
How will you monitor how it’s going?
How can you review how your learning has gone?

All the while a general interest in learning can be kept fresh by references to media reports and articles about the brain and the mind…. visualisation in sport coaching, or what happens to learning in Alzheimer’s Disease, or how babies learn to talk…

Learning as a process is brought to life by making it the subject of conversations.

Ask yourself:

How much do you talk with your students about the process (not content) of learning itself?

Which of the ideas above might you start using in your classroom?

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

Prompting learning

The language of learning can help you to think about how you might talk in a way that helps to cultivate the learning behaviours and help students to gain a better personalised understanding of content.

You can turn each of the learning behaviours into sets of casual prompts or nudges to move students along in learning. For example, to nudge curiosity/questioning:
- “What’s odd about that?
- What does that make you wonder?
- What do you want to find out?
- How else could you do that?”
Where your classroom talk is all focused on the process and the experience of learning itself your comments should encourage students to pay attention to how they are learning. Your comments could ask them to slow down and notice and appraise the strategies and steps they are using along the way:
- “What would have made this easier for you?
- Where else could you use that?”
- What’s making you do it that way?
This helps students to become more reflective and thoughtful about their own learning.

Promoting self-talk

Since you want young people to turn out to be robust confident learners you have to talk with them in terms of a growth mindset.

You develop your students’ interest in the learnable skills and strategies.
Your comments focus on effort, habit and disposition, focusing students on how to get better by looking for ways to try harder or differently.
You steer students away from carving the world into things they are ‘good at’ or ‘not good at’ since developing learning behaviours will help them to become better learners.

Feedback prompts

In the learning centred classroom feedback can be seen at three levels. Notice that all the prompts ask rather than tell.

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

Does this answer meet the success criteria?
Is this right?
Could you elaborate on this answer?
What aspect of your response to this assignment are you pleased with/unhappy about?
What other information do you need to meet the criteria?
What’s the sticking point in this task?

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 questions could you ask about this task?
Do you grasp the concept underpinning this task?
Have you done anything similar to this before?

Self-Regulation-Level Feedback prompts (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?

Ask yourself:

What proportion of my feedback is on the same lines as the examples above?

Which of these types of feedback could I start with?

Find out 1

How do teachers build a language for learning that changes their classroom culture?

The chart alongside shows how the classroom culture for the three aspects of Talking for Learning:

Creating a language for learning;
Exploring learning as a process;
Nudging learning forward;

may grow as the culture moves from being teacher centred towards being learning centred.

Download and print a copy.

Look over these trajectories. For each of the 3 columns, ask yourself the key question:

Which cell in each column do you think best describes your current classroom culture?

Growing Talking for Learning, from a teacher centred classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Which cells best describe your classroom culture now?

Find out 2

How are your students responding to changes in classroom culture?

How are your students reacting to the learning climate of your classroom? How are they reacting to the changes you are making to create a language to explore and understand the learning process?

Download and print a copy.

Look over these three groups of statements.

The first 5 statements are about Sharing a language for learning, the second about Exploring learning as a process, and the third is about Nudging learning through feedback.

For each of the 3 groups, ask yourself the key question:

Which statement in each set do you think best describes the majority of your learners at this time?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Teachers are in the habit forming business

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for creating a language for learning;

Try Out 3 focuses on exploring learning as a process;

Try Out 4 focuses on nudging learning forward.

Explore the teaching ideas for creating a language for learning here

Try out 2

Build Talking for Learning by creating and sharing a language for learning

Creating a language for learning – helping learners to understand and use a language of sufficient precision and subtlety that enables them to describe, discuss and understand the learning process. The learning language begins with naming learning behaviours and moves on to exploring what these are, when we use them, how we might get better at using them and how we can become a better learner.

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start in creating a language for learning. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Try out 3

Build Talking for Learning by exploring learning as a process

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 ( the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start in exploring learning as a process. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for exploring learning as a process here

Try out 4

Build Talking for Learning by nudging learning forward

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start in nudging learning forward. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for nudging learning forward here

Find out 3

Developing a deeper understanding of how learner behaviours may respond to the changes you have made in your classroom culture.

We have thus far, with the exception of Find Out 2, focused on changes you can make to your classroom culture, focusing on the three ‘Means’ of Talking for Learning:

Creating a language for learning;
Exploring learning as a process;
Nudging learning forward.

Here we turn our attention to the two ‘Ends’, the anticipated outcomes for learners, and how these are linked to the changes you are making / have made:

Growing a language for learning;
Growing an understanding of learning.

Ask yourself:

Which cell in each column best describes my learners at present?
Is there a good match with the Steps I have been working on in Try Outs 2/3/4?
Are they responding in the ways anticipated?
Are they ready to be challenged to become increasingly fluent in their learning language and ready to further understand the process of learning, or is there a need for a period of consolidation while the changes you have made take full effect?

But, do not forget – you can always return to this unit in the future with the intention of further progressing your classroom culture and their responses.

Growing Talking for Learning: the anticipated outcomes for learners.

Find out 4

Finding out about 8 further learning behaviours to broaden the range of behaviours you are actively promoting in your classroom.

This Find Out, which appears in all units, is a reference tool to be accessed when / if you need it.

It gives a short introduction to 8 additional learning behaviours: Noticing; Reasoning; Imagining; Making Links; Capitalising; Listening; Planning; Meta Learning.

Each contains 5 short sections:

What do we mean by this learning behaviour?
How do teachers create a classroom culture for it.
How does the behaviour grow?
Some teaching ideas to encourage the behaviour.
How to develop your learning language to support the behaviour.

You will find these introductions most useful as you begin to tackle Steps 2 and 3 in the Try Outs (above).

Review and Evaluate

Suggested termly review activity

Suppose that your main focus over the Spring term was on Talking for Learning:

You were working mostly on Step 2, with a focus on introducing a wider range of learning behaviours;
You used some familiar books to stimulate discussions about listening and noticing;
You created a display of nursery rhyme characters and their learning behaviours;
You may well also have had some associated actions in the other 3 aspects of classroom culture;
You have noticed that many students are developing a broader understanding of what a successful learner does;
And in the future you intend to work on introducing Reasoning and Imagining.

Your review and evaluation sheet might well look like the one opposite.

Culture master 2025

Building a classroom culture that extends students’ responsibilities

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This four??? unit online programme looks at how your development as a teacher can enable and strengthen the development of a learning-friendly classroom culture.

The programme combines three types of action to help you to experiment, analyse and understand how you can create an increasingly learning-friendly classroom culture.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information.

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

This unit explores how your development can create a classroom culture to develop students’ autonomy as you gradually devolve responsibility for learning to them.

What are the key aspects of ~~devolving responsibility for learning~~? (Essential and Extended Read about 1)
With regards to ~~devolving responsibility~~, is my classroom currently more teacher focused, or more learning focused? (Find out 1)
How are my students responding to the changes I have made in my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches will be useful in moving this forward? (Try out 1 to 4)
~~Take a deeper look at how a learning centred classroom develops and the anticipated outcomes for learners~~ (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below in your classroom over the next few months or so will edge your classroom culture towards ~~supporting student independence~~.

change image

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Relating for Learning

from HYLT, edited

From this…

In many classrooms responsibility for learning seems to rest almost exclusively with the teacher. The teacher decides the what and how of learning, and undertakes most of the questioning. The main focus is on student performance and most tasks are undertaken individually. In these classrooms the teacher assumes responsibility for assessment and adopts a ‘fount of knowledge’ role. Hence students come to believe and accept that responsibility for learning lies with their teacher and become increasingly dependent on them.

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

To this…

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

In short…

The key features of this cultural shift include:

gradually devolving responsibility for learning to students;
giving students more of a stake in the process of their own learning;
teachers becoming learning coaches, enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
using collaborative activity to help students see each other as resources for learning;
giving students choices about what and how to learn;
enabling students to talk more and adults to talk less;
teachers modelling being a learner.

image?

Extended Read about Relating for learning. ⬇️

from hylt, almost verbatim, formatting removed

There are three aspects to relating for learning:

~~giving more responsibility to learners for their learning;~~
~~moving away from telling to coaching;~~
~~modelling the learning process; showing ourselves as learners.~~

Aspect 1: Devolving Responsibility – this is about shifting the emphasis towards learners taking increasing responsibility for their own development. It involves working towards students asking more of the questions, monitoring their own learning, doing more of the work, making more choices, pursuing their own lines of enquiry. In short it’s about enabling students to become more active in the learning process; offering them more opportunities to decide what to do and actively review their own experiences.

~~The focus becomes how students are learning rather than how they perform, so teachers who work in this way tend to want to make sure that:~~

~~there’s plenty of collaborative activity because this helps students to see each other as resources (not rivals) for learning;~~
~~students can make choices about what and how to learn (high levels of learner autonomy);~~
~~students experience failure as a necessary and useful part of learning (tolerating uncertainty, mess, error and initial failure);~~
~~students are given a chance to talk more – and adults talk less;~~
~~3students experience more open-ended activities – and create their own;~~
~~students have more opportunity to spend longer on an activity, to feed their interest/engagement in it;~~
~~students establish high-level goals for their own learning, based on challenge and quality feedback including their own;~~
~~students have access to learning experiences that are under rather than over-engineered, with elements of ambiguity;~~
~~students can decide on admissible outcomes.~~

~~This shift to more learner involvement offers deep professional satisfaction and a new set of learning relationships.~~

~~Ask yourself:~~

~~How many of the above do I use in order to enable my students to become better learners?~~
~~How frequently do I offer such opportunities?~~

Aspect 2. Coaching approaches – this is about moving away from ‘telling’ whenever possible. It is one of the hardest of balancing acts: knowing when you can coach and when you have to tell requires a teacher to have a deep understanding of both the subject matter and the learner.

“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 it 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 student hasn’t been allowed to confront and engage with the problem and find their way forward. Learning powered teachers adopt a coaching role.

~~Ask yourself:~~

~~What is the balance between telling and coaching in my classroom currently?~~

Aspect 3. Modelling the learning process – this is about the ways in which we show that we too are learners. It indicates a shift away from teachers being ‘all-knowing subject specialists’ to displaying uncertainty, sharing their own learning stories, learning ‘aloud’ and learning alongside students.

‘Through our modelling we have the opportunity to nurture the very attitudes, values and behaviours we want to see in our students’ Ron Richhart Creating Cultures of thinking.

The way we act in classrooms sends messages about what we think and value. The more we model the behaviours we wish to see in students, the more they will pick up on them. If you model patience, forgiveness, and openness to ideas this will begin to set the tone for the sort of classroom where developing learning power can flourish. Importantly it will make students feel safe and able to take risks in learning.

Noticing and commenting on everyone’s strengths (not weaknesses), valuing everyone’s contributions, noticing and commenting on their use of learning behaviours all helps to get the balance between safety and challenge. If you model being calm, orderly and accessible the classroom will become likewise.

One of the more obvious ways of unpicking learning, putting it on show, is to model being a good learner to students. This type of modelling is about showing how you are a learner too; showing that you are a confident finder outer. So teachers who work in this way:

~~Take their students behind the scenes of learning and share with them some of the uncertain thinking of learning;~~
Learn aloud, taking students through how they would or could work out a problem. Model the thought processes (including how they feel) they as a learner go through. This is important because a lot of the skill of learning only manifests itself in the inner world of the learner;
Expose the thinking, feeling and decision making of a learner-in-action to help students actually see and hear how learning works. This thinking aloud will help students become aware of the thought processes they might have running through their head while learning;
~~Model their own fallibility in order to show it’s OK not to know;~~
Model that they’re willing to stick at problems; to research it; to spend time just thinking about it. You can do this by thinking out loud with the students when you are teaching by saying “I might be wrong about that.” ” I’m not to sure about that at the moment” ” I’ll have to come back to you about that”;
Sharing their own experiences as a learner, which can be very powerful for boosting learning power in the classroom. Students will be fascinated to hear that teachers go through the same struggles as they do.

~~Ask yourself:~~

~~How much do I learn aloud– externalise my own exploratory thinking– in front of students?~~
~~How much could I reveal about my own learning projects, with all their ups and downs?~~

Find out 1

How do teachers progressively devolve responsibility for learning to students and so change their classroom culture?

The chart alongside shows how the classroom culture for the three aspects of ~~Relating for Learning:~~

~~Devolving responsibility~~
~~Coaching approaches~~
~~Modelling~~

may grow as the culture moves from being teacher centred towards being learning centred.

Download and print a copy.

Look over these trajectories. For each of the 3 columns, ask yourself the key question:

Which cell in each column do you think best describes your current classroom culture?

Growing Relating for Learning, from a teacher centred classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Which cells best describes your classroom culture now?

find others in:

culture master april 24 v7

Find out 2

How are your students responding to changes in classroom culture?

How are your students reacting to the learning climate of your classroom? How are they reacting to the changes you are making ~~to encourage learners to take more responsibility for their learning?~~

Download and print a copy.

Look over these three groups of statements.

The first 5 statements are about ~~Devolving Responsibility, the second about Coaching, and the third about Modelling.~~

For each of the 3 groups, ask yourself the key question:

Which statement in each set do you think best describes the majority of your learners at this time?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Teachers are in the habit forming business

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for ~~moving responsibility towards learners~~;

Try Out 3 focuses on ~~developing a coaching approach~~;

Try Out 4 focuses on ~~teachers modelling themselves as learners~~.

From HYLT moving practice on

Explore the teaching ideas for ~~devolving responsibility~~ here

Try out 2

Build Relating for Learning by devolving responsibility to learners

copy from FO2

Devolving Responsibility – is about shifting the emphasis towards learners taking increasing responsibility for their own development. It involves working towards students asking more of the questions, monitoring their own learning, doing more of the work, making more choices, pursuing their own lines of enquiry. In short it’s about enabling students to become more active in the learning process; offering them more opportunities to decide what to do and actively review their own experiences.

Try out 3

Build Relating for Learning by extending your coaching behaviours

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 to identify the best place to start to further develop a coaching approach.

Explore the teaching ideas for ~~developing a coaching approach~~ here

Try out 4

Build Relating for Learning by modelling yourself as a learner

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

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 to identify the best place to start to model yourself as a lifelong learner.

Explore the teaching ideas for ~~modelling yourself as a learner~~ here

Needs FO3 and Meeting inserted here from Relating

=====================================

For each section:

From Find Out 1 (the green tables) you’ve developed an idea of where your classroom culture is in relation to ~~Devolving Responsibility~~ for Learning, and from Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) you have considered how your students are responding to the changes you have made.

Look below at the 5 Steps and identify the step that best fits your current classroom culture and how the majority of your students are responding.

If in doubt, start at the step that most accurately reflects how the majority of your students are responding.

Step 1. Start here if . . .

~~You run a well organised, efficient classroom where learners broadly expect you to help them to be successful~~ (from Find Out 1).

And as a result, the majority of your students ~~prefer you to do most of the work and make learning easy for them~~ (from Find Out 2).

These ideas will help you to ~~begin to move responsibility towards learners~~.

Step 2. Start here if . . .

You have introduced students to simple self-monitoring tools which help them to become more aware of what’s happening as they learn. You endeavour to make being ‘stuck’ acceptable, normal and interesting (from Find Out 1).

And as a result, the majority of your students ~~are becoming aware of how they are learning and are not afraid of difficulty or getting stuck~~ (from Find Out 2).

These ideas below will help you to ~~move responsibility for learning towards learners~~.

Step 3. Start here if . .

You have scanned the curriculum for opportunities to introduce a broadening range of learning behaviours to students. Your students are gradually realising they have an array of capacities through which to control their own learning (from Find Out 1).

And as a result, the majority of your students ~~are aware of the wide range of learning behaviours they command~~ (from Find Out 2).

These ideas will help you to ~~move more responsibility towards learners~~.

Step 4. Start here if . . .

~~You encourage students to monitor and evaluate their use of an increasing variety of learning behaviours and you harness their motivation by encouraging their use of tools like ‘If-Then’ planning~~ (from Find Out 1).

And as a result, the majority of your students ~~monitor and evaluate their own learning and work towards achieving ‘if -then’ learning targets~~ (from Find Out 2)

These ideas will help you to begin to ~~move yet more responsibility towards learners.~~

Step 5. Start here if . . .

~~You offer students opportunities to tackle ‘wild’ rather than ‘tame’ tasks and expect students to develop their own high level goals and success criteria~~ (from Find Out 1).

And, as a result, the majority of your students ~~are becoming autonomous, independent learners~~ (from Find Out 2).

These ideas will help you to secure this and further ~~devolve responsibility to~~ learners.

==================================

Ideas for modelling yourself as a learner Step 1. ⬇️

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Ideas for modelling yourself as a learner Step 2. ⬇️

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Ideas for modelling yourself as a learner Step 3. ⬇️

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Some text linking the blue quiz answers to this step

Ideas for modelling yourself as a learner Step 4. ⬇️

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Ideas for modelling yourself as a learner - beyond Step 4. ⬇️

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Return to the ~~Relating for~~ Learning Unit

BPL 3: Building Coherence – Curriculum & Lesson Design

An overview of this phase 3 unit: Building Coherence – Curriculum and Lesson Design

This unit is designed to be undertaken by a small team of teachers with a view to building a strategy for introducing a whole school approach to ~~tracking the growth of learning power for all students~~.

The unit should take around 6 months to complete if you follow these suggested timings:

~~Section 1 explores the rationale for tracking learning power;~~
~~Sections 2 and 3 are reminders of the tracking ideas introduced in phase 1 and the learning behaviours introduced in phase 2 respectively;~~
~~[Expect these 3 sections to take a month to complete.]~~
~~Sections 4 and 5 is where the unit really gets underway;~~
~~In section 4 you are invited to dip your toes in the water and explore your own learning profile and tentatively create profiles for a couple of your own students;~~
~~Section 5 challenges you to create learning profiles for all of the students in your class;~~
~~[Expect sections 4 and 5 to take at least one month, maybe 2.]~~
Section 6 is the first team meeting. It is designed for team members to share their students’ learning profiles. Schedule this once all team members have completed section 5 – this will likely be sometime in month 4;
Section 7 supports your preparatory thinking in advance of the final team meeting in section 8. Aim to complete these sections in months 5 and 6. Be prepared to allocate some time after the section 8 meeting to finalise your team recommendations in writing.

1. Why it is important to track students’ learning growth

Tracking tools sometimes have a bad press. Too often assessments are summative rather than formative, too often used to label, too infrequently used developmentally. Some are little more than an administrative burden that have minimal effect on classroom practice.

The motivation to track students’ learning growth is not rooted in a desire to identify ‘Grey phase Perseverers’ or ‘Green phase Collaborators’ – rather it is about capturing individual students’ learning strengths and relative weaknesses so that:

~~teachers can tailor their interventions to target and support the growth of learning behaviours;~~
~~students can become aware of their own learning behaviours so that in time they can take control of their own learning growth.~~

~~It is part of a whole school approach to bringing learning out of the shadows, to helping teachers and students to value how they learn at least as much as what they learn.~~

In addition, it offers schools an alternative metric for success, a coherent approach to monitoring the impact of learning related initiatives and, most importantly, the rich information necessary to support all students to become ever more effective learners.

2. How you tracked growth in Phase 1

In Building Powerful Learners Phase 1, Unit 3 . . .

~~You met the progression charts for the four key learning behaviours (Perseverance, Questioning, Collaboration, Revising), and were invited to ask yourself:~~

~~What sort of learning characteristics do my learners have?~~
~~What sort of learning characteristics do my more successful learners have?~~
~~Which characteristics or behaviours do my struggling learners have?~~
~~Which learning behaviour contributes to the success of most of my learners?~~
~~Which learning behaviour is used less than any of the others?~~
~~How do the answers to these, and similar questions, apply to my teaching and the curriculum?~~

You considered your own growth in relation to these 4 behaviour trajectories and subsequently created Learning Profiles for four students in your class. If you still have those learning profiles it would be a good idea to retrieve them as a reminder. Alternatively you can just revisit the relevant parts of Unit 3 here:

~~Revisit Phase 1, Unit 3~~

~~Now in this Phase 3 unit we explain how to mirror that process, but this time:~~

~~in relation to 12 learning behaviours;~~
~~and in relation to all learners in your class;~~
~~and eventually to all learners in your school.~~

3. Adding a further 8 learning behaviours.

To help schools make the collection of learning data more manageable we have selected 12 of the original 17 characteristics for you to take a closer look at over time. The 12 we have selected are the original 4 (Perseverance, Questioning, Collaboration, Revising) plus the 8 further learning characteristics (Noticing, Making Links, Reasoning, Imagining, Capitalising, Listening, Planning and Meta Learning) that were introduced in phase 2.

This section offers glimpses of these fascinating learning characteristics and how they grow under the influence of a learning friendly environment. Understanding more about them will increase your confidence to collect valid data about how these characteristics are growing in your students.

4. Up close and personal with your own learning behaviours

This section gives you opportunities to…

~~discover and understand what ‘good learners’ tend to be like in terms of the 12 learning behaviours~~
~~look at yourself through a learning behaviour lens~~
~~tentatively consider the learning behaviours of a couple of students~~
~~remind yourself of how the 12 learning behaviours progress~~

Perhaps the best way of really getting to grips with all of these 12 learning behaviours is to take a personal look at yourself as a learner and the learning behaviours you tend to use. What might your learning profile look like; where are your strengths, what are the behaviours you find tricky; which would you like to improve?

Having got the idea we then invite you to look at just a couple of your students; a low and a high attaining student. This should give you a glimpse of how easy or tricky it is to generate a learning profile for an individual student.

~~Create your own learning profile~~

5. Creating learning profiles for your own class

~~The learning profiles you began to explore in section 4 have the power to reveal interesting and vital information about students’ learning.~~

This is the point at which you do the ‘heavy lifting’ and create profiles for each of the students in your class. Take your time over this – it is the vital preparation for the upcoming team meeting when you will compare and contrast your own class profiles with others.

~~The first team meeting should be scheduled around 2/3 months into your engagement in Building Coherence, and you should aim to complete this section in advance of that meeting.~~

~~Creating learning profiles~~

6. Team Meeting #1

Comparing and contrasting our learners’ profiles

The purpose of this first team meeting is to give team members the chance to:

~~share their experiences of creating student learning profiles;~~
~~explore similarities and differences;~~
~~begin to frame some possible hypotheses about what the profiles reveal;~~
~~consider whether the completed profiles offer any evidence that learning behaviours are progressing as students move through the school;~~
~~pave the way for the next team activity – beginning to think about how student learning profiles might be integrated into whole school practices.~~

~~Team Meeting Agenda~~

7. Considering the issues around whole school implementation

The prospect and potential of ~~developing learning profiles~~ as a whole school strategy will inevitably raise all manner of important questions. There will be strategic, leadership and management questions that deserve consideration before leaders can make a reasoned decision about the implementation.

Here we outline the leadership considerations that will be necessary for the successful implementation. Considerations include: Shared Values; Skills; Staff; Systems; Structure; Style; and Strategy.

It’s worth taking your time to reflect on all seven aspects – it is only when you’ve addressed all seven will you have laid the foundations of success.

Getting strategic

8. Team Meeting #2

Framing our proposed strategy for whole school implementation

This final team meeting is designed to agree recommendations around how the school should introduce ~~student learning profiles~~ across the school, and to foreshadow some of the potential consequences of so doing.

If the team does not already contain a senior leader, we suggest that at least one should be invited so that they can hear your suggestions, probe your reasoning, and understand the implications of moving to a whole school approach.

Team Meeting Agenda

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Download Download

Phase 3: Building Coherence -Tracking Learning Power Growth

An overview of this phase 3 unit: Building Coherence – Tracking Learning Power Growth

This unit is designed to be undertaken by a small team of teachers with a view to building a strategy for introducing a whole school approach to tracking the growth of learning power for all students.

The unit should take around 6 months to complete if you follow these suggested timings:

Section 1 explores the rationale for tracking learning power;
Sections 2 and 3 are reminders of the tracking ideas introduced in phase 1 and the learning behaviours introduced in phase 2 respectively;
[Expect these 3 sections to take a month to complete.]
Sections 4 and 5 is where the unit really gets underway;
In section 4 you are invited to dip your toes in the water and explore your own learning profile and tentatively create profiles for a couple of your own students;
Section 5 challenges you to create learning profiles for all of the students in your class;
[Expect sections 4 and 5 to take at least one month, maybe 2.]
Section 6 is the first team meeting. It is designed for team members to share their students’ learning profiles. Schedule this once all team members have completed section 5 – this will likely be sometime in month 4;
Section 7 supports your preparatory thinking in advance of the final team meeting in section 8. Aim to complete these sections in months 5 and 6. Be prepared to allocate some time after the section 8 meeting to finalise your team recommendations in writing.

1. Why it is important to track students’ learning growth

teachers can tailor their interventions to target and support the growth of learning behaviours;
students can become aware of their own learning behaviours so that in time they can take control of their own learning growth.

It is part of a whole school approach to bringing learning out of the shadows, to helping teachers and students to value how they learn at least as much as what they learn.

2. How you tracked growth in Phase 1

In Building Powerful Learners Phase 1, Unit 3 . . .

You met the progression charts for the four key learning behaviours (Perseverance, Questioning, Collaboration, Revising), and were invited to ask yourself:

What sort of learning characteristics do my learners have?
What sort of learning characteristics do my more successful learners have?
Which characteristics or behaviours do my struggling learners have?
Which learning behaviour contributes to the success of most of my learners?
Which learning behaviour is used less than any of the others?
How do the answers to these, and similar questions, apply to my teaching and the curriculum?

Revisit Phase 1, Unit 3

Now in this Phase 3 unit we explain how to mirror that process, but this time:

in relation to 12 learning behaviours;
and in relation to all learners in your class;
and eventually to all learners in your school.

3. Adding a further 8 learning behaviours.

4. Up close and personal with your own learning behaviours

This section gives you opportunities to…

discover and understand what ‘good learners’ tend to be like in terms of the 12 learning behaviours
look at yourself through a learning behaviour lens
tentatively consider the learning behaviours of a couple of students
remind yourself of how the 12 learning behaviours progress

Create your own learning profile

5. Creating learning profiles for your own class

The learning profiles you began to explore in section 4 have the power to reveal interesting and vital information about students’ learning.

The first team meeting should be scheduled around 2/3 months into your engagement in Building Coherence, and you should aim to complete this section in advance of that meeting.

Creating learning profiles

6. Team Meeting #1

Comparing and contrasting our learners’ profiles

The purpose of this first team meeting is to give team members the chance to:

share their experiences of creating student learning profiles;
explore similarities and differences;
begin to frame some possible hypotheses about what the profiles reveal;
consider whether the completed profiles offer any evidence that learning behaviours are progressing as students move through the school;
pave the way for the next team activity – beginning to think about how student learning profiles might be integrated into whole school practices.

Team Meeting Agenda

7. Considering the issues around whole school implementation

The prospect and potential of developing learning profiles as a whole school strategy will inevitably raise all manner of important questions. There will be strategic, leadership and management questions that deserve consideration before leaders can make a reasoned decision about the implementation.

It’s worth taking your time to reflect on all seven aspects – it is only when you’ve addressed all seven will you have laid the foundations of success.

Getting strategic

8. Team Meeting #2

Framing our proposed strategy for whole school implementation

This final team meeting is designed to agree recommendations around how the school should introduce student learning profiles across the school, and to foreshadow some of the potential consequences of so doing.

Team Meeting Agenda

Phase 2 – Senior leader guide

BPL 2: Culture – Relating for Learning

Building a classroom culture that extends students’ responsibilities for learning

The programme combines three types of action to help you to experiment, analyse and understand how you can create an increasingly learning-friendly classroom culture.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information.

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

This unit explores how your development can create a classroom culture to develop students’ autonomy as you gradually devolve responsibility for learning to them.

What are the key aspects of devolving responsibility for learning? (Essential and Extended Read about 1)
With regards to devolving responsibility, is my classroom currently more teacher focused, or more learning focused? (Find out 1)
How are my students responding to the changes I have made in my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches will be useful in moving this forward? (Try out 1 to 4)
Take a deeper look at the anticipated outcomes for learners of developing a relating-friendly classroom culture (Find out 3)
Find out about 8 further learning behaviours that will, in time, be added to the key behaviours of Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising (Find Out 4)

Structuring and using the ideas below in your classroom over the next few months or so will edge your classroom culture towards supporting student independence.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Relating for Learning

From this…

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

To this…

In short…

The key features of this cultural shift include:

gradually devolving responsibility for learning to students;
giving students more of a stake in the process of their own learning;
teachers becoming learning coaches, enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
using collaborative activity to help students see each other as resources for learning;
giving students choices about what and how to learn;
enabling students to talk more and adults to talk less;
teachers modelling being a learner.

Extended Read about Relating for learning. ⬇️

There are three aspects to relating for learning:

giving more responsibility to learners for their learning;
moving away from telling to coaching;
modelling the learning process; showing ourselves as learners.

The focus becomes how students are learning rather than how they perform, so teachers who work in this way tend to want to make sure that:

there’s plenty of collaborative activity because this helps students to see each other as resources (not rivals) for learning;
students can make choices about what and how to learn (high levels of learner autonomy);
students experience failure as a necessary and useful part of learning (tolerating uncertainty, mess, error and initial failure);
students are given a chance to talk more – and adults talk less;
3students experience more open-ended activities – and create their own;
students have more opportunity to spend longer on an activity, to feed their interest/engagement in it;
students establish high-level goals for their own learning, based on challenge and quality feedback including their own;
students have access to learning experiences that are under rather than over-engineered, with elements of ambiguity;
students can decide on admissible outcomes.

This shift to more learner involvement offers deep professional satisfaction and a new set of learning relationships.

Ask yourself:

How many of the above do I use in order to enable my students to become better learners?
How frequently do I offer such opportunities?

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

Ask yourself:

What is the balance between telling and coaching in my classroom currently?

‘Through our modelling we have the opportunity to nurture the very attitudes, values and behaviours we want to see in our students’ Ron Richhart Creating Cultures of thinking.

Take their students behind the scenes of learning and share with them some of the uncertain thinking of learning;
Learn aloud, taking students through how they would or could work out a problem. Model the thought processes (including how they feel) they as a learner go through. This is important because a lot of the skill of learning only manifests itself in the inner world of the learner;
Expose the thinking, feeling and decision making of a learner-in-action to help students actually see and hear how learning works. This thinking aloud will help students become aware of the thought processes they might have running through their head while learning;
Model their own fallibility in order to show it’s OK not to know;
Model that they’re willing to stick at problems; to research it; to spend time just thinking about it. You can do this by thinking out loud with the students when you are teaching by saying “I might be wrong about that.” ” I’m not to sure about that at the moment” ” I’ll have to come back to you about that”;
Sharing their own experiences as a learner, which can be very powerful for boosting learning power in the classroom. Students will be fascinated to hear that teachers go through the same struggles as they do.

Ask yourself:

How much do I learn aloud– externalise my own exploratory thinking– in front of students?
How much could I reveal about my own learning projects, with all their ups and downs?

Find out 1

How do teachers progressively devolve responsibility for learning to students and so change their classroom culture?

The chart alongside shows how the classroom culture for the three aspects of Relating for Learning:

Devolving responsibility for learning
Coaching approach to teaching
Modelling being a learner

may grow as the culture moves from being teacher centred towards being learning centred.

Download and print a copy.

Look over these trajectories. For each of the 3 columns, ask yourself the key question:

Which cell in each column do you think best describes your current classroom culture?

Growing Relating for Learning, from a teacher centred classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Which cells best describe your classroom culture now?

Find out 2

How are your students responding to changes in classroom culture?

How are your students reacting to the learning climate of your classroom? How are they reacting to the changes you are making to encourage learners to take more responsibility for their learning?

Download and print a copy.

Look over these three groups of statements.

The first 5 statements are about Devolving Responsibility, the second about Coaching, and the third about Modelling.

For each of the 3 groups, ask yourself the key question:

Which statement in each set do you think best describes the majority of your learners at this time?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Teachers are in the habit forming business

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

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility towards learners;

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a coaching approach;

Try Out 4 focuses on teachers modelling themselves as learners.

Explore the teaching ideas for devolving responsibility here

Try out 2

Build Relating for Learning by devolving responsibility to learners

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to further devolve responsibility for learning. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Try out 3

Build Relating for Learning by extending your coaching behaviours

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to further develop a coaching approach. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for developing a coaching approach here

Try out 4

Build Relating for Learning by modelling yourself as a learner

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to model yourself as a lifelong learner. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Explore the teaching ideas for modelling yourself as a learner here

Find out 3

Developing a deeper understanding of how learner behaviours may respond to the changes you have made in your classroom culture.

We have thus far, with the exception of Find Out 2, focused on changes you can make to your classroom culture, focusing on the three ‘Means’ of Relating for Learning:

Devolving responsibility;
Coaching approaches;
Modelling learning.

Here we turn our attention to the two ‘Ends’, the anticipated outcomes for learners, and how these are linked to the changes you are making / have made:

Growing motivation;
Growing independence.

Ask yourself:

Which cell in each column best describes my learners at present?
Is there a good match with the Steps I have been working on in Try Outs 2/3/4?
Are they responding in the ways anticipated?
Are they ready to be challenged to become increasingly motivated and independent, or is there a need for a period of consolidation while the changes you have made take full effect?

But, do not forget – you can always return to this unit in the future with the intention of further progressing your classroom culture and their responses.

Growing Relating for Learning: the anticipated outcomes for learners.

Find out 4

Finding out about 8 further learning behaviours to broaden the range of behaviours you are actively promoting in your classroom.

This Find Out, which appears in all units, is a reference tool to be accessed when / if you need it.

It gives a short introduction to 8 additional learning behaviours: Noticing; Reasoning; Imagining; Making Links; Capitalising; Listening; Planning; Meta Learning.

Each contains 5 short sections:

What do we mean by this learning behaviour?
How do teachers create a classroom culture for it.
How does the behaviour grow?
Some teaching ideas to encourage the behaviour.
How to develop your learning language to support the behaviour.

You will find these introductions most useful as you begin to tackle Steps 2 and 3 in the Try Outs (above).

Review and Evaluate

Suggested termly review activity

Suppose that your main focus over the Spring term was on Relating for Learning:

You were working mostly on Step 1, with a focus on Devolving Responsibility and Coaching Approaches;
You introduced Stuck Posters, Laminated monitoring cards, and started to explore coaching using the ‘Support to Continue’ strategy.
You may well also have had some associated actions in the other 3 aspects of classroom culture;
You have noticed that many but not all students are responding as expected;
And in the future you intend to work on building reflection on learning behaviours into lesson planning.

Your review and evaluation sheet might well look like the one opposite.

BPL Meta-Learning

Building the habit of Meta Learning.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building meta learning.

What are the key aspects of meta learning? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as meta learners? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building meta learning into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed meta learning chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Meta Learning

John Biggs (1985) is credited with creating and defining the concept of Meta learning. His conception is framed around the ideas of “being aware of and taking control of one’s own learning”. Implicit within this conception are the ideas that people need to have a knowledge of how they learn; have the motivation to be proactive in managing themselves in this way; have the capacity to be able to regulate their learning.

Becoming a Meta-learner; being able to assess the effectiveness of your own learning process and regulate it for greater success, is made up of several strands;

how you become and stay motivated and plan your learning
how you build and organise your ideas
how you learn with and from others
how you manage your learning environment and
how you monitor your learning process itself in order to improve

When looked at from these diverse angles, growing meta learning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think about it’.

So a well formed Meta-learning habit involves being able to talk about the process of learning and how it works. They understand how they learn and are able to play to their strengths and improve areas of weakness. They learn from learning itself, mulling things over, avoiding mistakes and reflecting on experiences and identifying what might be useful elsewhere.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Meta learning ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as meta learning

Meta-learning involves drawing out of your learning experience a more general, explicit understanding of the process of learning, and specific knowledge about yourself as a learner. Let’s take these two aspects of meta-learning in turn.

There is a wealth of research which shows that good learners know a lot about learning.

They possess a vocabulary for talking about the process of learning itself, and are able to articulate how learning works.

Extract from Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton 2oo2

Re-find out 1

Focus on the Meta Learners in your class.

The meta learning progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the meta learning behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how meta learning grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

While you may be tempted to focus your efforts on the majority for greatest impact, you’ll need to take care not to do so at the expense of your ‘grey’ students, as these are your potential underachievers in the future.

What to look for.

In Try Outs 1 to 5, look out for teaching ideas that you think will have the greatest impact on your particular group of learners. Don’t attempt to try all of the ideas – better to do a few thoroughly than to adopt a scattergun approach.

Growing meta learning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Meta Learning?

Culture is the curriculum of the classroom, frequently hidden from the external observer, but always all evident to learners. It is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner. Culture is your enacted values in the classroom – what you do and what you do not do, what you say and do not say, what you believe and do not believe, what you value and do not value.

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage meta learning.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate meta learning
ideas for constructing lessons to build meta learning
ways of celebrating meta learning

Ask yourself which of the features of the meta learning-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

At this point it might be worth having an informal chat with some of your colleagues. Is anyone already making progress with one of the features you would like to work on? Do you have any consistent features that others might learn from? Take your completed sheet to discuss at the meeting at the end of this unit.

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Meta learning.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for meta learning towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for meta learning (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop meta learning (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how meta learning can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build meta learning

Build in lesson review points – so that students reflect for themselves

The problem with lesson review points (or plenaries) is that they are often teacher-led. Too often they are a recap of what the teacher wanted students to learn – little more than a restating of the learning intentions and a quick check of student understanding. Necessary, maybe, but not the opportunity for students to reflect for themselves on what they are learning, have learned or how they are/ have learned it.

Try the simple method of students talking in pairs to distil:

three things we have learned so far;
three things we still need to find out;
three things we hope to do next.

Select one or two pairs to feed their opinions back to the rest of the class. Steer students to explain what they think they have learned rather than to hear what you think you have taught them. Gradually add in questions about the learning behaviours they have been using;

three ways we are learning
the most useful learning behaviour so far
a useful learning behaviour we might need to try

You are beginning to give students a richer language in which to couch their reflective thinking.

Teacher talk – for reflecting on content . . .

What have you learned today?
What do you still need to find out?

Teacher talk – for reflecting on learning . . .

How have you been learning today?
Which learning behaviour was most useful, and why?

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Moving responsibility for recalling and reflection towards students

Begin each lesson with ‘Tell me Three … things we learned last lesson; ways we learned last lesson; things we still need to find out; things you hope to achieve today’.
End each lesson with ‘Tell me Three … things we learned today; learning skills we used today; things we need to do next lesson; ways you could become a more effective learner’ etc.
Ensure that students tell you three. Do not lapse into doing it for them!

Teacher talk

Have we remembered the 3 most important things?
What else do you want to find out about this?
So, what are you trying to achieve next?
What learning behaviours did you use in achieving that?
Which behaviour was most successful/useful/redundant?
Have you made a habit of that behaviour yet?

Engage students in becoming aware of learning behaviours and stimulate learning conversations at home.

Select or create a soft toy and give it a name …say Pansy. Develop Pansy as a well-loved model learner. Encourage students to consult Pansy to see how she would learn something new.

When Pansy is well established in the classroom begin to send her home with students. By taking Pansy home for an evening or a weekend children are encouraged to talk about their learning… how/what they are learning at home as well as school. When back in school encourage students to write about what they learned with Pansy in their learning journal.

Where this idea has been tried with younger children, parents noted that the children were better behaved when Pansy ‘came to tea’ and asked when she could come again! This simple idea helps children to understand that learning can happen in environments other than school and gains parents’ interest in learning.

Try out 3

Build a learning language of meta learning.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge meta learning. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What are the most important things you have found out about yourself as a learner?
Build in a moment to review what you have done and how you have done it
Where else could you use this skill/knowledge/idea?
Think back to when you. . . What did you learn from that?
What went well? What could be improved? What can we learn from this?
How can you / do you plan your learning in advance?
Ask yourself: what you need to know and then how are you going to come to know it?
How do you get through the boring/difficult bits?
Are you getting better at regulating your learning environment?
Can you / do you talk about your learning?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Name the learning behaviour being used.

Examples of written feedback that name the types of learning behaviours being used. Using the learning language enables you to be more precise about the sort of learning effort a student has used. Beneficially this means that you notice more precisely how students are learning.

Here, a teacher tells Thomas he is a brilliant imitator. She has noticed that he successfully used his Imitation learning behaviour to draw like Van Gogh. She is making him aware of this, and praising him for it. We are sure you will agree with her observation.

And here, feedback helps Matthew to understand how his ‘super reasoning skills’ helped to assure success. The teacher is intentionally linking these learning behaviours and curricular success.

Explore what do good learners actually do

Open up a conversation with students about what good learners do. At this phase, their answers are likely to be shallow and lack precision. This will be because they have not really thought of themselves as learners as yet, preferring perhaps to view themselves as people who are taught things. Equally the lack of a language with which to discuss the process of learning will be a second inhibiting factor.

Focus on someone they perceive to be a good learner. Ask questions like:

What do they do ?
What don’t they do ?
What makes them successful ?
What do they believe ?
How do they approach their work ?

Answers will, at this stage, be weak. Try to move students beyond simplistic notions of ‘(s)he is a good learner because they are clever’ to exploring what they actually do in order to succeed – shift the focus from ability to effort.

Create a ‘What good learners do’ display, and add to it as ideas develop over time.

Try out 4

Build meta learning into lesson design

It is through learning activities that learning behaviours get a workout. Their role is to enable your students to access and wrestle with information and ideas; to help them use and understand something; to ensure their effectiveness as a learner. The ‘right’ activity helps to make new concepts more concrete. The ‘right’ activity provides insights into new ideas and subject matter. The ‘right’ activities need to be carefully chosen and, critically, linked to the learning goal.

Make coupling content and process public

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

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

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

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

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

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Building learning behaviours into learning objectives

In phase 1 you met the idea of building learning behaviours into lesson planning.

Reminder #1 – Putting the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

If you write a goal relating to ‘understanding xxxxx’ or ‘knowing yyyyy’ it’s less likely to motivate learners to make the effort than a goal that starts with some indication of the sort of ‘effort’ or way of doing something you want them to make. In other words learning goals that relate to doing something or researching something, or creating something . . . are better motivators than goals that relate to knowing something.

Reminder #2 – The big addition to lesson plan thinking . .

In putting a lesson together the 3 key questions to ask yourself are;

what is to be learned? (goals)
by using which learning behaviour(s)?
by doing what sort of activity?

Translating that into lesson objectives:

In the earliest stages a learning objective like ‘to understand xxxx’ becomes ‘to use your reasoning skills to understand xxxxx’
As teachers’ understanding of Reasoning develops, the objective becomes more specific. ‘To use your reasoning skills to understand xxxxx’ might become ‘To support your ideas with evidence to explain how you have come to understand xxxxx’ (Here the learning behaviour is drawn from the progression chart for Reasoning, rather than using the somewhat blunt expression ‘reasoning skills’.)
And as student understanding of learning behaviours develops, the focus of the objective shifts again, requiring students to speculate for themselves on the precise learning behaviours that they expect to bring to bear on the problem at hand.

Encouraging students to link learning behaviours with curriculum content

In one KS1 classroom, every day, Orla the orangutan, who is a bad learner, is brought to life through their teacher Clare. Orla sets the children a problem which she herself can’t manage – Are the numbers in the right order? And off pupils go to work it out for themselves. In this short video clip from the end of this maths lesson Orla is wanting to know what’s been going on. The children gather together to discuss what and how they have been learning. Can the children explain to Orla how they have done something? Notice that Orla wears a school shirt, she’s seen as one of them. Through the use of Orla’s questions this relaxed and purposeful metacognitive activity is helping the children to reflect, revise, reinforce and understand their learning and how their learning behaviours are contributing to this. Both the what and the how. The language of learning is being skilfully and fluently brought to life by the teacher, Orla and the pupils. It all looks effortless, but as usual when you see experts at work, it’s all the result of lots of purposeful practice and rigorous, careful planning.

And as we watch transfixed, we notice a class book on the floor which the teacher sometimes refers to. This is Orla’s maths book and the children record the answer and how they found out about it each day.

Try out 5

Build meta learning by celebrating its use.

Self-monitoring meta learning in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for meta learning to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Students refer to them during lessons, using them as prompts about the finer aspects of a learning habit that is being stretched. This tool helps students to be able to join in meta-cognitive talk.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Noticing learning behaviours

Noticing our learning behaviours has been put into action in many schools. As soon as a learning behaviour has been introduced students are encouraged to notice when they use it, and to briefly record what they have done—imagined something, used a good question, managed a distraction and so on —on a sticky note which they stick on a Learning Tree wall display. Teachers are on a constant look-out for the behaviours they have been explaining, encouraging and enabling, which they, too, capture through photographs or on sticky notes and add to the Learning Tree. This ‘looking for learning’ is further enhanced by ‘learning detectives’: two children who are assigned this role each day and who look for good learning behaviours in others and again add them to the Learning Tree. At the end of the day the Learning Tree offers a rich source of information to reflect on, explain, and reinforce through a whole-class learning power discussion.

At the end of the week the sticky notes are carefully saved in a large scrapbook. This gives the teachers a running record of what the children have been doing and noticing about themselves. Even when this had only been in operation for a term or so teachers began using their analysis of the weekly data to plan further development. They were refining their own professional view of how students’ learning behaviours could be converted into instinctive habits.

Teacher talk

How are you learning?
What did you do?
How did you do it?
Why was it successful?

Praising learning behaviours

1. Design stickers such as ‘Proud to be a learnatic’ and encourage students to show how proud they are to be learners. This is a simple, fun way to recognise efforts and by taking the stickers home they capture parents attention. Parents now ask what it’s all about when students take their stickers home with pride.

2. Use circle time to discuss learning each week and to positively identify students who learned well. Initially students who are seen as traditionally successful will be selected; good students as opposed to good learners. However, as discussion gradually develops through your modelling, students will begin to realise that just because someone doesn’t get it ‘right’ doesn’t mean they aren’t a good learner. Talk about students who persevere with their learning in, say, a science investigation by repeating the test when it’s gone wrong. Students quickly come to value how they learn and take greater notice of how others learn too.

3. Write to learners on celebratory paper to congratulate them on their learning. Find a sheet of ‘special’ paper that is instantly recognisable. Write a short letter to a student when you notice impressive learning behaviour. You could leave it in their tray, send it home by post, attach it to their recorded learning on a display; whatever suits you and the student..

Teacher talk

Well done. You used some good learning behaviours there.
I watched as you were learning to xxx. Well done you really keep on trying.
I’ve noticed you using some really interesting learning behaviours?
Great questions. You will learn lots from asking them.

Find out 3

Build meta learning by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Meta learning may grow.

Column one is about motivation and planning, wondering whether we have the skill and the will to do something. We gain motivation from seeing success and build strategies to help us keep going through the inevitable hard slog bits. We turn dissatisfaction to satisfaction as understanding emerges.

Column two is about building and organising ideas, moving from seeking information, seeing how it fits together with what you already know about and how you can retell the ‘story’ of this differently after incorporating the new and old ideas. It’s about making sense of things.

Column three is about learning with and from others, not just face to face or in teams but more and more through distributed electronic contact. It involves sharing hypotheses, posing questions and absorbing others’ perspectives. It’s an iterative process of gaining new ways of knowing, new insights and crafting ideas for the desired outcome.

Column four is about managing and structuring the learning environment to optimise learning effort. We learn in different ways, from physical surroundings to hours of day or emotional state. We learn how to manage distraction, how to channel our emotional energy positively and how and when to break state.i.e.we learn how to regulate our environment just as much as other aspects of the learning process.

Column five is about self-talk, what we say to ourselves as we learn. Statements capture what someone in each phase may be thinking. Teachers might usefully encourage students to set learning goals, talk through which learning methods/ resources might be useful, and to monitor and evaluate the learning being used.

The last column has to do with how we self-monitor our learning, adjusting how we are doing things and whether it is effective enough to achieve the goal; there is a causal link and the goal is all important in keeping us going.

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of meta learning more fully?

A deeper meta-learning chart.

Growing meta learning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of meta learning (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of meta learning displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as meta learners;

what did you find out about your students as meta learners (Find out 1)?
are students improving meta learning with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as meta learners and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop meta learning.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening meta learning in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Outcome. A clear picture of our interest in and enthusiasm for amending classroom cultures to support learning to learn. A feel for which are proving to be most effective and why. Would any of these culture shifts call for action on current school wide policies?

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To share your experiments with others and to enable senior leaders to maintain an overview of developments, please complete this proforma termly and hand it to the Building Powerful Learners coordinator.

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Imagining

Building the habit of Imagining.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building imagining.

What are the key aspects of imagining? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as imaginers? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building imagining into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed imagining chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Imagining

A well formed Imagining habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Use the mind as a theatre in which to play out ideas and possible actions experimentally.
Use a rich variety of visual, aural and sensory experiences to trigger creative and lateral thinking.
Explore possibilities speculatively, saying ‘What might …’, ‘What could …’ and ‘What if …?’ rather than being constrained by what is.
Retain a childlike playfulness when confronted with challenges and difficulties.
Be aware of intended outcomes whilst adopting a flexible approach to realising goals.
Rehearse actions in the mind before performing them in reality.

So, at a less abstract level, students need to have a wide range of experiences on which to base their imaginations; to have the bravery to take imaginative risks; to have the ability to visualise what they will do in advance of taking action; to be happy to allow their minds to explore intuitions and possible lines of enquiry; and to create innovative creative outcomes. When looked at from these diverse angles growing imagination moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘be creative’.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Imagining ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as imagining

Imagining is an important way of thinking but one that seems to be afforded too few opportunities in classrooms. Imagination isn’t just a cute faculty that children use to weave fantasies: it is one of the most effective tools in the learner’s toolbox. Scientists, designers and executives need a powerful imagination just as much as painters and novelists, and it can either be developed, through appropriate experience and encouragement, or left to shrivel up. Good learners are ready and able to look at things in different ways. They like playing with ideas and possibilities and adopting different perspectives (even though they may not have a clear idea of where their imagination is leading them). They use pictures and diagrams to help them think and learn.
There are two kinds of imagination: active and receptive. In active imagination, you deliberately create a scenario to run in your mind’s eye. Sports people use this kind of mental rehearsal and experiments have shown it to be very effective at improving their level of skill.
The second kind of imagination is more receptive, like daydreaming: letting a problem slip to the back of your mind, and then just sliding into a kind of semi-awake reverie, where the mind plays with ideas and images without much control on your part. Successful learners and inventors know how to make good use of this kind of creative intuition. They are interested in inklings and ideas that just bubble up into their minds.

Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002.

Re-find out 1

Focus on the imaginers in your class.

The imagining progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the imagining behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how imagining grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing imagining; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Imagining?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage imagining.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate imagining
ideas for constructing lessons to build imagining
ways of celebrating imagining

Ask yourself which of the features of the imagining-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Imagining.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for imagining towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for imagining (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop imagining (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how imagining can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Download guidance for the activity

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build imagining

Use a quick starter to key students into the learning behaviour you want to concentrate on in the lesson.

Provide a stem statement…

A man walks into a room with a suitcase in his hand…

Invite one student to carry it on. Each student continues from where the previous one left off.

Or . .

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Adopt a character to help to anchor imagining

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who/that exhibits the best features of imagining. Talk about the character until your students become familiar with its attributes. Leave the character (actual /picture) on tables when you have set a group to work on using a particular learning behaviour in – numeracy, reading, writing etc., as a reminder.

Teacher talk

What is imagining all about?
Why do we need to imagine things?
What will help us to imagine?
It’s all about letting your mind play with ideas

Draw me the answer – can you draw ‘Change?’

An activity to stimulate the use of the imagination.
Use drawings to release student imagination and to encourage students to identify the key features of whatever it is they are drawing. [Much like Mind Maps, this is also a Distilling and Link Making activity].

It is at its most powerful when the ‘thing’ being drawn is abstract – change, democracy; fairness; liberty; fear; happiness, struggle, stuck etc.

Teacher talk

Get a feel for the concept…
Does it have a dominant colour?
What shaping might this concept suggest?
What can we learn from the different interpretations you have drawn?
What sorts of feelings does this drawing evoke?

Try out 3

Build a learning language of imagining.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What would happen if …
Try to picture … in your mind. Tell me about . . . .
Can you use your mind’s eye to see what that might look like?
Are there any other possible explanations?
Close your eyes – what can you see? Hear? Feel?
What do you feel might be happening?
What could this be?
How might you do this differently?
Imagine yourself doing it before you do it for real.
Can you imagine how xxx feels now even though you disagree with their views?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Talk about how things might look, feel, sound.

Give students a familiar object – a pencil, hairbrush, scissors, toilet roll, cushion – whatever comes to hand.

Then pose the question: ‘What else could it be?‘ or ‘What could this become’

Discuss and praise the most imaginative ideas.

What you are trying to develop in young learners is:

An awareness of the power of imagination;
The ability to use their imagination to picture how things might look, sound, feel or be;
The willingness to talk imaginatively about situations, events, characters, etc.

Guided Visualisation

Invite students to visualise, for example, a snowy mountain peak until the image fades – discuss how long this could be sustained.

Now visualise hovering over the mountain and exploring the terrain by helicopter – the experience will have lasted longer.

Now provide students with a guided visualisation of the mountain that triggers their imaginative faculties – discuss the features of this experience.

Enable students to identify the ways of triggering their own imaginations when provided with stimuli. Invite them into a city at night, or the alimentary canal, . . .

Stimulating the imagination

Use music to create atmosphere and stimulate imaginative thinking.

Provide varied, unexpected and ever-changing visual experiences — on whiteboards, classroom walls, in ideas banks, through web-links, etc.

Read vivid prose and poetry that captures details, moods and atmospheres.

Try out 4

Build imagining into lesson design

An activity to highlight and strengthen Imagining

What has happened here? Good guy or bad? Can we see any colours? Hear any sounds? Imagine being there….

A quick way to activate the Imagination and explore how we use our senses to imagine.

What you are trying to achieve:

To support students to use their imaginations using all of their senses,

How might you use the technique?

As a starter for creative writing
As a prelude to reading a book – start with the B&W copy of the dust jacket.
To build empathy
To scaffold the use of all of the senses
To trigger the imagination

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Visible Thinking Routine

Creative Questions

Creative Questions is a visible thinking routine that encourages students to create interesting questions and then imaginatively mess around with them for a while in order to explore their creative possibilities:

Pick an everyday object or topic and brainstorm a list of questions about it.

Look over the list and transform some of the questions into questions that challenge the imagination. Do this by transforming questions along the lines of:

What would it be like if…
How would it be different if…
Suppose that …
What would change if …
How would it look differently if …

Choose a question to imaginatively explore. Explore it by imaginatively playing out its possibilities. Do this by: Writing a story or essay, drawing a picture, creating a play or dialogue, inventing a scenario, conducting an imaginary interview, conducting a thought experiment . . . .

Reflect: What new ideas do you have about the topic, concept or object that you didn’t have before?

Go to the Visible Thinking Websitefor more examples and information about visible thinking routines.

Download Creative Questions as a pdf

Another VTR, Step Inside.

The visible thinking routine ‘Step Inside: Perceive, Know, Care about‘ helps students to explore different perspectives and viewpoints as they try to imagine things, events, problems, or issues differently.

The routine asks students to step inside the role of a character or object from;

a picture they are looking at
a story they have read
an element in a work of art
an historical event being discussed
and so on—

and to imagine themselves inside that point of view. Students are asked to then speak or write from that chosen point of view. This routine works well when you want students to open up their thinking and look at things differently. It can be used as an initial kind of problem-solving brainstorm that opens up a topic, issue, or item. It can also be used to help make abstract concepts, pictures, or events come more to life for students.

Go to the Visible Thinking Websitefor more examples and information about visible thinking routines.

Download Step Inside as a pdf

Teacher talk

What is X really saying here?
What are the feelings underneath the words?
What is their viewpoint?
Why is this view unusual?
What problem does this highlight?
That’s a different perspective
Where is that leading us to?

Try out 5

Build imagining by celebrating its use.

Self-monitoring imagining in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for imagining to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Create a setting where students are more likely to engage the imagination and wonder

Often students have little conception of imagination as being an essential part of ‘good learning’. They think ‘good learning’ means neat, correctly spelled and done on time, while imagination ‘is when you think about stuff and see pictures in your head’—but they don’t get the connection.

It has long been a feature of primary classrooms that areas are designated for a particular purpose, whether it be for reading, imagining, improving work, noticing detail etc. Rarely is it seen in secondary classrooms – too often the physical constraints of the classroom and the rotation of students from class to class make such arrangements impossible. Or is it? If we are serious about developing the imagination of younger students, we may need to be imaginative ourselves and seek a creative solution to this problem. Where could such an ‘Imagination Space’ go? Does it even have to be in the classroom? Could it be in a public circulation area? The library? What would the Imagination Space be like if it is to trigger imaginative thinking?

Places to sit and wonder…

Teacher Talk

Can you use your mind’s eye to see what that might look like?
Can you imagine yourself doing that really well?
Can you imagine what that would be like?

Switch perspectives

Ask students to imagine something and then try to see it from different perspectives.

Sit down quietly, close your eyes, and think about one of your pets. (If you don’t have any, try to imagine a pet you would like to have.) Now, try to take on your pet’s point of view. Don’t just try to become a human being in an animal’s body. Try to think and interpret things the way an animal really would. This can be a lot of fun, because many of the things we humans do probably appear confusing and silly to animals.

Or…

How would a bird flying overhead view your garden?
How did the sinking of the Spanish Armada appear to the fish in the North Sea?
What might a flower look like when seen through the multi-faceted eye of an insect?

Teacher talk

How would your kitchen appear to your pet?
What might your pet think about the television?
That’s a really unusual/fresh idea.
How is your pet feeling about that?
Put yourself in their shoes.

Find out 3

Build imagining by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Imagining may grow.

Column one deals with how students are able to nurture their imagination; from building their experience from day to day living, to purposefully gathering ideas to trigger the imagination.

Column two is about how students gradually develop their understanding of their own and other peoples’ feelings. Growing empathy fuels our imagination as we learn to see things in ways that are different to our own, including through film or television where we are put into the lives of others.

Column three is about the development of self-talk; what students may be saying to themselves in growing their self-awareness.

Column four is about the growth of the conscious use of imagination, moving from imaginative play to linking ideas together and asking ‘what if’, then being able to visualise what we want to achieve or make or create, then rehearsing it in our minds and living the process.

Column five is about receptive imagination where we shift the problem to the back of our mind where we enter a state of reverie to play with ideas. it’s a state of wondering, shifting, sifting, juxtaposing, just to see where it goes.

Column six is about growing the outcomes of imagination from limited and predictable to more original and innovative.

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of imagining more fully?

Growing imagining; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of imagining (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of imagining displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as imaginers;

what did you find out about your students as imaginers (Find out 1)?
are students improving imagining with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as imaginers and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop imagining.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening imagining in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Planning

Building the habit of Planning.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building planning.

What are the key aspects of planning? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as planners? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building planning into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed planning chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

What do we mean by Planning?

A well formed Planning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Identify end goals or objectives before considering possible action;
Consider timescales and possible obstacles in drawing up a realistic plan;
Make use of a wide variety of skills and tools to gather ideas and information;
Sequence activity in order to decide what needs to be done;
Think laterally as well as logically so that the task benefits equally from creative and rational thought;
Be open-minded and flexible about how things might happen so that opportunities can be seized and fresh directions taken.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Planning ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as planning

Planning is the ability to take a strategic overview of your learning, and make sensible decisions. It means:

taking stock of the problem and the parameters within which you must work
assessing the available resources, both inner and outer, and deciding which you think are going to be needed
making an estimate of the time the learning will take, and the competing priorities that may have to be delayed or sacrificed
imagining a route-map for the learning
anticipating hurdles or problems that may arise along the way.

Good learners like taking responsibility for planning and organising their learning. They welcome opportunities to decide for themselves when, where, why and how they are going to learn—and to get better at doing so. Research shows, for example, that people who can make a reasonable estimate of how long a task will take are more likely to finish on time, and to do better work.

From Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton 2002

Re-find out 1

Focus on the planners in your class.

The planning progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the planning behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how planning grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing planning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Planning?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage planning.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate planning
ideas for constructing lessons to build planning
ways of celebrating planning

Ask yourself which of the features of the planning-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Planning.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for planning towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for planning (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop planning (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how planning can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build planning

Assist students to recognise what planning consists of and that it has a number of stages, from exploring possibilities to defining exactly what has to be done.

Group sits in a circle.
Group or teacher identifies a problem or issue — school-based or wider world.
Person nearest the door states their ‘could be’ solution.
Each subsequent group member (to left) adds their own view, using as many ideas from the previous speaker as possible.
Continue process until a plan generally acceptable to all group members is arrived at.
When a member can’t add anything new they pass.
When ideas run out, break into groups of four:
- distil what we have
- summarise group plan of action
- share all plans and see if one plan emerges.

Teacher talk

What happened in our discussion?
What are the stages in coming up with a plan?
How did you feel …when your idea was taken on, or rejected?
Did we build on the good ideas?
Did we have any wild ideas?
What happened to them?
How can we present the plan effectively (flow diagrams etc.)

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Adopt a character to help to anchor planning

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who/that exhibits the best features of planning. Talk about the character until your students become familiar with its attributes. Leave the character (actual/picture) on tables when you have set a group to work on using a particular learning behaviour in – numeracy, reading, writing etc., as a reminder.

Teacher talk

What is planning all about?
Why do we need to plan things?
What will help us to plan?
It’s all about planning carefully.

Engage students in looking for planning behaviours.

What will a good one look like?

What Will It Look Like When I’ve Finished – WWILLWIF ?

Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action. Ask students to determine WWILLWIF for themselves in conjunction with others. Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.

Try out 3

Build a learning language of planning.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What will your end product look like?
How will you judge the success of what you have done?
Look at what you have done so far – do you need to make any changes?
Are you on track to meet your deadline?
What needs doing? In what order will you tackle it?
Do you have a contingency plan if that does not work?
Keep a weather eye on how it is going.
Are any particular planning tools appropriate here?
Is the goal manageable?
How can you make this plan more efficient?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Introduce the language of planning

Design a planning sheet to use with the students when you are planning an activity with them. You might include these and other headings:

What are we trying to achieve? (agreed goal, outcome)
How will we know we have been successful? (success criteria)
What do we need to do? (actions, jobs)
What will help us? (resources)
What might be a problem? (traps, obstacles)
What will we do about it? (What- if or contingency plans)
Who will do what? (roles) [Simplify according to age range.]

How might we tackle this?

A lack of confidence often stems from simply not knowing what to do or how to do it. The task appears overwhelming and otherwise confident individuals become paralysed by the prospect of the task ahead.

At the beginning of a session talk with students about the strategies and things they might use to help them with their learning. Steer talking about how they might tackle this, thinking about strategies that have worked in the past, or speculating on new approaches that might work. It is time spent thinking about tackling the task rather than actually starting to tackle it. It reminds students that they have a range of strategies available and gives confidence that they have the tools for the job in hand.

Teacher talk

How might we tackle this?
Which learning behaviours may be needed?
Have we done something like this before?
Which strategy is most likely to be successful?

Try out 4

Build planning into lesson design

Advance organiser

A graphic organiser that is much used in primary schools to help students to plan their approach to an investigation or problem. The TASC wheel, derived from Thinking Actively in a Social Context, is a framework that helps develop thinking and problem-solving skills. With TASC, learners can think through a problem to the best outcome – and understand why it’s the best outcome.

TASC will guide students through the stages of thinking and problem-solving in an organised way, starting at one o’clock working clockwise. If you have a complex or wide-ranging problem you want to tackle, it offers a means of organising and synthesising a range of ideas.

Much like PEE (Point / Evidence / Explain) that helps students to structure a paragraph, the TASC wheel gives a simple way of helping students to sequence what they need to do to undertake an investigation.

Teacher talk

This wheel has all the steps you need to take.
It will enable you to do this task all by yourselves
What do you know about this already?
Think carefully about what the task is asking you to do.
How did the wheel questions help you…and so on

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

FAME planning

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;

a thinking component
an action 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, what is your focus, what do you want to achieve?
Act, what action steps do you need to take to get there?
Monitor, what will you need to keep checking along the way?
Evaluate, what will make you pleased with yourself when you have finished?

Include more steps e.g. 2 for focusing or 3 for acting but having too many steps becomes confusing. Keep the magic number 7 in mind.

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

Once students understand the planning process and have used them for a number of purposes they will become more proficient and confident, developing skills in:

knowledge of what plans are;
formulating plans for different purposes;
understanding when planning would or would not be useful/appropriate;
being mindful (strategic) in undertaking tasks and solving problems.

Teacher talk

Take time to decide what you are going to do
With a good plan of action, you can do this
Your last plan was really successful. So you could use that way of doing it again.

Visible Thinking Routine

How long will it take ?

This routine helps students to anticipate what needs doing and how long it might take. It also encourages them to consider the sequencing of the activity. There are three questions:

What needs to be done ?
What order will you do it in ?
How long do you think it might take ?

The natural place to use this routine is prior to embarking on a piece of extended work in order to slow the impulse to ‘get on with it’ and to encourage a more strategic approach.

Try out 5

Build planning by celebrating its use.

Self-monitoring planning in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for planning to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Prioritising action

The familiar Skill / Will matrix (Tao of Coaching, Max Landsberg) is a useful tool to help students develop ways of reflecting on their own performance and identify where they need to practice. Using the matrix (see below), students judge their levels of accomplishment and motivation in any area of the curriculum or indeed life beyond school.

This ‘identifying the problem’ planning tool is a valid way to approach revision.

Teacher talk

Put the topics you want in the skill:will diagram
You will need to make two judgements about the topic
First, how good at it are you? …your level of skill?
Second, how keen on it are you?…your level of will?
Is it time to tackle the low skill/low will box?

Tips for poor planners

Read, digest and convert the essence of this article into a useful wall display.

Just as we tend to recognise that skills like creativity, analysis or writing can come much easier to some than to others, ease with planning, it appears, is something that we’re either born with or we’re not. However, we can develop those skills by actively building neuro-connections in our brain through persistent practice.

Here are some key steps for using knowledge of your natural brain strength to build your planning skills.

Recognise your strengths and weaknesses… work out which aspects of planning are strengths or weaknesses.

Accept the difficulty… If we think something should be easy when it’s hard, we tend to get upset and are more likely to give up. But if we set expectations that a task will be difficult, we may still flounder, but we’re more willing to work through any issues, since we understand that challenge is part of the process.

Let go of all-or-nothing thinking… Some people think that they must follow their plans perfectly, or their efforts have been wasted. Instead, try to view learning as a process where improvement counts and every day matters. This will build your resilience because you won’t beat yourself up as much when you deviate from your plan, and in turn, you will find it easier to get back on track.

Find systems that work… Instead of forcing yourself into an established scheduling process, find a system that works for you, whether it’s using sticky notes, whiteboards, spreadsheets or apps on your phone. Experiment until you find the right fit.

Borrow other people’s brains… If you know people who excel in planning or have good organisational skills, ask for their advice and insight. They may be able to offer solutions to problems that overwhelm you.

Keep trying… When you find yourself getting frustrated in the process of planning, have self-compassion when you make mistakes, refocus when you get distracted and adjust your plan when new issues crop up.

Understanding what’s going on in your brain as you acquire time management skills can make a dramatic difference in your ability to plan. When you convince yourself that you can change and accept that you’ll need to work harder than most, you’ll have a much higher chance of improving your planning. Adapted from Harvard Business Review.

Find out 3

Build planning by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Planning may grow.

Column one deals with the growth of planning tools. Planning may simply start in our heads but we need tools to help when it gets more complex. us work Progress of planning tools runs from simple lists to spider diagrams to Post its to flow diagrams, to spreadsheets and so on. The point here is about moving from simple to complex tools.

Column two is about the student’s attitude to planning. Attitudes are central to whether we do something willingly or not. Here we capture the journey from following a given plan, to planning being a key part of how a person runs their life. It’s in the Values phase that the process of planning is beginning to make sense and shown to be worthwhile. These attitudes are tied up with how a student views themselves as a learner; whether they think they have the skills to carry through with a plan or brave enough to set challenging targets. Helping students to get good at planning is a hearts as well as a minds job.

Column three is about Self-talk, what we say to ourselves as we learn. The statements capture what someone in each phase of the grid would be thinking. We’ve shown a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. Helping to develop such talk is a critical part of a teacher’s role.

Column four is about goal setting. It may start with simple statements about what we want something to look like. As we come to know ourselves and our intentions we become more skilled in estimating what is possible, what’s realistic within time constraints and how such a view of the end result could be measured/assessed.

Column five captures the sort of things commonly associated with a plan; the actions, the order of things, the timing, the resourcing, the contingencies. These elements of a plan grow to become more sophisticated and accurate over time.

The last column concerns the how we monitor and change our plans; how we keep an eye on a plan as it moves along. Such checking may simply be ‘have I met or will I meet that target/milestone’. i.e. is the plan going to plan? Later it’s about how plans have to be amended as circumstances change. This level of understanding and flexibility begins in the values phase and grows to become meta-evaluation; ‘is this method of planning itself effective? Do I need to tweak the process of planning?’

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of planning more fully?

Growing planning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of planning (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of planning displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as planners;

what did you find out about your students as planners (Find out 1)?
are students improving planning with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as planners and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop planning.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening planning in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Listening

Building the habit of Listening.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building listening.

What are the key aspects of listening? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as listeners? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building listening into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed listening chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Listening

Understanding how to listen effectively is an essential skill that benefits everything from family life to business. It’s one of the most critical skills for working effectively in teams. Hearing and listening are different. Whereas hearing is a automatic and effortless process when sound waves strike the ear drum and cause vibrations in the brain, listening is about the brain giving those sounds meaning. It’s unnatural, and it requires effort. There’s all sorts of faulty listening. Sometimes we fake it or pretend to listen; sometimes we only respond to the remarks we are interested in and reject the rest. Sometimes we listen defensively and take innocent remarks as personal attacks. Or, we listen to collect information to use to attack the speaker, or we avoid particular topics, or we listen insensitively and can’t look beyond the words for other meanings, or we turn the conversation to ourselves. So, listening is indeed hard and requires effort. To be a good listener you need to be able to listen for information, listen to judge the quality of the information, and listen empathetically to build a relationship and help solve a problem. When looked at from these diverse angles growing Listening moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘do good listening’.

A well formed Listening habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Be genuinely interested in other people and what they are saying;
Focus on the current moment, being attentive and responsive to visual cues and atmosphere;
Notice subtle details and nuances in what is being said;
Know when to make well-judged interventions to elucidate, probe or challenge;
Manage distractions constructively;
Be comfortable with silence and attend actively to what is being said.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Listening ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as listening

Empathy and listening are core skills. We bracket them together because listening is the main medium through which empathy is generated and communicated. Students can quite readily be coached in the art of being a good listener, and can be given games and exercises that help them develop the ability to hear what someone else has said and, if necessary, play it back to them. Teachers sometimes complain that students will not listen, either to them or to each other; but the habit of listening can be cultivated in most classes inside a term. The most powerful way to do this is for the teachers to model good listening.
Extract from Building Learning Power. Guy Claxton 2002.

Re-find out 1

Focus on the listeners in your class.

The listening progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the listening behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how listening grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing listening; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Listening?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage listening.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate listening
ideas for constructing lessons to build listening
ways of celebrating listening

Ask yourself which of the features of the listening-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Listening.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for listening towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for listening (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop listening (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how listening can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build listening

Understanding facial expression

Making faces

Experiment with facial expressions, asking students to show their feelings when they:

step in a pool of mud
eat a chocolate
watch a dance

Discuss whether everyone reacts in the same way. Show photos of different expressions. Discuss what the people in them might be feeling and why. Paint pictures to express particular feelings and discuss the use of colour in relation to emotional content.

Teacher talk

What can we tell from people’s expressions?
How might this person be feeling?
Show your happy face
Paint a happy/disappointed/surprised/mystified expression
What does your choice of colours in the pictures tell us?

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Adopt a character to help to anchor listening

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who/that exhibits the best features of listening. Talk about the character until your students become familiar with its attributes. Leave the character (actual /picture) on tables when you have set a group to work on using particular learning behaviour in – numeracy, reading, writing etc., as a reminder.

Teacher talk

What is listening all about?
Why do we need to listen to things?
What will help us to listen carefully?
It’s all about looking carefully
But is it just about hearing?

Engage students in looking for listening behaviours.

Reinforce the basics of good listening

When students are learning in groups/teams, ask them to begin their contribution with “I agree with” or “I disagree with”. This technique both ensures that they are listening to each other, and build on each others’ ideas.

Teacher talk

How do you know that someone is listening to you?
How will you show that you are interested?
How might you disagree with someone sensitively?
…and let someone know that you agree with their idea?

Try out 3

Build a learning language of listening.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What does the tone of voice tell you about the person?
Close your eyes and let the sounds wash over you.
Can you hear what she’s really saying?
Listen for the main messages. Can you summarise the key points of what you’ve just heard.
How does what he’s saying make you feel?
Wait for your turn to talk.
How can you help XXX to say what they are thinking?
Do you think there’s a deeper meaning in what is being said?
How can you show empathy for the speaker in your responses?
Do you understand the mood and beliefs of the speaker?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Focus your listening talk….

Listening carefully.

Try the game ‘Who said sausages?’ to help students to listen carefully . . .

Warm up with a quiet activity to help them focus on the physical sensation of intent listening.

Ask students to move round to sit in a circle.
Ask them to close their eyes and put their hands on their laps.
Tell them you are going to chime an Indian bell and that they should listen as carefully as they can and only open their eyes when they can no longer hear the sound.
Ask them to be very, very quiet so that they do not disturb each other.
Now move on to a simple listening game.
Student remain sitting in their circle.
They take turns to sit blindfolded in the middle.
Point to a student in the circle who then says “sausages.”
The blindfolded student has to guess whose voice it is.

As they become more familiar with this game, they will deliberately alter their voices and it can be a lot of fun. Remind students regularly of the skills they are using and reward good listening! Playing this game, you may enable the class to agree some good listening tips.

Teacher talk

Listen carefully to the voice
Can you tell who it is
They can only say ‘sausages’ once so you will need to listen very hard
Was that easy of tricky?
What was happening in your ears and brain?
What makes it easier?

Using could be language

You may have taken up this idea in Phase 1. But it’s so important that we wanted to re-enforce its usefulness again.

Could-Be’ language encourages more genuine engagement with what is being taught; how students will question and solve problems more readily if knowledge is presented as provisional. It’s about shifting the tone to more tentative, less cut and dried. The opposite is ‘Is’ language which positions the learner as knowledge consumers where their job is to try and understand and remember. ‘Could be’ language immediately invites students to be more thoughtful, critical or imaginative about what they are hearing or reading.

For more on using ‘could be’ language, see page 69-71 in The Learning Powered School

Teacher talk

Could be language includes phrase like;

In most cases;
may include;
may on occasion;
wide variety;
could be;
probably;
possibly;
most often;
there are other ways;
one of which….
some people say…

Try out 4

Build listening into lesson design

Listening for a purpose

Listening for a purpose is about sharing the reason for or purpose of listening. At an early stage it’s about making the distinction between hearing and listening; saying why we are listening and what we are listening for.

With younger pupils this may just involve talking about what we do when we listen rather than just hear.

For older pupils its about being clear about the specific purpose of listening…what to listen for as part of the learning objective. For example you may give students specific questions at the start of a lesson, expect them to listen for the answers in the lesson input and require them to answer the questions later in a reflection journal.

For more sophisticated listeners.

Explain and discuss the five preferred listening styles that can be used in response to different circumstances:

Appreciative: enjoying what is being said and how it is being said in a relaxed way
Empathic: responding to the feelings expressed with sympathy and understanding
Discerning: focusing on information, making notes and avoiding distractions
Comprehensive: relating what is said to what they know already, asking questions, preparing arguments
Evaluative: critiquing what is being said and building counter arguments

Set up ANY lesson with a specific listening purpose. For example, to discern facts; to note down new knowledge; to generate counter arguments; to critique what was said.

Use post-listening activities to evaluate students’ listening skills and their ability to transfer the use of listening strategies to other contexts.

Teacher talk

Today we are going to see if we can spot what we do when we listen
Listen out for the main/important ideas here
Today I want you to listen for….
As I go through this I want you to listen for information/facts about ….. so that you can….

Teacher talk for sophisticated learners

There are various ways of listening. Which of these are you familiar with……..?
Which type of listening do we tend to do in school?
At the start of every lesson I’m going to suggest the sort of listening I want you to practice.
When might you need to use empathetic listening?

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Blend listening and predicting

Research has shown that asking students to listen and then predict what might happen serves to strengthen listening skills. Many students maybe familiar with this skill as it is used casually in the classroom, but to accelerate the effect, try this short activity several times a week.

Pairs
Ask one student to talk for 30 seconds making up anything
The partner has to say what they think might happen next.
Swop roles and then discuss results

Teacher talk

Did anyone make the right prediction?
How close were you?
Think about what you heard. Were there any clues to help your prediction?
What did you miss?
What will you listen for next time?

Jigsaw listening

Form groups of students, each group tasked with listening for a different aspect of what is being said. (e.g. facts, opinions, emotions, false evidence, mixed messages etc.) After listening they agree as a group what they have heard. The groups then ‘jigsaw’ into new groupings each containing at least one member of the original groups, where they put together the different aspects that have been heard.

Teacher talk

Form yourselves into four groups A, B, C, D.
Group A are listen for… B for…
It might be helpful if you note down the particular things you have been asked to listen for
After the input each group checks out if, between the members, they have captured what they were asked to
What did you miss? Which aspect (A,B,C,or D) proved the most difficult to capture
Now jigsaw into new groups with an A,B,C,D member in each to put what you heard back together
Paraphrase what you have and report back.
What can you conclude from your discussions?

Try out 5

Build listening by celebrating its use.

Self monitoring listening in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for listening to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Good listener prompts

Have the students make suggestions about good listening:

Pay attention. Focus on the person and what is being said
Don’t get distracted by other things around you
Show you’re listening by saying uh-huh or nodding your head
Keep quiet while the other person’s talking
Wait to ask a question or give comments that show others that you care about what they’re saying.

Make these into a public display and refer to them often. This is an example from a group of 9 year olds.

Managing distractions when listening

Help students to understand how to manage their distractions when listening. This of course is part of the wider Self-Regulation agenda which has been alive in schools for a while now.

Use the list below as:

A wall display
Adapted for a learning mat to help students monitor their focus on listening
A focus for a discussion on listening
A meta-cognitive listening checklist

Ways to help you focus on listening

Put aside thoughts of what you are going to say next
Avoid interrupting
Know what else is on your mind and ignore it
Face the other person so you both see and hear each other
Ask for clarification when you don’t understand
Focus hard on the main points
Make brief notes of key words

Teacher talk

Well done for not interrupting in that conversation…even though you were really wanting to say something important.
I could see you concentrating hard on that and you picked up the main points. Great stuff.
Have you re-thought what you were going to say? Well done for not coming in too early. I could see you rethinking your ideas.
A good idea to make notes here to follow and remember the key points.

Find out 3

Build listening by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Listening may grow.

Column one is about how we move from the convention of taking turns when listening rather than hogging a conversation, to being curious and respecting the speaker, moving on to listening actively and picking up intentions and emotions in the speaker and knowing how best to respond when people think differently, both from yourself and others, in a conversation

Column two is about self-talk; what students may be saying to themselves in growing their self-awareness about listening. We show a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. Some relate to understanding the message while others relate to responding to the speaker. All such self-talk is important in building a listening habit.

Column three is about the ‘how’ of listening. Understanding information, being open to finding the essence of the message, the big ideas and main points; asking questions to gain more information (closed and open) and paraphrasing to check what was meant. And finally listening between the lines, looking beyond the words to find meaning.

Column four is about judging the quality of the message and deciding whether to accept or reject it. This moves from concentrating on listening, not making a judgement too early and separating the message from the speaker, ignoring information that may lead you to verbally attack the speaker. It’s important through sensitive questioning to evaluate the speaker’s credibility and check the source of the information. Conversations may then move on to examining the evidence before making a decision to accept or reject the argument/ information/idea. Finally being able to respond empathetically when rejecting an idea with your counter arguments.

The last column is about empathetic listening and helping people to sort out problems. This style of listening demands showing respect for another person’s point of view. Your role is to question in order to sort out problems, offer supportive responses, prompt the speaker to make suggestions for themselves and paraphrase their words to check understanding. It’s the hardest listening skill of all and takes a great deal of practice

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of listening more fully?

Growing listening; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of listening (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of listening displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as listeners;

what did you find out about your students as listeners (Find out 1)?
are students improving listening with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as listeners and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop listening.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening listening in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Capitalising

Building the habit of Capitalising.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building capitalising.

What are the key aspects of capitalising? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as capitalisers? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building capitalising into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed capitalising chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Capitalising

A well formed Capitalising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Recognise that we learn from many different sources – other people, books, the internet, music, the environment, experience…
Select appropriately from a range of learning strategies;
Keep a purposeful look-out for useful learning aids;
Adapt and adopt the successful habits and values of others into their own learning repertoire;
Make intelligent use of all kinds of things to aid learning;
Use resources in novel ways to solve problems.

Being a good capitaliser involves learning with the help of many different sources –other people, books, the internet, music, the environment, experience…and making intelligent use of all kinds of strategies and things to aid learning. In the early stages, it means selecting and making the best use of known strategies and classroom resources but this swiftly moves on to embracing a much wider and varied range of possibilities. This involves being able to seek novel ways of solving problems by exploiting the potential of known strategies and what is around them including things you may never have thought of as a resource. Importantly it includes being able to adapt and adopt the ways other people do things; taking their habits and values into your own repertoire (imitating). Gradually students can improve their physical skills, absorb ideas and thinking patterns by observing the approach and detail of how others do things. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing capitalising moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘read pages 24 and 25’.

Good capitalisers are resourceful, enterprising learners who make the best of what is to hand, they are good at resourcing their own learning. For that reason, we tend to use the terms ‘Capitalising’ and ‘Resourcing Learning’ interchangeably.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Capitalising ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as capitalising

Capitalising is about being on the lookout for strategies, resources and forms of support in the environment that can help you in your current learning or problem-solving. Traditional schooling assumes that intelligence is all in the head, but recent studies show that it is much fairer and more accurate to see good learners as people who are ready and able to make intelligent use of all kinds of strategies and things around them—floor space, filing cabinets, dictionaries, notebooks, personal organisers, telephones, libraries, e-mail, the internet and, of course, other people. Everyone needs to be good at capitalising on resources available in the world so it’s obviously a good idea to start developing this skill at school.

The form of assessment we use in schools have a powerful influence on the kinds of learning that students do, and the kinds of teaching their teachers use. If the good learner is essentially the person plus their resources (and their ability to draw on them), our methods of testing should encourage teachers and students to value and practise capitalising. In today’s world, it makes as much sense to sit 15-year-olds down at solitary desks and ask them to display their knowledge and skill as it would to take away David Beckham’s football away and tell him to perform.

From Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton 2002

Re-find out 1

Focus on the capitalisers in your class.

The capitalising progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the capitalising behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how capitalising grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing capitalising; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Capitalising?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage capitalising.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate capitalising
ideas for constructing lessons to build capitalising
ways of celebrating capitalising

Ask yourself which of the features of the capitalising-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Capitalising.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for capitalising towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for capitalising (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop capitalising (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how capitalising can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Coaching Notes Learning Challenge DIY Resource Rating Wheel

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build capitalising

Classroom layouts

The obvious starting point in encouraging capitalising is to organise your classroom in such a way that students are able to select, get and return the resources they need.

The first decision is to position furniture to maximise flexibility within the space. Think about centralising the resources so as to give access to large whiteboards at student height on every wall. This enables students to think about, explore, plan and reflect upon their learning on Working Walls at their height. A range of work and break out spaces could be provided including tables and chairs, bar tables and stools, sofas, bean bags, and an architect’s desk. Display boards could be covered in neutral backing paper in order to maintain a calm space where the students’ work would provide the colour.

Teacher talk

You might need a XX resource to do that.
Have you got everything you need?
Where might you find a XX
You might be missing . . . .
You can find that one yourself.

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Adopt a character to help to anchor capitalising

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who/that exhibits the best features of capitalising. Talk about the character until your students become familiar with its attributes. Leave the character (actual/picture) on tables when you have set a group to work on using a particular learning behaviour in – numeracy, reading, writing etc., as a reminder.

Teacher talk

What is capitalising all about?
Why do we need to use resources?
How will we know what will help us?
Which resource will work best?

Engage students in looking for capitalising behaviours.

What is it?

Help students to appreciate / recognise that:

objects can be used in different ways
sometimes we need to free up thinking — not seeing things as functionally fixed.

Set up the Activity by dividing students into groups of four. Each group selects an object in the room. The aim is to develop as many strange uses as possible for each object.

Each person in the group uses the object in a different way (e.g. the chair becomes a wheelbarrow, horse, cart, etc.)
Group members to guess what the objects have become.
Debrief and Discuss

As in all cases, deeper learning relies on our capacity to see possibilities — what exactly do we do when we open our minds to possibilities? Explore what happens when we capitalise — we open things up and then focus things down. Indicate the importance of keeping things open for as long as possible and not closing things down too soon. What is the danger of closing down our thinking and reducing the range of capitalising?

Teacher talk

Can you use this object in a different way?
What has this become?
Try not to think too hard about what we usually use this for.
Why was …object…more difficult to think of in another way?
That’s a great idea…

Try out 3

Build a learning language of capitalising.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

(To ensure students do the thinking for themselves)

What could we use to help us with this?
What led you to choose to use that?
Look very carefully at someone you think is doing …… really well and think about how you can do it like that
Could you tackle this by imagining someone who does it really well?
What sort of reference / resource do you need here?
Look around. See what is available to help. How could you use it?
Could you work this out for yourself first before looking for more information?
Who could you turn to for help?
Think through the strategies you might use.
Which is the best learning strategy for this job?

What do you think?

Which of these capitalising nudges might you start using?
In which particular lessons would such nudging be most useful?
How will most of your students respond to such nudges?
Will this way of engaging be more popular with girls or boys?
What other nudging ideas might you add to the list?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Focus your capitalising talk….

Spend time with your class just noticing learning, talking about how it feels and when it’s best. Then ask the class to talk about what helped their learning, the ingredients of learning.

Capture what students say and make lists of:

Doing words such as
- sharing
- focusing
- listening
- talking
- practising
- quiet thinking
Feeling words such as
- energy
- support
- happy
- patient
Words relating to things such as
- number lines
- computers
- TV
- books
People words such as
- brothers
- sisters
- parents
- doctors

You will be pleasantly surprised by the number of words offered for processes, and the great range of items that students find helpful when learning. Make the lists into posters and display in the classroom, as a public support to continuing the dialogue about learning. It’s also worth reviewing and developing the lists at a later date.

Teacher talk

What helps you to learn?
Can we make a list of all the things that help us to learn?
What sort of feelings help us to learn?
What sort of things do we do when we are learning well?
Who helps us to learn?

How many uses for…

To get students thinking about how resources can be used in many different ways.

Try out 4

Build capitalising into lesson design

The missing wallet

A wallet was found at a crime scene on the 10th August. Detectives need to work out as much as they can about the person they are looking for in order to focus their enquiries . . . . .

Teacher talk

What types of questions did you pose at different points?
How did you seek to answer these questions?
In what ways did you make links between different resources to try and put a full picture together?
What did you imagine about the person and upon what was your imagination based?
How did you work logically with the resources to make sense of people and events?
Did you capitalise on all of the resources in the wallet and what other resources did you use (e.g. your own experience and knowledge of other things)?
What other resources might a detective use to get more precise information?

You can download a full set of resources to help you run this activity from our extensive BLP’s Activity Bank.

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Finding out about…

A painting

Purpose: Recognition of the range of resources that can be called upon when seeking to acquire new knowledge, understand the unfamiliar and respond to challenges. Acknowledge that internal resources – such as attitudes and prior experience – are often as valuable as external ones.

Show the painting e.g. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Breughel. Do not give its title.
Ask students to examine the picture, notice, and make observations.
Accept observations from paired discussion – encourage curiosity – take all offers at face value.
Ask class to consider “What could we find out about this picture?” and then “Where could we find out about it?”
Capitalising on using resources available in the school (internet, library, the art department …)
Offer the artist’s name and encourage further research possibilities.
Offer, or allow the discovery of, the painting’s title.
Consider: “What does the title mean? How can we find out …?”
As suggestions and realisations occur prompt curiosity about Icarus – as the myth emerges, through existing knowledge or research, encourage enquiries into what the myth has to do with the picture … and what the artist may have had in mind.
Distil all of the resources – from memory, to other people, to books and the internet, that have been used or could be used to fully explore what challenges are offered by the picture.
Debriefing and rating the learning stretch Capitalising means making use of a wide range of internal; and external resources.

Teacher talk

What internal capacities can you draw upon?
What external resources did you turn to?
How did you use external resources – by being selective – skimming for information – going deeper to find out more – linking ideas and information?
What are the first things to do when set a challenge that requires you to capitalise on all possible sources?

Information hunt

Summary of an activity from The Teacher’s Toolkit: Raise Classroom Achievement with Strategies for Every Learner by Paul Ginnis

Supply each student with a Fact Finder sheet and require them to find out information about the topic in hand.
For younger children the sheet could be in the form of a treasure map giving locations in the classroom and beyond where materials (posters, photos, books, people…) enable students to solve riddles that entitle them to a crack at the “treasure chest key question”. It is important that there are a variety of different information sources to keep the exercise interesting and to stretch students’ abilities to utilise different resources. For older students the sheet could be a more regular matrix to fill in or a standard question-and-answer sheet.
Students have to find accurate and complete information against the clock.
Students can come to the teacher at any point to check how they are doing – this must still be done within the time limit, so students need to decide carefully whether they need the check.
As soon as someone has a full set of answers/has opened the treasure chest, or when the time is up, the activity stops and the teacher and class go over the questions together.

In science, each station could include a mini experiment to carry out. For Modern Foreign Languages, the activity could be conducted in the target language.

Why?: The exercise practises a number of learning skills including working to a deadline, using a range of resources, identifying key points, and recording information quickly.

Variations: Students could work in pairs or teams rather than individually. The exercises could be numbered and tackled in order, with students starting at different numbers to avoid congestion – this reduces the independence of the exercise.

Teacher talk

If you could find people/sources who have thought about this problem before, who would you turn to?
How might you amend XX’s ideas to suit your style/purposes?
That’s a brilliant adaptation of XX. What inspired you to try that?
I can see this essay/drawing/experiment/ calculation/piece has been influenced by XX’s work/ideas. How have you made it work for you?

Try out 5

Build capitalising by celebrating its use.

Self-monitoring capitalising in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for capitalising to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Top Tips

Set aside an area of display where students are asked to share any strategies or ‘top tips’ that they have found particularly helpful in their own learning. For those offering the ‘top tip’, it is a distilling activity, but the resulting gallery of ‘top tips’ invites students to adopt the successful strategies of others.

This will also support the skills of noticing, collaborating, and distilling.

Teacher talk

Who has a top tip to add to the board today?
What made you think of that way of doing it?
Well done, you worked this out for yourself.
Can you try to do this without that tool? Can you work it out in your head?
What else might be helpful?

Becoming a skilled imitator

This learning mat was worked out and produced by Yr 6 students at a school in Gloucestershire. When you take a closer look you will see that it’s effectively a progression path for imitation. It starts with straight copying being likened to plagiarism. As you read around the ovals the emphasis moves from selecting to being inspired. . .

carefully selecting the best parts
carefully selecting and combining with their own thinking
improving someone else’s idea (innovate)
finally to be inspired by someone else.

The tool was used by students in a similar way to the learning mats we have featured throughout the units, and eight year olds were certainly able to reflect effectively on how they had used imitation during a lesson.

Use the ideas to stimulate and discuss more sophisticated levels of imitation.

Find out 3

Build capitalising by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Capitalising may grow.

Column one deals with self-talk. We’ve shown a small flavour of self-talk thoughts that teachers can encourage students to imitate. Some relate to setting about learning, others to talking through which learning methods or resources might be useful, and others to monitoring and evaluating the learning being used. All such self-talk is important in building a Meta-Learning habit.

Column two is about building expertise for finding and selecting resources and strategies for learning. It shows how students move from relying on others to provide strategies and tools to being able to choose from a selection and on to being able to find their own strategies and tools and finally to use familiar strategies and resources imaginatively to broaden their effect.

Column three is about how we broaden our use of sources of expertise. This moves from people we know before broadening out to other sources of expertise i.e. books, the internet. This broadening range of expertise must be used with care and discernment and moves on into more specific and complex realms.

Column four is about when to use resources and is included as a caution. It’s about students being able to recognise when a resource is needed and when they could indeed work something out for themselves such that resources don’t become learning props. Eventually, a person’s own expertise enables them to learn well from themselves.

The last column is about our inclination and ability to learn from others. We are all hard-wired to learn by imitating others. This moves from being unaware of how other people do things to using people’s ideas and values to help guide our own lives. It moves from watching and listening; ‘magpieing’ but with little selection; selecting and combining; changing and adapting (innovating). So this is not straight copying, it’s about being stimulated by using others’ ideas but making them fully your own.

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of capitalising more fully?

Growing capitalising; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of capitalising (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of capitalising displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as capitalisers;

what did you find out about your students as capitalisers (Find out 1)?
are students improving capitalising with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as capitalisers and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop capitalising.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening capitalising in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Reasoning

Building the habit of Reasoning.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building reasoning.

What are the key aspects of reasoning? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as reasoners? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building reasoning into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed reasoning chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Reasoning

A well formed Reasoning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Resist jumping to conclusions;
Seek justifiable evidence to shape sound, well-honed arguments;
Scrutinise your assumptions;
Seek evidence and counter evidence, look for false steps and carefully draw conclusions;
Remain suspicious, doubting and self-doubting in order to avoid unwarranted certainty;
Convey your logical thinking clearly, through dialogue, symbols, analogies, prose and pictures.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Reasoning ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as reasoning

It turns out to be quite difficult to free any kind of thinking or learning skill from its ties to the particular setting and subject matter in which it was originally practised.

From Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton 2002

Re-find out 1

Focus on the reasoners in your class.

The Reasoning progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the reasoning behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how reasoning grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing reasoning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Reasoning?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage reasoning.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate reasoning
ideas for constructing lessons to build reasoning
ways of celebrating reasoning

Ask yourself which of the features of the reasoning-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Reasoning.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for reasoning towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for reasoning (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop reasoning (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how reasoning can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build reasoning

Sequencing

Cut up;

a cartoon,
series of pictures of a production process,
a flow diagram,
a mathematical proof,
a story line,
a musical score,
a poem,
a sequence of events, and so on.

Invite students to reassemble the pieces in what they think is a viable order and explain their reasons for this. Model and listen for the language of reasoning to strengthen the process.

Teacher talk

Why do you think that?
What comes next?
If that has happened, what now?
Can you explain that?

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Making an intelligent guess

Get in the habit of requiring students to make estimates and to predict what should happen. This is quite different from asking them to say what might or could happen – that’s closer to speculation and Imagining. Here you are asking students to use what they already know to make a prediction. Often referred to as hypothesising in Science, this is about using logic to make an intelligent ‘guess’.

Once they have made their prediction, encourage them to explain why they think that – it helps to move their thinking from describing what they think will happen to explaining why they think it will happen. It is the ‘giving reasons’ bit of Reasoning, that will in time mature into justification and proof.

Teacher talk

What’s going to happen here?
From what you know about this what’s the next stage?
What makes you say that?
Why do you think that…?

Trial and Error, or better still…

Trial and improvement

Get into the habit of inviting students to ‘have a go’ at something to see what happens. It will provide you with the opportunity to probe what students are noticing and thinking, helping them to tease out why things turned out how they did. Or you could:

Include a trial and improvement success criterion when asking students to create a piece of work. For example: I would like to see evidence that you have tried and improved at least a couple of different attempts at xxx before settling on…

Teacher talk

If it doesn’t work, try something else
Have a go! See if it works
Don’t rush at it
Tell me about it
Try it and see

Try out 3

Build a learning language of reasoning.

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge reasoning. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

Here are 10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What assumptions are you making? Are they sound?
Can you think it through in clear steps from start to finish?
How many reasons can we find for that?
Can you spot the false step there? Is the argument water tight?
What evidence can you find to support your case/argument? What’s the counter evidence?
How have you reached that conclusion? What are the implications?
Which thinking tool would help us solve this?
Are you convinced?
One the one hand . . . , but on the other . . .
Why do you think that?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Focus your reasoning talk….

De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats

Students reflect on an issue from different perspectives in a structured and disciplined way. They wear six different coloured hats in turn, each of which indicates the sort of thinking required at the time.

- White Hat — Facts and information: What do I know…what’s happening?
- Yellow Hat — Positive judgment: What are the positive features and why?
- Black Hat — Critical judgment: What are the negative features and why?
- Green Hat — Alternatives and learning: What is possible?
- Red Hat — Feelings and emotions: How do I feel about this?
- Blue Hat — The big picture: What hat should we use now?
Make sure that students take enough time wearing one hat before moving on to another.

The discipline which this imposes is very helpful for clarifying issues, it makes students separate out different types of reaction and thinking, and helps them to focus on one aspect of a complex problem at a time.

‘Six Hats’ in Wikipedia gives an excellent introduction to using the hats; or buy the book!

Teacher talk

What’s happening here?
Are there any positive things here?
Why do you say that?
What are the negative things about this?
How would you criticise this?
What are the possibilities?
How are we feeling about this?
Now what?

Draw out the language of reasoning through jigsaws

Explain why you put a piece in a certain place and why it couldn’t go elsewhere.

Develop conversations around…

What can we see?
Why does this fit here?
What tells you it is right?
Does this make sense? and so on.

Try out 4

Build reasoning into lesson design

A Visible Thinking Routine

What’s happening here?
What makes you say that?

The first question in this routine is flexible: it is useful when looking at objects such as works of art or historical artefacts, but it can also be used to explore a poem, make scientific observations and hypotheses, or investigate more conceptual ideas (i.e. democracy).
The first question invites students to describe what they notice, see or know, but it is the supplementary question (What makes you say that?) that requires them to build explanations. It promotes evidence-based reasoning and when the students share their interpretations it encourages them to understand alternatives and multiple perspectives.

This is one of many visible thinking routines to be found on the visible thinking website.

Go to the Visible Thinking Websitefor more examples and information about visible thinking routines.

To download ‘What makes you say that’ from the Visible Thinking Website as a pdf:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Make-Just-One-Change-Questions/dp/1612500994 ]

Teacher talk

Why is that?
What evidence can you give to support that?
Do you have good reasons for…?
How do you mean?

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Odd one out

Identifying similarity and difference is one of the most powerful learning skills since it requires students to notice detail, distil information, make links, and use their reasoning skills in order to spot the odd one out.

Give students sets of words or pictures and ask them to identify the odd one out and give reasons for their choice.
E.g. in the group Square, Circle, Triangle, Cube the cube is the odd one out because the other shapes are all two-dimensional. [Of course, circle could be the odd one out, for different reasons].
Extend the activity by asking them to create sets with an odd one out as challenges for other students to solve.

Teacher talk

Can you find anything that should not be here?
How do those fit together?
Does that make sense?
Because???

Using QFT Question Formulation Technique in maths

This technique was unpacked in Phase 1 Questioning unit 5 where it was used to stimulate story writing. Here, it is used in maths.

[In QFT students practise question formation and additionally three fundamentally important thinking abilities: divergent thinking, convergent thinking and meta-cognition.

The following is a brief summary of a case study described in;

The book Make Just One Change: Teach students to ask their own questions, is a very readable comprehensive discussion and analysis of how to use the QFT.

To read more about the Question Formulation Technique:

Making mathematicians

Students...had not experienced much success in maths and were conditioned to think they had to finish a problem set, give in the answers and wait to be given the next problem.

Teacher...wanted to shift them from turning in answers to turning answers into questions and begin ‘thinking like mathematicians’.

Start with.. a problem the group could solve or at least understand the solution.
Ask for a volunteer…to present a solution and explain why it was correct.
Challenge them …to take the solution and generate new questions from it. The previous solution becomes the Question Focus.
Students generate questions, chose one to work on further, present their solution and repeated the process.
Students got used to this flow; answering a question and generating new questions, answering those, sharing their work with the whole class, and then selecting an answer as a new QFocus for generating even more questions.
The process helped them take apart and drill down deep inside a maths problem from different perspectives.

Here’s a classical word problem they tackled after a week or so using QFocus.

The broken egg problem.

A farmer is taking her eggs to the market when her cart hits a pothole. The cart tips over and every egg is broken. For insurance purposes she needs to know how many eggs she had. Unfortunately she doesn’t know, but remembers something from various ways she tried packing the eggs. When she put the eggs in groups of two, three, four, five and six, there was always one egg left over, but when she put them in groups of seven they ended up in complete groups with no eggs left over.

What can the farmer figure out from this information about the number of eggs she had? Is there more than one answer?

What questions are we now asking ourselves?
How can we investigate this further?

Try out 5

Build reasoning by celebrating its use.

Self-monitoring reasoning in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for reasoning to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Wall display showing how learning behaviours are used to solve a Maths problem.

This wall display hails from the early days of Building Learning Power. Here the teacher has identified and labelled the learning behaviours being used at each step of solving a particular maths problem. In this case the behaviours being used are Imagining, Noticing, Planning, Capitalising and Monitoring, in addition of course to Reasoning which is an almost ever present feature of successful problem solving.

It illustrates that successful learning is rarely a case of employing one learning behaviour – rather it is bringing to bear a wide range of learning behaviours, moving seamlessly between them as necessary.

Sometimes referred to as ‘sensitivity to occasion’, it is not only important to have a wide range of learning skills, but it also equally important to understand when to exercise them.

Draw out reasoning in Strategy Games

Use games that require strategy and logical thinking. From noughts and crosses to chess, from hangman to backgammon, such games help to develop and refine reasoning skills.

Many appear in the form of maths investigations and problems: Frogs; Tower of Hanoi; Nim; Connect 4; etc.

Find out 3

Build reasoning by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper, more sophisticated view of how Reasoning may grow.

Column one deals with how students tend to think about things; their frame of mind as they build or add to/increase their reasoning skills.

Column two is about self-talk; what students may be saying to themselves in growing their self-awareness about reasoning.

Column three is about the ‘how’ of reasoning; what they actually do that shows they are applying reasoning ‘know – how’.

Column four is about the reasoning tools they actually use at each growth stage; from guessing and comparing/contrasting to employing ‘if-then reasoning and using techniques to provoke new ways of thinking.

The last column concerns how the person tends to describe or show or explain their reasoning.

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of reasoning more fully?

Growing reasoning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students use of reasoning (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of reasoning displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as reasoners;

what did you find out about your students as reasoners (Find out 1)?
are students improving reasoning with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as reasoners and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop reasoning.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening reasoning in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Making Links

Building the habit of Making Links.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building making links.

What are the key aspects of making links? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as link makers? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building making links into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed making links chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Making Links

Learning is about making connections – you will experience them through the ‘ah ha’ experience of seeing a connection between two previously isolated concepts, or the satisfaction of seeing the connection between an abstract idea and a ‘hands-on’ concrete experience. It’s how you make sense of the world.

To be a good link maker you need to keep stimulating your brain and enriching your experiences because through active learning you quite literally ‘build’ your own mind.

This is done in many ways;

through having a repertoire of cognitive strategies;
through the social process of constructing knowledge;
by connecting experience and learning;
through how you direct the work of learning, sometimes called meta-learning or simply reflection.
at the heart of all this is your attitude to knowledge; whether it is bound up in rules and ‘is-language’, or whether you see knowledge as provisional, ever building and changing.

When looked at from these diverse angles growing link making moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘look for a link’.

Understanding and making use of a widening range of links to satisfy our need to know what or why or how etc. is an important life skill which is arguably more important today than ever before. In negotiating an increasingly complex world our tendency to make links needs to be further sharpened and enhanced.

Extended Read about 1. Introducing Making links ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as making links

New ideas become meaningful to the extent that we can incorporate them within our own mental webs of associations and significances. When the patterns of relationship to be discovered are rather complex or subtle, business guru Peter Senge calls it ‘systems thinking’. Good learners get pleasure from seeing how things fit together. They are interested in the big picture, and how new learning expands it.

Extract from Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton.

Making Links is about how you understand and make meaning of the world. Your brain develops schema (plural, schemata): this is a cognitive structure that organises collections of bits of information that build together to form a concept of something. This working structure changes and grows throughout life.

Each new event, filtered by perception, is organised and connected to the existing structure to create meaning. We as teachers cannot transfer our own knowledge ready-made to students. They remember what they understand – what they have connected in their own schemata. When a schema is very sparse for a particular subject, connections are hard to find and make.

Teachers should always be helping children to make the connections that lead to deeper understanding. We can help students to become effective learners through cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies to gain insight into the how of learning. But to make connections more easily across different disciplines, or linking the obvious with the more obscure, we need to get beyond being bound by early rules and conventions and view our knowledge system as open and flexible, allowing all manner of possibilities. It is in this way that our minds truly grow.

“ Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories and ideas.” Daniel Tammet

Re-find out 1

Focus on the link makers in your class.

The Link Making progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the link making behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how noticing grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing making links; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Making Links?

Culture is the curriculum of the classroom, frequently hidden from the external observer, but always all too evident to learners. It is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner. Culture is the enacted values of the teacher, not the espoused ones – it is the shadow that the teacher casts in the classroom in terms of what they do do and what they do not do, what they say and do not say, what they believe and do not believe, what they value and do not value.

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage making links.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate linking
ideas for constructing lessons to build linking
ways of celebrating linking

Ask yourself which of the features of the linking-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Making Links.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for making links towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for making links (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop link making (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how making links can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build making links.

Build awareness of making links

Odd One Out.

For younger students.

Encourage the students to find an odd one out and perhaps go on to invent a reason or story about how/why the odd one could be made to ‘fit’.
Start with a row of 5 pictures. Four that can be linked together easily but one doesn’t fit readily with the others.
Spend plenty of time discussing why the pictures fit together and what the links are.
It’s fine if the students can think of different ways to link them as long as they can explain their rationale.
Praise and reward the ‘making links’ bit of the activity rather than focusing on getting it right.
Extend the activity and assess their understanding by inviting students to devise their own row of pictures which they swop with other students.
Join in yourself and model your link making by thinking aloud.

Find the Odd One Out

Print out and photocopy the Odd One Out series of pictures.

Learning Challenge Coaching Notes DIY

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Odd One Out

For older students,

Identify four ‘things’ related to different subject areas – this could be

4 images,
4 words,
4 techniques,
anything else that links to the subject and/or what students are currently learning about.

Invite them to identify the odd one out, and to explain why they think this.

When you can, construct lists where it is possible to justify that each of the items are, in fact, the odd one out.

Reconnecting with prior learning

Many students find it difficult to relate what they are doing / learning to what they have done / learned in the past. Begin lessons with an invitation for students to tell you what they were doing in the previous lesson so that they re-connect for themselves. Be prepared to nudge or remind them if they are struggling to do this. Resist the temptation to tell them what they did last lesson – it is they who need to make the link, not you!

Try out 3

Build making links into the learning language

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge link making. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

What do you know already that might help?
Can you say how . . is like . . .?
What conclusions can you draw?
Does the analogy… help us to get a handle on this?
Now that you know… has it changed how you think about…?
Can you see a link between what we did in… and what you do…?
How can you apply what you know about xxx to this problem?
Have you seen/done/felt something like this before?
Do you need to re-think ‘X’ in light of ‘Y’?
Can you link this information to what you know already?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Talk and think about making links.

Encourage students to become intrigued:

My Grandma went shopping . . .

A traditional memory game with a twist.

Recommend group of no more than 12

Start by saying “My grandma went shopping and she bought…” and name an item.
Let students take turns but each time an item is added they have to explain how their item links to the one before.
Encourage students to think of lots of different ways of linking items and reward their ingenuity.
To take the learning a bit further, it can be useful to share a real shopping list with your children and discuss the links that help you when actually shopping.
For example, perhaps you list all the fruit and vegetables first, if they are found in the first aisle etc. Or perhaps you list all the breakfast foods together…

Teacher talk to support the weakest link makers

Use language like this:

To help them to remember facts

Can you make a note of this?
How could you use a highlighter pen?
How do / could you remember that?
Can we find an easy way to remember that?

To consider past experiences

What does this remind you of?
Tell me about your trip to………
Have you ever done anything like this before?

To help to see connections

What might go with this one?
You’ve met this sort of thing before. Can you remember xx?
How could you fit this together?
I wonder how this would fit?
Let’s try to sort these out to see where they fit together.
What do you know already that could help?
What else do you know?

Try these If/Then targets to help students to move on:

If I am doing something new, then I will ask myself what it reminds me of.
If I come across something new, then I will ask myself how I am going to remember it.

Try out 4

Build making links into lesson design

Connect, Extend, Challenge

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

Connect: How are the ideas and information presented connected to what you already know?

Extend: What new ideas did you get that extended or pushed your thinking in new directions?

Challenge: What is still challenging you or confusing for you to get your mind round? What questions, wondering or puzzles do you now have?

The natural place to use this routine is after students have learned something new. For example: after exploring a work of art, a theory, a method, a piece of evidence. Try it as a reflection during a lesson, after a longer project, or when completing a unit of study. The routine works just as well with the whole class, small groups or individually.

This is one of many visible thinking routines to be found on the visible thinking website.

Visit the website

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

An activity to highlight and strengthen Making Links

And or So

An activity to encourage students to make imaginative links between seemingly unconnected objects. Who can find the most novel / humorous / unexpected link? Are some objects not linked in any way at all?

Use to explore how most things can be linked together in some way, and how making the links helps us to remember things and maybe see things in new ways.

Match them up.

Offer students a set of cards that need to be matched up or linked in some way.

It might be:

a set of pairs of cards like ‘It has been raining’ and ‘The river is flowing fast’ where the student is challenged to decide whether there Must be a connection between the two events, Could be a connection, or No possible connection;
a problem to select a substance (metal, clay, wax, salt, ice, …) and a change (freezes, dissolves, melts, burns, …) and decide if the change is Reversible or Irreversible;
a set of cards that students are required to match into pairs – it could be 5 graphs and 5 equations; 5 characters and 5 attitudes; 5 words and 5 definitions etc.

Try out 5

Build link making by celebrating it.

Self-monitoring link making in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour each month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
How do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How do you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general.
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour in how they learn.

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for making links to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Two more celebrating ideas ⬇️

Use display

Show connections between ideas, characters, objects that are being studied through the use of classroom wall displays. Refer to them and encourage students to add new connections as they emerge.

Update frequently with discussions like . .

We have made an interesting grouping here – what could we add to it?
From our learning today how could we reorganise this display?
How else might we display that link?
What makes you want to display it like that?
Where might that fit better?

Use mind maps with more sophisticated link makers

Use mind maps to encourage students to link and explain how information and ideas seem to be associated.
Use mind mapping at the beginning, middle and end of a unit of study to show how links and understanding change as knowledge grows.
Use a ‘thought shower mind map’ at the outset of a lesson to connect with prior learning and activate link making.
Use at the end of a module of learning as a synthesising tool.

Find out 3

Build making links by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Making Links may grow.

Column one is about how we retain and organise information or content; the ‘what’ of learning. It’s the nuts and bolts of how we construct meaning.

Column two is about how we make meaning by ‘learning by doing’ and learning with others.

Column three is about how we reflect on the action of learning itself.

Column four is about how we view what we know; how open we are to information and experiences.

Column five is about what we say to ourselves as we learn.

The last column is about the breadth of our link making. Whereas column one was more about storing knowledge, this column is about linking that knowledge together in a broad sense.

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of link making more fully?

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of making links (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of link making displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as link makers;

what did you find out about your students as link makers (Find out 1)
are students improving as link makers with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture Find out 2?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features
- which 3 actions are our strongest
what surprised or baffled you
are there significant differences between year groups

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as link makers and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop making links.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening making links in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma is in the Noticing unit. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

BPL Noticing

Building the habit of Noticing.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to expand your students’ use of learning behaviours.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become more skilled in developing your students’ use of learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

This unit explores the “how” of building noticing.

What are the key aspects of noticing? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as noticers? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building noticing into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Estimate my students’ development using a detailed noticing chart (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so will enable them to extend the range of learning behaviours that they use consciously.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Noticing

Noticing involves being ready, willing, and able to:

be attentive to details and subtleties in seeking to understand things;
seek underlying patterns patiently, understanding that connections may take time to emerge;
actively use all the senses to gather information to build understanding of the world around;
gain a clear sense of the ‘what’ of something before considering the ‘why’ and ‘how’;
recognise that learning is often complex and difficult and takes time and effort to accomplish.

So students need to learn how to focus their attention; to look patiently beyond the obvious to see detail and subtlety; to be able to identify the relative importance of what they are observing; to develop the ability to see detail in the context of the bigger picture; and to develop the ability to explain, hypothesise about and explore what is being noticed. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing noticing moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘look carefully’.

Extended Read about 1. Understanding Noticing ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as noticing

Learning often relies on being able to pay attention to what you are interested in: not necessarily thinking about it, just really noticing how it looks, what it is made of, or how it behaves. Many professionals, from poets to scientists to business managers, rely on this quality of attentive noticing: being able to identify the significant detail, or to let an underlying pattern of connections emerge into their minds. Sometimes you have to be patient before the detail or the pattern will reveal itself to you, like looking for sea creatures in a rock pool. And this is a skill that can be strengthened with practice. We often pick up this skill from people around us. Babies very soon learn to work out what their mother is focusing on, and to ‘share joint attention’ with her. It helps to be around people who are demonstrating this ability to watch carefully and turn their observations into accurate descriptions. Getting a really clear sense of what, before starting to think about how or why, is very useful.

From Building Learning Power by Guy Claxton 2002

Re-find out 1

Focus on the noticers in your class.

The Noticing progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the noticing behaviours and how your students do, and do not, currently exhibit them.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made general progress even in learning behaviours not spotlighted earlier.

The chart alongside shows how noticing grows. Column 1 identifies the 6 phases of development, column 2 describes how the skills and behaviours may grow over time, column 3 shows the self-talk; what students may quietly say/explain to themselves at each phase of development.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing making links; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

Does my classroom culture encourage Noticing?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage noticing.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met last year in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate noticing
ideas for constructing lessons to build noticing
ways of celebrating noticing

Ask yourself which of the features of the noticing-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Noticing.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for noticing towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for noticing (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop noticing (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how noticing can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build noticing

Encourage students to think it through for themselves

The difference between looking and noticing is rooted in the time each takes. Looking is frequently superficial and completed ‘at a glance’. Noticing, however, takes time and patience. Patterns and details that are not immediately obvious emerge slowly and require a deliberate attempt to focus. It follows that too much pace can be the enemy of effective, attentive Noticing.

So – slow down, give students time to notice for themselves.

Give them time to say what they are noticing to a partner. Praise any observation that has not been spotted by other students.

For younger students.

Introduce activities that require noticing behaviours

For example… Use the familiar Kim’s Game where students have to look carefully for a given time and then try to remember the group of articles. This simple format has numerous variations…what’s missing, what’s been added, what’s the odd one out? Always remember to talk about the noticing and explore the strategies that they were using.

For older students.

Introduce intriguing pictures to provoke noticing.

Use any interesting, fairly complex images you can find, and challenge students not just to find certain items within the image but to look carefully since all is not what it seems.

Have a look at Joan Steiner’s book ‘Look Alikes’ for ideas.

Alternatively, use images / paintings from the internet. Put one on the whiteboard to explore as the students enter the classroom each day.

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Adopt a character to help to anchor noticing

‘Adopt’ a character – real, imaginary, human or animal – who/that exhibits the best features of noticing. Talk about the character until your students become familiar with its attributes. Leave the character (actual /picture) on tables when you have set a group to work on using particular learning behaviour in – numeracy, reading, writing etc., as a reminder.

Teacher talk

What is noticing all about?
Why do we need to notice things?
What will help us to notice?
It’s all about looking carefully
But is it just about seeing?

Engage students in looking for noticing behaviours.

Invite some students to be Learning Detectives. Task them with seeking and capturing examples of effective learning on camera / video. Build the outcomes into a display that helps all students to become more aware of the effective habits of others.

Try out 3

Build a learning language of noticing.

Why is noticing important?
What does it help us to do?
If you were a gardener what sort of things would you have to notice?
If you are cooking/making cakes what will you need to notice to ensure success?
When texting friends what sort of things do you have to notice/ have you become expert at noticing?

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge noticing. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

What do you notice about the way… is doing that?
Just watch/listen for a while. What’s happening? Wait a little longer. What’s really going on?
Be patient for a bit longer. Do you notice any patterns here?
Great! Your patience is rewarded. You noticed some (unusual) patterns/really useful details there.
Do you notice any differences between xxx and yyy?
Is there more to this than you are seeing now?
Had you noticed that before?
What seems to be going on here?
Do you notice [something different/unusual] about this?
Have you missed anything?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Focus your talk to encourage noticing….

To notice detail and the big picture

Don’t lose sight of the big picture
What’s the big overview/picture/classification/taxonomy/theory
How does that detail fit in?
Keep the end in mind

To spot patterns

Are you seeing any patterns in that?
What might that be telling us?
Have you found a sequence?
Why do you think that might be?
Have you spotted anything unusual/unexpected?
Would you really expect to see X with Y in this context? Seems a bit irregular.
What might explain it?
Worth exploring further?

Use Could-Be language

You first met Could-Be language in Phase 1 Unit 7. We’ve included it again here because it’s a way of talking/engaging that influences how you think and act. Could-Be language influences the ‘how’ of noticing.

The opposite is ‘Is’ language which positions the learner as knowledge consumers where their job is to try and understand and remember. ‘Could be’ language immediately invites pupils to be more thoughtful, critical or imaginative about what they are hearing or reading and to explore other possibilities,
For more on using ‘could be’ language, see page 69-71 in The Learning Powered School

Could be language includes phrases like;
- In most cases
- may include
- may on occasion
- some people think that…
- on the other hand…
- wide variety
- could be
- probably
- possibly
- most often
- there are other ways
- one of which….

Try out 4

Build noticing into lesson design

The beginnings of See / Think / Wonder

What can you see?
Many students at the Receives (purple) phase find it hard to Notice detail – they tend to look quickly and see little beyond the obvious. As a consequence they are unable to explain what they have noticed or ask questions about what they have seen. In other words, poor Seeing means that the Thinking and Wondering aspects of See/Think/Wonder are beyond them. This activity focuses only on the See bit of S/T/W.

NB. This activity is NOT about the picture itself but rather how to use a picture and viewing frame to encourage and deepen noticing.

The use of viewing frames is surprisingly powerful, and has the effect of removing the Think and Wonder aspects of S/T/W so that students focus only on the Noticing aspect. It elevates Noticing beyond ‘looking/scanning’ to ‘attention to detail’.

When you distribute the image and the viewing frames, challenge students to place their viewing frame over the part of the painting that best shows:

Skaters (a no-brainer)
Something broken (the inn sign)
A circle (usually the water wheel)
Warmth (the fire, an easy one !)
Cold (more challenging – there are a number of alternatives)
Together (usually the Hunters)
Alone (much more challenging, requires empathy. Many go for the bird sitting in the tree)
Hope (Lots of varied answers, as by now they have interrogated the painting very fully)
Despair (ditto).

The viewing frame helps to ‘fix’ the whole image, even though a limited number of things were sought. Deep noticing versus shallow looking.

[For information: The painting is by Pieter Breugel the Elder, 1565, and is called Hunters in the Snow.]

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Developing the art of noticing

Using Viewing Frames more widely

Use sets of interesting pictures together with cards with a viewing window cut into them. Students place the viewing card over the picture in seeking a range of different features. E.g. something red, made of xx, something denoting happiness, something which suggests what might happen next. It’s a good idea to look firstly for concrete features before moving on to abstract features. You could:

use a poem. Use the viewer to find the stanza that is most descriptive, that makes them happy, that uses the best simile…
or use a geometrical image, use the viewer to find corresponding angles, perpendicular lines, a reflex angle…
or an image of the water cycle, use the viewer to find where water vapour is rising, where water is moving downwards, where it would be best to site a farm, a village, a wind turbine…

Whatever you use…pictures, diagrams, spreadsheets, tables, etc… the more complex the better. The technique is wasted on simple drawings.

The Visible Thinking Routine in full.

See, Think, Wonder:

Invite students to make an observation (see) about an object (artwork, image, artifact) or topic.
Follow up with what they think might be going on. Encourage backing up their interpretation with reasons.
Ask students to think about what this makes them wonder about the object or topic.
The routine works best when a student responds by using the three stems together at the same time, i.e., “I see…, I think…, I wonder…”. If not you need to scaffold each response with a follow up question for the next stem.

This routine encourages careful observations and thoughtful interpretations. It helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry. Use it at the beginning of a new unit to motivate student interest. Try it with an object that connects to a topic during the unit of study. Use the routine with an interesting object near the end of a unit to encourage students to further apply their new knowledge and ideas.

Try out 5

Build noticing by celebrating its use.

Self-monitoring noticing in action.

Introducing a new learning behaviour every month or so is trickier than it seems.

You might concentrate on it in say three or four lessons.
You will bring it to the fore in your talk.
But how do you get students to pick up all the aspects of the behaviour?
How might you ensure they see its usefulness in lessons in general?
How do you ensure they absorb the use of the behaviour into how they learn?

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for noticing to ensure students monitor their own use of the behaviour.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Find out 3

Build noticing by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper view of how Noticing may grow.

Column one deals with being able to manage distraction and focus attention.

Column two is about self-talk; what students may be saying to themselves in growing their self-awareness about noticing.

Column three is about the ‘how’ of noticing; for the familiar, to a given brief, for interest, for fine grained detail.

Column four is about what we are noticing, from things that matter to them, or similarities and differences or for unusual or curious etc.

The last column concerns the impact and outcomes of the noticing; to simply describe what has been noticed or to raise more questions or to seek new understandings.

Take a look at the chart and see if you can plot where the majority of your students are now.

Which aspects do they find more tricky?

How has the chart helped you to understand the development of noticing more fully?

Growing noticing; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Learning together meeting (for schools that have decided that all teachers study the same unit at the same time)

Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of noticing (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Year 2 Meeting Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of noticing displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as noticers;

what did you find out about your students as noticers (Find out 1)?
are students improving noticing with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture (Find out 2)?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features?
- which 3 actions are our strongest?
what surprised or baffled you?
are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as noticers and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop noticing.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening noticing in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Feedback proforma (for schools that have decided that teachers can study the units in any order)

To give you a flavour, an example of a completed proforma relating to Noticing is opposite. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.

Go to the overview section

Creating a learning powered school: A guide for senior leaders

Creating a Learning Powered School is a suite of courses designed to assist primary schools to build their students’ learning character and so help them become effective lifelong learners.

Read on to find out about the what, the why and the how of this suite of on-line courses.

1. Learning power and why we need to build it

How you learn changes over time and responds to the qualities of the learning environment, either in the classroom culture, the home or in the workplace. As environmental circumstances change, they can have either a constructive or a destructive influence on developing, or ignoring, the potential of learning power.

As understanding of the nature of learning grew, building learning power formed as an approach to helping young people to help themselves become better learners. It went beyond the ideas of metacognition and self regulation by trying to build a child’s learning character…how they… approach, take part in, maintain interest in, make meaning from and reflect on…learning

It’s about creating a culture in classrooms that systematically cultivates a researched range of learning behaviours into learning habits; enabling students to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently, collaboratively and creatively.

Building student’s learning powers refocuses schools on preparing young people better for an uncertain future; to educate not just for exam results but for lifelong learning; to thrive in the increasingly turbulent twenty-first century. Students need to have learnt how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.

The joy and wonder of learning

2. The vision, heritage and shape of the programme

Vision

Creating a Learning Powered School is a suite of courses for primary schools that want to ensure their students knowingly become better learners. The aim is to help schools prepare their students for a lifetime of learning, by:

growing their independence as learners;
ensuring they understand how they learn, and how they can get better at learning;
empowering them to lead a productive lifetime of learning.

Heritage

The suite of courses combines a rich research heritage from Carole Dweck, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Art Costa, Sir Ken Robinson, Dylan Wiliam, Chris Watkins, John Hattie, David Perkins, Ron Ritchhart and Guy Claxton, and includes;

The formative work of finding out about your students’ learning behaviours
The practical work of shifting classroom cultures to better accommodate learning behaviours
The fine grained work of purposefully blending the use of learning behaviours into lesson design
The blending work of gradually adding more of the original researched learning behaviours into the mix.

Shape and flexibility.

This suite of courses has two very different phases;

Phase 1 Building Powerful Learners. This introductory on-line course introduces the ‘what’ of the learning mind, the features of classroom learning cultures and the growth of learning behaviours. It explores practical ideas for developing the four key learning behaviours; perseverance, questioning, collaboration and revising. It’s about establishing the approach across the school. See section 4 below for more detail.

Phase 2 Expanding and deepening practice. You might look on this phase as a differentiated expansive library. It offers a range of on-line courses and specialised resources which schools can mix and match to meet a wide variety of their specific needs across the school. See section 5 below for more detail.

3. A blended learning approach

Developing teachers’ working practices is known to be hard and delicate work which needs support to ensure the ideas take root in classrooms. Our suggestions for staff development practice are heavily influenced by the work of Dylan Wiliam and EEF’s Effective Professional Development guidance report.

The suite of courses offer a careful blend of:

online learning units or resources that… are available at any time, faithfully present researched content, are broken into manageable chunks and encourage the use of prior knowledge;
learning team sessions that……are placed throughout the programme, provide a carefully structured agenda to ensure effective meetings, offer social support, act as a forum for affirming and reinforcing progress;
trying things out in classrooms where…teachers develop plans and monitor their actions because “learning by doing” is integral to the development of expertise.

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

Why is changing practice hard? ⬇️

Changing practice is hard and takes both time and deliberate practice.

Although this suite of courses aims to develop learners’ learning behaviours, it firstly requires teachers to adapt their teaching behaviours! Changing practice is hard and takes both time and deliberate practice. It’s not just about knowing new stuff, it is about doing what you do differently and involves teachers changing:

what they know – their knowledge;
what they believe – their feelings or attitudes;
what they can do – their teaching skills;
what they actually do – putting it all into practice.

Changing how you teach is a delicate, complex process……...that’s why it’s hard! And the hardest thing isn’t getting new ideas into teachers’ heads . . .It’s getting the old ones out…….that’s why it takes time and effort.

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

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

The shape and content of the whole suite of courses takes account of this delicate professional change process.

4. Phase 1 of this suite of courses

Phase 1 is about making a confident start. Building Powerful Learners is made up of 8 on-line units. Each unit may take a couple of hours to read and digest and offer a range of activities to try out in classrooms over about a month. It works best when all staff undertake the same units . This phase covers the essentials of developing powerful learners and draws on the Professional Learning Teams model.

On-line Units;

The big picture of learning — reveals the “what” of learning itself.
The big picture of classroom culture — examines the “how” of a learning culture.
The big picture of progression in learning — explores what getting better at learning looks like.
Building the habit of Persevering — encourages building the “how” of perseverance.
Building the habit of Questioning — encourages developing the “how” of questioning.
Building the habit of Collaborating— encourages expanding the “how” of collaboration.
Building the habit of Revising — encourages accommodating the “how” of building revising.
Looking Back, and Moving Forward —reflects on changing practice and explores the possibilities of what next.

Press the button to find out more about the content for phase 1, Unit by Unit

5. Phases 2 and 3 of this suite of courses

Phase 2 Expanding and deepening practice is designed to support schools that wish to take things further and deepen the start made in Phase 1. This phase offers a selection of two different packages that can be used and re-used by all staff and/or groups of staff over several years. We leave it to schools to decide how best to make use of them.

Package A. Building the Scope – This is simply about expanding the range of learning behaviours being brought into play in classrooms. The familiar format of the Phase 1 units is copied here for a further eight learning behaviours.

You can access these units in any order:
- Noticing, Making links, Reasoning, Imagining, Capitalising, Planning, Meta learning, Empathy & Listening.

Package B. Building Depth – This package is about deepening and securing teachers’ understanding of a learning -friendly classroom culture. Essentially it puts more meat on the bones of the teacher’s palette model introduced in Phase 1.

You can access four substantial units that further develop:
- Devolving responsibility for learning to students
- Talking to deepen students’ understanding learning
- Constructing lessons with learning in mind
- Celebrating the growth of student learning behaviours.

Phase 3 is about consolidating the gains made at phase 2. It is about building a coherent whole-school approach to Building Powerful Learners and should not be started until phase 2 is well underway. Unlike the previous 2 phases, this is designed as a small team-based research and development project that aims to shape and harmonise whole school practice.

Building Coherence – This package is about developing two whole-school-wide strategies; one to collect information about how students’ characters are developing and one to enhance the integration of learning behaviours into curriculum design.

Creating Students’ Learning Profiles
- Enables schools to uncover, collect and analyse information about each of their students’ learning characters, and to use the outcomes to better understand how to support individual students to grow their learning power.
Creating Curriculum and Lesson Plans
- Explores more deeply how to integrate the use of learning behaviours into individual lessons and into the design of the whole curriculum.

6. Leadership questions for schools

The prospect and potential of taking on the initial Phase 1 Building Powerful Learners programme will inevitably raise all manner of important questions. There will be strategic, leadership and management questions that deserve consideration before school leaders can make a reasoned decision about whether or how to implement Building Powerful Learners.

Here we outline the leadership considerations that will be necessary for the successful implementation of any or all of the programmes. Considerations include: Shared Values; Skills; Staff; Systems; Structure; Style; and Strategy.

It’s worth taking your time to reflect on all seven aspects – it is only when you’ve addressed all seven will you have laid the foundations of success.

1. Shared Values

How does Phase 1 Building Powerful Learners fit with our school’s ethos?

Do the course’s aims fit with the school’s vision and values?
Do these ideas fit well with our vision of the purposes of education?
If our vision / mission statement does match, is our vision lived in the day to day life of the school, or is it more aspirational and indicative of a direction of travel?
If our vision is at odds with Building Powerful Learners, do we need to open up a conversation about the core purposes of education before embarking on this route?

If, at this stage, you feel that Phase 1 Building Powerful Learners may well be the way forward for your school, you’ll find the following six questions essential as the school moves towards implementation.

2. Skills

What sort of skills/competencies would the programme enhance:

in our students?
in our teachers?

3. Staff

How could we accommodate the Blended Learning staff development approach suggested?

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

4. Systems

How do we prevent it becoming a workload issue?

What sort of time and effort will staff need to make?
What changes to the school’s operations will need to be accommodated?
How will we prevent Building Powerful Learners becoming a workload issue for teachers, support staff, the programme lead, and senior leaders?

5. Structure

Who will lead it and what accountability may be needed?

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

6. Style

How are we going to support the programme?

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

7. Strategy

How do we expect Building Powerful Learners to work? How will we create and agree a plan to pull all this together?

Will this be a top-down ‘initiative’, or will we involve all staff in the forward planning?
How will we keep the strategy ‘tight but loose’? – tight enough to create momentum and maintain sustained interest, yet sufficiently loose to flex and accommodate emerging needs as necessary.

Building Powerful Learners Unit 8

Unit 8. Looking Back, and Moving Forward

Here’s a reminder of why you’ve been working through units 1 to 7.

Learning how to learn matters.

Students across the world need now to reach higher levels of achievement, not only to find fulfilling work but also to empower themselves to thrive in an increasingly complex world.

Employment requires being able to enhance and transfer knowledge and to operate collaboratively.
The capacity to learn and to adapt needs to be lifelong because change is a permanent state.

Research in the learning sciences shows that learning itself is learnable; that we, as a species, can get better at learning. This means we, schools, teachers, parents, can grow/develop better, more effective learners.

Vast amounts of information is now available and learners, young and old, need to know how to find, select and validate relevant information, to process it, connect it, to understand it and use it.
Learning is increasingly taking place in different settings and with different relationships.
Learning is a way of life.

Over the last eight or nine months you have used:

Read abouts…offering ‘must know’ information;

Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse what’s happening;

Try outs…practical activities to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

To help you move on, Unit 8 has 3 very different purposes:

Section 1 invites you to look back over the past few months and to evaluate the impact of:
- what you have learned;
- the ideas that you have tried out;
- how these changes have impacted on your students’ learning behaviours.
Section 2 distils the key messages for teaching and classroom culture and explores what you might do next to consolidate the positive changes you have already made.
Section 3 signposts the way ahead and opens up further possible avenues of enquiry.

Download and use the Unit 8 Reflection Summary below to record your thoughts as you work through Unit 8. Take your completed sheet to the end of unit team meeting.

Download the Unit 8 Reflection Summary

Section 1 – Looking Back

1a) Looking Back at Unit 1…which was all about learning behaviours.

In Unit 1 you were introduced to The Supple Learning Mind framework which shows high value learning behaviours identified by research.

The Supple Learning Mind framework is made up of the four domains of learning:

The Emotional domain of learning (where becoming a good learner involves the disposition to be resilient)
The Cognitive domain of learning (where becoming a good learner involves the disposition to be resourceful)
The Social domain of learning (where becoming a good learner involves the disposition to be reciprocal)
The Strategic domain of learning (where becoming a good learner involves the disposition to be reflective)

This framework shows that learning isn’t just about having a good memory; it includes how we feel, how we think, how we learn with others and how we manage the process of learning. It shows that effective learning is a complex process with a dispositional overlay i.e. all the positive or negative ways someone views learning. It also provides a language that helps you as a teacher to think about how to cultivate each of the learning behaviours and help students to gain a better personalised understanding of what they have to do to learn content.

The Supple Learning Mind framework

Reflecting on learning from Unit 1 ⬇️

Consolidate your understanding of your students as learners

Unit 1 Find Out 2 invited you to ‘Get curious about your students as learners’.

This seemingly simple task was actually more demanding than it first appeared. It was probably easy to assign positive learning behaviours to one or two of your ‘golden children. Similarly when you turned the positive learning behaviours into negative behaviours, the one or two students who’ve yet to develop any positive learning behaviours also stood out from the crowd.

What of ‘the crowd back then’? You may have found that while you know your students well in terms of their attainment levels, you were far less aware of ‘how’ they were as learners.

But what of your students now that you’ve spent a few months building their awareness of learning and themselves as learners?

Download and print a few of copies of the ‘Get curious’ sheet.

Consider just one student in your class (but avoid the extremes, just select ‘one of the crowd‘). Which of these learning behaviours are positives, neutral, or negative for your chosen student? Does this raise any questions for you about them as a learner? About your knowledge of them as a learner?

Try another ‘one of the crowd’. Do you now know them well enough to identify individual differences?

Turn your attention to one of the ‘golden children’. Although many or most of these behaviours will be positive, are there still a few areas of relative weakness?

Repeat for one of your predominantly negative learners. Although the majority of their behaviours may still be negative or, at best, neutral, are there some learning behaviours that are showing signs of improvement? Which? Why might this be?

Now think about your class as a whole. Can you identify 5 learning behaviours that you would say are mostly positive – the learning strengths of your class as a whole? Repeat for 5 learning behaviours that are still mostly neutral or negative – the weaker aspects of your class’ learning profile? What are you noticing?

Download the page

Key Question: As a result of your engagement with this course do you now have a clearer view of your students as learners?

1b) Looking Back at Unit 2…which was all about teaching.

In Unit 2 you were introduced to the Teachers’ Palette framework which is about the culture of the classroom.

The culture of the classroom is determined by how you are as a teacher, the relationships that exist between you and your learners, the ways in which you talk and what you talk about, the extent to which your teaching is designed to ensure both content acquisition and the development of learning behaviours, and the often subliminal messages about what you think is really important.

You used two tools to analyse your own classroom culture:-

Culture Tool 1, looked at differences between classrooms that are:

teacher focused;
those becoming learner focused;
those achieving the ultimate goal of becoming learning focused.

Culture Tool 2, expanded on 4 key aspects of a teacher’s behaviour and the effects or anticipated Ends/Outcomes for students of this learning culture.

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

The Teachers’ Palette

Download the Culture Wheel

Reflecting on learning from Unit 2 ⬇️

Re-assess your classroom culture.

At the end of Unit 2, you were invited to consider the aspects of classroom culture that you may have begun to re-think. Spend a few minutes revisiting this wheel.

Ask yourself;

Which aspects of classroom culture have I already made progress in?
Which other aspects might still be in need of attention?

The learning culture wheel is made up of the four aspects of culture depicted in four shades of green:

relating for learning (encouraging students to take more responsibility for learning)
talking about learning (creating a language for learning)
constructing learning (curriculum planning to link content and learning behaviours)
celebrating learning (putting learning on display)

Ask yourself;

Which aspects of classroom culture have I started to develop?
Which aspects might need attention going forward?
Which aspects do I need to find out more about?
In which quadrant have I made most progress? Least progress?
Is there anything about my classroom culture that’s jumping out at me?
What do I need to do next?

1c) Looking Back at Unit 3…which was all about progressing as a learner.

In Unit 3 we identified a key disposition from each domain of learning; from the Emotional domain – Persevering, from the Cognitive domain– Questioning, from the Social domain– Collaborating, and from the Strategic domain– Revising; these are what we call the foundational four.

Why pick out these four dispositions to start with?

Persevering because teachers find that it’s the disposition to keep going, to remain engaged, to relish challenge and go for goals that’s most lacking in many students.

Questioning because this is the driver of learning; wanting to know why, how, if, when and so forth fundamentally connects us with learning.

Collaborating because ‘working together’ is a familiar classroom activity and yet few students know how best to learn profitably together.

Revising because learning is a process and like any process it needs managing and adapting to work really well.

This foundational set of four offer the soil in which other dispositions can take root more easily.

In Unit 3, Get Better at Getting Better, you met the progression charts for these four learning behaviours. (opposite).

In Find Out 2 you looked at 4 of your students through the lens of these charts and completed their individual Learning Profiles, and if you undertook the deeper dive in Extended Find Out 2 you may have completed Profiles for some groups of students, like boys, girls, more able, SEND, Pupil Premium etc.

Dig out your records.

If you’ve kept these Learning Profiles and any impressions / analysis that you recorded at the time, please retrieve them. Equally look back to any notes made at the end of Unit meetings as they may also help to remind you of your thinking and your colleagues’ thinking at the time.

Learning development stages behaviour by behaviour

View a possible completed Unit 8 Reflection Summary

Reflecting on learning from Unit 3 ⬇️

Is there any evidence that our students’ Learning Profiles are showing signs of growth?

Beware, and manage your expectations!

These progression charts show a lifetime of growth and development – most adults are not consistently at the top of these charts, in all circumstances, after many years of experience. It follows that the amount of progress that can be achieved by your children in a few short months will necessarily be limited.

But, having said that, do you get the sense that your students are already on an upward trajectory?

Go back to the 4 students you focussed on in Find Out 2 of Unit 3. Create updated Learning Profiles for these 4 students. What are you noticing? What questions are you asking yourself?

More generally:

Are there maybe some students who were initially in the ‘Grey’, negative zone who are now beginning to engage more positively, albeit with teacher encouragement and support, at the ‘Purple’ level?

Are there some students who now require less teacher encouragement and support than previously who are beginning to display some ‘Blue’ level characteristics?

Are there even some students for whom the penny has dropped, who have come to realise that adopting these learning behaviours has a big pay-off for them, and they are beginning to exhibit some ‘Green’ level characteristics?

What about groups of students? Are any groups of students displaying greater, or lesser, progress than other groups? Why might this be? What might need to be done?

And finally:

What is a realistic target for the whole school? What might the future look like if these changes are implemented consistently over an extended period of time? What, for example, might your year 1’s look like in 5 years time when they are in year 6, compared to how your year 6 students are today? Dare you dream that many more students may have made the significant shift from ‘Blue’ to ‘Green‘ before they move on to secondary school?

1d) Looking Back at Units 4/5/6 & 7…which were all about basic teaching ideas that stimulate learning behaviours.

In Units 4, 5, 6 & 7 you were invited to explore 4 key learning behaviours – Persevering, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising respectively – through the lens of the 4 aspects of classroom culture – how you relate and talk to students, and how you construct learning activities and celebrate learning.

In each unit, you:

considered whether your classroom culture was learning-friendly (Find Out 2s);
thought about things you should stop and start doing to create a classroom culture within which the learning behaviour might flourish (Try Out 1s);
were encouraged to explore Try Outs 2/3/4/5 relating to each of the 4 aspects of classroom culture (relating, talking, constructing, celebrating).

Altogether there were 52 Try Out activities for you to choose from. But which did you try and how effective were they?

Take a look back and reflect on which Try Outs you tried, why you chose them, which worked, which didn’t, which would you try again, and which you’ve already built into your curriculum plans.

Reflecting on learning from Units 4/5/6&7 ⬇️

How well did the Try Outs work?

Within these 4 units there were over 50 things that you could have ‘Tried Out’, and hopefully you followed the advice to focus on adopting just a few rather than taking a scattergun approach that merely scratches the surface of a large number of possible ideas.

Look back over the 4 units, particularly at the suggested ‘Try Outs’. Ask yourself, for each of the 4 units:

Which ‘Try Out(s)‘ had the greatest impact in your classroom?
Which ‘Try Out(s)‘ had the least impact?
Which ‘Try Out(s)‘ have become embedded in your classroom culture?
Are there ‘Try Out(s)‘, maybe ones that your colleagues found useful, that you did not try at the time and need to re-visit?

Section 2 – Moving Forward . . .

Many research papers, projects and books have been written about learning to learn, metacognition and self-regulation. The problem with all this scholarship is that you can easily get lost in the detail.

In this section we’re fast tracking you to the key set of learning culture shifts that you’ve had opportunities to experiment with over the last 8 or 9 months. When they’re woven consistently together, they combine to create a learning-friendly classroom culture within which positive learning behaviours can flourish and grow. It’s the start of a culture where learners knowingly use and develop a whole range of learning behaviours and become disposed to do so when necessary.

All of the cultural shifts in this early key set have made multiple appearances during the first 7 units, and, in the toggle box that follows, we summarise their implications for teaching and their intended outcomes for learners.

Key learning culture shifts

Relating for Learning

Coach whenever possible, tell only when necessary
Shift responsibility for monitoring learning to the learner

Talking for Learning

Create a rich language for, and understanding of, the process of learning
Blend in the use of ‘Could-Be’ language across the curriculum

Constructing Learning

Plan the use of appropriate learning behaviours into lessons across the curriculum
Use a wide range of Visible Thinking Routines to activate the use of learning behaviours

Celebrating Learning

Re-define usual ideas of classroom learning
Create classroom displays to support and celebrate the process and growth of learning

Key learning culture shifts explained. Some really important stuff here. ⬇️

Reflecting on your progress to date . .

You may find it helpful to download a short review sheet to support your reflections on:

How your own classroom culture has changed;
And how your students have responded to the changes you have made.

[Do not be too disappointed if you feel that your students have yet to respond sufficiently to the changes you are making. In the same way that it takes teachers time to change their teaching practices, it also takes time for students to discern and respond to these changes.] Download the Review Sheet

Key learning culture shifts explained

Relating for Learning…gradually devolving responsibility to the learner

1. Coach whenever possible, tell only when necessary.

Curiosity lies at the heart of coaching, so this means you have to become an effective listener and ask questions to open dialogue without it sounding like an interrogation. Your aim is to enable students to see what they are doing more clearly and discover their own ways to improve. Above all, you’ll need to resist offering solutions because this does little to secure learning as students haven’t been allowed to confront and engage with the problem and find their way forward.

2. Shift responsibility for monitoring learning to the learner

Reviewing lies at the heart of learning. It involves stopping every so often to take stock of progress and to ensure that whatever someone is trying to produce—an artwork, an essay, a draft business plan—is on track; how they want it to be. So reviewing involves your students being able to look at their own work with the critical eye of an editor, and not being afraid of the possibility that some corrections or alterations may be needed.

As a result students will be moving towards:

being able to explore their own challenges, problems and goals;
their own motivation and self-esteem improving;
building their curiosity and self-encouragement for learning.

As a result students will begin to develop their own metacognitive frame of mind and they’ll muse over:

What’s the best way of checking my work?
How can I improve this?
Am I achieving what I wanted to?
What would be a better way of doing.that?
How have my ideas changed?

Talking for Learning…promoting talk about learning

3. Create a rich language for, and understanding of, the process of learning

The importance of and ideas for a learning language have been introduced across all the Units

Having a language that captures the richness of learning helps you and your students to uncover learning as a visible process that can change and improve. A rich learning language offers you, and your students, a way of talking about what learners actually do, and this in itself enables them to expand their capacity and appetite for learning.

4. Blend in the use of ‘Could-Be’ language across the curriculum

The importance of using ‘Could-Be’ language was introduced in Unit 7.

Could-Be language encourages more genuine engagement with what is being taught; how students will question and solve problems more readily if knowledge is presented as provisional. It’s about shifting the tone to more tentative, less cut and dried. The opposite is ‘Is’ language which positions the learner as knowledge consumers where their job is to try and understand and remember.

As a result learners will begin to ask themselves things like:

am I using the best strategy here?
what’s the sticking point of this task
are there other strategies I might use?
what’s the best way of checking this?

As a result students will become:

more thoughtful, critical or imaginative about what they are reading;
more able to consider alternatives or revise their point of view;
rightly sceptical about apparent ‘truths’.

Constructing Learning…shaping activities to promote learning

5. Plan the use of appropriate learning behaviours into lessons across the curriculum

Thus far you have introduced the use of four learning behaviours into your lesson plans

In designing schemes of learning or individual lessons there’s a central practical turnaround that you’ve come to recognise. You’ve now started asking the fundamental question… ‘How are my students going to learn this?’ rather than ‘How am I going to teach it?’ You’re making conscious choices about which learning habits to introduce and stretch and how to make lessons more interesting and challenging.

6. Use Visible Thinking Routines to activate a wide range of learning behaviours

Thus far you have met the VTRs ‘See Think Wonder’ (in Unit 5), ‘Think Pair Share’ (in Unit 6) and ‘I used to think . . but now I think’ (in Unit 7).

Visible Thinking Routines are simple routines that you can apply across a wide range of subjects and contexts. They require students to think or behave in a variety of different ways. When you use them regularly they become woven into the fabric of the classroom culture and progressively hard-wired into the thinking practices of your students. They become part of the learning culture. There are many more to explore at the VTR website:

Visit the VTR website

As a result students will become;

more curious and self-reliant rather than compliant and dependent;
and over time they’ll come to know, understand and take control of their learning behaviours.

As a result, over time, students will:

with guidance be able to use VTRs for themselves;
use them routinely as valid ways of thinking about and tackling problems.

Celebrating Learning…by putting learning on display

7. Re-define the usual ideas of classroom learning

In effect this is about re-defining failure – turning the lens around. Mistakes become learning opportunities; difficulty is when learning happens; struggle is to be expected; asking questions shows curiosity, not a lack of intelligence; effort not just talent is what leads to success. This shift is about ensuring that hard won gains over what is difficult are preferable to effortless success over the easy.

8. Create displays to support growing independence and celebrate learning

In your classroom you will have been displaying the process of learning (as opposed to the finished outcomes of learning) on the walls. This may have included annotated work in progress, first attempts, revisions, failed lines of enquiry, leading to the finished article. What you choose to display tells your students a lot about what you believe: displaying/praising only the finished article suggests more interest in the outcome than the process.

As a result students begin to recognise that:

that being stuck is an interesting not shameful place to be;
being stuck makes them a stronger learner;
making mistakes is natural and valuable part of learning;
they can learn by applying different types of effort.

As a result, over time, students will recognise they are:

using their learning habits quite a lot;
using these learning behaviours in different subjects;
getting better at using various learning behaviours.

Section 3 – Signposting the way ahead

Broadening the scope of learning opportunities for staff; supporting the development of a learning focused school.

In this Phase 1 of the journey towards becoming a learning focused school you’ve explored the three models that form the foundation of the approach to learning, namely;

Supple Learning Mind, (the brain diagram)
The Teachers’ Palette
Growth in learning behaviours

and you’ve worked on developing the foundational four learning behaviours, Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising. Phase 2 offers opportunities for you to both branch out and go deeper.

Phases 2 and 3 of the programme.

Phase 2 is about both expanding and deepening the start made in Phase 1. This phase offers a choice of two different packages that are all available, can be used and re-used by all staff and/or groups of staff spread over a couple of years. You can choose to do one or both of them:

Building the Scope – Expanding the range of learning behaviours being brought into play

Access 8 units, each supporting the introduction of a further learning behaviour to add to and blend with the 4 that you have already explored in Phase 1.

Building Depth – Deepening and securing teachers’ understanding of a learning-friendly classroom culture

Access 4 units, each supporting teachers to better understand classroom culture, how it grows and the strategies necessary to develop a learning-friendly classroom culture. Building Depth builds on and further develops the ideas explored in Phase 1, and introduces the idea of progression in culture development in terms of both teacher actions and intended student responses.

These phase 2 packages are always available for use whenever required and each may take a couple of years to fully embed.

Building Coherence – Developing two school-wide strategies

These materials are designed to assist specialised groups of staff to develop a school-strategy; one for the development of a school wide system for keeping students’ learning development under review; one for a school wide policy for curriculum and lesson design that enhances students’ development as learners.

Find out more about these phase 2 and 3 options ⬇️

Phases 2 and 3 of Building Powerful Learners offers 2 distinct routes:

Either . .

Building the Scope – introducing 8 further learning behaviours

Or . .

Building Depth – delving deeply into classroom culture, exploring how to create a learning-focused classroom culture

Followed by . .

Building Coherence – 2 whole-school strategies for creating a consistent approach to:
- a) creating student learning profiles;
- b) creating learning-infused curriculum and lesson plans.

All routes are supported by a senior leader guide.

Building the Scope – Expanding the range of learning behaviours being brought into play.

You will access 8 new units, presented in the same format and detail as Phase 1, introducing:

Noticing, from the emotional aspects of learning;
Making links, Reasoning, Imagining, Capitalising from the cognitive aspects of learning;
Empathy & Listening from the social aspects of learning;
Planning and Meta Learning from the strategic aspects of learning.

These units form an extension to the Building Powerful Learners programme in Phase 1. They can be undertaken in any order, by any group or groups of staff, at any time over the next two years. They help you expand the range of learning behaviours you want students to use.

For completeness, there is also a complementary, 9th, unit that explores and elaborates on progression in the 4 foundation learning behaviours.

Building Depth – Deepening and securing teachers’ understanding of a learning-friendly classroom culture

You will access 4 substantial new units, presented in the same format as Phase 1, that further develop:

Devolving responsibility for learning to students;
Talking to deepen students’ understanding learning;
Constructing lessons with learning in mind;
Celebrating the growth of student learning behaviours.

These units form an extension to the Building Powerful Learners programme in Phase 1. They can be undertaken in any order, by any group or groups of staff, at any time over the next two years. They help you to further develop a learning-friendly classroom culture with a focus on the stages of teacher development.

Building Coherence – Developing two school-wide strategies

You will have access to 2 units, supported by a Senior Leaders’ Guide, to enable the school to:

Create Students’ Learning Profiles
- Enables schools to uncover, collect and analyse information about each of their students’ learning characters, and to use the outcomes to better understand how to support individual students to grow their learning power.
Create Curriculum and Lesson Plans
- Explores more deeply the skill of integrating the use of learning behaviours into individual lessons and into the design of the curriculum.

Unlike the other Building Powerful Learners phases which are designed to be undertaken by all classroom teachers, these materials are designed to assist specialised groups of staff to develop school-wide strategies; one for the development of a school-wide system for keeping students’ learning development under review; one for a school-wide policy for curriculum and lesson design that enhances students’ development as learners.

Learning together. Meeting 8

Unit 8 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Looking back at Unit 1
Reassessing our classroom cultures
Student’s progress in learning
Our use of the Try Outs
Re-cap and reflect on the 8 Key Shifts
Where and what next?

This is the last Learning Together meeting of Phase 1 of the programme. To make the most of it please ensure you all complete the Unit 8 Reflection Summary and record your thoughts on each aspect. It’s likely that discussion in this meeting will influence how the school could move forward with Learning Power in Phase 2. Please allow at least an hour for this crucial meeting.

Learning Team Meeting 8 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

share and learn from each other what we have each experimented with in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward more ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Looking back at Unit 1

Do you have a clear view of all of your students as learners? How would you summarise their strengths and weaknesses?

Explore together your current views of students as learners;

how has the course helped us to understand the process of learning?
are we comfortable with the four aspects of learning?
how has this view of learning helped our teaching?
do we look at our students differently now?
if so, how?
would we say, in general, there are any signs that our students are improving as learners?

Outcome. A clearer view of our understanding of learning and our students as learners.

Item 3. Re-assessing classroom cultures.

Which aspects of classroom culture (Relating; Talking; Constructing; Celebrating) have I already made progress in? Which other aspects might still be in need of attention?

Share and discuss the action you each undertook in strengthening classroom practice.

Which aspects did you each develop?
Which would you want to find out more about?
Which seemed the most valid or successful.
Which is jumping out at you?

Outcome. A clear picture of our interest in and enthusiasm for amending classroom cultures to support learning to learn. A feel for which aspects of culture are proving to be most effective and why.

Item 4. Learning progress in students.

Do you get the sense that your students are already on an upward trajectory? What evidence do you have for this?

The progression charts show a lifetime of growth and development so the amount of progress that can be achieved by your students in less than a year will necessarily be limited. Having said that,

have the charts helped our understanding of learning behaviours?
do we get any sense that our students are already on an upward trajectory?
would we say any of our students have moved forward
- from purple to blue or blue to green?
if we were to set a forward looking whole school target
- what might our current Yr 1’s look like in 5 yrs time when in yr 6?
- Might we be able to help a significant number attain Green?

Outcome. A clear understanding of the progression charts and how this relates to students in each class. A feel for how the chart can be a useful tool of measuring effectiveness and setting meaningful targets.

Item 5. Exploring action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Which of the Try Outs had the greatest impact in your classroom? Are there other Try Outs you still intend to explore?

Which of the 50+ Try outs did we use and how might we assess their usefulness and success?

did we follow the advice to focus on adopting just a few rather than taking a scattergun approach?
which Try outs had the greatest impact across the school?
how did this differ from one year group to another?
are there any Try outs we could all use profitably?
are there any approaches we’d rule out altogether?

Outcome. At this stage it would be useful to note the Try outs that seemed to have the greatest impact.

Item 6. The 8 key learning shifts

On which of the 8 cultural shifts have I made the greatest progress? Least progress? What are the most noticeable impacts on my students?

A consideration of the suggested 8 key learning shifts and the effects on students.

share the charts you have made
which of the 8 suggested learning culture shifts have you all used?
which was used the least?
which seems to have had minimal impact on students?
which seems to be the most successful in terms of impact on students?
what can we learn from this data?

Outcome. A valuable sharing of individual data that will help guide practice in the next stage of development as a learning powered school

Item 7. Where now? What next?

Moving forward – Of the two phase 2 routes (Building the Scope – Introducing more behaviours; Building Depth – Going deeper into culture), which holds the greatest appeal for you? Why?

A consideration of the two phase 2 routes.

Building the Scope – focusing on 8 new learning behaviours
Building Depth – going deeper with classroom culture and lesson design.

Outcome. Strong ideas or even an agreement about which aspect(s) of the Building Powerful Learners phase 2 programme the school should pursue over the coming year.

Building Powerful Learners Unit 7

Unit 7. Building the learning habit of revising.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This 8 unit online programme aims to enable teachers to:

explore how learners might become not just better at learning but effective lifelong learners;
engage learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three ways of helping you to understand, play with and become skilled in developing your students’ learning power:

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

Unit 7 explores the “how” of revising.

What are the key aspects of Revising? (Essential Read about 1)
How effective at Revising are my students now? (Find out 1)
How can I embed building Revising into my classsroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches are useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
What is ‘Could-Be’ language and how can it contribute to creating a revising-friendly culture? (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so is your seventh step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Revising

A well formed Revising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Self-monitor how things are going, keeping an eye on the goal;
Expect the unexpected, having a readiness to re-shape, re-order, re-form plans to take account of new circumstances;
Remain alive to new, unforeseen opportunities and ideas;
Look at what you are doing with a critical eye;
Strive to be the best you can be;
Make sure things are on track and make improvements along the way.

So at a less abstract level, students need to learn how to deal with change, emotionally and practically. With an inflexible frame of mind they are unlikely to recognise the need to change their ideas or the way they do something. They also need to know what ‘good’ looks like; how
to keep an eye on how things are going and the willingness to evaluate how things went against external standards. When looked at from these diverse angles, growing revising moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘have another go’.

Essential Read about 1. Introducing Revising ⬇️

What do we mean by Revising?

Making improvements

The word Revising has unfortunate connotations with Revision [for a test]. What is meant here is being prepared to do things differently in light of feedback, to be adaptable, flexible and open to change. Another word might be ‘Refining’, and indeed we’ve used the two words, revising and refining, interchangeably.

However well prepared learners are, they have to expect the unexpected. They have to have the readiness to revise / refine as they go along. Good learners are able to change their plans and think on their feet. They are able to be flexible. It may be a good decision to say ‘This is turning out to be far harder than I thought, and I’m getting less help than I imagined, and there are other interesting possibilities opening up, so I think I’ll cut my losses and quit.’ Note that the decision is based on a realistic cost-benefit analysis of the actual situation, not on frustration, pique or a blow to self-esteem.

To be effective at revising, learners need to monitor how things are going and periodically review where they have got to.

Monitoring is the art of looking over your own shoulder as you’re working away at a problem, asking yourself how it’s going.

Getting better at monitoring involves cultivating the little voice of self-awareness that keeps the strategic goals in mind, and is ready to change tack if it seems appropriate. A football manager contemplating making a substitution is monitoring, as is a teacher who decides to throw away the lesson plan on the spur of the moment and go with the interesting discussion which is developing. Students can pick up the habit and the skill of this kind of monitoring by being around people—teachers are ideally placed—who are able to model it, and who have learnt how to learn aloud, i.e. to externalise the thought processes of the vigilant monitor.

Reviewing means stopping every so often to take stock of progress, and to ensure that any emerging product—an artwork, an essay, a draft business plan—is on track. Reviewing requires the ability to look at your own work with the critical eye of an editor, and not be afraid of the possibility that some corrections may be needed. A writer may put a piece of work aside for a while and then come back to look at it afresh. An athlete may sit down and look at the video of her starting technique to see if any adjustments need to be made. But reviewing is what the low-achieving maths student, for example, is very often unable to do.

Donald Schon called monitoring ‘reflection in action’, and reviewing ‘reflection on action’. Again, modelling and coaching can help develop these abilities.

Try outs 1-5 offer a range of things that you can do to strengthen and build your students’ inclination to revise and refine their efforts to achieve high quality responses.

Re-find out 1

Focus on the Revisers in your class.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick look back to what you discovered in Unit 3 about Revisers in your class.

Through the lens of the Revising progression chart, you should have a fairly clear view of the Revising behaviours that your students do, and do not, currently exhibit.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple/blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made more progress than the majority.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing Revising

A trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Revising?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage Revising.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture. Which of the features of the Revising-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

And, which of these features are you interested in further developing?

Take your completed sheet to the end of the unit meeting, but in the meantime have an informal chat with some colleagues. Is anyone already making progress with one of the features you would like to work on? Do you have any consistent features that others might learn from?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Revising.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for Revising (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate Revising (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how Revising can be rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Build Revising by extending students’ responsibilities.

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 students 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.

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

End of lesson plenaries

End-of-lesson plenaries needn’t be formulaic (as they sometimes tend to be). Here are a couple of creative ideas to keep plenaries fresh and interesting. For example:

Panning for gold

Ask students to think back over their learning as if it were panning for gold. In the first sift they might throw away irrelevant material. The last sift leaves only the shining nuggets—the really important things they have learned that they will take forward and use again. Have students discuss what they have left behind, and what they will take forward to be of real value to them in the future.

‘Tell me Three’:

End a lesson with ‘Tell me Three’ . .

things we learned today
learning skills we used today
things we need to do next lesson
ways you could become a more effective learner etc.

Ensure that students tell you three. Do not lapse into doing it for them!

Try out 3

Build Revising using a learning language

Using ‘Could-Be’ language to encourage students to consider alternatives

The importance of using ‘Could-Be’ language is well researched. It encourages more genuine engagement with what is being taught; how students will question and solve problems more readily if knowledge is presented as provisional. It’s about shifting the tone to more tentative, less cut and dried. The opposite is ‘Is’ language which positions the learner as knowledge consumers where their job is to try and understand and remember. ‘Could be’ language immediately invites students to be more thoughtful, critical or imaginative about what they are hearing or reading with a view to considering alternatives, to revising their point of view.

Begin by experimenting with how you present information to your students. Find out what happens when you use ‘could-be’ language to present information as tentative, more open to question, less cut and dried.

To find out more about the background and research behind the use of ‘Could-Be’ language, go to Find Out 3 in this unit.

Teacher talk

‘Could Be’ language includes phrase like;

In most cases
may include
may on occasion
wide variety
could be
probably
possibly
most often
there are other ways
one of which
some people think that…

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Talk about and have students create success criteria.

Make it clear to students what you are looking for in a piece of learning and give them opportunities to check their ‘work ‘against the criteria, either individually or in pairs. Ensure the criteria are linked to the original learning intention. Knowing what is expected encourages students to stay on focus and to revise their work to meet the criteria. Invite students to create success criteria themselves in order to encourage ownership.
Include

what students should know
how much, and how, they should include opinions, judgements and their own thinking
what skills they should be able to demonstrate
how to link the outcome to the original learning intention.

Evaluating progress towards the goal

Things to say;

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?

Try out 4

Build Revising into lesson design

Use the Visible Thinking Routine ‘I used to think . . . . . Now I think . . . .’

This routine helps students to reflect on how and why their thinking/understanding is changing:

Remind students of the topic you have been working on;
Ask them to respond to each of the sentence stems: I used to think…, Now, I think…

Alternatively ask students to write down their views at the beginning of a topic. Invite them to revisit & update their answer during and at the end in light of what has been learned.

Or, at the beginning of a lesson ask students to write down what they understand by a particular term that will be explored in the coming lesson (e.g. Phrase (English); Proof (Maths); Power (Science) etc). At the end of the lesson ask them to write down what they now understand by the term.

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

An activity that enhances content understanding by using Revising

Per-verse

Use this activity to demonstrate how opinions and hypotheses change and are revised as more information becomes available. Underline the importance of speculative thinking that is unlikely to be right first time.

Groups of three or four. One stanza of a poem to each group. DO NOT REVEAL THE POEM’s TITLE! Explain: The group has to make assumptions about what they are reading based on the limited information they have.

Ask groups to:

Distil what they know so far, and
List the questions to which they need answers.

Next, exchange stanzas with another group

Does the new information answer any questions?
Are there new questions to find out about?
How do the verses fit together — which comes first?

Repeat the process about four times. Run a formative plenary: What do we know so far? Now issue all groups with the complete but cut up poem and ask students to work towards a sequence that makes sense.

Extend understanding of revising by exploring;

How did opinions change as more information became available?
Were group members willing and able to revise their views?
How flexible was people’s thinking?
What is the wider importance of keeping an open mind?

We have found Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath a useful poem to start with. Download it in cut up form here
Download

Give students opportunities to practise revising

What do you see here?

Ready students’ minds for adjusting their point of view, changing their mind or revising their ideas.
The technique, illustrated here through the picture of a dog leaping over First World War trenches, can be applied to any image where there is some kind of unexpected juxtaposition of conflicting aspects within the same picture.
The purpose is to draw students into speculating about various parts of the image before revealing the full image. This will necessarily require them to revise and build on their first impressions. The underlying message is that new information often forces us to change our original understandings.

Try out 5

Engage students in purposeful revising

Simply watch and wonder. How might I use this approach?

Ron Berger’s Ethic of Excellence

Build a culture of critique

Plan formal critique sessions, where students show a piece of work, explaining their ideas and what they were trying to achieve. Students are then encouraged to critique the work, but using the rules that it must be:

Kind
Specific
Helpful

Students should be encouraged to phrase their critique as questions e.g. ‘Have you thought about…..?’ As a result of this feedback from their peers, students improve their work over time.

Although, surprisingly, this video is now well over a decade old it offers a perfect example of how to begin helping students to build the habit of revising their learning.

Take a look back at the revising learning mat in Unit 3. Estimate where your students are now and select one or two aspects to work on. E.g. Willing to redraft my work to improve it.

Two more Celebrating learning ideas ⬇️

Build Revising by celebrating it.

What stuck with you today?

Make reflection on what they have done part of the daily or lesson routine. This display from a primary school in Bradford shows a range of discussion cards which the teacher uses with specific groups of students during or at the end of a day.

The questions include:

Today I have learned….
Today I have tried to…
My biggest success today has been….
What will your tell your family when they ask ‘What did you do at school today’?
The most important thing I have learned today.
Has something inspired you today?

Each, in different ways, encourages students to think about how their thinking / understanding has changed, how they have revised their view of things.

Support students to reflect on their own performance

Skill : Will

Use the ‘Skill: Will’ matrix to help students develop ways of reflecting on their own performance. Using the matrix (see alongside), students judge their levels of accomplishment and motivation in any area of the curriculum. Students can support or coach each other to complete the grid objectively and then identify for themselves small steps to create the desired movement. Each of the quadrants requires a different coaching approach.

Direct – (bottom left) set short-term goals, structure learning tasks and monitor progress closely.
Inspire – (top left) re-kindle interest, set short term actions and accentuate positives.
Guide – (bottom right) envision the future when skill levels are raised, secure appropriate learning opportunities and provide reflective feedback.
Delegate – ( top right) encourage experimentation and further challenges to maintain interest.

Find out 3

Find out more about ‘Could Be’ language

Ellen Langer’s work on the importance of using ‘Could-Be’ language illustrates how this encourages more genuine engagement with what is being taught; how students will question and solve problems more readily if knowledge is presented to them as being provisional. Langer’s studies document the effect of shifting the tone in which knowledge is presented on students’ learning.

What we might call ‘Is language’ is full of certainty. It sets clear boundaries, and it often looks as though it is complete and definitive. ‘Could-Be language’, on the other hand, is more tentative and provisional: it leaves open the possibility that things might not be cut-and-dried, and that the reader or listener might be able to spot a flaw or an improvement.

Read on . . . ⬇️

‘Could Be’ language includes phrase like;

In most cases
may include
may on occasion
wide variety
could be
probably
possibly
most often
there are other ways
one of which
some people think that…

If we want young people to grow up to be inquisitive about what they are told, and imaginative in their responses to it, it would seem to be patently self-defeating to talk to them in a linguistic register that prevents them from bringing those learning dispositions to bear. ‘Is language’ invites—or almost requires—students to use learning muscles like ‘verbatim remembering’ and ‘accurate transcription’. There is nothing wrong with these; they are indeed useful in the real world. But they are not the be-all and end-all of learning. Nor, many would argue, are they the most useful habits of mind with which to meet a complex and contested world. ‘Could-Be language’ invites critical thinking, imagination, flexibility and resourcefulness, as well as helping students to develop a richer set of transferable skills.

A central belief of Learning Power is that, to breed powerful and enthusiastic young learners, we need to engage them not just as consumers of knowledge, but as critics and makers of knowledge. We need to talk to them as if the subject-matter we are discussing is provisional and contestable, not as if it is cut and dried. Of course, much of the knowledge and theory in the curriculum has stood the test of time very well. But in order to turn out thinkers rather than hoarders and regurgitators, we need to find and emphasise its unravelled edges, and help them discover how to function intelligently in this zone of contest and uncertainty.

Learning Powered schools know that it is in this zone that much real learning happens, and that this is where they have to learn how to be comfortable and effective. As a consequence, teachers observe that not only the words they use change, but also the tone they adopt shifts. As one teacher said:

“I used to ask leading questions which structured their thinking towards the “right” answer that I wanted, but that was too much scaffolding. So now I use an inquisitive tone and nudge them to work things out for themselves. It’s always surprising what students can find out for themselves when you let them.“

Learning together. Meeting 7

Unit 7 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students use of Revising (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting 7 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of Revising displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as Revisers;

what did you find out about your students as Revisers? (Find out 1)
are students improving as Revisers with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture Find out 2?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features
- which 3 actions are our strongest
what surprised or baffled you
are there significant differences between year groups

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as Revisers and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop effective Revising.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening Revising in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful.
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing using Find out 3, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Building Powerful Learners Unit 6

Unit 6. Building the habit of collaborating.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This 8 unit online programme aims to enable teachers to:

explore how learners might become not just better at learning but effective lifelong learners;
engage learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three ways of helping you to understand, play with and become skilled in developing your students’ learning power:

1 Read abouts…offering two types of information

Read about A…essential must read text.
Read about B…interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information.

3 Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom.

Unit 6 explores the “how”of building collaboration.

What are the key aspects of collaboration? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as collaborators? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building collaboration into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
How are my approaches working? Are they building confidence in collaborating? (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so is your sixth step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Collaboration

A well formed habit of Collaboration involves being ready, willing, and able to:

- Work effectively with others towards agreed, common goals, acting flexibly in response to circumstances.
- Adopt different roles and responsibilities in pursuit of agreed goals and the well-being of the team.
- Hold and express opinions coherently, compromising and adapting when appropriate.
- Seek to understand what others are saying; sharing, challenging, supporting and building on ideas.

In short…

Collaboration: Having both the skills and the inclination to contribute positively to group work in order to learn productively with and from others.

Essential Read about 1. Introducing Collaboration ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as Collaboration

In a learning context we have come to understand collaboration as being able to manage yourself effectively in the give and take of a collaborative venture, having a range of interpersonal skills that enable you to work and learn with and from others, being willing and able to contribute constructively and with sensitivity, and adding to and drawing strength from the team itself.

At its least sophisticated, it 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.

Try outs 1-5 offer a range of things that you can do to strengthen and build your students’ inclination to learn with and from their peers.

Re-find out 1

Focus on the Collaborators in your class.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick look back to what you discovered in Unit 3 about Collaboration in your class.

Through the lens of the Collaboration progression chart you should have a fairly clear view of the collaborative behaviours that your students do, and do not, currently exhibit.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple/blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made more progress than the majority.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing Collaboration

A trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Collaboration?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage collaboration.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture. Which of the features of the collaboration-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

And, which of these features are you interested in further developing?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to collaboration.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for collaboration (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate collaboration (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how collaboration can be rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

The start of working together

Use the Visible Thinking Routine ‘Think Pair Share’

The basic building block of collaboration is pair work. Through brief and focused conversations, peers get the opportunity to voice their thoughts and start a dialogue about them. TPS is a well-known strategy for ensuring that students build up to learning in a team. One way of using this might be to:

Pose a question or problem, give pupils 1 minute to think individually about their own personal response;
give 2 minutes in pairs to compare their first reactions with a partner;
give fours 3 minutes to share their views in a group.

Use as a simple strategy to prepare students for working together in teams.

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Start slowly with team roles

Introduce students to a few essential team roles, for example.

Coordinator
Resource gatherer
Completer/Finisher

There are many ideas for team roles.

Visit:

Think we need a better and up to date reference here ( just simple role definitions)

Ground rules for resolving conflicts

As students become used to working together it’s wise to agree with your class a routine to be followed when conflict arises; ground rules for how students should behave. This could form the basis of a display to help students to remember what they have signed up to do.

You might end up with a variation on

Resolving Conflicts – Without Fighting

STOP Don’t let the conflict escalate.
SAY What the conflict is about.
SAY What each of us want.
THINK of positive things we could do.
CHOOSE a positive option that all of us can agree on.
ASK someone for help if we can’t agree

Ground Rules

Listen to each other, try to understand how others feel
Take turns, don’t interrupt
Say how you feel and be truthful
Brains, not hands

Try out 3

Build collaboration using a learning language

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Choose different groups today so that you work with different people.
Who is going to be responsible for how the team gets on?
Time to check you are on the right lines.
Are you making the most of everybody’s talents?
How will you / did you help your team?
Have you worked together to discover what this task/problem is about?
How can you / did you help to get everyone more involved?
Will you / did you contribute your own ideas and listen to the ideas of others?
How will you find a way to agree / make a decision?
How and why was your team successful?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Teacher talk

Introducing the idea of different roles in a group

What sorts of jobs are there to do in a team?
How can we each do a special job to help get things done?
What is your role going to be?
I would like you to be the ……today
What does the ……(role)… do in /for the team?
What will you do to make a contribution to the team ?
What else needs doing, and who will do it ?
You don’t all have to do the same thing !

Talk for agreeing relevant goals

What do we think we have to do?
What’s this task really about?
What are we trying to end up with?
What will that look like?
How will we know we have been successful?
Which is the best idea so far?
So, what is our goal?
Does this goal sound do-able/worthwhile/right for us?
What do we need to do together?
How will you agree what needs to be done?
What will the end product be?
Does/will that answer the question / solve the problem

Try out 4

Build collaboration into lesson design

Pizza the action; working out what’s to be done.

Provide each team member with a piece of ‘pizza’, plus have one spare. Ask students to write their own ideas or responses or solutions or questions or answers etc on their own piece. Once complete, the pizza is assembled and the team together distil their thinking and complete the final piece of the pizza. Display either each team’s pizza, or the distilled pieces from all teams to form a composite view.

Alternatively the groups could be formed after students have completed their personal ‘pizza’ piece. You then form groups deliberately putting students with opposing ideas into the same group, thereby creating the need for seeking consensus.

Alternatively, the teacher could form groups of like-minded students, so that when it comes to forming the composite class view there are polarised group views that need to be accommodated.

This illustrates an important and occasionally neglected aspect of group work – minor shifts in how you handle the activity can impact significantly on the teamworking behaviours that it activates.

Consider how you can deliberately adapt team-working strategies that you currently use in order to build in disagreement and the need for resolving it through seeking consensus.

Teacher talk to support the task

What do we think we have to do?
What’s this task really about?
What are we trying to end up with?
What will that look like?
What will the end product be ?
Does/will that answer the question / solve the problem?

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Building on others’ ideas

Prepare the way for students to build on the ideas of others when working in a group by making ‘ABC’ a routine that you use during whole-class teaching. Once a student has answered a question, ask another student to Add to it, to Build on it, to Challenge it, to Defend it, to Elaborate on it, or to Find a Flaw in it. As easy as ABC! This improves students’ listening skills at the same time!

Teacher talk

Can you add your ideas to this?
What can you add to what xxx said?
Who can build on xxx’s idea?
Can we make that a bigger idea/expand it?
Do we need to think smaller?

Offer tools to help guide groups in tackling problem based learning

Offer students choices in what to learn and increase their opportunities to contribute, co-design or co-deliver and pursue their own necessary improvements in learning behaviours in appropriate areas of the curriculum.

TASC will guide groups through the stages of thinking and problem-solving in an organised way, starting at one o’clock working clockwise. If you have a complex or wide-ranging problem you want to tackle, it offers a means of organising and synthesising a range of ideas.

Much like PEE (Point / Evidence / Explain) that helps students to structure a paragraph, the TASC wheel gives a simple way of helping groups to sequence what they do to undertake an investigation.

Try out 5

Celebrate improvements in collaboration.

Learn from the data…how to build collaboration

Of course it’s a good idea to celebrate growth in collaboration but what do you know about what is getting better or what else needs to be improved. It’s a good idea to collect data both before you begin concentrating on collaboration because using the same data collection method later provides fascinating information and what to celebrate. The impact of improvements in collaboration.

Read how teachers in Cumbria explored Collaboration with their students.

See toggle box below.

Understanding what you are celebrating in growing collaboration ⬇️

How children were empowered to take control of their learning, by investigating effective strategies for collaboration.

Three primary schools in Cumbria determined to enable their students to improve their collaborative behaviours. The children were taken out to build dens in the woods. Their teachers observed the collaborative den building carefully using the collaboration wheel shown here.

Download as a pdf – Emerging collaboration Download as a pdf – Developing collaboration Download as a pdf – Secure collaboration

Teachers’ were surprised when their 7–10 year olds not only failed in their den-building task, but became ill-tempered and sullen. As the teachers observed and recorded students’ behaviours they were ‘quite shocked’. The problem — the students just didn’t know how to work together effectively: their collaborative skills were near rock-bottom.

The teachers charted how much the students used behaviours such as taking turns, making a plan, sharing ideas, helping others, listening actively, identifying what the task calls for, setting realistic goals, and so on. The data revealed that students were poor at listening actively, sharing and building ideas, and setting realistic goals. Hence the dens were, as the students themselves said, ‘rubbish’.

Over the next six weeks, the schools worked with their students on collaborative skills. Classes generated lists of good collaborative skills and talked about how those help to get things done. They made wall displays, took part in collaborative learning challenges with minimal adult intervention, and the rich and sophisticated language of teamwork became everyday classroom talk.

Learning challenges involved things like building bridges with newspaper and cardboard and designing and baking cakes.

Over the course of those six weeks, working through at least two significant collaborative learning challenges a week, the students were found to be taking more responsibility for their own learning. They became very aware of the importance of planning and of listening to others. As time went on they relied less on adult guidance and were far more prepared to persist when things went wrong.

Those students who built bridges from ‘junk’ material, for example, made huge improvements between their first and second attempts. They were proud of their success and, importantly, were able to make the connection between the behaviours they had used and their success. As Alfie said, ‘Because we planned this time round, the bridge stands.’

This learning power research has had many other positive and influential effects on teaching and learning.

This six-week enquiry has had a big influence, going well beyond collaborative skills:

Yes, the children’s collaborative skills shot up, and have been sustained;
They now initiate their own collaborative learning tasks;
The challenges enabled them to show their creativity and take risks;
They now guide their own learning and take charge of their own progress;
They are highly motivated even to the point of asking for collaborative challenges instead of ‘extra play’ as a treat for best class attendance!

It’s when children recognise that their behaviour has a real impact on their success that building learning power really takes off.

How do you think your students would take to a collaborative exercise? How could you measure your students’ collaborative skills?

Find out 3

Helping your students to Find Out about their own collaborative behaviours

At the end of a group task, the whole group reflects together on how they functioned as a group and agree a development target. Choose the review tool that best fits your students’ current collaborative behaviours:

Learning together. Meeting 6

Unit 6 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students use of collaboration (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting 6 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of collaboration displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as collaborators;

what did you find out about your students as collaborators? (Find out 1)
are students improving as collaborators with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture Find out 2?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features
- which 3 actions are our strongest
what surprised or baffled you
are there significant differences between year groups

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as collaborators and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop effective collaboration.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening collaboration in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful.
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing using Find out 3, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

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Essential Read about

Introducing

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Essential Read about..xxxxxxxxxxxx. ⬇️

Essential Read about

Why all this matters

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Find out 1

Look at yourself as a learner.

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Find out 2

Look at

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Extended Read about

The

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Try out 1

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Try out 2

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Try out 3

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Try out 4

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Try out 5

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Find out 3

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Learning together meeting 6

Unit 6 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students use of collaboration (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that could or should be implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting 6 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;
plan further personal developments in classroom practice.

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your reaction to The Teachers’ Palette classroom culture model and discoveries about yourself and your students as learners

what were our first impressions of Unit 2?
where did we each estimate the school was in terms of the Culture Tool 1/Find out 1?
what did you find out about yourself as a teacher (Find out 1)
what did we each learn from using Culture Tool 2.
- which 3 of the teacher actions do we tend not to use
- which 3 teacher actions are our strongest
what surprised or baffled you
are there significant differences between year groups

Outcome. A clearer understanding of the thinking behind the idea of a learning culture, the teacher’s role in creating it and where we are as a school.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on developing a learning culture

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
The impact of these actions. See Find out 3.
Which seemed the most valid or successful.
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Outcome. A clear picture of our interest in and enthusiasm for amending classroom cultures to support learning to learn. A feel for which are proving to be most effective and why. Will any of these culture shifts call for action on current school wide policies? i.e. how we all treat mistakes, being stuck and praise.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing using Find out 3, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s valuable to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

The School Development Guide PDF

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

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The 4 learning behaviour sessions

The 4 culture sessions

First 2 sessions

Building Powerful Learners Unit 5

Unit 5. Building the habit of questioning.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to:

explore how learners might become not just better learners but effective lifelong learners;
engage your learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become skilled in developing your students’ learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

Unit 5 explores the “how” of building questioning.

What are the key aspects of questioning? (Essential Read about 1)
How confident are my students now as questioners? (Find out 1)
How could I embed building questioning into my teaching? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches may be useful in making a start on this? (Try out 1 to 5)
Find out more about Visible Thinking Routines. (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so is your fifth step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking Questioning

Understanding and making use of a widening range of questions to satisfy our need to know what or why or how etc. is an important life skill which is arguably more important today than ever before. In negotiating an increasingly complex world our tendency to question needs to be further sharpened and enhanced.

A well formed Questioning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Want to find things out;
Actually go about finding things out;
Have the strategies for searching for answers;
Make sure answers are valid;
Be brave about asking difficult questions;
Have strategies for coping with getting under the surface of things;
Learn to be comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty;
Not be afraid of the ‘don’t know’ state of mind.

Being willing and able to ask appropriate, searching questions is as much about how we deal with this emotionally as it is about having the practical strategies to do it. Being able to question, seek a range of possibilities and be sufficiently open minded to actively consider alternatives is a critical aspect of becoming a resourceful learner.

Essential Read about 1. Introducing Questioning ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as questioning

Questioning: asking questions of yourself and others; being curious and playful with ideas; delving beneath the surface of things.

Questioning means both the ability to ask good questions and the disposition to do so (which is sometimes called curiosity). Good learners like questions, and are not afraid of the ‘don’t know’ state of mind out of which questions emerge.

Good learners like to wonder about things. For them, it often really is a wonder-ful world. The phrases ‘How come?’ and ‘What if?’ are never far from their lips.

They value getting below the surface of things, and are less likely to accept uncritically what they are told. They like to come to their own conclusions. They are more willing to reveal their questions and uncertainties if they think it will help them learn.

Questioning can be as much non-verbal as it is verbal. Playing around with materials or ideas just to see what happens is a powerful way of asking questions. It is what artists and inventors spend a lot of their time doing. The inclination to ask questions flourishes when you are around people who are also asking questions, and who encourage and appreciate your questions too.

So effective questioners are motivated and not afraid to ask questions about the past, the present and to explore the future. They have an extensive range of question types and techniques at their disposal, which they use with discernment and sensitivity to occasion. A well-formed questioning habit involves being ready, willing and able to:

not take things at face value;
be less likely to accept answers uncritically;
ask questions of oneself as well as of others;
get under the surface of things;
be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity;
not be afraid of the ‘don’t know’ state of mind;
be playful, yet systematic and analytical;
be socially aware of the impact that questions may have on others;
challenge others’ thinking;
understand and use different types of question for different purposes;
recognise that revealing their own uncertainties helps them learn.

Try outs 1-5 offer a range of things that you can do to build and strengthen your students’ questioning skills.

Re-find out 1

Focus on the questioners in your class.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick look back to what you discovered in Unit 3 about Questioners in your class.

Through the lens of the Questioning progression chart you should have a fairly clear view of the questioning behaviours that your students do, and do not, currently exhibit.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (ie the majority may be in the purple or blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (ie they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made more progress than the majority.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing questioning; a trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Which phase have most of your students reached now?

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Questioning?

Here is a selection of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage questioning.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate questioning
ideas for constructing lessons to build questioning
ways of celebrating questioning

Ask yourself which of the features of the questioning-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Questioning.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility for questioning towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for questioning (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop questioning (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how questioning can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Try out 2

Extend students’ responsibilities in order to build questioning

Build in Wait Time

Let students think it through for themselves

What we should do. Research suggests that the optimum time that teachers should wait after asking a closed question relating to factual recall is approximately 3 seconds. For an open question that requires a more elaborate response students should be given around 10 seconds of thinking time.

What we actually do Research into the actual wait time that teachers give students before accepting an answer is closer, on average, to 1 second, irrespective of whether the question is closed or open.

In other words, students aren’t being given sufficient time to think things through for themselves. Q&A sessions become an exchange between teachers and the intellectually fleet of foot and/or impulsive students. Students who want or need time to think it over and come up with their considered answer are denied the opportunity to do so.

A tough question: How long do you routinely give your students to think through an answer before they give it? Are you one of the 3 second / 10 second teachers, or have you lapsed into pursuing pace at the expense of giving time for thought? Most teachers won’t know the answer, but it might be worth finding out!

A challenge – ask a close colleague to monitor the time that you tend to give students to respond to your questions. If you find that you are in the 3 second / 10 second group – great! But if you find that you are giving too little time for student responses, you might consider how changing your practice might improve your students’ responses.

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

Internet Search.

Establish a topic which the students could research on the Internet. Ask them to use search engines to find out what they need to know, without being precise about what the outcome should be. Find out which key words have been most successful in helping them to access useful information.

In pairs, use these key words to construct good questions. Try typing those questions into a search engine to see if they produce different or more focused information.

Discuss the different ways that questions might need to be structured in different contexts and for different audiences.

Build a three-level questioning habit

‘ReQuest’ is a structured process for deepening questions. For example, start with an image or a painting such as The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck:

On-the-line questions: ask questions about the picture for which the answers can be seen just by looking closely at the picture: ‘How many candles are there?’ ‘What kind of room is it?’ ‘What is on the wall behind the people?’

Between-the-lines questions: questions whose answers can be inferred by looking at the picture: E.g. ‘What is the relationship between the two people?’ ‘How long ago was the picture painted?’ ‘What time of day is it?’

Beyond-the-line questions: questions whose answers need to be elicited by making interpretive links from the picture: E.g. ‘What did the artist think of his subjects?’ Is the number of candles significant?’ How does perspective work in the painting?’

Try out 3

Build questioning with a learning language

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge curiosity. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

10 ideas to ensure your students do the thinking for themselves

That’s an interesting/insightful question.
What questions did we ask last time?
You might find it useful to try and predict what you think will happen.
Could you speculate about the possible results and solutions.
What sort of questions might help you get a bit further with this problem?
Do you believe that? Might there be more to it?
A closed question might focus your search.
How can you get to the bottom of this?
A hypothetical question might help to stimulate your ideas.
How can you phrase that so that you don’t upset people?

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Talk about what happens when you ask questions?

Encourage students to become intrigued:

What do we mean when we say . . . Let’s ask a question?
What are questions for?
Asking questions helps us to find out things.
You can ask questions in your head. It doesn’t need to be out loud.
If you never ask, you never find out!
What would you like to find out about….?
That’s a great/useful question …
Can you think of any more questions?

Managing class questioning

How many of us elicit an answer from a student, polish it slightly, put the emphasis in the correct place, and then paraphrase what the student originally said back to the class? In such ways teachers unintentionally create the conditions for inattentive or selective listening.

The main problem appears to be that teacher/student exchanges often resemble a game of table tennis – ping, pong, ping pong – all student responses going back to the teacher before another question is directed to another student. It would be better if class discussions resembled a game of basketball or volleyball, where the discussion bounces around the classroom and the teacher’s role becomes one of redirecting student answers to other students.

Achieving this means saying things like:

Do you agree (or disagree) with that?
Can you add anything to what xxx said?
Who can build on that?
Are you convinced by what xxx said?
Can you explain what xxxx meant?
Can you find a flaw in that argument?
Can you defend that view?
How would you challenge that viewpoint?
Could you summarise what xxx just said?
Do you think (s)he is right/wrong?

No repetition, just passing one answer on to another student for comment. And because the teacher does not repeat the original answer, students have to listen to their peers’ answers be prepared to involve themselves in the discussion.

Try out 4

Build questioning into lesson design

The Question Formulation Technique

This intriguing technique has been developed by the Right Question Institute over several years. The technique puts students into the driving seat of asking their own questions. It helps students to learn how to produce their own questions, improve them, and think how best to use them. During this process students practice divergent and convergent thinking and metacognition (thinking about thinking). When students know how to ask their own questions, they take greater ownership of their learning, have deeper comprehension and make new connections and discoveries on their own.

The teacher begins the technique with a sharp enough hook to start the students’ questioning process. In brief the process goes like this;

Stage 1: Produce Your Own Questions
Stage 2: Improve Your Questions
Stage 3: Prioritise Your Questions

For yourself this activity can be used for two purposes.

to introduce your students to the idea of questioning being a useful learning behaviour.
to inform yourself of your students’ current questioning skills.

Present students, in groups of 4/5, with an image in the centre of a large piece of paper. Invite them to ask as many questions as they can about the image, following the rules below. [The image, or artefact, could relate to an existing or upcoming project, or as a stimulus for creative writing, or any part of your curriculum – anything that will intrigue and generate lots of questions.]

Stage 1: Produce your Questions

Four essential rules for producing your own questions:

Ask as many questions as you can;
Do not stop to discuss, judge or answer the questions;
Write down every question exactly as it is stated;
Change any statement into a question.

Stage 2: Improve Your Questions

Categorise the questions as closed – or open-ended:

Working together, categorise your questions as either closed (C) or open (O);
Agree if any of your open questions would be better if they were closed, and if any of your closed questions would be better if they were open;
Change any of the questions from one type to another in light of the above discussion.

A reminder. A closed question is one that can only be answered with a limited set of options. Yes/No or single word answers. Open questions are questions that encourage detailed answers and cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no”.

Stage 3: Prioritise the Questions

Choose your three most important questions:
Why did you choose these three as the most important?

Ask students to prioritise their questions for the job in hand [project or creative writing]. Prioritisation will differ according to the lesson plan in mind.

This causes students to compare their questions and assess which will be most helpful. They also begin to sequence the questions; which would need to be answered first before others could be even considered. Looking at the sequential nature of the questions – e.g. for a story – that offers a possible storyline.

By this point, having observed your students, you will have a clear idea of which questioning skills are alive and well or are not secure.

Reflection Point: How can I design lessons and activities that will enable my students to ask questions in a wider range of contexts?

Learn more about this technique.

The book Make Just One Change: Teach students to ask their own questions, is a very readable comprehensive discussion and analysis of how to use the Question Formulation Technique.

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Developing the art of asking questions

See Think Wonder

A visible thinking routine that encourages students to;

notice attentively and make careful observations (See)
make thoughtful interpretations
reflect on what they are noticing
make links to what they already know
distil the important bits (Think)
ask a question about what has been noticed (Wonder).

It helps stimulate curiosity and sets the stage for inquiry.
Use this routine when you want students to think carefully about why something looks the way it does or is the way it is.

Use at the beginning of a new unit to motivate student interest or try it with an object that connects to a topic during the unit of study.

Consider using it with an interesting object near the end of a unit to encourage students to further apply their new knowledge and ideas.
The routine works best when a student responds by using the three stems together at the same time, i.e., “I see…, I think…, I wonder …. “ However, you may find that students begin by using one stem at a time, and that you need to scaffold each response with a follow up question for the next stem.

Variations on See Think Wonder:

Read, Think, Wonder;
Hear, Think, Wonder;
Or introduce emotions by using See, Feel, Think, Wonder.

Question dice

Shaping the learning around learners’ questions.

Create (or buy) two dice. One has What/Where/Who/Which/Why/How. The other has Is/Was/Could/Would/Should/Might.

Towards the end of a lesson/module, generate question stems comprising a question word and a verb by rolling the 2 dice. Ask students to create a question about the topic in hand using the question stem as a starting point.

Which xxxx could….?
Why was…….?
What might……?

“Is” will generate answers about the present, “Was/Did” about the past, “Can/Could” requires students to explore possibilities, “Would” requires students to consider what is probable, “Will/Should” requires students to predict/hypothesise, “Might” requires students to imagine/speculate.

Use the learners’ questions to frame the next lesson.

Try out 5

Build questioning by celebrating it.

Have students work out a hierarchy for their learning goals for classroom display

Invite students to categorise the following statements into 3 groups for a classroom display

basic questioning skills
developing questioning skills
higher level questioning skills

I ask closed questions to gather factual information.
I can tell the difference between open and closed questions.
I ask questions when I want to find something out.
I am good at finding information on the internet.
I ask open questions to encourage others to tell me what they think.
I think about how I am asking questions to make sure I don’t upset anyone.
I am not afraid of asking questions in class.
I ask ‘what if . . . ‘ type questions to explore possibilities
I ask myself if the answer is true and if it tells me what I need to know.
I can use a book index to help me find information.

Could you change each of these statements into an If / Then target, which can then become the basis of the Learning Goals display?

NB. You first met If/Then targets in Unit 2 Try out 1. Take a look back to find out/remind you of how.

Two more Celebrating learning ideas ⬇️

Make questioning a subject

Question walls…exploring question types

At the start of a topic call for and display questions which students think might be answered during a topic. Go on to:

Discuss what sort of questions these are — open, closed, speculative, divergent, clarifying, essential, subsidiary;
how they might lead to different types of information/reactions/strategies to gather information;
Draw up and display lists of generic questions to use whenever students undertake certain types of task, e.g. scientific investigation;
Refer to and extend these question groups regularly.

Create, with students, a set of questions they might ask when they are stuck. These could include; What did I do last time when . . . . ? What do I already know about this? What should I do first? And next? I am finding this tricky because . . . . Who might know? Where can I look?

Monitoring questioning in action

A learning mat

Use a learning mat for questioning to ensure students monitor their own use of questioning.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Students refer to them during lessons, using them as prompts about the finer aspects of a learning habit that is being stretched.

Download as pdf

Find out 3

Introducing Visible Thinking Routines

You met the Visible Thinking Routine ‘See Think Wonder’ in Try Out 4. You can find out more about Visible Thinking Routines here, further examples of which you will find as you move through this programme.

Visible Thinking Routines are simple routines that apply across a wide range of subjects and contexts, and which require students to think or behave in a variety of different ways. When you use them regularly they become woven into the fabric of the classroom culture and progressively hard-wired into the thinking practices of your students. They become part of the learning culture.

More on Visible Thinking Routines ⬇️

To be effective these routines need to;

direct, guide, support, encourage thinking
be short, memorable with few steps
be used over and over again
be useful in a variety of contexts
facilitate connections, generate ideas, use knowledge

Visible Thinking Routines (VTRs) have been developed at Harvard University. These are another excellent way of bringing to the fore the mental muscles that students are using in class. Making Thinking Visible, a book by Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church and Karin Morrison, describes a wide range of VTRs, and how to make use of them, in considerable detail.

In the thinking routine ‘See–Think–Wonder’, students are asked to pay careful attention to a demonstration, a video clip, or an image, and then to ‘do an STW with your learning partner’. Very quickly they learn that this means: share with your partner the details that you saw, the thoughts that those impressions suggested to you, and the further questions that these trains of thought made you wonder about.

Another very simple routine that you may already use is ‘Think–Pair–Share’ which invites students first to spend a few seconds marshalling their own thoughts on a question they have been asked, then to discuss the issue with a partner, and finally to be ready to report back the fruits of that discussion to the whole class. We explore this in the next unit, unit 6.

A third routine, which prompts students to reflect on how their thinking has changed is ‘I used to think . . . but Now I think . . ‘ is introduced in Unit 7.

There is a wealth of information on the Visible Thinking website should you wish to explore further.

Remember these routines are not simply ways of delivering an action packed lesson but serious ways of training students to think.

Visit the VTR website

Learning together. Meeting 5

Unit 5 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students use of questioning (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting 5 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of questioning displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as questioners;

what did you find out about your students as questioners (Find out 1)
are students improving as questioners with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture Find out 2?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features
- which 3 actions are our strongest
what surprised or baffled you
are there significant differences between year groups

Outcome. A clearer understanding of students as questioners and the extent to which our classroom cultures are set up to support and develop questioning.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening curiosity in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful.
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Building Powerful Learners Unit 4

Unit 4. Building the habit of persevering.

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This 8 part online programme aims to enable teachers to:

explore how learners might become not just better at learning but effective lifelong learners;
engage learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three ways of helping you to understand, play with and become skilled in developing your students’ learning power:

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

Unit 4 explores the “how” of building perseverance.

What are the key aspects of perseverance? (Essential Read about 1)
How perseverant are my students now? (Find out 1)
How might I embed perseverance into my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
What sort of approaches are useful for making a start? (Try out 1 – 5)
How are my approaches working? Are they strengthening perseverance? (Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so is your fourth step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

Essential Read about 1

Unpacking perseverance

A well formed Persevering habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

Keep going in the face of difficulties;
Enjoy working at the edge of our comfort zone;
Channel the energy of frustration productively, marshalling positive emotions to succeed;
Maintain optimism when the going gets tough;
Understand that learning is often a slow and uncertain process that requires grit, risk-taking and different ways of working;
Relish working towards ever more challenging goals without fear of ‘failure’;
Give it ‘one more go’, or come back to it later for another attempt.
Recognise that being stuck is when learning really begins, not when it finishes;

Effective perseverers have a range of strategies that they use independently when stuck. They exhibit emotional toughness in the face of difficulty and are able to relish learning that is challenging. They form and pursue their own goals with tenacity, and have a range of strategies for maintaining focus if or when distracted.

Essential Read about 1. Introducing Perseverance ⬇️

The learning behaviour known as perseverance

Keeping going; edge of our comfort zone; maintaining optimism; taking risks; one more go.

Perseverance is often undermined by two common and erroneous beliefs. The first is that learning ought to be easy. If learners think that they will either understand something straight away, or not at all, then there is simply no point in persisting and struggling. The second is that bright people pick things up easily, so if you have to try it means you’re not very bright. Clearly the idea that effort must be symptomatic of a lack of ability makes persevering an unpleasant experience. Good learners develop perseverance when their parents and teachers avoid conveying these messages, even unwittingly.

Attention can be broken when learning gets blocked, but good learners have learnt the knack of maintaining or quickly re-establishing their concentration when they get stuck or frustrated. The quality of stickability or perseverance is essential if you are going to get to the bottom of something that doesn’t turn out as quickly or easily as you had thought, or hoped.

If you get upset and start to think there is something wrong with you as soon as you get stuck, you are not going to be able to maintain engagement.

Instead all your energy will go into trying to avoid the uncomfortable feeling, and this may mean drifting off into a daydream, creating a distraction, or blaming somebody else. A great deal of classroom misbehaviour starts this way. If students were better equipped to cope emotionally with the inevitable difficulty of learning, they would mess about less.

Try outs 1-5 offer a range of things that you can do to strengthen and build your students’ stickability.

Re-find out 1

Focus on the Perseverers in your class.

Just to get you tuned in – have a quick look back to what you discovered in Unit 3 about Perseverers in your class.

You should have a fairly clear idea of the perseverant behaviours your students do, and do not, currently exhibit.

The majority of students may well display a similar set of positive behaviours (i.e. the majority may be in the purple/blue phase)
You will also be conscious of some students who still lack positive behaviours (i.e. they are still firmly rooted in the grey/lacks phase of the progression chart)
But some students will appear to have made more progress than the majority.

A word of warning.

What to look for.

Growing perseverance

A trajectory of developing behaviours, skills, attitudes and self-talk

Find out 2

How much does my classroom culture encourage Perseverance?

Here is a selection of features that you might begin to use in order to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage the behaviour of perseverance.

Download and print a copy.

Reflect on your current classroom culture.

It’s worth noting that the list is made up of the four action types you first met in the Teachers’ Palette (Unit 2);

ways of giving students more responsibility for their learning
the sort of language you might use to stimulate perseverance
ideas for constructing lessons to build perseverance
ways of celebrating perseverance

Ask yourself which of the features of the perseverance-friendly classroom are:

already a consistent feature of your classroom?
an occasional feature of your classroom?
rarely evident in your classroom?

Which of these features are you interested in developing further?

Try out 1

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to perseverance.

Then cast your eye over the other 3 boxes. Which ideas appeal to you? Which do you think will have the greatest impact on your students?

Now seek out teaching ideas below in Try Outs 2/3/4/5 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving more responsibility towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for perseverance (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate perseverance (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how perseverance can be rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

https://www.learningpit.org/

Try out 2

Build perseverance by extending students’ responsibilities.

From ‘I’m stuck ‘ To ‘I’m stuck because …‘

When a student says ‘I’m stuck’, resist the temptation to ask ‘what are you stuck on?’ – you know only too well they will probably reply ‘everything’. Better to explore ‘why’ they are stuck . . . .

Encourage students to identify the cause of their stuckness. Move students from saying “I’m stuck” to ” I’m stuck because…” Naming the problem will often suggest a reasonable next step.

It’s also useful to insist that students can’t call themselves ‘stuck’ unless they have tried to apply at least 1 solution.

Two more ideas for extending students' responsibilities. ⬇️

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 – for example by;
- trying different strategies to solve a problem;
- aiming to achieve challenging goals;
- using different un-sticking techniques when something is tricky;
- paying attention to whoever is speaking.

Students need to be aware of a connection between effort and improvement; that the sort of effort being used is causing their improvement. This is why it is important to give effort meaning. Meaning often underpins motivation which in turn drives behaviour.

Re-frame challenge: explore learning how to overcome a struggle

The Learning Pit: from struggle to success

Use the ‘Learning Pit’ as a means of opening up a conversation around the feelings involved when struggling with learning, and the journey to overcoming the struggle. It is essential that students know:

that the ‘pit’ is only one staging post on the learning journey
they can get out by using ‘stuck strategies’ and tools

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.

The ability to cope with and overcome difficulty and challenge is a key aspect to becoming a successful learner.

James Nottingham introduced the idea of the Learning Pit as a way to explain that struggling is part of learning and that if we are to understand something we need to struggle with it first. Students move from unconsciously incompetent (an emotionally ‘safe’ area before learning), to consciously incompetent (the emotionally tricky “pit”), to consciously competent (the far side, after the learning has happened).

Find out more by visiting:

Try out 3

Build perseverance using a learning language

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

10 ideas to encourage your students to do the thinking for themselves

What happened when you got stuck before? What did you do to work it out?
Great! You have come through the confused / stuck feeling. What helped you?
It’s when you get stuck that you really start to learn.
How can you avoid that distraction?
Is this goal worth going for?
What do you know? What do you need to know? How might you bridge the gap?
You can’t do it – yet.
Can you explain why you are stuck?
That’s an interesting mistake.
Give it a go and see what happens.

Two more teacher talk ideas ⬇️

Talk about what happens when you get stuck?

Try this type of mindset shifting language:

- Being stuck is a good place to be.
- Getting stuck means your brain is working hard on something new.
- When you learn new things your brain gets bigger.
- If you don’t get stuck you’re probably not learning anything new
- Getting stuck is good for you.
- It’s not too hard, it’s just a bit tricky right now.
- When you say you can’t do this, just add ‘yet’
- Being stuck means you are about to discover something new

Develop self-reliance

Support to continue: questions not answers

If students freeze when they are stuck, offer supportive questions not answers. A basic support to continue is ‘What do you do next?’, and when this has been answered or done ask the question again, and then again

Support to continue’ prompts are seen as helpful by students. You are encouraging them to take over the job themselves and reminding them that uncertainty shouldn’t lead to paralysis. It’s about weaning students off depending on you and activating their positive self-talk about learning.

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

What have you already tried? What else might work?
What did you do when you got stuck before?
I wonder what you did to move on?
How about taking a short break and coming back to it later.
Have you looked at the stuck prompts ?
Who seems to be managing this ok ? What are they doing
I can see that [this task] is important to you. Well done for keeping going.

Try out 4

Build perseverance into your lesson design

Look first at learning goals (sometimes called objectives)

Put the ‘how’ before the ‘what’.

Goals with perseverance in mind

In one sense every lesson should engage students’ perseverance and you’re likely to support this constantly through the culture of your classroom. But, every now and again it might be wise to set lessons off with goals that start by picking out the persevering skills students will need to use to complete the task effectively. By doing so you are giving students some indication of the sort of ‘effort’ you want them to make. For example;

select a harder level of challenge than you would normally go for and work out what the success criteria could be.
identify three areas when you got stuck and work out a possible solution for yourself.
assess your own story/written piece using the checklist you made last week
work out your own checklist which will help to ensure you are successful with this task….
look over your learning this term and estimate what has made you become more successful/bold/confident/accurate.

The big addition to lesson plan thinking . .

In putting a lesson together the 3 key questions to ask yourself are;

what is to be learned? (goals)
by using which learning behaviour(s)?
by doing what sort of activity?

Two more lesson design ideas ⬇️

Plan to get students stuck

Start some lessons with something like:

In this lesson I expect you to get stuck 3 times.
If you get half-way through and haven’t become stuck move to more challenging activities.
When you get stuck make a note and try to explain to yourself why you are stuck 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.

The explicit message is that students need to expect to be stuck during the lesson. The implicit message is that being stuck is a good thing – something you want to see. Using this technique regularly means students come to accept being stuck as a natural part of learning. It begins to build their curiosity about the why and possible patterns to stuckness.

Build in trial and improvement

Coupling content and process: 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.

Try out 5

Build perseverance by celebrating it.

Rethink achievement in learning

Invite your students to brainstorm their own definitions of achievement 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 building the idea that achievement comes in many ways. Ensure your praise matches these statements.

Two more Celebrating learning ideas ⬇️

Help your students to change their thinking about failure

Turn the lens around, make it clear that we FAIL before we succeed, shift the thinking . . .

From ‘Challenge’ to ‘Interesting challenge’
From ‘Mistake’ to ‘Learning opportunity’.
From ‘It’s hard’ to ‘It’s tricky’.
From ‘Too hard’ to ‘Tricky learning builds my brain.’
From ‘I can’t do it’ to ‘I can’t do it yet’.
From ‘I’m stuck’ to ‘I’m about to learn’.
From ‘I can’t . . . ‘ to ‘How can I . . . .?’
From ‘I’m good at this’ to ‘This is too easy for me’.
From ‘I don’t know how to’ to ‘I’m learning how to’.

This is about building a positive mind set and self-belief, challenging that little voice that says ‘I can’t . . . ‘ Create a display around these ideas to initiate a learning conversation to shift the pessimistic, ‘glass half empty’ outlook towards an optimistic, ‘already half full’ attitude.

Re-enforce the values of learning

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

Do displays support your desire to build a learning-friendly culture?

Beware displays

that are jaded,
too high on walls,
rarely referred to,
laminated to lengthen their life,
bought in from Twinkle and don’t reflect the underlying culture,
over reliant on quotes from the great and the good of learning.

Where quotes are used in displays ensure the sentiments behind the words are understood and the classroom organisation allows the implications to happen!

Find out 3

Create opportunities for students to Find Out about how / when they are persevering

For KS2:

Encourage students to monitor and reflect on their own persevering habits. Copy and laminate the chart alongside, refer to it in lessons and invite them to consider how often they display these characteristics.

As a result of their self-evaluations, challenge / support students to create a target for their own development as a perseverer by identifying something that they do sometimes that they would like to do more frequently.

These perseverance behaviours tend to become more subtle and challenging as you move down this list, so it is better to set targets relating to doing more of what they currently ‘sometimes’ do, rather than trying to jump towards the bottom of the list and tackle a behaviour they currently ‘never’ employ.

For KS1:

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, students use them to let you know whether you are meeting their learning needs or if they could do with more extension or more 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.

For the teacher, it provides valuable, instant feedback. ‘Challenging Learning’ is, of course, the sweet spot – tricky but doable, the place where perseverance is both necessary and likely to pay off. Intervene here only if it becomes too difficult. For the child who is on ‘easy learning’, prepare to inject more challenge; for the child on ‘too hard’, explore whether that is really the case or whether a nudge in the right direction might bring it back to ‘challenging learning’.

Learning together. Meeting 4

Unit 4 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
Discuss what you have found out about students use of perseverance (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting 4 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

discuss levels of perseverance displayed across the school
share and learn from what we have each tried in our classrooms;
feel confident about taking forward ideas from online materials into our practice;
identify actions that would be more useful if everyone applied them in their practice;

Outcome. To have decided what the meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about learning culture (15 mins)

Explore together your discoveries about your students as perseverers;

what did you find out about your students as perseverers (Find out 1)
are students improving as perseverers with age? Moving from grey to purple to blue etc?
where did we each estimate our classroom to be in terms of its culture Find out 2?
what did we each learn from Find out 2.
- which 3 are the weakest features
- which 3 actions are our strongest
what surprised or baffled you
are there significant differences between year groups

Outcome. A clearer understanding of current learning culture features across the school. Inklings about how the learning culture could be strengthened across the school.

Item 3. Explore action using the initial Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action you each took in making a start on strengthening perseverance in classroom practice.

Which of the suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
Which seemed the most valid or successful.
How the Try Outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these to ensure we can all learn from and adapt.

Outcome. A clear picture of our interest in and enthusiasm for amending classroom cultures to support learning to learn. A feel for which ideas are proving to be most effective and why. Recognition that these culture shifts will call for action on current school wide policies? i.e. how we all treat mistakes, being stuck and praise etc.

Item 4. Learning from practice (10 mins)

In relation to all the shades of practice you have been trying out, sharing, mulling over and observing using Find out 3, think about them now in two ways;

1. personally and 2. school wide.

Which ideas/practice stand out as:

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

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to note ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams;
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.

Download all 4 growth trajectories

Item 5. Evaluate team session. (5 mins)

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

Building Powerful Learners Unit 3

Unit 3. The big picture of progression in learning

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to:

explore how learners might become not just better learners but effective lifelong learners;
engage your learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become skilled in developing your students’ learning power.

1 Understand by using Read abouts…of which there are two types

Essential Read …essential must read text.
Extended Read …interesting, good to know, absorb when you can.

2 Analyse by using Find outs…tools to help you discover and analyse essential information

3 Experiment with Try outs…practical activities for you to try, check and perfect in your classroom

Unit 3 explores what getting better at learning looks like.

What are the key aspects of progression in learning behaviours? (Essential Read about 1)
How do the progression charts work? (Find out 1)
How do groups of my students differ in that progression? (Find out 2)
Where are my students strengths and weaknesses in four key behaviours? (Try out 1 to 4)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month or so is your third step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

The idea of growth in learning behaviours

Essential Read about 1

A framework for the growth of learning behaviours

Building the powers to learn

The whole point of building better learners is to do just that, to build the learning behaviours, not just name them. The diagram alongside – Learning: Poles Apart – offers an outline view of this journey showing the reluctant learner on the left and the learning powered learner on the right. It’s a long but exciting journey from what can sometimes be negative behaviours on the left to rich, skilled and positive attitudes on the right. This journey covers students’ emotional learning habits, their cognitive/thinking habits, their social learning habits and their ability to manage the learning process itself.

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

the frequency/how often the behaviour is being used (How much)
the range/scope of contexts in which it is used (Wheres)
the skilfulness with which it is employed. (How well)

Our understanding of what the journey might look like in practice has emerged and taken shape over the past seven years. The stages of the journey are ‘borrowed’ from Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain of learning. It is this scaling of the learning dispositions that will help you make sense of the journey as you track, and influence, your learners’ progress over time.

Poles apart for four key learning behaviours

Essential Read about 1..The phases of learning behaviour growth.⬇️

Download as pdf

We’ve borrowed ideas from Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Objectives of the Affective Domain to generate a very condensed version of the five main phases of growth, namely;

Receiving. (purple)…which involves giving attention to something; becoming aware, not avoiding or rejecting it; being alert to something.

Responding. (blue)…which involves going beyond merely attending to actively attending; complying; taking more responsibility for and enjoyment in initiating action.

Valuing. (green)…which involves accepting the worth of something; preferring something; being committed to the value of something.

Organisation. (yellow)…which involves adding to, formulating and organising their values into how they live their life.

Embodies. (Characterisation in the original)(orange)…which involves behaving consistently in accordance with their values, living what they stand for.

We’ve added a negative phase labelled Lacks (grey) where learners are unaware, show no interest in or avoid or reject the learning behaviour.

We have simplified and applied these ideas to the affective development (emotional) of learning behaviours.

Take a look at the phases shown above, but start at the bottom and work up

We urge you to see this progression as long term.
Some phases will take years for people to work through.
Some will never be worked through or achieved.
None of the phases are inevitable.
There is a lifetime of development captured here.

Nevertheless your role as a teacher or parent should surely be to encourage and enable this journey.

It’s worth getting your head around the outline of these phases of development. They apply to any of the learning behaviours as we show in the toggle boxes as you scroll down.

Essential Read about 2

Growth in the big four learning behaviours

It’s useful to remember the essentials of building powerful learners include:

recognising that learning is a learnable craft; you can get better at it.
learning how to learn involves attitudes, values, interests and beliefs.
developing better learners is done with and by learners rather than to learners;
it involves cultivating dispositions and values rather than training skills;
it is not an inevitable by-product of ‘traditional effective teaching’;
it is about making students ready and willing as well as able to learn.

So now ask yourself…

What sort of learning characteristics do my learners have?
What sort of learning characteristics do my more successful learners have?
Which characteristics or behaviours do my struggling learners have?
Which learning behaviour contributes to the success of most of my learners?
Which learning behaviour is used less than any of the others?
How do the answers to these, and similar questions, apply to my teaching and the curriculum?

Learning development stages behaviour by behaviour

Find out 1

How do the charts work?

You as a learner

To get a better sense of the growth of these learning behaviours use the chart to think about yourself as a learner. Start slowly and think:

where would I place myself on each of these 4 trajectories?
do I understand the statements well enough to answer? Any I need to check?
can I really say that the statement is secure? [By secure, we mean that these are behaviours that you exhibit in a range of different circumstances.]
does it actually describe what I do most of the time, or does it describe something I can do but tend not to? (what I do do, rather than what I can do).
have I ever thought about myself like this before?
would my partner or colleagues see me in the same way?
colour in your secure statements on the chart.

This has now become your Learning Behaviour Profile.

Now ask...
- which learning behaviour is particularly strong, or weak?
- am I substantially lower or higher in some? Which?
- are there any surprises or disappointments?
- what questions is this raising for me?
- where would I like to improve?
- what may have shaped my current learning characteristics?
- if I hadn’t used this chart how would I have described myself as a learner?

From a chart to a profile

Download a blank copy to colour in

Find out 2

What do learning profiles reveal about my learners?

Your students as learners

Now turn your attention to some of the learners in your class just to get an idea of how useful such profiles can be.

Begin by identifying 4 students you wish to focus on. Choose 1 lower achieving boy, 1 higher achieving boy, 1 lower achieving girl, and 1 higher achieving girl.

Download and print 4 copies of the behaviour chart opposite.

Using your knowledge of these 4 students, colour in and create a learning profile for each student.

Now ask...

- which learning behaviours are particularly strong or weak?
- are the profiles of the girls different from the boys?
- are the profiles of the higher attainers different from the profiles of the lower attainers?
- what questions is this raising for me?
- has this exercise changed or sharpened your understanding of these students as learners.

If this activity has piqued your interest and you want to find out more about your students as learners, have a go at the Extended Find Out that follows.

Download a blank copy to colour in

Extended Find out 2

A deeper dive into your students as learners.

We hope you’ll have time and be sufficiently intrigued to find out more about your students as learners. Ideally this deeper dive would be done for every student but, since schools are busy places, here’s a swifter way of gaining a broader picture of your students as learners.

Make four or five copies of the progression charts each to represent one of the various groups you want to analyse. For example;

one for boys and one for girls
ones for high and low attainers (however you designate that label)
one for your class as a whole

You might also have separate charts for groups like;

Pupil Premium
EAL
SEND
other groups that may have significance for your class

Complete a profile for each group just like the ones you compiled in Find out 1. Remember – colour in the behaviours that you think are secure, that is behaviours that the students consistently exhibit in a range of different circumstances. BUT if they use a behaviour in, say, maths but not in other subject areas you cannot count it as secure.

Now ask; Can I discern any patterns across groups of learning profiles?

You might be thinking:

How do my higher attaining learners differ from my lower attaining learners? i.e. do they score higher in the columns?
Is the range of higher scoring columns different in the 2 groups?
Do the boys’ learning behaviours seem to differ from the girls’?
Do Pupil Premium learners’ behaviours differ from other students?
- if so how? Is this more about progress in learning behaviours or using a different range of learning behaviours?
Move on to look at other groups of interest and ask:
Do my EAL or SEND or G&T learners’ behaviours differ from others? How?

Whatever your area of interest, shuffle the profiles and look for common features in one group of profiles that are different from the other group of profiles.

It’s important to capture and summarise your main findings.

The chart shown alongside could be your most valuable collection of learning information about your students that you’ll ever have.

Note down;

What you noticed about the individual learning profiles of your students. e.g. which phase of behaviours appear to be more / less secure across the board? Which of the four learning behaviours is the least well developed across the whole class?
What you’ve learned about groups of students. e.g. boys/girls, pupil premium, and others.
Have you noticed any significant differences that merit further investigation? e.g. the differences in types and phases of learning behaviours used by high and low achieving students?

Download ‘piggies in a field’ Origami Coaching Notes Origami Learning Challenge

Encouraging students to become aware of their own learning behaviours.

All the Try outs below will help you to:

focus your class/group on using one of the four learning behaviours being addressed in this course;
closely observe your students using one of those behaviours;
identify your students’ current stage in their use of each behaviour.

Try out 1

Understanding perseverance

This activity has two purposes.

to introduce students to the idea of perseverance being a useful learning behaviour.
to inform yourself of your students’ current perseverance skills

Open up a conversation with your class about perseverance. You could stimulate the discussion by challenging them to have a go at the ‘Piggies in a field’ activity that you met in unit 1, or, for older students, by getting them to do some origami. [Downloads for both are opposite.]

Debrief the activity with questions like:

How did you feel when you were doing the activity?
Who wanted to give up?
What made you give up?
What sorts of things did you say to yourself?
Did you find yourself saying ‘I’m no good at …’?
What did it feel like to see some people doing it quickly?
Who completed the challenge?
What made you keep going?

Explore further with the group — what makes us give up, what helps us keep going?

Later, by yourself after the discussion, look at the perseverance progression chart and consider what you’ve discovered about your students’ current perseverance skills. Which skills are secure? Which ones in particular might need some attention?

Reflection Point: How can I design lessons and activities that will enable my students to persevere more frequently?

A reminder about Growing Perseverance ⬇️

1. Perseverance – Keeping going

Attention can be broken when learning gets blocked, but good learners have learnt the knack of maintaining or quickly re-establishing their concentration when they get stuck or frustrated. Perseverance is often undermined by two common and erroneous beliefs. Firstly, learning ought to be easy. If learners think that they will either understand something straight away, or not at all, then there is simply no point in persisting and struggling. Secondly, bright people pick things up easily, so if you have to try it means you’re not very bright. Clearly the idea that effort must be symptomatic of a lack of ability makes persevering an unpleasant experience. Good learners develop perseverance when their parents and teachers avoid conveying these messages, even unwittingly. Perseverance is about:

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

Growing perseverance

This complex learning behaviour is part of the emotional domain of learning. Here it’s reduced to a single column which attempts to capture enough detail for you to recognise the behaviours as you witness them in your classroom.

Note also that the actions going up the column become more skilled and sophisticated. Purple, Blue and Green phases have two descriptions which belong to the same phase but the lower ones in each colour tend to happen first.

Perseverance has a great deal of emotional involvement and its growth will rely heavily on an emotionally supportive classroom culture. Much of this behaviour relies on students’ feelings, how ‘failure’ is handled and how they are supported through difficulty and challenge.

Try out 2

Introduce opportunities to ask questions

Here are a couple of examples of involving students in posing their own questions.

At the start of a learning unit on the Egyptians the class discuss what they want to find out and log this on a wall of questions. This gives students some ownership of this unit of work and consequently greater emotional involvement.

Here the class have a wonder wall where pupils can record their ‘wonders’, knowing that their teacher will find time to address their questions over time.

A reminder about Growing Questioning ⬇️

Questioning – Finding out

Effective questioners are motivated and not afraid to ask questions about the past, the present and to explore the future. They have an extensive range of question types and techniques at their disposal, which they use with discernment and sensitivity to occasion. A well-formed questioning habit involves being ready, willing and able to; not take things at face value; be less likely to accept answers uncritically; ask questions of oneself as well as of others; get under the surface of things; be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity; not be afraid of the ‘don’t know’ state of mind; be playful, yet systematic and analytical; be socially aware of the impact that questions may have on others; challenge others’ thinking; understand and use different types of question for different purposes; recognise that revealing their own uncertainties helps them learn.

Growing questioning

This complex learning behaviour is part of the cognitive domain of learning. Its growth here attempts to capture enough detail for you to recognise the behaviours as you might witness them in your classroom.

Note also that the actions going up the columns become more skilled and sophisticated. Purple, blue and green phases have two descriptions which belong to the same phase but the lower ones in each colour tend to happen first.

Questioning drives our learning; that curiosity to find out. The column focuses on skills that enable students to find things out for themselves and emphasises getting under the surface of things and assessing the validity of information. In today’s world this is a learning behaviour of primary importance.

Try out 3

Make reflecting on collaboration part of everyday lessons

Here is a practical example of how you might develop the social climate of the classroom and make it collaboration friendly.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Students can refer to them during lessons as prompts about the finer aspects of collaborating and later for self-reflection on what they have used, whether it was successful and how to improve it.

Learning Mat

A reminder about Growing Collaboration ⬇️

Collaboration – Learning together

Effective collaborators are adept at learning with and from others. They help to:

shape the ideas of the team
decide what needs to be done
contribute to getting the job done
keep an eye on how things are going
improve team performance through reflection.

A well-formed collaboration habit includes being ready willing and able to: work effectively with others towards agreed common goals; acting flexibly in response to circumstances; adopting different roles and responsibilities in pursuit of agreed goals and the well-being of the team; holding and expressing opinions coherently, compromising and adapting when appropriate; seeking to understand what others are saying; sharing, challenging, supporting and building on ideas.

Growing collaboration

This learning behaviour is part of the social domain of learning. Its growth here attempts to capture enough detail for you to recognise the behaviours as you witness them in your classroom.

Collaboration is often thought of as a natural skill but as the column shows it is highly sophisticated and will take time to become productive. Here the skills of working with others as a team are given centre stage.

Try out 4

Explore what it means to revise.

Invite the students to move around a big open space then stop and make the shape you call out.
When they have all made their shape, ask them to look around at each other and then have another go at making the same shape differently.

Do this several times.
Talk about thinking again and changing one’s first idea of how to do something.
Over time get the children to start asking themselves whether they want/need to improve their first go at making the shape -so gaining a sense of an internal ‘good enough’ measure.

A reminder about Growing Revising ⬇️

Revising – Making improvements

A well formed Revising habit involves being ready, willing, and able to: self-monitor how things are going, keeping an eye on the goal; expecting the unexpected, having a readiness to re-shape, re-order, re-form plans to take account of new circumstances; remaining alive to new, unforeseen opportunities and ideas; looking at what you are doing with a critical eye; striving to be the best you can be; making sure things are on track and making improvements along the way.

So students need to learn how to deal with change, emotionally and practically. With an inflexible frame of mind they are unlikely to recognise the need to change their ideas or the way they do something. They also need to know what ‘good’ looks like; how to keep an eye on how things are going and the willingness to evaluate how things went against external standards. Growing revising moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘have another go’.

Growing revising

This complex learning behaviour is part of the strategic domain of learning. Here the chart attempts to capture enough detail for you to recognise the behaviours as you witness them in your classroom.

Revising. This critical learning skill has been given a new lease of life recently, often evoked by metacognition in the world of teaching. The column charts the type of skills students will need to embrace to become an effective self-monitor and evaluator of their own learning.

Extended Read about 1

Progression in learning behaviours.

Teachers are familiar with the need to assess, record and report on curriculum progress and attainment. The world is full of levels, level descriptors, tests, diagnostics, examinations, point scores, value added measures, and the like – even in ‘life after levels’ !! But they all refer to the acquisition of the knowledge, skills and understandings defined in the National Curriculum. But what of the child’s progress as a learner ? Where are the comparable measures for identifying how the child is growing and developing as, for example, a curious, tenacious, flexible and sociable lifelong learner? Not, mercifully, in the National Curriculum!

Learning together. Meeting 3

Unit 3 Suggested meeting agenda

Decide what you want this meeting to achieve
Discuss what you have found out about a progression in learning habits, (15 mins)
Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
Consider issues of progression that may have consequences across the school (10 mins)
Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

Learning Team Meeting 3 Agenda ⬇️

Item 1. Meeting Objectives. (5 mins)

Meeting objectives might include:

share and learn from what we have each discovered about progression in learning habits;
to feel more confident about being aware of students growth as learners;
identify difficulties and possible solutions for collecting and acting on learning habit progression data;
report findings on the management of progression data to senior leaders. (see item 4)

Outcome. To have decided what this meeting should aim to achieve.

Item 2. Discussion about progression in learning habits (15 mins)

Explore together your reaction to the progression charts and your discoveries about yourself and your students as developing learners.What do the profiles look like for our classes? Where are the similarities / differences?

what were your first impressions of progression in learning habits?
what did you find out about yourself as a learner (Find out 1)
what did we each learn about our students as learners. (Find out 2)
share your students’ Learning progression charts. (Find out 2)
- which of the four learning habits seem to be the strongest across the school?
- which of the four learning habits appear to be the weakest across the school?
What surprised or baffled you?
Are there significant differences between year groups?

Outcome. A clearer understanding of the thinking behind the progression in learning behaviours and first understandings of the growth levels of our students’ learning behaviours.

Item 3. Explore action using the Try outs (20 mins)

Share and discuss the action and results from your close observation of students’ use of four key behaviours.

Which of the Try out suggestions did you each use?
Any concerns about or difficulties in putting the Try outs into action.
How did students react to being introduced to their learning behaviours?
Which approach (Try outs) seemed the most valid or successful?
How the Try outs affected different age groups.
Ways of implementing these that we can all learn from and adopt.

Outcome. A clearer understanding appreciation of our students’ learning behaviours, their strengths, weaknesses and growth potential.

Item 4. Now you know…so what? (10 mins)

In relation to all the ideas about progression you’ve been finding out, sharing and mulling over, it’s now time to think about the future impact of having this information;

1. Do the charts provide us with useful information?

2 How should we each use that information now that we know it?

3 Should collecting this information become whole school requirement? If so when?

It’s more than likely that, as you become more familiar with the benefits of growing learning behaviours, you will frequently return to considering the how, when and where of its use, collection and storage at school level.

Outcome.

At this stage it’s essential to record ideas arising from this discussion using 2 pentagon diagrams outcomes:
- one for each team member personally and
- one for decisions/suggestions that are school wide.
Ensure that your school/group wide pentagon is shared with senior leaders.