BPL 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.

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’.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

A range of little culture shifts

Have a think about your current classroom culture in relation to Capitalising.

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 2/3/4/5 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).

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 – as a learning coach

(To ensure students do the thinking for themselves)

1. What could we use to help us with this?
2. What led you to choose to use that?
3. Look very carefully at someone you think is doing …… really well and think about how you can do it like that
4. Could you tackle this by imagining someone who does it really well?
5. What sort of reference / resource do you need here?
6. Look around. See what is available to help. How could you use it?
7. Could you work this out for yourself first before looking for more information?
8. Who could you turn to for help?
9. Think through the strategies you might use.
10. 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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

Suggested meeting agenda

1. Decide what you want this meeting to achieve (5 mins)
2. Discuss what you have found out about students’ use of capitalising (15 mins)
3. Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
4. Consider issues that would be beneficial if implemented across the school (10 mins)
5. Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)

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.