Growing your Teaching – A route map for learning champions

Growing your Teaching – A route map for learning champions

A bridge to the next stage of your journey as a lead practitioner of learning power

At this stage, the school has explored the online resource ‘Playing the Learning Power Game’, and you have acted as Learning Champion, supporting your colleagues to access the materials. The school is now moving on to ‘Playing the Deeper Learning Power Game’ to deepen and broaden understanding, and you will no doubt want to continue to act as Learning Champion. You have chosen to build on your experience as champion to become accredited as a ‘Lead Practitioner of Learning Power’?

This module entitled ‘Growing your Teaching’ uses many of the same materials as ‘Playing the Deeper Learning Game’, but in a quite different way. Whereas the Deeper Game focuses on broadening and deepening student learning behaviours, ‘Growing your Teaching’ is all about you, as a Learning Champion, honing your skills and how you might grow into a beacon of learning power excellence.

Through engaging with ‘Growing your Teaching’, you will develop a deep understanding of classroom culture, how it grows, and the anticipated outcomes for learners. It helps you to build systematically a learning-focused classroom culture and have your efforts accredited.

The accreditation route is that you will build a portfolio of evidence relating to your teaching behaviours and classroom culture; one of your senior leaders will verify that the minimum standards have been met; and The Learning Organisation (the owners of Building Learning Power and authors of these modules) will accredit you as a ‘Lead Practitioner of Learning Power’. [Guidance relating to minimum standards and what a portfolio might look like is in section 6 of this module].

It has three very practical aims:

1. To help you grow your practice in a deliberate and measured way, across every aspect of the Teachers’ Palette. It draws on the effective practice we have observed over almost 20 years of BLP practice in schools and these descriptions have been ordered to offer a growth pattern – from traditional good teaching to the highly effective practice of the seasoned learning power practitioner. These witnessed growth pathways are something we hope you will debate, share, try out, add to or tweak, as you work to develop your practice.
2. To help you find a way through and select from a massive range of classroom based ideas. In support of phase 2 of your journey, Playing the Deeper Learning Game, there are detailed online modules to help you activate and build many more learning dispositions. This resource nudges you to find appropriate activities for both yourself and your students.
3. To support you as you to seek to become accredited as a ‘Lead Practitioner of Learning Power’. Unlike the Deeper Game, it invites, rather than requires, a professional learning team approach, and can if necessary be accessed by individual learning champions.

‘Growing Your Teaching’ has six sections:

• Section 1 explores the big picture of teachers’ behaviour and talk that strengthen students’ power to learn over time.
• Sections 2,3,4 and 5 home in on developing your practice across the four aspects of creating learning-friendly classrooms:
  • Relating for Learning; gradual steps you might take in devolving more responsibility to learners
  • Talking for Learning; gradual changes you might use to influence how learning is understood
  • Constructing Learning; how you might gradually shift your design of learning to enable independence
  • Celebrating Learning; how you might transform the look and feel of the classroom to encourage the growth of students’ learning habits
• Section 6 establishes the criteria for becoming a Lead Practitioner of Learning Power; describes how you might build a portfolio of evidence; and offers guidance on the accreditation process. [If you are interested in becoming a Lead Practitioner, it might be worth having a quick read of section 6 before delving into sections 1 to 5.]

Each section first offers you just a few teaching ideas, some of which you may have tried already, and goes on to steer you towards other ideas and activities from across the range of Deeper Learning Game modules, helping you to move your classroom culture forward and sharpen your own practice.