Personalising Learning in the Primary Classroom E-Book

Dr Elaine Wilmot

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Personalising learning is the hot topic on the government's education agenda. It is seen to be the way forward to get the very best out of every child and it forms the focus of this timely new book by Crown House Publishing. Personalising Learning in the Primary Classroom will: - Challenge the schools' thinking about how they teach; - Encourage schools to put the learner at the heart of the educational agenda; - Support primary schools in their work to meet this challenge; - Consider all aspects of learning and teaching in the primary school; and - Provide useful questions for the reader to consider their own working practices in the context of personalising learning. Personalising learning is seen as a powerful solution to reforming our current education system in order to meet individual learning needs and thereby raise standards. Where current thinking has personalising learning in the secondary sector, the author argues that for personalising learning to be successful, children must start making real choices about their learning from the earliest age and must be guided and coached through their primary years rather than being taught in the traditional way. She argues that the curriculum should be made to fit the child rather than the child being pushed through the 'sausage-factory' education systems as it currently stands. The book is packed with practical ideas that have been tried and tested in a real school and have proved popular with staff, parents and pupils (and Ofsted). It considers all aspects of learning and teaching in the primary school and provides useful questions for the reader to consider their own working practices in the context of personalising learning.

Leseprobe

Personalising Learning

in the Primary School

If you want to feel secure, do what you already know how to do. If you want to be a true professional and continue to grow … go to the cutting edge of your competence, which means a temporary loss of security. So whenever you don’t quite know what you’re doing, know that you are growing.

– MADELINE HUNTER

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Preface

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1 What is Personalising Learning?

CHAPTER 2 What Do We Already Know About Learning?

CHAPTER 3 Whole-School Systems

CHAPTER 4 The Foundation Stage

CHAPTER 5 Key Stage 1

CHAPTER 6 Key Stage 2

CHAPTER 7 Transfer to Secondary School

CHAPTER 8 Leading a Personalising Learning School

CHAPTER 9 Out-of-School Learning

CHAPTER 10 Troubleshooting

APPENDICES

A: Annual Work Cycle for Governing Body Tasks

B: Behaviour Policy

C: Evaluation Policy

D: External-Relations Policy

E: Finance and Resources Management Policy

F: Staff Induction Policy

G: INSET Policy

H: Performance Management Policy

I: Quality Charter

J: Staff Development Policy

K: Learning and Teaching Policy

L: Assessment Policy

M: Marking Strategies

N: Interview Questions

References

Index

Copyright

Preface

As I meet teachers and others who work in education, I am not amazed to find that many people working in schools today had a bad experience of our education system themselves. Many of them were unhappy at school and suffered at the hands of their teachers (either knowingly or unwittingly).

I went through my own school career being told, repeatedly, that I was not good at learning, so I didn’t put any effort into the process because what was the point? Consequently, I grew up with a poor self-image of myself as a learner. It was this that inspired me to become a teacher myself so that the children of the then future would not experience the same ‘failures’ that I had.

I have given this much thought in my adult working life and have come to the conclusion that I ‘failed’ at school because I was being pushed through a system that was not interested in my own individual learning needs. No one ever took the time to find out how I learned best and consider me as an individual with some strengths and abilities as well as the many areas I had that needed to be developed. Instead, teachers seemed to be able to see only my deficiencies and, because I could not easily commit things to memory and regurgitate them during exams, I was not deemed to be a success at school. What I needed was a system that would start with what I could do and encourage me to build on it, supporting my development as an independent and confident learner – a system of individualising or personalising learning (or PL).

What better way to influence what happens in classrooms and schools than to become a teacher, and eventually a headteacher? So that was what I did, spending thirty years working in schools, seventeen years as a headteacher in three very different schools, trying to ensure that all children got a better chance at being effective learners than I did.

I have spent much of my career in schools researching further this phenomenon of individualised or personalising learning and have come across many able children who were not seen as such until someone took the trouble to get to the core of them and began to understand the way they thought, felt and learned.

I have seen children and staff ‘blossom’ just by being celebrated for who they are and what they can offer, and they have often told me that they have surprised themselves by achieving what they have just because someone took the time to believe in them and the possibilities of what they could become.

This book will be a practical guide to introducing personalising learning into a primary school, drawing on my seventeen years’ experience as a headteacher and on a case study of my last school, where we decided to put PL at the centre of our agenda since the school opened in September 1998. The principle that guided all the work of the school was that the curriculum would be made to fit the child rather than the child being pushed through a prescribed curriculum.

I hope you will find it useful.

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks go to all those I have learned from throughout my career, particularly the many talented and selfless professionals with whom I have had the privilege to work but most particularly the children from whom I have learned so much.

I give special thanks to Bill for his patience, to Caroline for her wonderful cartoons and to Paul and Matthew who have provided undying love and support.

CHAPTER 1

What is Personalising Learning?

Perhaps it would be best to start by saying what personalised learning is not. It is not about abdicating, as teacher, the responsibility of planning and delivering learning activities and the assessment of your pupils. It is not about allowing pupils to do exactly what they want, when they want, how they want, if they want. It is not about a return to the ‘laissez-faire’ attitudes of the 1960s.

It is about focusing attention on what makes effective learning for every individual learner within your institution, at child (and adult) level and making provision accordingly. It is a shift in emphasis from examining the quality of teaching to looking at how we can provide quality learning. It is a shift in emphasis from curriculum content at the centre to the child’s development as a confident and competent learner at the centre of the learning process (this will entail looking at the development of the whole child and not just their cognitive development).

Traditional education in this country is built around a one-size-fits-all model. The curriculum is fixed and delivered in a particular style and the pupils are tested at the end of the system in order to grade their ability (or inability) at regurgitating facts and formulae. My model of PL shifts the starting block from the curriculum to the child and what they can do, and then builds upon their skills at learning and abilities to learn, supporting them in tailoring a curriculum to fit their developing needs.

Figure 1.1

Because what is learning for, anyway? Are we in the business of merely schooling our pupils so that they can ensure that we do well in the league tables? Or are we in the business of preparing them for their lives in a future that is shifting faster than we can keep up with? We need to be moving away from a curriculum based on subject knowledge to a skills-based curriculum, so that our children are prepared for all possible futures.

We should be making the learning fit the learner and not what seems to have been the shift in focus in the education system in the last fifteen years with the advent of the National Curriculum – making the learner fit the learning. As much as we want all our pupils to succeed as learners, we are in a situation in our current system whereby we are still producing too many who are seen as ‘failures’ because they are unable to access the curriculum for a myriad of reasons. Pupils are opting out because they see the current curriculum and ways of learning as irrelevant to them and their world.

We need our children to be successful as learners but we can’t do the learning for them. They must construct their own meaning through their interactions with their environment and other learners around them. We can guide and coach, mentor and support and provide a rich, stimulating environment in which learners can learn and provide an abundance of opportunities for learning, but we can’t learn for them. Therefore, we need to examine more closely how we can make learning more accessible to all of our learners.

For me personalising learning is about:

teachers, or other learning facilitators, knowing each of their learners as an individual;knowing each learner’s strengths and areas that need further development;sharing that knowledge with the learners, through constructive feedback so that they begin to understand themselves as learners and develop the language to describe their learning needs;working alongside the child, devolving some of the responsibility for their learning, increasing their independence, over the period of time that the child is in formal schooling;supporting children and encouraging them to develop the skills of lifelong learning;the teacher (or learning facilitator) really knowing her pupils, as individual people as well as individual learners because learning is about the whole child, not just their cognitive abilities;not being a ‘slave’ to a curriculum, of whomever’s design, but working with pupils to create a flexible learning path that will meet their changing needs as they develop; looking at systems within our schools to ensure that they provide the flexibility to ensure that we can meet individual needs;extending learning beyond the five-plus hours a day for 190 days per year spent in a school – it’s about 24/7 learning; andtrying to do our best for every single child and supporting them in being the best they can be; butmost of all it is about not tolerating failure for our children.

Our ultimate aim should be for learners to become responsible for managing their own learning and assessment; they should be able to describe themselves in terms of their learning attributes and should be forever seeking new opportunities to develop themselves as learners – learning from their mistakes and from working closely with others.

Knowing how to learn, understanding how to understand and learning how to learn are at the heart of the key skills for lifelong learning. It is not just about mastering a few study skills: it is more about developing a set of positive attitudes to learning.

Where has the notion of personalising learning come from?

The notion of personalising learning first appeared in the public arena in a party conference speech made by Prime Minister Tony Blair in autumn 2003. It was then developed in a speech by David Milliband, then a minister of state, at the National College for School Leadership in October 2003:

The goal is clear. It is what the prime minister described in his party conference speech as ‘personalised learning’: an education system where assessment, curriculum, teaching style, and out of hours provision are all designed to discover and nurture the unique talents of every single pupil … the most effective teaching depends on really knowing the needs, strengths and weaknesses of individual pupils.

Personalised learning is seen by the prime minister as part of the wider political context of the personalisation of all public services. It is supported by the advent of ‘Every Child Matters’ (DfES, 2003a) and ‘Excellence and Enjoyment’ (DfES, 2003b), where a focus on individual children is pushed to the fore in both documents. Personalisation is also at the heart of the new ‘Five-Year Strategy’ from the DfES (2004a) and in the White Paper (DfES, 2005).

The ‘New Relationship with Schools’ (DfES, 2004c) also supports and underpins these initiatives. The government is proposing a cluster of interlocking changes that will affect school inspection, schools’ relations with local and central government, schools’ self-evaluation and planning, data collection from schools and communication with schools.

But it is not only policy and the legislative framework that are being developed to support personalisation. We are also beginning to see that it is impacting in other areas that affect schools. For example, the National College for School Leadership is starting to develop resources to support personalised learning; the Schools for the Future initiative is looking at building design to accommodate these new ways of working; the National Remodelling Team are supporting schools in developing greater flexibility within the schools’ workforce, which will support personalised learning. The infrastructure is developing to support one of the biggest changes to our education system since the 1870s.

What do other people say about personalising learning?

The DfES (2004b) leaflet, ‘A National Conversation about Personalised Learning’, defines PL in terms of five principles:

for children and young people, clear learning pathways through the education system and the motivation to become independent, e-literate, fulfilled, lifelong learners;for schools, a professional ethos that accepts that every child comes to the classroom with a different knowledge base and skills set and that there should be the determination for every young person’s needs to be assessed and their talents developed through diverse teaching strategies;for school governors, promoting high standards of educational achievement and wellbeing for every pupil, ensuring that all aspects of organising and running the school work together to get the best for all pupils;for the DfES and local authorities, a responsibility to create the conditions in which teachers and schools have the flexibility and capability to personalise the learning experience of all their pupils; combined with a system of intelligent accountability so that central intervention is in inverse proportion to success; andfor the system as a whole, the shared goals of high quality and high equity.

The DfES leaflet then sets out the components of personalised learning as follows:

assessment for learning, and the use of evidence and dialogue to identify every pupil’s learning needs;effective teaching and learning strategies that develop the competence and confidence of every learner by actively engaging and stretching them;curriculum entitlement and choice that delivers breadth of study, personal relevance and flexible learning pathways through the system;school organisation, with school leaders and teachers thinking creatively about how to support high-quality teaching and learning; andstrong partnership beyond the school to drive forward progress in the classroom, to remove barriers to learning and to support pupil wellbeing.

Charles Leadbeater, a senior research associate with the independent think tank Demos and adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit, has been engaged in work with the DfES Innovations Unit, the National College for School Leadership and Demos on personalisation. He wrote a pamphlet for this group entitled ‘Learning about Personalisation: how can we put the learner at the heart of the education system?’. In it he talks about young people as having:

choice in what they learn;choice in how they learn; andchoice in how they are assessed.

He states that personalisation isn’t about doing anything radically different: it’s about doing what you’re supposed to be doing better. He encourages teachers and schools to think radically about what educational institutions could be like and to spread the capability to take action, by gathering evidence about what works.

David Hopkins, then the head of the DfES Standards and Effectiveness Unit, said we have the potential to bring about a major and dramatic shift in the education system.

It’s building schooling around the needs and aptitudes of individual pupils, shaping teaching around the way different youngsters learn. It’s also making sure that the talent of each pupil is supported and encouraged and about personalising the school experience to enable pupils to focus on their learning.

He reminds us that personalisation is not about shying away from the standards agenda. Indeed, he says it should have a standards focus. He defined personalised learning as:

defining teaching, curriculum and school organisation to address the needs of the individual pupil;a learning offer to all children that extends beyond the school context into the local community and beyond;an approach to teaching and learning that focuses on an individual’s potential and learning skills;a system that recognises and supports the needs of the whole child;a system that removes barriers to learning early on; anda system that is more accessible and open to customisation.

He says that the agenda is around action and experimentation.

David Hargreaves has been at the forefront of discussions and research about learning and how it can be made more efficient and effective for our learners in schools. His work has contributed much to our growing understanding of what personalised learning should look like. He says that personalising learning will:

reinforce some current practices in schools and classrooms;demand modifications to some current practices; andentail creating some new practices.

He considers PL in terms of nine interconnected gateways:

1 curriculum

2 advice and guidance

3 assessment for learning

4 learning how to learn

5 the new technologies

6 workforce development

7 mentoring

8 school design and organisation

9 student voice

He challenges schools to create networks of innovation, starting from the different gateways according to the needs and preferences of individual networks, but then to bring the outcomes of the different networks together to produce an overall, coherent version of personalisation as a well of resources from which everyone can draw.

Much of the current literature, particularly that from the DfES, talks about personalised learning as if it were something that can be done, finished and ticked off as completed, but I have deliberately used the phrase personalising learning, because I see the process as a never-ending journey of discovery about what works for each individual. There should never be an end to this journey, because we should always be learning for ourselves about how to improve, and there will always be the challenge of new learners at our school gates.

So what’s the solution to providing PL?

The bad news is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to PL. The very essence of it is that learning should be different for every learner. Learning shouldn’t be about squeezing children through the ‘sausage-factory’ curriculum so that they all come out the other end with a set level. It should reflect their needs, their wants, their dreams, their developing abilities and skills, and develop their talents and excite them with new interests.

If you want to develop PL within your primary school, this book will provide you with some checklists of questions to ask yourselves, some step-by-step guidance and frameworks that you can adapt to your needs. But it will not provide the answer to what PL will look like for your pupils in your school. That is for you to determine, in close collaboration with your staff, parents, governors and, most importantly, your pupils.

It is often said that there is nothing new in the world of education, and if you wait long enough trends will come round again. I believe that is the case for PL. Many of the ‘components’ considered in this book have been out there in the educational field and have been tried in many schools, by many teachers and are backed up by theory based on extensive research. There are no new magic techniques in this book: it is just a holistic approach that is based on years of trying to develop effective practice. The only secret about the successful implementation of personalising learning is to ensure that it is a whole-school approach to putting the learning needs of every individual child first, so that a solution can be found to empower learners to manage their own learning.

There are, of course, going to be implications for teachers, for how schools are led and managed, for how learning is organised and how assessment is conducted and so forth. There are lots of issues to be considered before you embark on PL in your school, but don’t let that put you off. You need to remember that there is probably much practice within your institution already that could be part of your solution to personalising learning.

So why bother?

There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals.

– BLANCHARD, 1994

Although Blanchard was writing about leadership, what he says also rings true about our current education system. Children enter the system bringing with them their own unique set of abilities. They all come from very different backgrounds and pre-school learning experiences, and yet we expect them to operate in a system that does not recognise and celebrate their individuality.

PL is a way of not only recognising that individuality but a way of celebrating it and encouraging children to use their individual skills and talents to improve what they can be. In our school, we found the benefits of working towards personalising learning were that:

the children were motivated to learn;incidents of bad behaviour were minimal because the children were operating in a system that they did not need to ‘kick’ against;the staff were motivated and gave 110 per cent;the parents were supportive of what was happening and became engaged in learning about learning themselves;the school developed a good reputation for caring for the individual and being inclusive;lots of other schools wanted to visit to look at what we did and how we managed it; andstandards were good (and improving).

So where do you begin?

Where you begin, of course, depends on where you are starting from! PL is going to be different in every institution that adopts it, because it needs to be tailor-made to fit the pupils and the community that you serve.

I hope that there are some ideas here that you will be able to trial, adapt as necessary to fit your needs and make your own practice. The key is to have a go and see what happens.

CHAPTER 2

What Do We Already Know About Learning?

The mind and brain

The mind or the brain is at the heart of all learning. When we talk to children about learning, we always remind them to switch their brains on, but actually we need them to engage their minds too. The mind is the bigger concept encompassing all of our personality. Psychology gives us many insights into its operation, as does educational research. From neuroscience we are finally beginning to see inside the brain and marvel at the electrical and chemical impulses that make it tick. But we are only just beginning to understand how mind and brain really work.

From psychology we are gaining new insights about the nature of intelligence, the importance of self-esteem and the ways in which different environments, and our emotional reaction to them, can affect us. A positive attitude and the power of the human will can make all the difference to learning (or not).

From neuroscience we are finding out more about the structure of the brain. Scientists have been able to see what is happening when we are undertaking various activities and have learned more about what occurs when we are under stress and begin to see what is going on when we remember (or forget) things. Whereas we once thought of the brain in terms of having two halves or three parts, we now realise that this is far too simplistic a view of this powerful learning organ, but it nevertheless provides us with some simple science to underpin our understanding of learning and what hinders and helps the process.

We know that the brain is divided into three parts: the reptilian brain, the limbic system and the neocortex. Each is responsible for different functions. The reptilian brain governs our most basic survival instincts; for example, our breathing, circulation and so on. The limbic system is responsible for processing emotions and dealing with the input from the senses and with our long-term memory (you can see why there is a strong connection between our emotions and long-term memory and why smell is such a powerful memory booster). The neocortex deals with our higher-order thinking and reasoning. All three parts of the brain work together to ensure prime function, but, if one or more of these parts is not satisfied by its stimulation through the environment, then learning opportunities and potential will be diminished.

It becomes obvious, then, why we need to consider our most basic needs in order to ensure that learning takes place. If we are, say, cold, tired, hungry or upset, then our brain is unable to engage its high-order functions of learning and thinking. We need to keep ourselves comfortable in terms of environment and emotional state to enable ourselves to be open to learning.

The brain can also be thought about in terms of its two hemispheres – left and right. We have known for a very long time that the left side controls the right-hand side of our bodies and vice versa. It is now thought that the left-hand side of the brain specialises in language, logic and number concepts, working in a very logical and sequential way. The right side specialises in nonverbal and intuitive thinking, dealing with imagination and intuition. The two hemispheres are joined together by the corpus callosum, which allows communication between the two sides. The most effective thinking and learning takes place when both sides of the brain are working together. This means that we need to consider activities to ensure that pupils stimulate both sides of the brain. For example, putting learning to music – singing times tables – combining numbers with rhyme and rhythm.

The environment

The environment has a huge impact on learning, in terms of the physical environment, but, more importantly, the emotional environment needs to be ‘right’ in order for learning to take place. Unless the relationship between learner and learning facilitator is characterised by trust and mutual respect, the learning process will be impacted upon in a negative way.

The learner must be physically comfortable in their environment for learning opportunities to be maximised – so the space for learning, the temperature, levels of lighting, availability of fresh air, seating arrangements, provision of drinking water and healthy snacks must all be considered. Physical discomfort can minimise learning.

Gender differences

We now know what educationalists have always suspected: that the brains of boys and girls are slightly different. The corpus callosum has been found to be thicker, therefore more effective, in female brains. This means that the male has a tendency to use only one hemisphere at any one time, making him focused and dogmatic. The male brain has a larger area for visual/spatial processing, making males much better at such things as construction activities, playing football and reading maps. The female brain has a much lower level of testosterone, making females more cooperative and compliant. The male brain has a lower level of serotonin, and this is associated with poor behavioural control and acting without thinking. It makes males greater risk takers. The female brain has a higher level of dopamine, enabling her to pay attention and maintain effort for longer periods than the male.

These are, of course, broad findings that highlight the stereotypes of male and female behaviour, and there is far more that is similar than is different. It can be dangerous to exaggerate and stereotype differences, and there will, of course, be a wide range of observable behaviours in both sexes. But these perceived gender differences provide some explanation for the differences seen in learning behaviours exhibited by boys and girls in classrooms and needs to be part of your observation of individual learners and your response in facilitating learning.

Learning cycles

Every single one of us is unique, and therefore we each have our own way of looking at, interacting with and learning from the world in which we live. There are many and varied learning-style profiles that are available, but by the very act of labelling a child with a particular learning-style profile you are undermining your quest for personalising learning. It is not about labelling a child: it is about knowing the child as an individual, supporting them in knowing themselves as a learner and providing a rich and varied learning environment to aid and support their learning.

Many neuroscientists agree that our performance as learners is dramatically influenced by our biological rhythms. These rhythms are regulated by the limbic system in our brains but are influenced by our genes, the solar and lunar cycles and other environmental factors.

We each have our own unique learning cycle: some of us are morning people, for instance, and others prefer to burn the midnight oil; some of us can concentrate for long periods of time, and others need to work in short, sharp bursts. It is no different for the children in our schools and we need to observe and discuss with the children the time when they feel they do their best learning.

We need to consider, when planning our learning activities, that we are providing opportunities for children to engage in the full range of learning activities at different times of the day so it is not all ‘work’ in the morning and all ‘play’ in the afternoon.

Learning to learn

If we think about learning in terms of the attitudes and skills needed to be an effective lifelong learner rather than the specific knowledge content of what we learn, then learning skills can be practised and developed over time. ‘Learning is learnable’ (Lucas, 2001).

Guy Claxton (1999) talked about the three Rs of learning: resilience, resourcefulness and reflectiveness. Bill Lucas (2001) took this work further and added another two Rs: remembering and responsiveness. If we want to help our pupils develop as effective lifelong learners, we need to be providing activities and learning experiences that will help them develop and strengthen these ‘learnacy’ (Claxton) skills.

1 Resilience

Resilience is about sticking at something when it becomes tough – having an inner determination to succeed. In order to be encouraged to develop resilience, children need to experience the thrill of success. Once that feeling is embedded in their brain, they will want to experience it again and again. Lucas (2001) talks about resilience in terms of four main areas:

how you persist;being an adventurer;dealing with difficulties; anddealing with confusion.

Children will need encouragement to develop all four of these areas. Very young children have very short concentration spans, usually, and they will need to be provided with an environment that stimulates and engages them if they are to be encouraged to develop their concentration for longer periods. Feedback from a learning facilitator on how long children have worked at an activity will enable them to see that they are developing this skill. Praise and encouragement will reinforce this and encourage them to stick at things for a longer period in the future.

Children are natural adventurers, riddled with curiosity about their world. We need to harness this and provide lots of opportunities for them to have adventures. This will mean not planning the learning activities too tightly.

How children deal with difficulties in their learning can provide a clear guide as to how successful they will be as a learner. If they stop at the first sign of a problem, then they will never experience success and will never be motivated to put themselves through the agony of failure again. If they learn how to have a go and try things out or where to go for support or help and are willing to get things wrong sometimes, then they will have a much more positive approach to learning and are more likely to succeed. So the learning facilitator will need to be ‘around’ to provide support when the going gets tough, but must never be tempted to complete the learning for the child. Maybe a prompt or question will be all that it takes to put them back on track. Maybe it will take some encouragement and support. Whatever it is, the learning facilitator will need to know when to spot that a child has become ‘stuck’ because of a difficulty – this can be done only through close observation, because, if you wait for the child to come to you or show frustration by leaving an activity, then it is too late. If you have more than one adult in a classroom, you could share the observation duties – one adult always being an observer of learners at work. They can then be asked to provide feedback on their observations during the plenary session.

Handling confusion is an important part of the learning journey. It is not a case of plotting your route and marching confidently from your starting point to your intended destination. The path is littered with all sorts of obstacles. Sometimes when we are learning, ‘stuff’ happens that we weren’t expecting. It is how we encourage young learners to handle this confusion that will support them in becoming effective and efficient lifelong learners. Sometimes, as learners, we just need time for the ‘penny to drop’, and knowing when to leave something and give ourselves time to think is a real lifelong-learning skill. Children will know that it is all right to leave something and come back to it later only if we make room for that to happen and model it for them sometimes. I am sure that we have all experienced the child who is forever out of their seat, sharpening their pencil, looking for a rubber, going to the toilet for the third time in ten minutes – maybe they just need some thinking time.

We need to recognise what happens when we are learning something new as adults, that it doesn’t always go smoothly and we will all have our own ways of finding our way through something – developing our resilience. If it is all right for adults to do this, then it should be all right for our children as learners to find their own way through too. As adults who are learning facilitators, we will need to be forever challenging our assumptions about the learning process and helping our children see that it is a complicated and messy business, but that they will get better at it with time and practice and lots of support.

2 Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is all about the learner developing their own approach to their learning – finding out what works best for them. It is about learning from and with others, about learning in different ways and being flexible as a learner. The resourceful learner will know how their brain and mind works; they will understand their own learning environment and how to maximise their efficiency as a learner within that environment. They will have a range of approaches to learning and will be able to communicate their learning in a variety of different ways and they will be able to use a range of learning tools, including ICT (information and communications technology), to great effect.

It will be our role as learning facilitators to encourage resourcefulness in the learners by having a well-resourced learning environment, with a wide range of learning tools available (and working). We will need to provide a wide range of open-ended learning activities so that the children can be flexible in how they meet the learning objective. Sometimes it will be about leaving the learning outcome open, so that the children can choose whether they write about it, dance about it, paint about it or make a poster about it; they can reflect their learning in a way that is meaningful to them. We will need to create opportunities for children to work together and learn from each other. I am not talking about administrative grouping of children for organisational purposes, but real group work that supports the children in developing the skills needed to work as effective members of a team.

3 Reflectiveness

One major criticism of our classrooms today is that they are always very busy places – in terms of content coverage and so forth. Children are always expected to provide an immediate response to an instruction to complete a task or provide an answer to a question. When do they get time to stop and think? If they are to become skilled learners, they need to develop reflectiveness. They need time to stop and think, look back over their learning, reflect on the processes they have experienced and consider which were effective for them and why. Do you provide thinking time for your learners?

You will need to consider your activities over a day/week/half-term period, to ensure that you are building in a balance of busy times and reflection times. We don’t always have to have hands-on learning, being constantly busy doing things; sometimes we need to make time for ‘brains-on’ learning, when we can do some deep thinking instead of doing.

4 Remembering

Memory is an important part of being an effective learner. Children can be helped to maximise their memory. They can be ‘taught’ simple techniques that will help them recall things more easily. Mnemonics, for example, can be used to great effect. Everyone will remember being taught ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Favour’ to aid our memory of the notes on the stave in music, or ‘Richard Of York Gained Battle In Vain’ to remember the colours of the rainbow. There are many examples of mnemonics that can be used, or why not get the children to make up their own?

Practise, repetition and review works to help improve memory. If this is done in short bursts and repeated several times it will be most effective. Using role play, drama, hot-seating and visualisation techniques can also be taught and used effectively to retain things in the memory. These techniques work because the children are actively involved in their learning and they often involve humour and other emotions that are proven to be a key factor to memory. When you think back to your own school days, what are the most powerful memories for you? For me, it was times when I was engaged in exciting activities such as the school play or on a visit to an exciting or different place. Or it was times when I experienced extreme emotion – being in trouble for not knowing my nine-times table and having to stand in front of the blackboard all day, where it was written, supposedly to help me remember it. (I didn’t actually learn my nine-times table until I was nineteen, at college, when a lecturer showed me that all the answers added up to nine and that the tens ascended while the units descended.) We need to use emotion (in a positive way) as an aid to memory.

Another way to support committing things to memory is to use the powerful technique of mind mapping or concept mapping. This is a simple skill that can be taught at an early age – we introduced it from Year 1 – and children can use it as an aid for planning, review and revision. A good guide to the use of mind maps as a learning tool is Mapwise (Caviglioli and Harris, 2000).

5 Responsiveness

Responsiveness is about how we react to change and manage our feelings about the process. To be an effective learner, it is essential that you can learn to do things differently and stay positive about your learning, particularly when things go wrong. This is a huge step for us to expect our primary-aged children to cope with, and it goes back again to the climate for learning that we create and maintain in our schools and classrooms. If, as adult learners, we can model a positive approach to change, to new learning and to new situations, and to making mistakes or getting things wrong, then it is more likely that our pupils will develop this positive outlook too.

In order to develop our children as lifelong learners, we should be helping them develop their ‘learnacy’ skills in the five Rs, so that they begin to understand how learning works for them.

Learning styles

Our learning style can be defined as the individual way in which we interact with our environment, how we take in information most easily and how we process that information. Our learning style is made up of cognitive, biological and psychological factors, including whether we like to work alone or with others; our preferred time of day for working; our requirements for food and drink; our preferences for our ideal working environment in terms of comfort, heat and light; our intelligence profile (in terms not of IQ but of the multiple-intelligences work of Dr Howard Gardner of Harvard University, of whom more shortly) and the way our brain works, which can be dependent on our gender. Theory tells us that learning is optimised when our learning style is catered for – but how do we begin to consider meeting individual learning styles when the permutations of the above factors are incalculable?

The answer is that as adults we are not responsible for meeting the individual learning styles of our pupils, but, rather, it is the learners’ responsibility to think about and make decisions about the way that they learn best and to optimise learning opportunities for themselves. The learners need to know themselves as learners and to develop strategies that work for them. Our responsibility as learning facilitators is to ensure that our children are given the time and opportunity to do this thinking and are provided with the background knowledge to support their decision making and the language to describe their learning needs to others.

Motivation

For most of us as adults, we would be motivated by something that we have an interest in, something that sparks our imagination or curiosity and where learning it would make an impact on us, in terms of either our ability to impress others with our skills or knowledge, or whether the skill or knowledge had obvious future uses. Shouldn’t we be offering learning experiences for our pupils that would stimulate the same levels of motivation and engagement?

Memory and recall

This ties in very closely with remembering in the five-Rs section earlier. Jenson in Brain-Based Learning (2000) shows how memories are formed. He says that:

we think, feel, move and experience life (sensory stimulation).all experiences are registered in the brain.they are prioritised by value, meaning and usefulness by brain structures and processes.many individual neurons are activated.neurons transmit information to other neurons via electrical and chemical reactions; and these connections are strengthened by repetition, rest and emotions; lasting memories are formed.

Techniques can then be used to improve memory and recall:

use storytelling and visualisations in your direct teaching;encourage pupils to look for patterns and connections with prior learning;make it memorable – use humour or emotion to help children remember;use acrostics and other mnemonic techniques;use large, colourful learning posters that the children have helped to create;present learning in short bursts (we remember beginnings and endings of presentations and lose bits from the middle, so, if you break learning into smaller, bite-sized chunks, you create more beginnings and endings);review learning frequently;use mind maps; andprovide time for thinking and reflecting.

Multiple intelligences

Over the twentieth century there was a widespread view that our ability to learn depended on how ‘intelligent’ we are. IQ was thought to be a fixed limit on an individual’s capacity to learn. Indeed, this was the basis of selection by the eleven-plus examination – only those clever enough could go to grammar school and continue to be effective learners. Thinking about children in terms of how intelligent they are can be a dangerous mindset for teachers to have, as we all know the theories around teacher expectation and self-fulfilling prophecies.

This theory was overthrown by Howard Gardner of Harvard, who developed a theory of multiple intelligences, comprising at least seven types of intelligence, which were not fixed but were capable of development and expansion. The theory of multiple intelligences shows us, as teachers, that intelligence can be expandable and is much more inclusive. Gardner wanted us to stop asking the question, ‘How intelligent is this child?’ and start asking the question, ‘How is this child intelligent?’. Gardner’s (1984) original seven intelligences were:

linguistic intelligence: relating to language and expression through words written or spoken;logical-mathematical intelligence: relating to mathematical and scientific approaches, manipulation of numbers and abstract symbols, logical structured approach to problem solving;visual-spatial intelligence: relating to visualisation and manipulation of images, construction of models, understanding of spatial relationships;bodily kinaesthetic intelligence: relating to movement and use of the body in a controlled way;musical intelligence: relating to a sensitivity to music, sound and rhythm;interpersonal intelligence: relating to a sensitivity towards other people, understanding and predicting their responses, and communicating well; andintrapersonal intelligence: relating to a sense of self and awareness of own feelings, strengths and areas for development.

He then went on to add an eighth: naturalistic intelligence, relating to the natural world, to awareness of patterns and meaning in nature, to taking a keen interest in your environment.

‘Each of us has all of them,’ said Gardner, ‘but in different measure and combined in different ways.’