Building Powerful Learners Unit 3

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

Unit 3 explores what getting better at learning looks like.

• What are the key aspects of progression in learning behaviours? (Essential Read about 1)
• How do the progression charts work? (Find out 1)
• How do groups of my students differ in that progression? (Find out 2)
• Where are my students strengths and weaknesses in four key behaviours? (Try out 1 to 4)

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

Building the powers to learn

The whole point of building better learners is to do just that, to build the learning behaviours, not just name them. The diagram alongside – Learning: Poles Apart – offers an outline view of this journey showing the reluctant learner on the left and the learning powered learner on the right. It’s a long but exciting journey from what can sometimes be negative behaviours on the left to rich, skilled and positive attitudes on the right. This journey covers students’ emotional learning habits, their cognitive/thinking habits, their social learning habits and their ability to manage the learning process itself.

There are three key facets to the progression of learning behaviours;

1. the frequency/how often the behaviour is being used (How much)
2. the range/scope of contexts in which it is used (Wheres)
3. the skilfulness with which it is employed. (How well)

Our understanding of what the journey might look like in practice has emerged and taken shape over the past seven years. The stages of the journey are ‘borrowed’ from Bloom’s taxonomy of the affective domain of learning. It is this scaling of the learning dispositions that will help you make sense of the journey as you track, and influence, your learners’ progress over time.

It’s useful to remember the essentials of building powerful learners include:

• recognising that learning is a learnable craft; you can get better at it.
• learning how to learn involves attitudes, values, interests and beliefs.
• developing better learners is done with and by learners rather than to learners;
• it involves cultivating dispositions and values rather than training skills;
• it is not an inevitable by-product of ‘traditional effective teaching’;
• it is about making students ready and willing as well as able to learn.

So now ask yourself…

• What sort of learning characteristics do my learners have?
• What sort of learning characteristics do my more successful learners have?
• Which characteristics or behaviours do my struggling learners have?
• Which learning behaviour contributes to the success of most of my learners?
• Which learning behaviour is used less than any of the others?
• How do the answers to these, and similar questions, apply to my teaching and the curriculum?

You as a learner

To get a better sense of the growth of these learning behaviours use the chart to think about yourself as a learner. Start slowly and think:

• where would I place myself on each of these 4 trajectories?
• do I understand the statements well enough to answer? Any I need to check?
• can I really say that the statement is secure? [By secure, we mean that these are behaviours that you exhibit in a range of different circumstances.]
• does it actually describe what I do most of the time, or does it describe something I can do but tend not to? (what I do do, rather than what I can do).
• have I ever thought about myself like this before?
• would my partner or colleagues see me in the same way?
• colour in your secure statements on the chart.

This has now become your Learning Behaviour Profile.

• Now ask...
  • which learning behaviour is particularly strong, or weak?
  • am I substantially lower or higher in some? Which?
  • are there any surprises or disappointments?
  • what questions is this raising for me?
  • where would I like to improve?
  • what may have shaped my current learning characteristics?
  • if I hadn’t used this chart how would I have described myself as a learner?

Your students as learners

Now turn your attention to some of the learners in your class just to get an idea of how useful such profiles can be.

Begin by identifying 4 students you wish to focus on. Choose 1 lower achieving boy, 1 higher achieving boy, 1 lower achieving girl, and 1 higher achieving girl.

Download and print 4 copies of the behaviour chart opposite.

Using your knowledge of these 4 students, colour in and create a learning profile for each student.

Now ask...

• • which learning behaviours are particularly strong or weak?
  • are the profiles of the girls different from the boys?
  • are the profiles of the higher attainers different from the profiles of the lower attainers?
  • what questions is this raising for me?
  • has this exercise changed or sharpened your understanding of these students as learners.

If this activity has piqued your interest and you want to find out more about your students as learners, have a go at the Extended Find Out that follows.

This activity has two purposes.

1. to introduce students to the idea of perseverance being a useful learning behaviour.
2. to inform yourself of your students’ current perseverance skills

Open up a conversation with your class about perseverance. You could stimulate the discussion by challenging them to have a go at the ‘Piggies in a field’ activity that you met in unit 1, or, for older students, by getting them to do some origami. [Downloads for both are opposite.]

Debrief the activity with questions like:

• How did you feel when you were doing the activity?
• Who wanted to give up?
• What made you give up?
• What sorts of things did you say to yourself?
• Did you find yourself saying ‘I’m no good at …’?
• What did it feel like to see some people doing it quickly?
• Who completed the challenge?
• What made you keep going?

Explore further with the group — what makes us give up, what helps us keep going?

Later, by yourself after the discussion, look at the perseverance progression chart and consider what you’ve discovered about your students’ current perseverance skills. Which skills are secure? Which ones in particular might need some attention?

Reflection Point: How can I design lessons and activities that will enable my students to persevere more frequently?

Introduce opportunities to ask questions

Here are a couple of examples of involving students in posing their own questions.

At the start of a learning unit on the Egyptians the class discuss what they want to find out and log this on a wall of questions. This gives students some ownership of this unit of work and consequently greater emotional involvement.

Here the class have a wonder wall where pupils can record their ‘wonders’, knowing that their teacher will find time to address their questions over time.

Make reflecting on collaboration part of everyday lessons

Here is a practical example of how you might develop the social climate of the classroom and make it collaboration friendly.

Learning mats are usually A4 laminated sheets that show various aspects of a learning habit. Keep them on desks/tables or as part of a wall display.

Students can refer to them during lessons as prompts about the finer aspects of collaborating and later for self-reflection on what they have used, whether it was successful and how to improve it.

Explore what it means to revise.

Invite the students to move around a big open space then stop and make the shape you call out.
When they have all made their shape, ask them to look around at each other and then have another go at making the same shape differently.

• Do this several times.
• Talk about thinking again and changing one’s first idea of how to do something.
• Over time get the children to start asking themselves whether they want/need to improve their first go at making the shape -so gaining a sense of an internal ‘good enough’ measure.

Extended Read about 1

 Progression in learning behaviours.

Teachers are familiar with the need to assess, record and report on curriculum progress and attainment. The world is full of levels, level descriptors, tests, diagnostics, examinations, point scores, value added measures, and the like – even in ‘life after levels’ !! But they all refer to the acquisition of the knowledge, skills and understandings defined in the National Curriculum. But what of the child’s progress as a learner ? Where are the comparable measures for identifying how the child is growing and developing as, for example, a curious, tenacious, flexible and sociable lifelong learner? Not, mercifully, in the National Curriculum!

Unit 3 Suggested meeting agenda

1. Decide what you want this meeting to achieve
2. Discuss what you have found out about a progression in learning habits, (15 mins)
3. Re-cap and reflect on the action you have each undertaken in your classrooms (20 mins)
4. Consider issues of progression that may have consequences across the school (10 mins)
5. Review how the meeting format went (5 mins)