BPL 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.

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’

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.

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 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?

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 Planning.

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 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).

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 – as a learning coach

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

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

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.

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.

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 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?

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 planning (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.