The page below shows just a small selection of learning activities and talk that may help to promote Ambitious and Capable Learner behaviours. The text below the picture explains and expands these basic ideas.
Offer learners more choices
Every time you are able to offer learners a choice their engagement is likely to increase and learners set themselves a level of challenge that’s right for them. This doesn’t mean turning lock stock and barrel to child-initiated learning overnight. It is possible to start with small-scale choices, fitting within current practices.
Choices in what to learn.
- Which of this set of problems will you begin with?
- Where in this text will you start reading?
- Which story shall we read to the class at the end of the day?
- What questions do you want to address in this topic?
Choices in how to learn.
- Which reading place will you choose in the classroom?
- Will you present your account to others?
- How much shall we operate alone, in small groups, as a class?
- What activities will help us learn this the best?
How does the Visible Thinking Routine work?
What’s happening here? What makes you say that?
The first question in this routine is flexible: it is useful when looking at objects such as works of art or historical artefacts, but it can also be used to explore a poem, make scientific observations and hypotheses, or investigate more conceptual ideas (i.e., democracy).
The first question invites students to describe what they notice, see or know, but it is the supplementary question (What makes you say that ?) that requires them to build explanations. It promotes evidence-based reasoning and when the students share their interpretations it encourages them to understand alternatives and multiple perspectives.
There are, of course, many other ways of encouraging students to move beyond describing what they think and beginning to explain and justify their thinking. Try using prompts like:
- Can you give me a bit more ?
- Go on – convince me !
- because ?
- why ?
- Are you sure ?
- What about xxxxxxx (a counter argument) ?
- Is that fact, or opinion ?
Questions you might want to ask
Something to think about . . .
Look at the list of attributes (far right on page 3 of the card) that an Ambitious, Capable Learner is likely to display:
- To what extent are your learners like this list?
- Do you believe that your students are becoming more ambitious and capable as they move through your school?
- Does this happen by design, or by accident?
- Which one attribute, if you could magically develop and secure it in your students, would make the greatest difference?
- What do you currently do to help your students to be like this?
- What else might you do?
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