BPL 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.

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’.

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.

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 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?

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 Noticing.

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 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).

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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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.

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 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?

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 noticing (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 relating to Noticing is opposite. Click below to download and print a blank version for yourself.