Building Powerful Learners Unit 1

Welcome to Building Powerful Learners. This eight unit online programme will enable you as a teacher to:

• explore how learners might become not just better learners but effective lifelong learners;
• engage your learners consciously with the ideas and processes of their own learning.

The programme combines three types of action that will help you to experiment with, analyse and understand how to become skilled in developing your students’ learning power.

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 1 explores the “what” of learning itself.

• What are the key groups of learning behaviours? (see Read about 1)
• What am I like as a learner? (see Find out 1)
• What are my students like as learners? (see Find out 2)
• What might I do to introduce students to their learning behaviours? (see Try outs 1 to 5)
• What could use I check how my experiments are going? (see Find out 3)

Structuring and using the ideas below with your students over the next month is your first step in becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.

The idea of learning power has been described as the raw ‘building blocks’ of learning; not abilities, not styles, but the actual components of learning itself; the raw energy of learning. Through a systematic programme of research over several years, and with the co-operation of thousands of research participants, researchers at Bristol University turned this ‘learning power’ inside-out until finally it was broken down into the four domains of learning and seventeen identifiable learning capacities; key psychological characteristics that were and are judged to be of the highest value in helping students to learn and thrive in a complex world. These learning capacities are inherent in us all, not fixed at birth, or when we leave school: they can be developed by everyone regardless of ‘ability’, social background, or age. There are no limits to extending our learning power.

The headlines of these ideas are shown in the supple learning mind diagram opposite.

Learn more in the Read about below.

Schools today need to be educating not just for exam results but for lifelong learning. To thrive in the twenty-first century, it is not enough to leave school with a clutch of examination certificates. Students need to have learnt how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self-disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.

‘Students throughout the world need now to reach higher levels of achievement, not only to find fulfilling work but also to empower themselves to thrive in an increasingly complex world’
– Dylan Wiliam

• Employment requires being able to enhance and transfer knowledge and to operate collaboratively
• The capacity to learn and adapt needs to be lifelong because change is a permanent state, and the pace of change is moving ever more rapidly.

The core purpose of education is to prepare young people for life after school; to get them ready, as Art Costa, an American educator with similar views, says, ‘not just for a life of tests, but for the tests of life’. This means helping them build up the mental, emotional, and social resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexity. If you strip away political dogma, the evidence is overwhelming that this aim is not currently being achieved for very many students. Of course, this has to be done in a way that also develops literacy and numeracy, and gets young people the best test results possible. Fundamentally this is what Building Powerful Learners is all about.

Which learning behaviours are you using?

Challenge: There are nine little pigs in a field. By drawing two squares, can you give each pig its own pen? 5 minutes to complete.

Analyse your approach: Take a few minutes to consider the learning behaviours that you brought to bear on this problem, even though you probably did so unconsciously . . . .

Did you….

• Become absorbed in the problem?
• Pay attention to detail?
• Manage any distractions?
• Keep going, even if you found it tricky?

• Ask yourself questions (maybe in your head)?
• Think about other similar problems you might have seen?
• Use your imagination?
• Think about the problem methodically?
• Use any particular resources or strategies?

• Decide in advance how you might go about solving the challenge?
• Have to change your approach because your first idea was not working?
• Think about what you learned from doing this short activity?
• Reflect on how you were learning while doing the activity

These questions reflect the essence of the learning behaviours, minus the social behaviour group, identified in the Supple Learning Mind Framework.

The purpose of this tool  is to encourage you to get to know your students as learners. It aims to raise your awareness of if or even how well your students use valuable groups of learning behaviours. It’s a seemingly simple activity but it can prove quite taxing and you’ll need to know your class fairly well. Try to think of your students as learners rather than just performers.

About the design of the tool.

• The tool’s four sections correspond to:
  • the emotional aspect of learning (feelings) pink;
  • the cognitive aspects (thinking) yellow;
  • the social aspects (working together) green;
  • the strategic aspects (managing) blue.
• Note that ALL the statements are positive. They describe GOOD learning behaviours

Using the tool

• Think about students in your class and note down the name of the first student that comes to mind for each statement. But don’t use the same child for all the statements.
• Think about what evidence you might have to support your judgement.
• Now turn each statement into a negative.
• Again, note down the names of students that come to mind for that negative statement.

Analysing results

• Which aspect of learning was the most difficult to fill in? i.e. emotional, cognitive, social, strategic?
• Was it easier to place students in the positive or negative statements?
• Is there a gender imbalance in the students you have named?
• Are the named students mostly high or low attainers, or do they represent a range of attainment?
• What have you discovered about your students as learners?
• Anything new? Surprising? Concerning?
• Broadly, which aspect of learning (emotional, cognitive, social, strategic) feels the strongest or weakest in your class?
• Issues raised here will help steer your thoughts about the current strengths and weaknesses of your students as learners.

Underlying this approach is a recognition that learning how to learn involves more than skills, it involves students’ attitudes, values, interests and beliefs as well. It’s about helping students to help themselves to be disposed to persist, to question and be curious, to collaborate harmoniously and to be open to new ideas.

Explore with your class what is it that good learners do.

‘What do good learners do?’ has been an interesting question for teachers and students over many years. The worry is that we’ve always had surprisingly different answers from teachers on the one hand and students on the other. Worrying because the messages teachers convey to students seem to be very different to their real beliefs.

The pictures alongside record a sample of responses we’ve seen over the years.

• from students who think good learners…finish quickly, get it right, get prizes and praise.
• from teachers who think good learners…work well with others, ask lots of questions, are independent.

Take time to ask your own students what they think good learners do.

• Organise students into groups of 4 or 5
• Give each group and yourself nine Post-its
• Ask students to think about what they think good learners do and write each idea onto one Post-it.
• Explain that you will do the same
• When groups have nine ideas they should arrange them into a diamond 9 pattern with the one they think most important at the top.

Consider the results together.

What’s the difference between 2 diamond nines? Like it or not, as a teacher you are in the habit forming business. Students ideas will be formed from teacher actions and responses.

• Take feedback on their ideas
• Pose questions about how the two diamonds differ
• Explore why students have these ideas and
• Why are they different from yours
• Broaden students ideas about learning

Try it again in 6 months

As a way of testing out how things are going try repeating this exercise in say 6 months or the end of the year.

• What would you like or expect your answers to be?
• What would you like or expect your students’ answers to be?
• Which three of your students’ current answers would you like to change most?

To support emotional aspects of learning

Make students aware of perseverance

Develop ‘stuck prompts’ together.

• Work with students to find useful questions to ask themselves and helpful strategies to use when they get stuck.
• Ensure that there are plenty of options that come higher on the list than “Ask the teacher”.
• Create stuck prompts as reminders around the classroom.
• Or a special Stuck Table with plenty of resources.
• Or Stuck Walls with multiple displays of Stuck Posters.
• Or a Stuck-of-the-week’ display.

All these are, in effect, low-risk, low-investment levers 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. It’s about making being stuck acceptable, normal and interesting.

To support cognitive aspects of learning

Make students aware of questioning

Engage with a ‘mystery’ object in a bag

Invite students to ask questions to find out what the mystery object is.

• Vary the complexity according to the age and experience of the class. Use clues to narrow down the possibilities for younger children e.g. it’s something you’d find in the garden. Young children will tend to want to ‘guess’. They will need encouragement to ask questions before offering solutions.
• Ask talk partners to come up with two ‘I wonder’ questions e.g.” I wonder what it’s made of?”
• Set a limit, say 10/15/20 questions allowing the children to guess before showing the object.
• Key is to focus on the questions, to acknowledge and reward good questions.
• At the end compile a list of some of the useful/unusual/interesting questions that were asked.

What you are doing here is encouraging students to find things out for themselves and to be interested in the answer as much as the question. You are raising their awareness of the role and power of questioning giving them help to ask a ‘good’ question (i.e. a generative question, one that will get them somewhere)

To support the social aspects of learning

Make students aware of collaboration

Work out Rights and Responsibilities

Work in pairs or small groups to suggest a charter of matching rights and responsibilities or ground rules for collaboration. If everyone has a right to have their voice heard, everyone also has a responsibility to listen attentively to others. If everyone has a right to take part, everyone also has a responsibility to include others. If everyone has a right to experience different group roles, everyone has a responsibility to be flexible in the roles they play.

What you are trying to do here is make students aware of social conventions and advantages of working/learning with others. Such rights and responsibilities are necessary in any class in any age group since they declare ‘how we want to be around here’. It’s a good idea to include the social skills needed, sharing ideas, working out what needs doing, playing their part and even thinking about how they have contributed to the team.

To support the strategic aspects of learning.

Make students aware of the process of learning

Work vs Learning

Teachers have traditionally talked much more about ‘work’ than they have about ‘learning’. One study carried out in London schools compared the frequency of use of these two words, and found that ‘work’ was used 98% of the time, and ‘learning’ only 2%.

Research has found that when classroom activity is called learning or ‘play’ groups find the activity more pleasurable than when it’s referred to as ‘work’. Students also become much more locked on to it, their minds wander much less, they are more imaginative, and they learn more from the activity.

Now there is nothing wrong with the word ‘work’ but it doesn’t invite you to get interested in the activity itself. You will be pleasantly surprised at the effect on your students if you talk less about ‘work’ and more about the process of learning itself.

It’s the start of a journey whereby learning is seen as a journey with an internal dialogue needing delicate encouragement. In Visible Learning, John Hattie says: “The more students are thinking about how they can make their own learning more and more effective, the better they do.”

Over the last few weeks you have been working to broaden your students’ awareness of learning and what good learners do. This is no easy task but even at this early stage it’s worth finding out more about how they are learning and wondering about possible stumbling blocks.

Over the next few weeks use the Find out 3 wheel every now and again to get a feel for the sort of learning behaviours students are being given a chance to use and whether they are indeed taking that opportunity naturally.

About the design of the tool

• The wheel is divided into the four aspects of learning:
  • emotional or feeling behaviours of learning… (red)
  • cognitive or thinking behaviours of learning…(green)
  • social or relating behaviours of learning… (yellow)
  • strategic or managing behaviours of learning… (blue)
• Each statement ‘wedge’ has four ‘levels’ of engagement/activity shown by the gradually deepening tones of colour.

Using the tool

• Copy and date several copies and use a new copy for each observation over the next few weeks.
• Make observations across the major aspects of your curriculum
  • Maths. English, Science. Humanities. PE.
• Observe for several minutes and;
  • Colour in the ‘strength’ of the learning behaviours are being used.
  • NB. Some or all of the behaviours may not be being used at all.

Analysing results

• Which single learning behaviour appears to be being used most often across all your observations?
• Which behaviour appears to have fewest opportunities for use?
• Which of the 4 ‘colours’ Emotions, Thinking, Relating, Managing appear more often? across these observations?

Two big questions

• Is the way the curriculum is structured/defined providing enough opportunities for students to use this broad range of learning behaviours? i.e. do the tasks/activities actually require, or unknowingly ensure, that students use the behaviours? Are they bound to use them?
• Are the students sufficiently aware of themselves as learners to be able to take advantage of such opportunities?

In other words is it the curriculum delivery that needs freeing up or are the opportunities there but the students are unaware of the ‘how’ of learning?

Learning together. Meeting 1

Guidelines to enable you to:

• Agree a meeting structure and ground rules for this and any following Learning Together meetings;
• Discuss your responses to your reading of Unit 1;
• Discuss your findings and reactions from working with suggestions in Unit 1;
• Plan further action.

Although time is short in schools, coming together after individually working through each Unit will serve to deepen individual experiences and secure a robust whole school approach.