the other 3

*Jumbled up planning

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Can you put these jumbled aspects of planning into a sensible order? Could you use the outcomes to create a planning flowchart with your class to guide future planning?

Timetables . .

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Ask students to think of other things that need a timetable or plan. Start a display table and board of anything they suggest or collect. You could find some bus and train timetables, a plan of the school and playground or a dinner menu for the term or a recipe and so on.

*Structure an extended project

Give students a pack of cards that describe the 10 or so sections in an extended project based on the Driving Question: Where’s the safest place to live? Ask them to sequence the material to make clearest sense. Ask them to give each section a generic heading.

Challenge students to prepare the outline structure for a response to other Driving Questions, for example, ‘Is Planet Earth injury prone?’ ‘Where did the dinosaurs go?’ ‘Why don’t people stay at home?’ ‘Should we choose to end a human life?’ ‘Is the idea of God more trouble than it’s worth?’

Agree with the class the generic headings for an extended piece of work – display it as an aide-memoire in the future.

*Discuss planning

Design a planning sheet to use with students when you are planning an activity with them. You might include these and other headings:

• What are we trying to achieve? (agreed goal, outcome)
• How will we know we have been successful? (success criteria)
• What do we need to do? (actions, jobs)
• What will help us? (resources)
• What might be a problem? (traps, obstacles)
• What will we do about it? (What- if or contingency plans)
• Who will do what? (roles) [Simplify according to age range.]

Extend the language of planning

Collect words that tell you how people plan.

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Relate planning to well-known sayings …

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Hit the ground running.

Cross that bridge when you come to it.

*’What will it look like when it’s finished?’

Too often students start a task without giving thought to what it will look like when it has been completed, what a good one will look like. Some find it easier to plan ‘in reverse’ – working backwards from the finished article to where they are now to establish a sensible plan of action.

Make WWILLWIF the regular precursor to any action. Ask students to determine WWILLWIF for themselves in conjunction with others. Help them to visualise this in an appropriate form.

*Visible Thinking Routine

How long will it take ?

This routine helps students to anticipate what needs doing and how long it might take. It also encourages them to consider the sequencing of the activity. There are three questions:

• What needs to be done ?
• What order will you do it in ?
• How long do you think it might take ?

The natural place to use this routine is prior to embarking on a piece of extended work in order to slow the impulse to ‘get on with it’ and to encourage a more strategic approach.

The London Game

Your challenge is to plan a two-day visit to London for a group from the school.

Seven events are to be scheduled over two days, and two of the events are already fixed. Creating a plan is not too difficult, but then one of the venues has to close unexpectedly…

How will you need to revise your plan in light of this?

DIY Resource

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.

*Give revising a high profile

Display work in progress

• Collect and display work at different stages of development. Use arrows and notes to highlight the changes and their impact.
• Renew and refer to these frequently to encourage students to review and amend their work.
• Show that learning isn’t about perfection at the first attempt!

Give revising a special place

The Editor’s Desk

Create an area of the classroom which is dedicated to and celebrates the skills of reviewing and improving.

Set aside a table in the classroom, and equip it as if it were an office – writing equipment, computer, office chair etc.

This is called the ‘Editor’s Desk’, which is set aside for a student to use when they are in editing, drafting, redrafting, correcting or improving mode.

*Make monitoring checklists

Construct checklists with students itemising the important things to check before they consider something is finished. Here’s just  one example:

*Focus on monitoring: checking as you go along

Extend the language of Revising

Collect words that describe what a good reviser does. How else might we talk about Revising? 

Relate Revising to well known sayings

What do we mean when we say …

Change tack
Think on your feet
Fine tuning
Back to the drawing board
Keep an open mind

*Optical Illusions

Use Optical Illusions to remind students that once we have seen something from one perspective, it is hard to change our minds and see it / think about it differently.

*What do you see here?

Ready students’ minds for adjusting their point of view, changing their mind or revising their ideas.
The technique, illustrated here through the picture of a dog leaping over First World War trenches, can be applied to any image where there is some kind of unexpected juxtaposition of conflicting aspects within the same picture.
The purpose is to draw students into speculating about various parts of the image before revealing the full image. This will necessarily require them to revise and build on their first impressions. The underlying message is that new information often forces us to change our original understandings.

*Visible Thinking Routine

I used to think . . . . . Now I think.

This routine helps students to reflect on how and why their thinking/understanding is changing.

Remind students of the topic you have been working on. Ask them to respond to each of the sentence stems: I used to think…, Now, I think…

Alternatively ask students to write down their views at the beginning of a topic. Invite them to revisit & update their answer during and at the end in light of what has been learned.

Or, at the beginning of a lesson ask students to write down what they understand by a particular term that will be explored in the coming lesson (e.g. Phrase (English); Proof (Maths); Power (Science) etc). At the end of the lesson, ask them to write down what they now understand by the term.

Read more on the VTR website

*An activity that enhances content understanding by using the behaviour in question

Per-verse

Use this activity to demonstrate how opinions and hypotheses change and are revised as more information becomes available. Underline the importance of speculative thinking that is unlikely to be right first time.

Groups of three or four. One stanza of a poem to each group. DO NOT REVEAL THE POEM’s TITLE! Explain: The group has to make assumptions about what they are reading based on the limited information they have.

Ask groups to:

• Distil what they know so far, and
• List the questions to which they need answers.

Next, exchange stanzas with another group

• Does the new information answer any questions?
• Are there new questions to find out about?
• How do the verses fit together — which comes first?

Repeat the process about four times. Run a formative plenary: What do we know so far? Now issue all groups with the complete but cut up poem and ask students to work towards a sequence that makes sense.

Extend understanding of revising by exploring;

• How did opinions change as more information became available?
• Were group members willing and able to revise their views?
• How flexible was people’s thinking?
• What is the wider importance of keeping an open mind?

We have found Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath a useful poem to start with. Download it in cut up form here

*Find out what students know about themselves as learners

A learning fitness quiz

Use this quiz to get students thinking about the process of learning and how they are as learners.

Introduce learning through story

Our learning friend

The purpose of this story is to introduce thinking about learning. It doesn’t by any means introduce all the learning ‘muscles’ but it begins to focus thinking about how we learn and what it is that good learners do. It offers a way to introduce the idea that there are very particular things that we can learn how to do that will help us to become better learners.

Does your class need a ‘learning friend’?

Create opportunities for reflection

*Pay equal attention to what has been learned and how it has been learned in plenaries and review points. Encourage students to describe and discuss the learning behaviours they have been employing. Build in such moments for reflection whenever possible. 

You might use a Rating Wheel to capture their thinking – colour in the segments according to how much they feel they have used the learning behaviour.

Rating Wheel

Encourage pupils to see themselves as learners

Invite pupils to make themselves a ‘Things I have Learned in my Life’ scroll or book.

• Encourage them to get as much help as they can from friends and family in order to make the most comprehensive list they could.
• Give them time to share their lists with one another so that one idea inspires another until they feel their list is as complete as it can be.
• Each time they learn something new, in or out of school, they add it to their list.
• This can prove be a super weekly celebration to hear about, talk about and congratulate additions.

*Explore successful learning

Time to think … and share ideas

In a small group — Think of something that one of you is good at that the others would like to learn … could be a sport or a school subject, playing an instrument, playing a game, making a drawing.

Interview this person about what goes on in their head when they are practising the skill.

Try questions like;

• “ What have you tried that didn’t work? ”
• “ Can you describe what ‘better’ means? ”
• “ What goes on in your head when you are doing it? ”
• “ Do you talk to yourself whilst you are learning? – What do you say? ”
• “ How do you get better at this? ”
• “ What different ways do you try?”
• ” When is it best?”
• “What hinders your learning?”
• “What helps you to learn?”

*Linking ‘Learning Objectives’ and ‘Learning Behaviours’

Rather than telling students how they will need to be as learners to be successful, share your Learning Objectives / Success Criteria and invite them to discuss and agree the types of learning behaviours that they expect they will need to use in the upcoming lesson / activity.

Ask:

• Why did they choose those particular behaviours?
• Have they missed any key ones?
• How precisely will they use these key behaviours?
• How will they monitor the use?
• What are their Success Criteria for the use of these key behaviours?
• What are my own?

Visible Thinking Routine

*Establish reflecting as a classroom routine

• Begin each lesson with ‘Tell me Three … things we learned last lesson; ways we learned last lesson; things we still need to find out; things you hope to achieve today’.
• End each lesson with ‘Tell me Three … things we learned today; learning skills we used today; things we need to do next lesson; ways you could become a more effective learner’ etc.
• Ensure that pupils tell you three. Do not lapse into doing it for them!

Teacher talk to make it work

• Have we remembered the 3 most important things?
• What else do you want to find out about this?
• So, what are you trying to achieve next?
• What learning behaviours did you use in achieving that?
• Which behaviour was most successful/useful/redundant?
• Have you made a habit of that behaviour yet?

*How do you want / need to improve as a learner?

The question itself is deep and searching. It requires the student to have an accurate assessment of their existing learning strengths and weaknesses, and to have identified particular aspects on which they wish / need to work.

Supplementary questions along the lines of ‘what are you actually going to do to achieve that?’ forces the move from wishful thinking to action planning. Such questions, asked to students who understand their learning strengths and relative weaknesses, should elicit fluent responses. But for many, initially, you will need to be prepared to scaffold the conversation, to provide suggestions and to offer strategies that might be employed.

Teacher talk

• What about your perseverance levels? What do you find tricky there?
• What do you usually try to do to overcome that?
• What else might you try to do to overcome that?
• Who do you know who seems to be good at persevering?
• followed by 2 supplementary questions . . .
• What do they do that you don’t?
• What do you do that they don’t?
• What will you try to do differently in future?
• [The same sequence of questions could also be used for any other learning behaviour].