On the page below you can explore an overview of the learning behaviours that make up powerful learners and how these progress over time.
What’s in the detail of the Supple Learning Mind framework?
The Supple Learning Mind framework, originally conceived and researched as part of the ELLI project by Bristol University, reveals learning as a complex process that isn’t just about thinking and having a good memory; it includes how we feel, how we think, how we learn with and from others and how we manage the process of learning. It gives the beginnings of a learning language that helps teachers think about how learning behaviours enable students to grow as learners and tackle the curriculum more profitably.
The Supple Learning Mind captures each of the domains of learning:
- The Emotional …feeling…domain of learning (capacities that build Resilient learners)
- The Cognitive …thinking…domain of learning (capacities that build Resourceful learners)
- The Social …relating…domain of learning (capacities that build Reciprocal learners)
- The Strategic …managing….domain of learning (capacities that build Reflective learners)
What does growing powerful learners mean?
The whole point is to enable young people to become powerful learners, to grow a supple learning mind, to become a life-long learner. So the growth of learning habits is attended to closely. Successful growth or progression means not only that can pupils make use of reflection, or imagination, or managing their distraction, but that over time they make more and better use of these learning skills and tools and secure them as habits.
Learning powered classrooms help to promote three dimensions of progress:
- the frequency and strength of the habit – how often it is used spontaneously as the need arises
- the scope of its use – the range of contexts within which the skill is used (from the familiar to new uncharted territory)
- the skilfulness of the habit – how the behaviour becomes more subtle, more appropriate to circumstances, more sophisticated.
We have developed maps or progression ‘trajectories’ to help teachers enable the steps between, for example, the natural curiosity of a three year-old and the sophisticated skill-set of the consummate questioner. The trajectories allow teachers to identify, nudge and design activity to help pupils build progressively the fine grain learning behaviours of the effective learner.
It’s the Building bit of Building Learning Power. There would be little point in introducing such learning habits if we didn’t attend to growing them.
Questions you might want to ask.
Something to think about
- Does the Supple Learning Mind, with its four domains of learning and seventeen learning ‘capacities’, yield insight for you?
- Of the four domains, which are your personal strengths and relative weaknesses?
- Think about your students – which are their strengths and relative weaknesses?
- Which of these seventeen capacities, if you could magically improve it, would make the biggest difference to your students?
- What are you currently doing to improve this? What more could you do?
- Do you have a sense that students are becoming increasingly emotionally engaged, cognitively skilled, socially adept and strategically responsible as they move through your school? How do you know? How might you find out?
Download the card as a pdf
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