Building Learning Power

Students who know how they learn are more confident in class:
✅ They learn faster and learn better,
✅ Concentrate for longer,
✅ Think more deeply and find learning more enjoyable,
✅ Do better in their tests and exams,
✅ Plus they are easier and more satisfying to teach!
Building Learning Power is about helping young people to become better learners. Discover more...https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/

Building Learning Power is about helping young people to become better learners. Learn more...
https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/

3️⃣ BIG ideas to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage 'flow' learning ✨

Read more https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2021/05/big-ideas-that-influence-flow-across-the-curriculum-flow-3

1️⃣ Making flow experiences possible

We might sometimes wonder if there’s any point in developing self-directed learners with the characteristics described by flow. It’s fair to say that relatively few learners leave our schools with strong flow characteristics, and yet we also know that even in the performance pressure of current times students who plan their learning, reflect on their learning and understand themselves as learners (i.e. meta-cognitive 🧠 and self-regulating learners, if you want the fancy titles) achieve significantly better results. Moreover, in the long-term, if young people are to make the most of themselves in this fast-changing world, their competence as a learner will be vital.

Early childhood experiences 👶 are important factors in determining whether a person will or will not easily experience flow ✨.

🤔 Positive parental influences on children include:

✔️ clarity – about what is expected

✔️ centring – showing an interest in what the child is doing in the present for itself (not, for example, whether this will ensure a university place later in life.)

✔️ choice – where children feel they have a variety of possibilities

✔️ commitment (trusting children) – allowing children to become unconsciously involved in whatever interests them

✔️ challenge – providing increasingly complex opportunities for action.

In other words children who know what they can and can’t do, who don’t have to constantly argue about rules and control, who aren’t worried about parental expectations for future success, who are free to develop interests in activities that will expand them, will find it easier to experience flow and happiness.

In classrooms that translates into promoting learning where pupils are given more opportunities to:

✅ make choices – of activities, within activities, when activities are completed

✅ make their own goals

✅ be involved in planning how they proceed

✅ review their experience

✅ offer commentary on their own learning

✅ evaluate the end product

✅ be motivated by internal incentives.

2️⃣ Offering learners opportunities to lead their own learning
Early years practitioners have long viewed learning as a blend of adult-led learning and child-initiated learning. Sometimes called ‘learning through play’, child-initiated learning enables children to plan and select their own activities, and adults participate rather than lead them. Although this works well for early years, it rarely survives into Key Stage 1 and beyond. The sheer amount of content to be learned and performed firmly pushes learning towards teacher controlled.

🤔 A bright spot ...
Hallbankgate Village Primary School in Cumbria has long organised itself so that all students throughout KS1 and KS2 experience child-initiated learning on a weekly basis. Teachers work with their students from Monday to Thursday. On Fridays, teachers have the day to plan and prepare for the following week, while students engage in child-initiated learning, supported by senior leaders and TAs. On Fridays, students can pursue any area of their own interest (so long as the Head approves!).

Three Year 5 lads, for example, decided they wanted to try to break the world record for launching a rocket 🚀 using water power. Equipment was planned for and gathered in advance. They had spent several sessions working this out in advance. Plastic bottles were water filled under pressure; problems in connecting hoses to bottles were discovered and resolved; some bottles were launched skyward; others exploded 💥 under the pressure; all children were regularly soaked.

A pointless bit of water play, or 10 year old students being scientists rather than being taught about science? They learned masses.

You may not ready to go as far as this school in enabling your students to take the reins of their own learning but you could try working towards enquiry or project based learning. But that’s a whole tricky topic in itself and we’ll touch on it again in the final flow blog next week

3️⃣ Distinguishing Performance from Learning

Performance is not learning, though it may develop from learning. Politicians and policy makers have reduced the goal of schools and colleges to measurable outcomes of knowledge of a limited sort and which offer a very narrow view of the aims of education.

The distinction between learning and performance is crucial if we want to move forward and secure our students as ‘flow’ learners✨. Evidence suggests that a focus solely on performance can depress performance: learners end up with negative ideas about their competence, they seek help less and use fewer strategies. Furthermore, the evidence shows that if you focus on learning, performance can be enhanced.

‘How to get better at the things you care about’
Set aside some quality time to watch this 11 minute TED Talk by Eduardo Briceno ‘How to get better at the things you care about’.
https://youtu.be/YKACzIrog24

Try spending time in your own learning zone, and temporarily abandon your own performance zone.

As you listen, consider particularly how you might “create low stakes islands in otherwise high stakes seas” in your own classroom.

🤔 Distilling the key ideas ...
In the Performance Zone, students seek to demonstrate what they can do; to focus on what they have already mastered; to eliminate or minimise errors; to get it right; to ‘do their best’; to execute flawlessly in the present.

In contrast, the Learning Zone is almost the polar opposite: students seek to explore what they cannot yet do; to focus on what they have yet to master; to learn from the mistakes they make; to do it even better; to ‘do their best’ to improve; to practise and learn how to execute even better in the future.

The focus in the former is on Proving what you can do now. In the latter, it is about Improving what you can do in the future.

🤔 Ask yourself:

❓What is the balance between Proving and Improving in my own classroom?

❓Which zone do my students believe they are predominantly operating in? How might I find out?

❓Would it be helpful to explore, together with my students, these 2 zones and the differences between them?

❓How can I make visible to learners which zone I expect them to be in?

❓How can I make it safer to fail, to ‘create low stakes islands in otherwise high stakes seas’?

❓Might my students benefit from watching this? What would I hope that they might learn?

Big ideas that influence flow across the curriculum [Flow #3] | Building Learning Power Big ideas that influence flow across the curriculum [Flow #3] How do we turn our classrooms into flow enabling learning cultures? The classroom culture depicted in our last blog showed a selection of features that begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage flow. This flow cl...

Helping students to experience a state of flow involves creating a culture in your classrooms that consistently offers opportunities for them to;
✳️ Find their element and create their own goals
✳️ Take time to develop how to become absorbed
✳️ Take up engaging activities
✳️ Recognise when they have been absorbed
‘Culture’ concerns the details of the micro-climate that you create in your classrooms. What you do and say, what you notice and commend and what you don’t, what type of activities you offer and how much learners are encouraged to do things for themselves. The micro-climate of a classroom can inadvertently stifle, or specifically enhance, the very behaviours you are seeking to promote.

🤔 How does your classroom culture help students to experience flow?
Here is a distillation of features that might begin to shape the emotional climate of your classroom to encourage flow.

Take a look at the diagram and consider how far you already use any of these features, and which others you fancy trying.

🤔 What do you think?
✳️ What are your first reactions?
✳️ Is this a realistic picture of a classroom?
✳️ Which aspects would be most challenging to put into practice?
✳️ Which one idea intrigues you most?

Make a note of:
✏️ Aspects of the diagram that are already a feature of your classroom culture
✏️ Aspects of the diagram that you fancy having a go at
✏️ Intriguing features in the diagram that you want to find out more about

Achieving flow / absorption requires some complex capabilities which were discovered and explored across a broad field of study. While becoming absorbed is seen as natural in early childhood it can easily be squashed by home or school cultures.

Achieving a flow-friendly culture in today’s education system can be problematic. Teachers often have to walk a tightrope between the traditional idea that ‘learning means being taught stuff’ and the more complex view of learning as ‘individual sense making’. Shifting from the first to the second view is never easy but it is what ‘being in flow’ requires.

Being able to achieve a state of flow is one of the most valuable outcomes a school can pass on to its students. In the next blog we’ll explore three big ideas that influence flow across the curriculum.
Read more... 🔗

A classroom culture for absorption [Flow #2] | Building Learning Power A classroom culture for absorption [Flow #2] In our first flow blog we looked at the meaning of flow and the research behind it, and suggested you look out for those behaviours that might help pupils achieve flow. This week we concentrate on flow-friendly cultures. Helping students to experience a s...

🤔 How do we bring the magic back into ✨ Learning?✨

Friends in schools are telling us that many children returning after lockdown, while delighted to be back, are finding it harder to settle down, to pay attention, to keep going or to simply ‘be there’.

So we thought we might devote a few blogs to the learning-friendly habit of Absorption — to explore what it is, how it happens and, importantly, what we all might do to help pupils bring the magic back into their learning...

Read more...

How do we bring the magic back into learning? [Flow #1] | Building Learning Power How do we bring the magic back into learning? [Flow #1] Friends in schools are telling us that many children returning after lockdown, while delighted to be back, are finding it harder to settle down, to pay attention, to keep going or to simply ‘be there’. So we thought we might devote a few bl...

Coming back to school 👩‍🎓 after the most difficult lockdown yet, many children – however glad 😁 they will be at seeing their friends again – will have become disconnected from their former patterns of learning. 🥱

Even the keenest are likely to have lost their edge of concentration; others, perhaps many, will be feeling adrift and maybe unwilling to learn. Signs of stress such as anxiety, recklessness, depression, self-doubt, are likely to show themselves and learning for many will have become a challenge – their Resilience a casualty of lockdown.

We know from research that Resilience is the foundation of emotional tolerance and that without resilience, in one form or another, learning is impossible. The continuing engagement which learning requires can be dangerous. When a child chooses not to learn, it’s because they don’t feel safe enough, or, they think they don’t have the skills , or, there isn’t enough time, or, they might have to give up something else, which they would rather not, or, it simply doesn’t matter enough. You can’t just explain this disinclination as ‘lazy’ or ‘unmotivated’ – there’s far more to this subtle psychological process than that. A child’s urge to withdraw and protect themselves becomes strong and it’s in these sorts of circumstances that emotions arise and students react in different ways.

Getting a handle on self-regulation

It’s useful, in the interests of emotional self management (self-regulation), for teachers and learners to be able to spot and understand when they move from learning mode to protection mode.

For example in protection mode learners may;

✳️ Face down the threat

One response to distress in the classroom you might see is regression. Students may just give up any attempt to learn and just say ‘ I can’t do that. You do it for me’ expecting that you will just tell them or do it for them in the end. In these circumstances the learner is getting other people to offer them comfort and fight their battles for them.

✳️ Not try

Other children may just stop trying and withdraw their effort in order to save face and ensure they fail. In this case they feel if they don’t really try they can’t be labelled ‘stupid’ when they fail. A quick way to counter this is to describe the tasks as ‘very difficult’ so giving pupils a ready made explanation for their possible failure hence their self esteem isn’t threatened and they are free to try as hard as they like.

✳️ Become unnoticeable

There are some children that may not display the signs of distress or apprehension but will flee in a different way by becoming unnoticeable. They are sometimes described as the ‘invisible children’ – those who manage to go through school without attracting anyone’s attention; the ones whose names you may forget, are a group who are never disruptive or difficult. The invisible children will have just as many difficulties to overcome but because they have learned how to hide will require a teacher’s keen observation skills to find them and gently address their problems.

Whereas learning mode often takes place close to where challenge can/may tip into threat.

✳️ Finding a tipping point

It’s important that learners understand the power and value of emotions in the context of learning and develop ways of weighing up the risks accurately so they engage with the ones that are safe enough and worthwhile enough, and avoid those that are genuinely dangerous. As learners gain understanding they will develop an increasing ability to tolerate and manage these inevitable feelings of learning.

✳️ But what’s the ultimate learning experience?

Being absorbed or in a state of flow is when learners;
✅ become immersed and engrossed in what they are doing
✅ are often unaware of the passing of time
✅ find learning satisfying and rewarding
✅ relish the feeling of being stretched in their learning
✅ gain a sense of accomplishment

This state of flow is achieved when there’s a good match between the learner’s motivation, their learning behaviours and the demands of the task, so that it leaves no room left over to feel self conscious or even concerned about success or failure. Flow is accompanied by a feeling of total concentration, and even excitement and can occur in any activity when (1) optimal interest, (2) skill and (3) the intrinsic challenge of the activity itself meet.

Where learning becomes an imposition, as will have happened in some home learning situations, it squashes the excitement of mastering new skills. By providing a culture that allows students to replicate the self propelling features of learning found in early childhood, even if it’s only for a couple of weeks at the end of lock-down, it will help strengthen or re-secure your students’ habits of becoming absorbed.

To achieve positive in flow experiences allow, and enable, learners to:

✅ make choices – of activities, within activities, when activities are completed;
✅ make their own goals
✅ be involved in planning how they proceed
✅ control their attention, noticing and listening carefully
✅ review their experience
✅ offer commentary on their learning
✅ evaluate the end product
✅ be motivated by internal incentives.

Spot the features of being absorbed in your learners
Have a quick think about ‘absorbed learners you may know’. Make a note of students you know who display these characteristics.

Developing students’ learning power involves developing a keen awareness of the subtleties of your students’ learning behaviours.

Staying intelligently engaged with learning challenges that matter to you, despite difficulties and setbacks, is perhaps the most important quality of a good learner. Life at present is consumed with extreme and unforeseen difficulties but it’s the ability to bounce back that is crucial.

To give every school a helping hand we have pulled together the best of what we know from schools’ approaches to building resilience and developed an online resource to help every teacher in any primary school ( you don’t need to be a ‘BLP school’ to benefit from this resource) to re-energise, re-engage and re-establish students’ resilience as they begin their long journey back to school life.

Find out more about rebuilding your students emotional capacity for learning…

Learn more 🔗

Re-energising Your Learners’ Resilience | Building Learning Power Re-energising Your Learners’ Resilience A post-lockdown repair kit After what we hope will be the final lockdown many children will have become disconnected from their former patterns of learning. Even the keenest are likely to have lost their edge of concentration while others will be feeling adr...

Picking up on the idea of students’ reactions to lockdown and how some have found them much more difficult than others….

I talked recently with an ex-colleague who works in a large, successful comprehensive school in the Midlands, and mused that students might fall into 6 broad ‘sustaining learning’ categories. During the lockdowns, some students:

1️⃣ Enthusiastically threw themselves into their studies, and continue to do so, maybe even independently initiating new learning of their own in addition to the school’s offer. These students do everything asked of them with enthusiasm, and at the same time teach themselves Latin / chess / the oboe;

2️⃣ Were initially enthusiastic, but interest and commitment waned after a while. These students were initially 1’s, but were unable to sustain it over the extended lockdown periods;

3️⃣ Engaged with the learning that the school offered but only because their parents insisted. These students appear to have kept up with work on offer, but need parental support, encouragement, bribery, cajoling. They may have been similarly needy and dependent / compliant prior to lockdown;

4️⃣ Initially engaged but subsequently became disengaged. Initially 3’s, these students became increasingly disengaged as the lockdowns wore on, unable to sustain engagement as the distance from formal schooling widened;

5️⃣ Did not begin to engage with the work on offer. These students have effectively enjoyed an extended holiday, maybe because they don’t, for whatever reason, see the relevance of learning to their lives.

6️⃣ There is, of course, a sixth group, defined not by their engagement levels, but by their inability to engage due to ICT connectivity issues. How they would have responded, given adequate ICT access from the outset, is unknown. There is every reason to think that they would have behaved much as their peers in groups 1 to 5 above. But we can be sure that, whatever their engagement levels might have been, they are now some considerable way adrift of where they would have been without the enforced absence from school.

My ex-colleague’s response was interesting. She recognised students in all six of these categories, and thought that the majority of her learners fell somewhere in the middle, with around 20% in categories 1 and 2. We went on to explore the difficulties of re-engaging each ‘category’ of learner, and concluded:

Students in category 1 would remain committed and engaged with their studies. Students in category 2, although they’ve become a bit disengaged, their initial commitment will carry the day making these students relatively easy to re-engage.

🤔 What proportion of your students do you estimate fall into these 2 categories?

🤔 And how could you maintain the enthusiasm and commitment of these learners during a period of catch-up – which some may not actually need?

But what of categories 3, 4 and 5? In all categories, students show a lack of enthusiasm and commitment. Those that do engage do so as an act of compliance, and students in category 5 will not even do that. Students in category 6 are simply an unknown quantity whose enforced dislocation from learning is more likely to have harmed rather than enhanced their enthusiasm for learning.

🤔 How easily do you think it will be to re-energise these students when schools fully re-open?

🤔 What would be the point of offering disengaged students any type of catch-up before re-engaging them with their learning?

And even if it were possible to coerce these students to re-engage, how could schools help those students, subsequently, to move from compliance to commitment? For it is only then that a catch-up programme might prove worthwhile.

What do committed learners do?

What is it that those committed learners in categories 1 and 2 do that compliant learners don’t do? What skills do committed learners have that compliant learner’s lack?

How about… committed, engaged learners:

✅ are able to approach their (school) learning independently; knowing when it’s appropriate to learn on their own or, via Zoom calls, with others;

✅ see school learning goals as their own goals and are therefore more likely to pursue those goals with tenacity;

✅ recognise and reduce distractions; knowing when to walk away and refresh themselves and how to create their own best environment for learning;

✅ are brave about not knowing something and have strategies not only to overcome being stuck or making mistakes but to learn from them;

✅ are excited by the prospect of triumphing over challenge by recognising risk and planning to avoid obstacles.

✅ have the wherewithal to overcome difficulties; keeping going in the face of difficulties; channelling the energy of frustration productively; knowing what a slow and uncertain process learning often is.

✅ know themselves as a learner — how they learn best; how to think and talk about the learning process. They are self-regulated learners.

Without attending to these aspects of learning on returning to school, the very students most in need of catch-up may continue to lack the inclination, skills and attitudes necessary to access it.
Let’s promote a focus on learners becoming ‘learning fit’ rather than level loss or ‘catching up’, with a clear determination on coaching students to become better learners rather than focusing exclusively on level attainment or recovering lost ground.

Find out more about rebuilding your students emotional capacity for learning…

https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/re-energising-your-learners-resilience-2/ 🔗

Is catching up catching on?

In June last year, the Welsh Government published some wise guidance about returning to school after the first lockdown. The emphasis was on the need to focus on students’ health and well-being and getting them ready for learning, and cautions against any attempt at ‘catch up’:

“Focus should be on learners becoming ‘learning fit’ rather than level loss or ‘catching up’ on activity: Learning should have a clear focus on preparing learners to learning strength gain and support their progression and next steps, rather than focusing on level attainment or perceptions they need to ‘catch-up’.” [p9]

https://gov.wales/keep-education-safe-guidance-learning-over-summer-term

Yet in England, the Government has recently announced the appointment of Sir Kevan Collins to ‘develop a long-term plan for helping pupils to make up for lost learning’ and to help children ‘make up their learning over the course of this parliament’. Catch-up funding of £1bn has been announced, including subsidies for tutoring services.

Already Sir Kevan has been dubbed the ‘education catch-up tsar’, and given his background at the Education Endowment Foundation, he will be well aware of how high-impact, low-cost strategies such as metacognitive approaches and self-regulation are proven to underpin effective learning.

Yes, there is some talk of well-being and the difficulties of re-engaging learners, but there is little doubt that the tide is turning towards attempts to recover lost ground, particularly in the core subjects, maybe even at the expense of time spent studying subjects that are considered ‘less important’. Mostly this is well-intentioned and designed to narrow the gap between those who were inclined to engage with their studies during lockdown, and those who were less so inclined.

The Government is reportedly considering 5 possible ways children could make up for lost time:
1) Summer schools – although research shows that the target group – the most disadvantaged – is the group least likely to participate, and that staffing it with teachers may prove problematic.

2) Weekly tutoring sessions – but the evidence is that the benefits of tutoring done online, not by professionals, is currently unclear and thin.

3) Repeating the school year – is almost certainly impractical and, moreover, the evidence is that pupils who repeat a year make less progress than those who do not.

4) Extending school days – as proposed by the chair of the Education Select Committee, to be staffed by ‘civil society instead of teachers’. Outsourcing learning catch-up to ‘civil society’? – we do indeed live in interesting times!

5) Increased wellbeing support – is at least in the right ball-park, but appears to focus almost exclusively on emotional wellbeing. Nothing wrong with attending to children’s mental health, but what about their cognitive and metacognitive health and their inclination to re-engage with schooling in a purposeful manner? To help learners to be ‘learning fit’, in the words of the Welsh Government?

What do we think will win the day – Sir Kevan’s understanding of what works in schools, or a combination of poorly thought through, expensive and potentially ineffective strategies that may, at first sight, have greater political appeal?

So – schools could wait for ‘civil society’ to intervene on their behalf [!], or begin to think about how they can best re-engage learners. In getting students ‘learning fit’, schools might find it useful to give some thought to why some learners have found engagement during lockdown really difficult, or have engaged but with reluctance.

Find out more about rebuilding your students emotional capacity for learning…

https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/re-energising-your-learners-resilience-2/

We’ll take a closer look at some of these concerns shortly.

Learning friendly classrooms where learners… were learners do more of the thinking. Find out more about Reasoning as a learning skill that students can get better at.
https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2020/03/learning-friendly-classrooms-where-learners-were-learners-do-more-of-the-thinking/

Learning friendly classrooms where learners … ask insightful questions.
Read more about what questioning skills are in learning. https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2020/03/learning-friendly-classrooms-where-learners-ask-insightful-questions/

What is good planning?
Read more:
https://www.buildinglearningpower.com/2020/02/what-is-good-planning/