BPL 2: Culture – Relating for Learning

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners Phase 2. This four unit online programme looks at how your development as a teacher can enable and strengthen the development of a learning-friendly classroom culture.

The programme combines three types of action to help you to experiment, analyse and understand how you can create an increasingly learning-friendly classroom culture.

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 how your development can create a classroom culture to develop students’ autonomy as you gradually devolve responsibility for learning to them.

• What are the key aspects of devolving responsibility for learning? (Essential and Extended Read about 1)
• With regards to devolving responsibility, is my classroom currently more teacher focused, or more learning focused? (Find out 1)
• How are my students responding to the changes I have made in my classroom culture? (Find out 2)
• What sort of approaches will be useful in moving this forward? (Try out 1 to 4)
• Take a deeper look at the anticipated outcomes for learners of developing a relating-friendly classroom culture (Find out 3)
• Find out about 8 further learning behaviours that will, in time, be added to the key behaviours of Perseverance, Questioning, Collaborating and Revising (Find Out 4)

Structuring and using the ideas below in your classroom over the next few months or so will edge your classroom culture towards supporting student independence.

From this…

In many classrooms responsibility for learning seems to rest almost exclusively with the teacher. The teacher decides the what and how of learning, and undertakes most of the questioning. The main focus is on student performance and most tasks are undertaken individually. In these classrooms the teacher assumes responsibility for assessment and adopts a ‘fount of knowledge’ role. Hence students come to believe and accept that responsibility for learning lies with their teacher and become increasingly dependent on them.

But does it have to be like this? What if learners are enabled to take responsibility for their own learning? How would classroom culture change?

To this…

Relating for learning is about developing the roles and responsibilities of teachers and learners such that learning becomes a shared responsibility. Students are given more responsibility for their own learning, the role of the teacher changes from ‘the sage on the stage’ to ‘the guide by your side’; the role of the student moves from ‘passenger’ to ‘crew’ and ultimately to ‘pilots of their own learning’.

In short…

The key features of this cultural shift include:

• gradually devolving responsibility for learning to students;
• giving students more of a stake in the process of their own learning;
• teachers becoming learning coaches, enabling students to find their own ways to improve;
• using collaborative activity to help students see each other as resources for learning;
• giving students choices about what and how to learn;
• enabling students to talk more and adults to talk less;
• teachers modelling being a learner.

The chart alongside shows how the classroom culture for the three aspects of Relating for Learning:

• Devolving responsibility for learning
• Coaching approach to teaching
• Modelling being a learner

may grow as the culture moves from being teacher centred towards being learning centred.

Download and print a copy.

Look over these trajectories. For each of the 3 columns, ask yourself the key question:

• Which cell in each column do you think best describes your current classroom culture?

It is worth taking your time over this. The outcomes from this self-reflection, coupled with the outcomes from Find Out 2, will help to identify the teaching strategies that will move your current classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

Culture is the minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day way that learners come to understand their role as a learner; it’s always all too evident to learners. Culture is sometimes seen as 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.

How are your students reacting to the learning climate of your classroom? How are they reacting to the changes you are making to encourage learners to take more responsibility for their learning?

Download and print a copy.

Look over these three groups of statements.

The first 5 statements are about Devolving Responsibility, the second about Coaching, and the third about Modelling.

For each of the 3 groups, ask yourself the key question:

• Which statement in each set do you think best describes the majority of your learners at this time?

It is worth taking your time over this. The outcomes from this, coupled with the outcomes from Find Out 1, will help to identify the teaching strategies that will move your current classroom culture towards a learning centred classroom culture.

A range of little culture shifts

Teachers are in the habit forming business

As a teacher you are an influential character builder and so you need to be mindful of how your classroom culture helps students to form, replace, re-form and strengthen their learning habits. Which aspects of your classroom culture are helpful in this respect, and which are perhaps less so? After all, if you are unable or unwilling to make changes to your classroom culture, learners are unlikely to change how they respond to it!

What to stop and start

Here are a few ideas you might want to try. Take it steady, this way of teaching can be a big but exciting shift so it’s worth doing it slowly and thoughtfully.

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 that you can use to move your classroom culture forward.

Try Out 2 focuses on ideas for moving responsibility towards learners;

Try Out 3 focuses on developing a coaching approach;

Try Out 4 focuses on teachers modelling themselves as learners.

Devolving Responsibility – is about shifting the emphasis towards learners taking increasing responsibility for their own development. It involves working towards students asking more of the questions, monitoring their own learning, doing more of the work, making more choices, pursuing their own lines of enquiry. In short it’s about enabling students to become more active in the learning process; offering them more opportunities to decide what to do and actively review their own experiences.

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to further devolve responsibility for learning. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Coaching approaches – is about moving away from ‘telling’ whenever possible. It is one of the hardest of balancing acts: knowing when you can coach and when you have to tell requires a teacher to have a deep understanding of both the subject matter and the learner.

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to further develop a coaching approach. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

Modelling the learning process – is about the ways in which we show that we too are learners. It indicates a shift away from teachers being ‘all-knowing subject specialists’ to displaying uncertainty, sharing their own learning stories, learning ‘aloud’ and learning alongside students.

Use what you have found out about your classroom culture in Find Out 1 (the green tables) and how your students are responding to it in Find Out 2 (the blue quiz) to identify the best place to start to model yourself as a lifelong learner. There are five possible growth stages to consider.

We have thus far, with the exception of Find Out 2, focused on changes you can make to your classroom culture, focusing on the three ‘Means’ of Relating for Learning:

1. Devolving responsibility;
2. Coaching approaches;
3. Modelling learning.

Here we turn our attention to the two ‘Ends’, the anticipated outcomes for learners, and how these are linked to the changes you are making / have made:

1. Growing motivation;
2. Growing independence.

Ask yourself:

• Which cell in each column best describes my learners at present?
• Is there a good match with the Steps I have been working on in Try Outs 2/3/4?
• Are they responding in the ways anticipated?
• Are they ready to be challenged to become increasingly motivated and independent, or is there a need for a period of consolidation while the changes you have made take full effect?

And critically – what next? You should probably choose to turn your attention to one of the other units so as to maintain a degree of consistency of approach across the four aspects of classroom culture (Relating, Talking, Constructing, and Celebrating).

But, do not forget – you can always return to this unit in the future with the intention of further progressing your classroom culture and their responses.

This Find Out, which appears in all units, is a reference tool to be accessed when / if you need it.

It gives a short introduction to 8 additional learning behaviours: Noticing; Reasoning; Imagining; Making Links; Capitalising; Listening; Planning; Meta Learning.

Each contains 5 short sections:

1. What do we mean by this learning behaviour?
2. How do teachers create a classroom culture for it.
3. How does the behaviour grow?
4. Some teaching ideas to encourage the behaviour.
5. How to develop your learning language to support the behaviour.

You will find these introductions most useful as you begin to tackle Steps 2 and 3 in the Try Outs (above).

Suggested termly review activity

Suppose that your main focus over the Spring term was on Relating for Learning:

• You were working mostly on Step 1, with a focus on Devolving Responsibility and Coaching Approaches;
• You introduced Stuck Posters, Laminated monitoring cards, and started to explore coaching using the ‘Support to Continue’ strategy.
• You may well also have had some associated actions in the other 3 aspects of classroom culture;
• You have noticed that many but not all students are responding as expected;
• And in the future you intend to work on building reflection on learning behaviours into lesson planning.

Your review and evaluation sheet might well look like the one opposite.

Download and complete your own review and evaluation sheet. Keep it as an ongoing record of what you have done, and pass a copy to senior leaders so that they can keep an eye on developments across the school.