A route map for teachers: Growing your development MRC

I’m having trouble working things out  for this new, and final, edition of phase 2. I think that spinning it around teacher development is an ok way to go especially as it then brings in where to find examples in the 12 learning behaviour modules.

So, the big idea fine, but the teacher development grid troubles me…too big, too wordy, unwieldy. Is it needed in one state or another? Is the scale right? Could it be streamlined somehow? Where have the student blue cells come from? Is there any link to our other work on student growth? If not, why? Does it matter? One of the areas we wrote really well about in the new v7 was Constructing lessons. I think we might need to take this thinking further in this Phase 2.

How can we make more of the learning behaviours we haven’t used so much in Phase 1? On a swift look through we seem to be sending teachers to the 4 well known ones rather than bringing in the use of a wider range.

We need too to link this teacher growth to staff development opportunities.

And lastly, do we need to do anything with the now very old learning habit modules themselves.

So I’m pondering all this and think a chat would be useful.

I’m going to leave my ‘thinking’ notes all the way through this unit and some in unit 1 and 2.

M

Growing your development.

How times have changed needed?

We used to think that children behaved badly or flunked a test because (a) they weren’t very bright; (b) they didn’t try; (c) they got in with a bad crowd, had trouble at home or had a bad teacher. Now research tells us that our personalities and mental aptitudes change and develop over our lifespan. What this means is that teachers have an opportunity to deliberately influence the development of these habits and dispositions in positive directions. This is what building powerful learners is all about.

Building every student’s learning power might sound obvious and sensible, but how on earth do we go about it?

What you’ve been up to thus far update

Over the last few months you have been trying out some approaches to help your students become more able to sort things out for themselves, to become more questioning, to appraise their own and each other’s learning. You will have noticed that this type of learning didn’t compete for your time. You didn’t have to stop practising tables in order to work on resilience. Your children’s resilience was being strengthened by the way you were ‘doing tables’. You have encouraged children to be more tolerant of their mistakes and to fix them themselves. Your children are now less passive and less dependent on you.

So where next?

As a teacher you can’t not be affecting their habits of mind that slowly develop over time. So, having made a good start – where next, what now? Is it just a case of trial and error or might there be some pointers, some pathways, some inklings of a journey or even a potential route?

This resource has two main aims:Good and agree

1. To help you grow your practice in a deliberate and measured way, across every aspect of the Teachers’ Palette. It draws on the effective practice we have observed over almost 20 years of BLP practice in schools. It’s something we hope you will debate, share, try out, add to or tweak, as you work to develop as a learning power practitioner.
2. To help you find a way through and select from a massive range of classroom based ideas and possibilities as you create a culture that draws students towards becoming more independent, engrossed, inquisitive, reflective, more imaginative and empathetic.

Find a stage on the journey, consider using the ideas shown and then seek other ideas from the considerable range of resources that you now have access to in modules titled ‘Putting xxx into Learning’.