This course picks up on your discoveries about your students’ learning behaviours (using the learning charts in Finding Learning Power). Following this course enables you, as a teacher, to fashion your classroom culture and teaching methodology to ensure students become better learners and grow a wide range of powerful learning habits.
1. This online course in a nutshell
The Big Picture of Playing the Learning Power Game.
This chart shows the big ambition of the course and distils what it’s all about.
- the yellow boxes capture what leaders, teachers and learners will need to do in:
- recognising the role of learning behaviours;
- beginning to shift classroom cultures to strengthen 4 key learning behaviours;
- beginning to shift how the curriculum is delivered in order to build 4 key learning behaviours;
- beginning to expand the number of learning behaviours consciously being used by students;
- the blue boxes capture the outcomes such changes could make to classrooms cultures and curriculum delivery.
- the green boxes capture the anticipated outcomes for leaders, teachers and learners.
Read more about the big picture at your leisure
The vertical and horizontal axes of the grid
The vertical axis to the left shows the 4 main aims or thrusts of the course. These four components involve:
- The formative work of finding out about your students’ learning behaviours. You may have already done this using the module Finding Learning Power;
- The practical work of shifting classroom culture to better accommodate learning behaviours, using 4 foundational behaviours to get you started;
- The practical work of purposefully blending the use of learning behaviours into lesson design, again focusing on just four foundational behaviours;
- The blended work of gradually adding more of the original charted learning behaviours into the mix.
The horizontal axis across the top shows the 3 main groups of players in the game and what they will need to do to make it all work.
The central 12 cells
These cells serve 2 purposes. Firstly:
- The text in each cell gives an indication of who needs to do what, in very broad terms, at each stage of this journey;
- When looked at vertically down the page, they map out the 4 stages of the first part of the learning power journey;
- When looked at horizontally across the page, they show the players in the game and how what they do needs to interact.
The cells to the bottom and to the right
The green cells across the bottom give an outline of how the school’s players will have developed by the time you have finished this first stage course. The blue cells to the far right give an indication of the anticipated outcomes for each part of the journey from; discovering students learning behaviours, to shifts in classroom cultures to support their growth, to early shifts in lesson design accommodating learning behaviours, to the beginning of using a much broader range of learning behaviours across the curriculum.
2. How the online course is designed
Section structure…
Each section deals with a key aspect of understanding learning power and has:
- an introduction to what it is about … followed by some suggestions about how to ‘navigate’ the content;
- part 1 aims to give you an idea of the sort of practice you are aiming for;
- part 2 highlights the main ideas of the section’s content;
- part 3 offers a few practical ideas to start things off;
- part 4 offers a couple of tools to help you evaluate what you have read;
- part 5 offers an agenda for a Professional Learning Team meeting.
Find out more about the content of each section of the online course
The content of each section of the course
Section 1 Two starting points for building better learners
The three subsections of this section draw together previous learning, helping you to link your analyses of your students’ learning power with a teaching framework to help students grow their learning power.
Here you will find:
- a brief exploration of your research into your students’ dispositional learning powers
- an introduction to a classroom culture framework that builds learning behaviours;
- descriptions of 12 learning powers and how they grow. (as section 2 in the Finding Learning Power resource).
Section 2 Shifting the culture of classroom relationships
Important shifts in classroom roles
Here you will find:
- examples of the sort of responsibilities teachers might devolve to learners;
- examples of different ways to be as a teacher;
- modelling the process of learning;
- acting as a coach; asking not telling;
- enabling greater learner responsibility;
- examples of things to try out with your learners to enhance perseverance, questioning, collaboration and revising;
- suggestions of ways to plan to expand devolving responsibility to students.
Section 3 Shifting the culture of talking about learning
How and when to talk about learning.
Here you will find:
- examples of how learners can talk about themselves as learners;
- examples of different ways to talk about learning;
- nudging the process;
- offering feedback;
- encouraging reflective self-talk;
- examples of things to try out with your learners to enhance perseverance, questioning, collaborating and revising;
- suggestions of ways to plan to expand your learning language.
Section 4 Shifting the culture of celebrating learning
What’s seen as important in learning friendly classrooms.
Here you will find:
- examples of how learners can celebrate their learning;
- examples of different ways to celebrate learning;
- in the growth of learning behaviours;
- in re-defining failure;
- in displays in the classroom;
- encouragement to try things out with your learners;
- suggestions of ways to plan to expand what you celebrate about learning.
Section 5 Shifting the design learning powered lessons
How to begin to put dual-focused lessons together.
Here you will find:
- examples of how teachers manage learning in their lessons;
- a format to assist in planning dual-focused lessons;
- activities to help start this journey;
- examples of things to try out with your learners to enhance the foundational four learning behaviours;
- suggestions of ways to plan to expand your lesson design.
Section 6 A closer look at students’ learning
Extending your thinking on progression in learning.
Here you’ll find:
- explanations of three aspects of progression – frequency, scope and skilfulness in use;
- deeper guidance on interpreting the phases of growth for;
- perseverance
- questioning
- collaboration
- revising
- encouragement to consider the impact of shifts in culture on students
- an opportunity to reassess your class learning profiles
Section 7 Broadening the range of learning behaviours: a catalogue of ideas
An opportunity to spread your wings and begin to work across all 12 of the learning behaviours.
Here you will find;
A rich catalogue of teaching ideas:
- for each of the 12 learning behaviour progression tables
- each classified into the specific phases of growth where they may be most useful
- and shorthand diagrams that summarise how this all plays out in classroom cultures.
The contents of this section offers enough material to start working across many more learning behaviours and makes this easier to focus more precisely on the phase on development. It helps you work ‘between the lines’
We would suggest you spend 2 or 3 months exploring this catalogue.
Section 8 Impacts on cultures and learners
Here you will find:
- a reflection tool to help you consider how your classroom culture has developed and how your students have responded;
- a reflection tool to help you to consider how your students’ learning behaviours may have changed;
- a reflection tool inviting you to evaluate the impact of the changes you have made on progress and attainment.
Section 9 Where now: where next?
Here you will find:
- explorations of ways forward;
- descriptions of the next phase of online courses to support teachers’ journey to becoming a skilled learning power practitioner.
3. How the wider blended learning programme works
A Professional Learning Team is your support mechanism in the blended learning cycle. We hope that time for PLTs has been built into the rhythm of the school’s meeting cycle, and offer you a safe, supportive space to discuss and explore the craft of the classroom. We hope too that PLTs will encourage you to learn with and from your colleagues – to become, in John Hattie’s words, ‘learners of their own teaching’.
Classroom Based Enquiries are the third aspect of the blended learning programme. Sometimes known as Action Research, classroom based enquiries involve changing aspects of your practice in order to develop student learning behaviours. Enquiries are likely to involve you in making small changes, monitoring the impact of those changes, and sharing these outcomes at the next team meeting for professional discussion. Most schools tend to blend these 3 aspects into a 4-week cycle.
3a. Talk, support and plan with colleagues
Professional Learning Teams; small groups of teachers who meet together regularly (usually monthly) to deepen their understanding of learning and how, by developing their classroom practice, they can make the learning process more visible and relevant to students.
- discussing and unpacking the online information;
- planning how to make use of it in their classrooms;
- questioning and probing their classroom experiments.
The delicate, hard work of changing practice requires a safe professional environment in which to explore and understand classroom triumphs and tribulations. The short guidelines (see download) are designed to be help a team set a collaborative, working climate to support the conversion of information and ideas in the online materials into “lived” practices in classrooms. The format of a meeting agenda below is based on research into teacher learning communities by Dylan Wiliam, of Assessment for Learning (AfL) fame.
Learning Team meeting agenda. A resource to help structure PLT meeting
Session agenda
- Agreeing objectives and agenda (5 mins)
- Considering working practices (15 mins)
- Re-capping the on-line materials (15 mins)
- Personal Action Planning (20 mins)
- Evaluating the meeting process (5 mins)
1. Session objectives: What do we want to achieve? (5 mins)
- Feel confident about working as a team
- Feel able to apply the on-line materials in the classroom
- Decide the strategic cultural issues that everyone needs to apply in their classroom
- Plan some do-able shifts in classroom practice
2. Consider the working practices of the team (15 mins)
- Purposes of the group
- Format of the sessions
- Ground rules for working
- Expectations of outcomes
- See What-Why-How of PLT notes above for ideas
3. Recapping on-line materials: What did the content make us think? (15 mins)
Thoughts about:
- what we thought about the online content
- where do most classrooms operate in relation to this?
- which of the four learning behaviours need most assistance? (perseverance, questioning, collaborating, revising)
- things that are in place, things that need attention now/soon, things that will take longer to establish.
- ideas you picked up from the content that you could use immediately.
4. Personal action planning: What am I going to do? (20 mins)
While we haven’t highlighted any specific ideas to try in this section the material will have triggered some…’what if I tried’.. thoughts.
Think of;
- how you want to strengthen your classroom culture to encourage students to become more learning friendly?
- What you are going to do to bring this about?
- Develop an enquiry question.
You’ll gain more value from a plan by creating it around a question. Why a question? Because this is an enquiry, you want to find out if something will change (student behaviour) when you change something specific. Think of it like this:
If I do XXXX will it improve/develop/enhance YYYY?
This is the crunch question – the moment of truth. Students are unlikely to change unless your behaviour changes! Visualise how you want your students to be and then think about what you might do, or say, or model, or celebrate, or whatever…. differently to bring about this change in students. Developing an enquiry question – .pdf
The learning enquiry plan is a record of what you intend to do. It takes your enquiry question from what to how. The format below may help you think through the planning process. You can fill in your Personal Action Plan using the word document version.
Remember:
- you can adapt the activities/ideas that you chose to ensure they meet the needs of your students;
- make the plan specifically focus on development;
- concentrate on no more than three actions;.
- decide how to map your actions over the next three or four weeks;
- It’s useful to think about what you are going to do less of to make room for the changes.
DEVELOPING-AN-ENQUIRY-QUESTION-CULTURE.PDF.
PERSONAL-ACTION-PLAN-CULTURE.PDF
For the monitoring bits of your plan you might want to look out for:
- an improvement in how students engage with learning
- improvement in behaviour
- showing less stress or worry about learning generally
- increased focus when working with other students
- reduced reliance on teacher support
5. Evaluate team session: How did we do as a team? (5 mins)
- Did we achieve our objectives?
- Are we comfortable with what we are trying to achieve?
- Any concerns at this point?
- Next meeting date and time.
3b. Classroom based enquiries
4. Why a learning power ‘game’?
Why? you might wonder, have we titled this course Playing the Learning Power Game?
Games can be used as a metaphor for learning anything and you tend to get better at anything if you treat it as a game. This programme is about learning to play the familiar game of learning but with an additional ingredient which you discovered in Finding Learning Power; that of your students’ learning dispositions or powers. This subtle addition changes the game of education to one of building learning character at the same time as building knowledge. So the programme explores certain guidelines and conventions that help to frame learning in ways that allow positive learning dispositions to flourish…how you might set up the game, get to grips with some new rules and tactics and learn to appreciate how you score it’s all important new endgame…that of the self-managed learner.
As with any game, it helps if you’re enabled to play the whole game from the start. If you were learning to play Scrabble you wouldn’t get far if all you were given to learn were lists of three, four and five letter words. Far better to start straight away by playing ‘Junior Scrabble’, so you get the feel for the whole game, and then build up your sophistication as you play.
So you might look on the programme you’re about to follow as the junior game of learning power. It has all the elements you will need to introduce the values and activities of building your students’ learning power. This junior game lays the foundation for greater sophistication in further programmes.
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