Narrowing the gap

This resource is designed to meet cries for help from schools as they combat a growing challenge of widening attainment gaps between some groups of students, most notably Pupil Premium, and other students.

Our approach to building better learners, explained in this resource, is commonly applied in primary schools as a whole school strategy. However the whole school approach has proved to be trickier to achieve in secondary schools where teachers meet students much less frequently and for far less time.

The resource helps individual secondary teachers to:

• analyse their students’ current development of learning power behaviours;
• introduce their students to their learning dispositions and skills;
• amend their teaching to better cultivate students’ kill and strength in learning behaviours;
• monitor and evaluate how their practise is changing and how the growth in students’ learning behaviours…

is narrowing the achievement gap, avoiding students falling further behind and enabling their students to become lifelong learners.

The approach to learning advocated here comes from the vision of twenty-first century education and the new sciences of learning that underpin it. It starts from first principles; that we now know an individual’s ability isn’t fixed; that the brain is like a muscle; that its intelligence grows with exercise. Selling this idea to learners brings, in itself, far more enthusiasm for engaging with the potential delights of learning, helping students to become more independent, more reflective, and better able to plan and evaluate their own learning. This, as John Hattie’s research has shown, is a better way of boosting students’ attainment than more drilling in the subject-matter.

The great strength of this approach is that there is already a wealth of tried and tested strategies that teachers can introduce immediately to begin to transform the learning experience of their students, and give them a language with which to think about the process of learning. You can boost the development of students’ confidence, capacity and appetite for learning itself.

This resource offers teachers;

• the basic tools and techniques of an approach that aims to raise students’ awareness of how they can begin to take control of their learning behaviours.
• ways of looking at students’ behaviour in order to understand which approaches might be needed
• a way of estimating the students’ growth in learning behaviours and how to move forward.

Section structure…

Each section deals with a key aspect of understanding, introducing and testing the approach:

• • Section 1 Why learning power makes a difference...introduces you to the meaning and attributes of learning power
  • Section 2 Close up and personal with learning…invites you to look at students through the lens of learning behaviours and hints at the sort of change in practice you are aiming for
  • Section 3 Finding the gaps…offers serious considerations about gathering evidence concerning the gap in learning you are trying to narrow
  • Section 4 Changing expectations...offers practical ideas about how your practice is likely to have to change to start things off
  • Section 5 Starting with the key basics...offers suggestions for how to first introduce the approach to your students
  • Section 6 Catalogue of ideas for cultivating learning behaviours...offers practical suggestions for blending aspects of any of the 12 behaviours into your teaching
  • Section 7 What’s working: what next? encourages you to find out how what you are doing is working and how you might extend the approach.

All this may be worthwhile but no one said it would be easy…worthwhile things rarely are…and that’s why you need to keep your eye on your students’ ‘dispositional’ progress. Seeing their learning dispositions become more positive and then grow will be your reward.

In the early days of introducing learning power the typical progress of a teacher followed 3 stages (as shown opposite). We think this is worth sharing this with you in the hope that you will avoid this slow start and grasp the essential teaching ideas more rapidly.

• Stage 1 Starting out
  • Teachers would say (signal) which learning behaviour was to be used in a lesson, but would do no more
• Stage 2 Improving
  • Teachers would signal the behaviour to be used and have students reflect on the learning behaviour and link the learning behaviour to the content used in a lesson
• Stage 3 Nearly there
  • Teachers signal the behaviour to be used, link it to a suitable activity, the behaviour, rather than the content, directs the learning, and students reflect on its use.