BPL Reasoning

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 reasoning.

• What are the key aspects of reasoning? (Essential Read about 1)
• How confident are my students now as reasoners? (Find out 1)
• How could I embed building reasoning 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 reasoning 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 Reasoning habit involves being ready, willing, and able to:

• Resist jumping to conclusions;
• Seek justifiable evidence to shape sound, well-honed arguments;
• Scrutinise your assumptions;
• Seek evidence and counter evidence, look for false steps and carefully draw conclusions;
• Remain suspicious, doubting and self-doubting in order to avoid unwarranted certainty;
• Convey your logical thinking clearly, through dialogue, symbols, analogies, prose and pictures.

So, at a less abstract level, students need to learn the inclination to resist impulsive responses; to respond logically and thoughtfully; to apply logic by explaining, justifying and, ultimately, proving what they think; to utilise a range of reasoning tools; and to develop strategies for presenting their reasoning to others persuasively. When looked at from these diverse angles growing reasoning moves well beyond encouraging a student to ‘think it through’.

The Reasoning progression chart should give you a fairly clear view of the reasoning 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 reasoning 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 reasoning.

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 reasoning
• ideas for constructing lessons to build reasoning
• ways of celebrating reasoning

Ask yourself which of the features of the reasoning-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 Reasoning.

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 reasoning towards learners (Relating);

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a learning language for reasoning (Talking);

Try Out 4 focuses on how lessons/activities can be designed to activate and develop reasoning (Constructing);

Try Out 5 focuses on how reasoning can be recognised/ rewarded / praised / celebrated (Celebrating).

Cut up;

• a cartoon,
• series of pictures of a production process,
• a flow diagram,
• a mathematical proof,
• a story line,
• a musical score,
• a poem,
• a sequence of events, and so on.

Invite students to reassemble the pieces in what they think is a viable order and explain their reasons for this. Model and listen for the language of reasoning to strengthen the process.

Here is a range of things you could say to nudge reasoning. When you use this kind of language you are talking as a learning coach, encouraging students to think for themselves.

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

1. What assumptions are you making? Are they sound?
2. Can you think it through in clear steps from start to finish?
3. How many reasons can we find for that?
4. Can you spot the false step there? Is the argument water tight?
5. What evidence can you find to support your case/argument? What’s the counter evidence?
6. How have you reached that conclusion? What are the implications?
7. Which thinking tool would help us solve this?
8. Are you convinced?
9. One the one hand . . . , but on the other . . .
10. Why do you think that?

A Visible Thinking Routine

• What’s happening here?

• What makes you say that?

The first question in this routine is flexible: it is useful when looking at objects such as works of art or historical artefacts, but it can also be used to explore a poem, make scientific observations and hypotheses, or investigate more conceptual ideas (i.e. democracy).
The first question invites students to describe what they notice, see or know, but it is the supplementary question (What makes you say that?) that requires them to build explanations. It promotes evidence-based reasoning and when the students share their interpretations it encourages them to understand alternatives and multiple perspectives.

This is one of many visible thinking routines to be found on the visible thinking website.

Go to the Visible Thinking Websitefor more examples and information about visible thinking routines.

To download ‘What makes you say that’ from the Visible Thinking Website as a pdf:

Self-monitoring reasoning 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 reasoning 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 reasoning by considering it in greater depth

The chart alongside offers a deeper, more sophisticated view of how Reasoning may grow.

Column one deals with how students tend to think about things; their frame of mind as they build or add to/increase their reasoning skills.

Column two is about self-talk; what students may be saying to themselves in growing their self-awareness about reasoning.

Column three is about the ‘how’ of reasoning; what they actually do that shows they are applying reasoning ‘know – how’.

Column four is about the reasoning tools they actually use at each growth stage; from guessing and comparing/contrasting to employing ‘if-then reasoning and using techniques to provoke new ways of thinking.

The last column concerns how the person tends to describe or show or explain their reasoning.

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 reasoning 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 reasoning (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.