Bitesize 1.5 Leadership strategies that secure and sustain a learning culture In PROGRESS

Clarity about ‘moral purpose’ is really important in leading a learning-powered school since it’s not merely about creating more efficient learning and improved exam results. The goal here is to broaden the scope of education.

Think about why you want to work on building better learners: is it about a wider scope for education and/or is it driven, in the first place, by a concern about student dependency and/or lack of resilience?

Take time to develop your own vision of building powerful real-world learners. Turn your vision into a narrative that will engage and inspire staff, who are after all, going to make that vision a reality.

You may find Chapter 1, Vision, in ‘The Learning Powered School’ useful in forming your narrative.

The key difference between schools where developing the learning process has been successful and those where it has fizzled out is understanding it as:

• whole-school culture change
• something that will take several years to implement and sustain
• not a quick fix to raise results
• a struggle for some teachers

Sharing your commitment to a long-term cultural change with staff will be vital for success. Make sure throughout that you frequently, visibly and genuinely express this commitment. Give a clear message – this is not just another initiative.

And as it goes along the big lessons are:

1. Keep close to the developments.
2. Keep it high profile in school, visit classrooms regularly.
3. Talk with teachers about how they are weaving the ideas into their lessons.
4. Focus on the kinds of learning processes teachers were routinely asking students to use.
5. Identify where this ‘mental exercise regime’ is really taking hold or is faltering.

Schools where Building Better Learners has been successful focus professional development on growing staff confidence and expertise to develop learning behaviours; usually by creating Professional Learning Communities. This serves to deepen and sustain the dialogue and empower staff to experiment and create their own solutions. A spirit of openness and enquiry increasingly pervades the school.

In the spirit of Building Better Learners teachers don’t just ‘learn how to do the approach’ they learn about it, critique it, customise and develop it through this radical rethink in Professional Development practice. This leads to regular opportunities to share experiments, successes, failures, doubts and ideas, and then go back to the classroom and have another go.

It’s the development of staff through professional learning communities that will be the engine of change.

As you move further into the innovation you will need to:

• keep talking about a vision for learning
• maintain interest and development of this vision of learning through in-school enquiry-led professional development

Working in this culture of trust and openness, teachers and teaching assistants will become increasingly confident to experiment and take risks. But this is no free-for-all: the quality of learning in classrooms and around the school needs to be kept under regular review.

As a result: Teachers get used to being observed regularly, and come to trust that the spirit of this is a learning support for them, and not a process of judgement or appraisal. Staff don’t see this as being checked up on but as part of a dynamic, reflective process across all levels of the school. As this culture consolidates, people get used to watching out for and recording changes in their practice and changes in students’ learning behaviour, motivation and achievement.

There are several reasons why schools find it useful to start documenting progression in students’ learning behaviours. They find that it:

• motivates and encourages students to put in the effort to continue improving their learning behaviours
• gives students feedback on their learning behaviour progress so that they can decide which ‘learning muscles’ they are going to put effort into next
• encourages teachers to realise that their efforts to improve learning behaviours are being effective
• gives teachers information about individual students or classes that will enable them, the teachers, to discuss and guide learning development more precisely and helpfully
• validates the progress made by students in terms of conventional attainment measures.

All of these purposes are legitimate and useful but they suggest different kinds of information gathered over different timescales. In devising a policy for tracking the development of learning power, schools are therefore beginning to create a multifaceted portfolio of indicators rather than a single metric.