BPL 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.

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’.

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.

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 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?

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 Imagining.

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 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).

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 . .

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?

Teacher talk – as a learning coach

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

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

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

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.

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 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?

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 imagining (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.