From ‘I can’t’ to ‘Show me’

When first introducing the concept of a learning behaviour…being stuck, dealing with challenge, reasoning, questioning and so forth… it’s important to make it a big, bold and brash affair. These introductory images or activities are the important hook(s)  that fire student’s imaginations and help them combat their more usual response to it . In other words it’s not about whispering that being stuck is an interesting place it needs to be shouted about, sung about, storied, played with etc. otherwise students will not believe this new framing.

The ability to cope with and overcome difficulty and challenge is a key aspect to becoming a successful learner.

James Nottingham introduced the idea of the Learning Pit as a way to explain that struggling is part of learning and that if we are to understand something we need to struggle with it first. Students move from unconsciously incompetent (an emotionally ‘safe’ area before learning), to consciously incompetent (the emotionally tricky “pit”), to consciously competent (the far side, after the learning has happened). 

Find out more by visiting:

https://www.learningpit.org/

Roy Leighton uses a similar concept, which he refers to as the ‘Learning Line’, as part of his ‘Butterfly model’. Find out more here

One of the first ways of surfacing learning, putting it on show, is to focus on how you are modelling being a good learner to students. Modelling is all the ways in which teachers demonstrate how they are a learner too; a confident finder-outer.

• Take your students behind the scenes of learning and sharing with them some of the uncertain thinking of learning.
• Learning aloud is a good place to start: take students through how you would work out a problem. Modelling the thought processes (including emotional) that learners go through is important because a lot of the skill of learning only manifests itself in the inner world of the learner.
• Expose the thinking, feeling and decision making of a learner-in-action to help students actually see and hear how learning works.

• Every classroom needs stuck prompts in one form or another.
• They could be of a general nature or made relevant to a subject or topic.
• It’s important to ensure that they ‘grow up’ through the school, reflecting the curriculum expectations. In essence they represent the level of independence expected in different year groups.

Extract from Building Learning Power in Action, by Sarah Gornall, Maryl Chambers, Guy Claxton

Building Learning Power in Action

So-called ‘Stuck posters’ or prompts come in various shapes and sizes, but essentially they are simply home-made lists of what students can try when they get stuck with their learning: ‘Read the question again’, ‘Split the question into smaller bits’, ‘Try sounding the word out letter by letter’, ‘Ask your neighbour’ — that kind of thing. If the teacher were simply to photocopy the list from a L2L manual and stick it on the wall it wouldn’t work. But in a learning powered classroom, the ideas are generated by the students themselves, and are the subject of continual debate and refinement.

“Instead of simply dishing out more good advice to students-as-consumers, classrooms are becoming places of day-by-day knowledge generation about learning”

Students are challenged to produce a continual stream of ever more sophisticated ideas about how they can boot-strap their own ability to be independent learners, and these are accumulated and displayed as ever-expanding public records of their achievement. To begin with, the teacher trains the students to make use of this information by greeting every request for prompting with; ‘Have you looked at the prompts?’ After a while, looking at the prompts becomes routine, and eventually, when the habit of self-unsticking becomes second nature, even prompts become redundant. It does not take long before ‘Ask the teacher’ becomes a last-ditch strategy, to be engaged only when all else has failed.

By contrast, when effort becomes seen as natural and interesting, the habit of perseverance expands, and a subtle but powerful shift in the classroom atmosphere begins to occur. It is in this kind of way that learning power moves up a gear, from the technical to the cultural. In a sense the STUCK poster is a stand-alone technique, but it can be much more than that if the teacher wants it to be. It can be used as an effective, low-risk, low-investment lever for creating a shift in students’ sense of what is valued, what is normal, and what is the point of their learning — and thus in the quality of their engagement.

The language of learning can help teachers to think about how they might talk in a way that helps to cultivate the learning behaviours and help pupils to gain a better personalised understanding of content.

• Teachers can turn each of the learning habits into sets of casual prompts or nudges to move pupils along in learning. For example, to nudge curiosity/questioning: “What’s odd about that? What does that make you wonder? What do you want to find out? How else could you do that?”
• Teachers’ classroom talk is all focused on the process and experience of learning itself. Sometimes teacher comments encourage pupils to pay attention to how they are learning. Teacher comments ask them to slow down and notice and appraise the strategies and steps they are using along the way. E.g. “What would have made this easier for you? Where else could you use that?” This helps pupils to become more reflective and thoughtful about their own learning.

The explicit message is that students need to expect being stuck during any lesson. The implicit message is that being stuck is a good thing – something you want to see. Using this technique regularly means students come to accept being stuck as a natural part of learning. It begins to build their curiosity about the why and possible patterns to stuckness.

What other sorts of questions would you include in such a selection for your classroom. Something about asking  good questions or how they got themselves unstuck would be useful. This exercise makes a good start on introducing meta-cognitive behaviours more generally.

It’s important that students understand learning as a process rather than an event, and that stuckness is a prominent part of that process. From scribbled notes to final copy can be a long and eventful journey. Learning routines along the way include capturing rough ideas, adding to them, trying again, trying another way, re-thinking, refining and completing. Such routines lead students to see that it’s not about everything being perfect or easy from the start. 

By celebrating the moment of being stuck, students are reminded that stuck is not a place of shame, rather that it is part of the journey. It is equally important to celebrate the unsticking strategy so that students can see that there is always a way forward.