The page below offers you an overview of the learning behaviours that comprise Building Learning Power and how these can help Wales realise the four purposes of Successful Futures. The text below the picture explores and extends these ideas.
A closer look at the Supple Learning Mind framework of high value learning behaviours.
The Supple Learning Mind framework, originally conceived and researched by Professor Guy Claxton, reveals learning as a complex process that isn’t just about thinking and having a good memory; it includes how we feel, how we think, how we learn with and from others and how we manage the process of learning. It gives the beginnings of a learning language that helps teachers think about how learning behaviours enable students to grow as learners and tackle the curriculum more profitably.
The Supple Learning Mind captures each of the domains of learning:
- The Emotional domain of learning….feeling… (leading to becoming a Resilient learner)
- The Cognitive domain of learning….thinking…. (leading to becoming a Resourceful learner)
- The Social domain of learning (leading to becoming a Reciprocal learner)
- The Strategic domain of learning (leading to becoming a Reflective learner)
What do we mean by growth in learning habits?
The whole point of everything described in the previous sections is to enable young people to become better learners, to grow a supple learning mind, to become a life-long learner. So the growth of learning habits is attended to closely. Successful growth or progression means not only that can pupils make use of reflection, or imagination, or managing their distraction, but that over time they make more and better use of these learning skills and tools and secure them as habits.
Learning powered classrooms are designed to promote three dimensions of progress:
- the frequency and strength of the habit – how often it is used spontaneously as the need arises
- the scope of its use – the range of contexts within which the skill is used (from the familiar to new uncharted territory)
- the skilfulness of the habit – how the behaviour becomes more subtle, more appropriate to circumstances, more sophisticated.
TLO have developed maps or progression ‘trajectories’ to help teachers enable the steps between, for example, the natural curiosity of a three year-old and the sophisticated skill-set of the consummate questioner. The trajectories allow teachers to identify, nudge and design activity to help pupils build progressively the fine grain learning behaviours of the effective learner.
It’s the Building bit of Building Learning Power. There would be little point in introducing such learning habits if we didn’t attend to growing them.
Questions you might want to ask yourself.
Something to think about . . .
- Does the Supple Learning Mind, with its four domains of learning and seventeen learning ‘capacities’, yield insight for you ?
- Of the four domains, which are your personal strengths and relative weaknesses ?
- Think about your students – which are their strengths and relative weaknesses ?
- Which of these seventeen capacities, if you could magically improve it, would make the biggest difference to your students ?
- What are you currently doing to improve this ? What more could you do ?
- Do you have a sense that students are becoming increasingly emotionally engaged, cognitively skilled, socially adept and strategically responsible as they move through your school ? How do you know ? How might you find out ?
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