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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In Powering Up Students: The Learning Power Approach to high school teaching, Guy Claxton and Graham Powell detail the small tweaks to daily practice that will help high school teachers boost their students' learning dispositions and attitudes. Foreword by John Hattie. The Learning Power Approach (LPA) is a pedagogical formula which aims to develop all students as confident and capable learners ready, willing, and able to choose, design, research, pursue, troubleshoot, and evaluate learning for themselves, alone and with others, in school and out. This approach therefore empowers teachers to complement their delivery of content, knowledge, and skills with the nurturing of positive habits of mind that will better prepare students to flourish in later life. Building upon the foundations carefully laid in The Learning Power Approach (ISBN 9781785832451), the first book in the Learning Power series, Guy Claxton and Graham Powell's Powering Up Students embeds the ideas of this influential method in the context of the high school. It offers a thorough explanation of how the LPA's design principles apply to this level of education and, by presenting a wide range of practical strategies and classroom examples, illustrates how they can be put into action with different age groups and in different curricular areas especially relating to literacy and numeracy, but also in specific subjects such as science, history, geography, and design technology. All teachers can foster the capacity of students to be, for example, curious, attentive, imaginative, rational, and reflective and Guy and Graham provide clear guidance on how this can be achieved. Step by step, they explore all aspects of pedagogy: from how to make learning compelling and challenging, to how best to make use of the environment for learning; from how to coach students so that they become more independent and responsible directors of their own learning, to subtle shifts in teacher language and behaviour that change the climate for learning. Rooted in the authors' knowledge of international research about how students can and should learn in schools, this practical guide is suitable for both newly qualified and experienced teachers of students aged 11 to 18. It will also appeal to those school principals, educationalists, and administrators who are committed to improving both students' achievement and their preparedness for the world of learning beyond school.
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Praise for Powering Up Students
The Learning Power Approach (LPA) is a very useful and realistic theory about teaching. It is a pedagogical approach with a worthy aim that puts language about learning at the forefront, focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses, helps us to conceptualise progress in students’ learning, and explains how to work towards developing independent, responsible learners.
Powering Up Students links together LPA theory, real examples from high school classrooms, and useful discussion around the implementation of the approach. It will empower high school teachers to make changes in their classroom practice and help them to enhance students’ ownership of their own learning.
Hjordis Thorgeirsdottir, sociology teacher, Sund Upper Secondary School
In Powering Up Students Claxton and Powell articulate much-needed clarity about what really matters when educating high school students in the 21st century. Their argument contrasts valuably with a discourse on schooling which tends to be overly focused on shallow and reductive outcomes for young people. Instead, the authors recognise how teachers need an approach that enables and empowers learners to navigate the complexities of modern life.
The myriad of practical examples – so applicable to any classroom – along with the authors’ conversational style of writing is what makes this book stand out, making the text perfectly accessible while also being deep in its content. The depth of contribution the book provides is exemplified in its approach to “wondering”, where Claxton and Powell “walk the talk” as they encourage the reader’s powerful learning by posing questions for reflection throughout the chapters.
Thus, Powering Up Students is a book that practises what it espouses, and so it is of great instructional value to both teachers and school leaders, as well as to those involved in the preparation of all professionals working in high schools.
Ian Potter, Executive Head Teacher, Bay House School and Sixth Form
Powering Up Students is a wonderfully practical guide for high school teachers of any subject who are committed to tweaking their practice to ensure that students build up their learning power as well as achieve good grades. The most important aspect of the book is that it communicates that the LPA is not a gimmick or a “quick fix”; rather, the LPA is successful as it takes commitment and time to embed. It is the middle way between the traditionalists’ and progressives’ views on education – making it clear that knowledge, skills and learning habits are not mutually exclusive but entwined, and that all three need to be catered for in order to create successful learners for life.
At our international school, the LPA is the golden thread of our pedagogy as all stakeholders are committed to preparing students for life’s challenges rather than simply securing excellent outcomes in public examinations. In our context, teachers join the school from many different backgrounds and there are frequent changes of staff; the strategies in Powering Up Students will therefore help me, through induction and CPD, to build up the confidence of all our teachers and achieve consistency of approach in line with the school’s LPA ethos. I particularly like the “bumps along the way” sections, as they address the fears of LPA novices and also help more experienced LPA teachers or school leaders to stay on track.
Powering Up Students will certainly be added to our CPD reading list for both our new and established teachers.
Margaret Rafee, Principal, Sri KDU International School
While many books on education are thought-provoking, one often ends up wondering how the ideas presented could actually be implemented in the classroom. Powering Up Students, however, is different. It reads like a greatest hits collection, and provides a very practical guide for busy teachers as Guy and Graham distil the best teaching practices they have witnessed over many years of watching a wide range of superb teachers.
An essential book for any teacher wishing to help young people to achieve outstanding academic results and be prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.
Neil Tetley, Principal, Hastings School
Engaging with the LPA in Irish schools has challenged teachers to consider the process by which students learn. I have witnessed teachers empower students to move from being passive recipients of information to active participants in their own learning, and have listened to pedagogical conversations within staffrooms which have led to the adoption of new teaching and learning methodologies.
The techniques and strategies that Guy and Graham have packed into Powering Up Students will boost the learning capacity of students, teachers, and school leaders in those schools that choose to adopt them.
Paul Byrne, Deputy Director, National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals
Teeming with ideas, as well as practical and illustrative examples of the LPA in action, Powering Up Students really shows high school practitioners how to become better LPA teachers.
The book starts with a concise and useful explanation of the LPA – its background and principles – and makes a compelling case for why it matters. Then the authors take the reader into real classrooms from across the curriculum and around the world, offering inspiring and exciting insights into what well-embedded and well-developed learning looks like, before unpicking the constituent parts of what is a wonderfully practical framework.
You may not feel you are a great LPA teacher yet, but follow the authors’ clear advice and step-by-step guidance and you can undoubtedly become one. The authors anticipate the “yes, buts” that you might be grappling with, and propose sensible and practical solutions to potential hurdles you may encounter. The book also features great “wondering” boxes, filled with pertinent and searching questions to ask yourself – enabling you to reflect on your practice more clearly.
Powering Up Students will spark teachers’ imaginations, give them nuggets of inspiration, and fuel their determination to go further and deeper in developing their students’ learning power. It also invites the LPA convert to consider how they might start working with others to develop the LPA beyond their own classroom, and once you have read this book that is exactly what you will be itching to do!
Rachel Macfarlane, Director of Education Services, Herts for Learning Ltd
Full of case studies, lesson examples, and conversations with real students, Powering Up Students is an immensely practical and solution-focused book. Its content is highly accessible and brings the ideas being discussed to life – making it really easy for teachers to integrate the LPA in their own settings, whatever the subject or phase. Guy and Graham present examples of excellent teaching practice from a wide range of sources and synthesise research undertaken by various other practitioners both in the UK and internationally. They also discuss potential barriers to progress with the LPA and offer advice on how to overcome them.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Powering Up Students – it has confirmed for me that the direction we have taken at John Taylor Free School is going to enable our students to be successful in life at school and beyond. I am now clearer than ever that creating a genuine love of learning, a spirit of curiosity, and a desire to challenge what is put in front of them is exactly the type of education I want us to provide for our students.
Sue Plant, Head of School, John Taylor Free School
To Art Costa, our perennial inspiration, and to William and George Ireland – Graham’s grandsons – in hope and expectation.
Foreword by John Hattie
There is a common “grammar of schooling” present in many classrooms.1 Teachers talk a lot. Tell-and-practice routines are common (teacher tells, students practise). Teachers ask many questions (more than 200 a day, by one estimate), to which the students know that the teacher already knows the answers, and which they are rarely given more than one to three seconds to consider. Students sit in rows or in groups (but mostly working alone), in classrooms where almost all of what goes on is decided and directed by the teacher, so students become increasingly compliant, dependent, and diligent (unless they decide to rebel). Many succumb to a passive ethos of teacher questions, class work, and assignments: “Just tell me what I need to know so I can tell it back to you.” When such students are asked, “Who is the best learner in the class?” they tend to point to a student who cottons on quickly to what is required, does not have to put in much effort, and regularly delivers back “right answers” to the teacher. When we ask students if they find this model acceptable, successful students – those who are doing well out of the conventional “grammar” – often seem eager for more teacher-talk, more superficial coverage, and yet more content. They aren’t keen on being asked to grapple with open-ended questions, complex or so-called “wicked” problems, or group assignments. They have been led to expect that high-stakes tests can be successfully completed merely by knowing lots.
There is currently considerable pushback against this “grammar” from a number of quarters, and education has become something of a battleground. Some are calling for a more “consumerist” model, in which education is seen as an economic transaction; the learner is a consumer who has needs, the teacher is a provider aiming to meet these needs, and education is a commodity to be delivered and consumed. Learners are invited to learn with attractive, exciting, and engaging activities, and debates about the content and purpose of education come to centre around “what the market wants”. But this economic perspective has itself been subject to critique. Students may know what they want, but is it what they need? What and how we teach, as Gert Biesta has recently argued, should be seen as social and moral questions, and not merely as questions of individual consumer preference. He notes that education can, and more importantly should, lead to disturbing challenges because it involves asking students difficult questions and exposing them to otherness and difference.2
Another challenge to the traditional model comes from employer organisations and some governments, who are demanding that education should be producing entrants to the job market who come with more than packages of quality-assured knowledge; they should have initiative, articulacy, conviviality, and entrepreneurialism as well. Schools should be teaching attitudes and abilities that go by a variety of names: 21st century skills, non-cognitive skills, soft skills, learning strategies, and so on. And as large testing groups like PISA add collaborative problem-solving and creative thinking as a focus of their investigations, there is pressure on schools to add these skills as topics or domains within the curriculum. Some even go so far as to ask, “Why would we want to stuff kids’ minds full of knowledge when we can offload such cognitive effort onto Alexa, Siri, and Google?” This emphasis, too, has its opponents, who argue that there is a necessary competition between the cultivations of such skills and the rigorous transmission of important and valuable bodies of knowledge. “How can you teach students creative thinking,” they retort, “when you have neglected to teach them anything worthwhile to think about?”
Happily, through the hubbub of this multidimensional battleground, riddled with simplistic polarities and false oppositions, some more nuanced and productive voices are beginning to be heard. Our own work on Visible Learning (VL) argues against aspects of these antiquated grammars of schooling.3 The messages of the VL research include inviting teachers to work together with students to evaluate their impact; asking for transparent and high expectations to underpin everything that happens in a school; moving towards explicit success criteria for mastering deeper aspects of the content; using the Goldilocks principle of challenge (not too hard, not too boring) to impel learners to move towards these success criteria; seeing errors as opportunities to learn (which means building high trust and supportive environments in which to fail and learn); teaching how to hear and maximise feedback (especially to teachers) about impact; and focusing on getting the right proportions of surface content, deep understanding, and transfer of learning.
And Guy Claxton, too, is a leading proponent of these more integrated and constructive views. A prolific writer and thinker, one of his earlier books, Educating Ruby: What Our Children Really Need to Learn, written with his colleague Bill Lucas, remains my favourite sketch of a different approach to education in the 21st century – one that reconciles many of these competing claims and perspectives.4 But that book was only a sketch, written for a general audience, and especially parents, to help them to appreciate new possibilities. Now, written with long-time collaborator and former high school principal Graham Powell, comes Powering Up Students: The Learning Power Approach to High School Teaching. This is actually the third in a projected series of four books that weaves together the threads of a new philosophy of teaching and learning that has been emerging in different groups, across the world, over the last 15 years or so. The first book laid the foundations. The second drew out, in great detail, the practical implications for elementary or primary school teachers. Now this third book does the same for high schools. The book outlines a range of design principles underpinning a style of teaching that develops both rich and secure understandings, and a set of broader attitudes and dispositions towards learning as a whole, and is richly illustrated with practical strategies and real-life examples that Guy and Graham have seen pioneered in classrooms around the world.
Powering Up Students will help teachers to understand a new and exciting middle ground where knowledge is valued and respected, but is also put to work to develop transferable abilities to critique, evaluate, link, create, and apply knowledge where it is needed. They will see how the old grammar of school can be leveraged to impact on students’ love of learning, their developing learning skills, and their advancing achievement. The authors outline many methods to develop secure and accurate understanding, to cultivate and coach skills, and to develop more general attitudes and habits of mind, but they offer more than a compendium of teaching strategies. They also delineate the facets of the underlying culture that needs to be cultivated by teachers if students are to become independent learners, ready and willing to design, pursue, and evaluate learning for themselves, alone and with others. It is this combination of the strategic and the cultural which leads to their Learning Power Approach. In my language, Guy and Graham are showing teachers how to develop “the skill, will, and thrill” of learning; and I would add that learning to know when the time or opportunity is right to develop surface or deeper learning is also crucial. Being a powerful learner involves balance, agility, and appropriateness. For example, when first learning a new topic, a higher proportion of surface knowledge may be worthwhile, but as one becomes more proficient, one can switch to the deeper skills of relating, extending, and exploring.
Now is an exciting time in education, and the development of new models of teaching is key. In Powering Up Students, Guy and Graham make a major contribution to our understanding of how teachers can prepare young people not just for a life of tests, but for the tests of life.
1 David Tyack and William Tobin, The “grammar” of schooling: why has it been so hard to change? American Educational Research Journal (1994), 31(3): 453–479. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312031003453.
2 Gert Biesta, What is education for? On good education, teacher judgement, and educational professionalism. European Journal of Education, Research, Development and Policy (2015), 50(1): 75–87. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ejed.12109.
3 See John Hattie, Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), and John Hattie and Klaus Zierer, 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2018).
4 Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas, Educating Ruby: What Our Children Really Need to Learn (Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing, 2015).
What is profoundly shocking and harmful is that we have a school system almost entirely focused on compelling children to get the best possible grades in exams that themselves measure a very inadequate set of skills. There is too little focus on, and time for, encouraging creativity, flexible thinking, confidence, intuiting, empathising, the ability both to lead and work in a team, and acquiring the capacity to listen, observe and adapt.
Robert Peston, WTF?, p. 243
The aim is to make students active in the learning process – through actions by teachers and others – until the students reach the stage where they can become their own teachers, they can seek out optimal ways to learn new material and ideas, they can seek resources to help them in this learning, and when they can set appropriate and more challenging goals.
John Hattie, Visible Learning, p. 37
Acknowledgements
We would like to say thank you to the many people from whom we have learned so much, and who have given generously of their time, their experience, and their materials to help this book be what it is. Without them it would undoubtedly have been much slimmer and poorer. Our intellectual friends and mentors include: Ron Berger, Margaret Carr, Art Costa, Angela Duckworth, Carol Dweck, Michael Fullan, Bena Kallick, James Mannion, Kath Murdoch, Dame Alison Peacock, David Perkins, Ron Ritchhart, Sir Ken Robinson, Chris Watkins, and David Yeager. Previous collaborators we are indebted to include: Maryl Chambers, Leanne Day, Jenny Elmer, Janet Hanson, Bill Lucas, Ellen Spencer, and Steve Watson.
Much of what we have learned has come not from books or university seminars, but from conversations with, and observations of, many like-minded, courageous, and ingenious teachers and school leaders. They include: Ruth Bangs, Tony Barnes, Hugh Bellamy, Clare Berry, Louise Blondell, Martin Burt, Becky Carlzon, Juan Carlzon, Liz Coffey, Janice Corrigan, Kim Cowie, Andrew Crampton, Jenny Dhami, Annie Eagle (née Bainbridge), Mark Fenton, Tracy Goodyear, Catherine Gunn, Dave Hall, Betty Harper, Susan Hills, Katie Holt, Pauline Hurley, Rachel Hutchinson, Tara Kanji, Giselle Isbell, Lynn James, David Kehler, John Keohane, Eric Levine, Rachel Macfarlane, Christopher McNamara, Nigel Matthias, Catherine Misson, Sam Morcumb, Barry O’Callaghan, Gerard O’Leary, Sue Plant, Ian Potter, Gavin Smith, Nick Smith, Ronnie Smylie, Jane Snowsill, Jo Spencer, Neil Tetley, Chris Turley, Emily Turner, Iain Veitch, Sean Warren, Helen Watts, and Michael Whitworth.
Many of these friends and informants come from schools that we have worked closely with to develop the ideas in this book. We would like to acknowledge:
Bankstown Girls’ High School, Sydney, Australia Bay House School and Sixth Form, Hampshire, UK Celbridge Community School, Celbridge, Ireland Christian College Geelong, Victoria, Australia Clongowes Wood College, Clane, IrelandColáiste an Chroí Naofa, Carrignavar, Ireland Coláiste De Lacy, Ashbourne, Ireland Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, Buckinghamshire, UK Flinders Christian Community College, Victoria, Australia High Arcal School, Dudley, UK Isaac Newton Academy, London, UK John Taylor Free School, Staffordshire, UK King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls, Birmingham, UK Landau Forte College, Derby, UK Melbourne Girls’ Grammar School, Victoria, Australia North Shore Academy, Stockton-on-Tees, UK Park High School, London, UK Park View School, County Durham, UK Sacred Heart Girls’ College, Hamilton, New Zealand Scoil Phobail Bhéara, Castletownbere, Ireland South Dartmoor Community College, Dartmoor, UK Surbiton High School, Surrey, UK Wellington High School, New Zealand Woodbridge School, Suffolk, UK Wren Academy, London, UK
We would like to pay particular thanks to the late Paul Ginnis for the inspirational work he did with thousands of teachers during his lifetime – and to Sharon Ginnis for allowing us to honour his memory by drawing on some examples of his work. Thanks also to John Hattie for writing the foreword. And we would like to thank the amazing team at Crown House Publishing, in particular David Bowman, Tom Fitton, Tabitha Palmer, Beverley Randell, Bethan Rees, Rosalie Williams, and especially our copy-editor, Louise Penny, whose eagle eye has improved this text enormously.
Finally, on the domestic front, a huge thanks to our long-suffering partners Jane and Judith, who cut us a lot of slack as we took time away from family to wrestle this book into shape.
Thank you all.
Contents
Introduction
This book on the Learning Power Approach (LPA) is for high school teachers.1 But it is not for all of them. It is only for those who are really serious about teaching in a way that builds character while ensuring that all students get the exam results and qualifications that will help them in the future. It is for teachers who are hungry for ideas and information about how to do that, and ready to change their way of being in the classroom to achieve that end. Let us explain.
School is about more than examination results. Everyone knows that. Everyone agrees. No school proudly claims on its website, “Send your children to us and we will squeeze the best grades we can out of them, by hook or by crook. And that is all we care about.” If pressed, every school protests that “we are not just an exam factory, you know”. There is always some acknowledgement that forming powerful habits of mind in students matters too: that we want them all to grow in confidence, kindness, resilience, or “mental agility”. “Fulfilling their potential” doesn’t just mean “getting top marks”. We want good results, but we want results plus: grades plus a character that is ready for the challenges and opportunities of the mid to late 21st century, as best we can predict what those will be. We can’t imagine a school that wants results minus: students with good grades but who are timid, dependent, unimaginative, and unadventurous.
The key question is: what does that plus amount to? What exactly do we want our students to be like when they leave our class, or move onto college or the world of work? And how exactly is our school – and especially our teaching – going to look different if we take this plus as seriously as we can? How are we going to teach maths differently if we want our students to be growing an adventurous and creative spirit at the same time? How are our displays of students’ work going to look different if we want them to develop a sense of craftsmanship – a genuine pride in having produced the best work of which they are capable? We all want our students to become more resilient – to be inclined and equipped to grapple intelligently with things they find hard. So how are our forms of assessment going to tell us whether we are successful: whether our Year 11s are indeed more resilient than they were in Year 7?
The LPA shows in systematic detail how to go beyond the sound bites and the posters to create classrooms that really do grow robust, inquisitive, imaginative, and collaborative learners – lesson by lesson, week by week, year on year.
Lots of teachers and school leaders espouse these values. Some of them have thought through – in detail – exactly what it will take, and set in motion – with the requisite degree of precision – the necessary changes. But many are still hesitant, awaiting clearer guidance and support from departments of education or academic “thought leaders”. Or they have got a firm hold on part of the challenge, but not yet figured out the whole of it. They work on resilience, but not imagination; on collaboration, but not concentration; on self-esteem, but not critical thinking; or, conversely, on higher order thinking skills, but not empathy.
It is this detailed and comprehensive help that the LPA provides. It is for teachers and schools that really want to take the plus seriously, and have begun to realise the implications of doing so. They know that “team games” are not enough to grow collaboration; that becoming a good collaborator is as much to do with the way we teach English as it is to do with the sporting trophies in the foyer cabinet. They know that a few fine words on the home page of the school website, or in a policy document on teaching and learning, are not enough. They have quickly realised that some glossy posters downloaded from Pinterest about growth mindset and “the power of yet” are not enough. You have to “live it, not laminate it”, as the Twittersphere pithily puts it!
We want good results, but we want results plus: grades plus a character that is ready for the challenges and opportunities of the mid to late 21st century.
For example, Sam Sherratt, who teaches the Primary Years Program of the International Baccalaureate (IB) in Ho Chi Minh City, wrote in his blog back in 2013, “All too often, in IB schools, the Learner Profile [a list of desirable attributes] exists in the form of displays and catchphrases, but doesn’t exist as a way of life, as a code of conduct or as an expectation for all stakeholders. We are not going to let that happen at ISHCMC [his school]!”2 The LPA shows in systematic detail how to go beyond the sound bites and the posters to create classrooms that really do grow robust, inquisitive, imaginative, and collaborative learners – lesson by lesson, week by week, year on year.
So this book is crammed full of practical illustrations, advice, and hints and tips. It is designed for busy high school teachers who want to get started on the LPA journey, and for others who have already made good progress, but may feel a bit stuck for fresh ideas or are wondering about the next step to take. And there is always a next step. As our understanding of the LPA has deepened, the horizon of possibility keeps receding in front of us. The further you go in training students to take control of their own learning, the deeper the possibilities that are opened up.
Depending on where you are in your journey, some of our suggestions will be very familiar to you, and some might seem rather pie in the sky. The spot we try to hit, as much as possible, is the area in between “I do it already. Tell me something new”, and “in your dreams, mate”: the spot where you sense a new possibility for tweaking your existing style and it feels plausible and doable with the real live students you teach. That’s what we want you to be on the lookout for. So if something seems familiar, we invite you to think about how you could stretch what you already do just a little more. And if a suggestion seems far-fetched it may nevertheless spark a train of thought that leads to a more fruitful idea.
The LPA is not a set of rigid “recipes for success”; it is a set of tools, ideas, and examples that we hope you will critique and customise to suit your own situation. All we ask is that you hold fast to the spirit and the values while you are developing your own version. Sometimes we have seen people introduce – without meaning to – the “lethal mutation” that kills the spirit. For example, if you slip into seeing the LPA mainly as a way to rack up those conventional test scores, you have missed something really essential. Rather, we develop habits of mind like resilience and resourcefulness mainly because they are valuable outcomes of education in their own right – and then we keep an eye on making sure that the results go up too.
The further you go in training students to take control of their own learning, the deeper the possibilities that are opened up.
The LPA is very far from being a quick fix or the latest fad. It is actually quite demanding because it requires us to re-examine our natural style of teaching, and to make small but real experiments with our own habits in the classroom. As Sir Ken Robinson has said, “If you want to shift culture, it’s two things: its habits and its habitats – the habits of mind, and the physical environment in which people operate.”3 The LPA requires some honest self-awareness and reflection, and that can be quite effortful and sometimes even uncomfortable. We told you the LPA wasn’t for everyone!
But our experience tells us that nothing less will do. Just adding some shiny new techniques on top of business as usual – what we call the “tinsel approach” – does not work in the long term because the same underlying messages of the medium persist. We are aiming to develop strong mental habits in our students that will stand them in good stead for a lifetime, and that takes time and consistency. Habits take months, even years, to develop and change. Students’ development depends on the day-to-day cultures we create for them to inhabit, not on something special we remember to pay attention to every so often. And to create those cultures, we teachers have to be conscious, resilient, and imaginative learners too.
The beauty of the LPA, though, is that it relies on a series of adjustments that are worked into your natural style one by one, gradually and cumulatively. You are not being asked to transform yourself from a leopard into a tiger overnight. It is evolution, not revolution. The LPA is a direction of travel, supported by signposts and resources to guide you along the way, and everyone can go at their own pace. The good news is that, on the journey, teaching the LPA way becomes highly satisfying and rewarding. A roomful of enthusiastic, resourceful learners, who are keen to sort things out for themselves, is a sight to behold – and a joy to teach. Instead of doing a lot of informing, explaining, and interrogating, your role develops a subtler side to it in which you spend more time nudging and challenging the students to “go deeper” – as we’ll see in this first account by Tracy Goodyear, a high school English teacher.
I was teaching in a mixed comprehensive school4 that had received a “good” Ofsted grading and the school was on a journey to transform the quality of teaching and learning to “outstanding”. As part of this journey, senior leaders asked for volunteers to join a group that would help to revolutionise the quality of teaching and learning across the school – the opportunity was too good to turn down. I feel that the depth of understanding I gained helped to transform my practice and the results were immediately tangible – suddenly my lessons were more engaging for all students; I noticed that the usually more reluctant students came to the fore to share their observations; I noticed the quality of the work that students were producing had improved; I noticed that they were able to capitalise on previous learning and apply it to new and unfamiliar situations with confidence. It worked!
As with any approach, there are potential pitfalls. First, it became clear quite quickly that there is an absolute necessity for all staff to believe in and crave the challenge of building learning habits in students of all abilities. Without this level of commitment from teachers, the students will not commit fully either, and the approach becomes superficial and redundant.
Second, with accountability on teachers for grades at all costs, many critics are sceptical of spending time “talking about learning” when there is pressure to cover content or teach to the test. However, it’s clear that in order to gain the grades, students need to show individuality of thought; they need to have their own opinions; they need to have had the opportunity to embed knowledge and understanding; and to be able to articulate how that process happens.
The content is the vehicle by which we teach young people how to learn. It is important that this is made explicit. The content will change over time; habits can be formed to manage new challenges, and developing these is our real responsibility.
Seeing this transformation really gave me the confidence to experiment with learning habits and it opened a series of exciting possibilities for my lessons and the ways in which I could develop students’ learning “character”.
About the Book
Because this book is designed to be really practical, there isn’t much in the way of background or rationale about the LPA in it. We only say a little about where the approach comes from, what the scientific underpinnings are, and what the evidence for its effectiveness is. You will find all of that, if you are not familiar with it already, in the first book in this series, The Learning Power Approach: Teaching Learners to Teach Themselves (published by Crown House in the UK and Corwin in the US). The only thing worth noting here is that the LPA is not another “brand” competing for your attention in the crowded education marketplace. It is our attempt to discern the general principles behind a number of initiatives that have been developing, often independently of each other, over the last twenty years or so. It is a new school of thought about the kind of teaching that effectively stimulates the growth of agile, tenacious, and inventive minds – as well as getting the grades. You will find examples and ideas from a wide range of sources, and from different countries, as well as from our own research and practice.
The book you are reading now is actually one in a series of four books, of which The Learning Power Approach is the first. The second is aimed specifically at primary school teachers. This, the third, is, as we have said, for high school teachers. And the fourth will be for school leaders, to illustrate in detail how LPA culture change can be brought about across a whole school.5
Will the LPA work in your classroom? We are sure it will. We have seen it work well in a variety of settings in the UK – from inner-city comprehensive schools in London to rural schools in Devon and Lincolnshire, in adult education colleges in Argentina, and in independent schools in Dubai, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. The examples, tools, and techniques with which this book is crammed have been tried and tested in a wide range of settings. But you will probably still have to experiment with them in the specific conditions of your classroom and adjust them to get them to work for your students. Every school and every class is different; there’s no getting around that. One size rarely fits all.
The content is the vehicle by which we teach young people how to learn.
With over forty years’ experience working as a teacher, senior leader, head teacher, school inspector, and education consultant, Graham has seen at first hand thousands of teachers providing their students with experiences that engage their curiosity and build their capacities as learners. Teaching is an intensely creative profession that requires flexibility and ingenuity. This cannot be provided by rigidly following a scheme of work or adhering to a textbook. What other profession requires its people to invent up to eight different performances a day, each of which is designed to suit the needs, moods, and enthusiasms of an ever-changing audience? Graham’s experience has taught him that – now more so than ever – teachers need a supportive framework on which to build inspiring lessons that will serve the needs and expand the capacities of their diverse learners. That is what the LPA provides.
A learning-power classroom has many varied sides to it. Teachers lay the furniture out in a different way. They choose different things to display on the walls. They involve the students more than is usual in designing their own learning. They use a specific vocabulary when they are talking to students, and encourage specific kinds of talk between the students. They create particular kinds of activities and challenges. They comment on students’ work and write reports differently. Over time, we have distilled a clear set of design principles to capture these differences that teachers can follow if they want to make their classroom a highly effective incubator of powerful learning.
And with that introduction, let’s now dive into Chapter 1 and see in more detail what the LPA is all about.
1 In the UK, the term “secondary schools” is generally used, but, as we hope this book will be useful to teachers in many different countries, we are going to use the term “high schools” which is more common internationally. We do, however, frequently refer to features within the English system, such as: SATs, GCSEs and A levels (all high-stakes exams, taken at ages 11, 16 and 18 respectively); Ofsted (the body that inspects and judges schools); and Years and Key Stages (into which high school education is divided). Key Stage 3 comprises the first three years of high school education (Years 7–9, during which children are aged 11–14). Key Stage 4 comprises the final two years of compulsory schooling (Years 10–11, educating 14–16-year-olds). In the USA, school years are called “grades”, and they tend to be one year “behind” the English years, so tenth grade corresponds roughly to Year 11. Post-compulsory education for 16–18-year-olds is usually delivered in sixth forms or colleges, and is sometimes referred to as Key Stage 5.
2 Sam Sherratt, Parent workshops: the IB learner profile, Making PYP Happen Here [blog] (7 October 2013). Available at: https://makingpyphappenhere.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/36/.
3 Cited in Ron Ritchhart, Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2015), pp. 230–231.
4 In England, comprehensive schools are non-selective state-funded high schools.
5 Throughout this book, we have borrowed or adapted some text from the second book in the series. We are very grateful to Guy’s primary practitioner co-author, Becky Carlzon, for allowing us to make use of her insights and expressions, and for her generous support in the planning of this book.
Chapter 1
An Overview of the Learning Power Approach
This chapter provides a brief sketch of the LPA: what it is, where it comes from, why it matters, how it differs from other approaches, and what it asks of teachers. These questions are dealt with in more detail in the first book in the series, The Learning Power Approach, which we hope you will refer back to as your appreciation of the LPA grows and deepens.1
What Is the LPA?
In essence, the LPA is a newly emerging school of thought about teaching and learning. It is about how to teach in a particular way if you value certain outcomes for the students in your classes. If you want your students to be quiet and well-behaved, to remember what you have told them, and to get good marks – if those are the behaviours and attitudes that matter to you most – then there is a kind of teaching that will steer students in that direction (though students being students, not all of them will comply!). But that is not the LPA. The LPA is a way of teaching for teachers who value politeness and success, but who value other outcomes even more. They want to see students do as well as they can on the tests, to hone their skills in reading for inference, writing essays, and solving mathematical problems, but – more than that – they also want them to grow in their independence, resourcefulness, creativity, curiosity, and capacity for thinking about and exploring important matters deeply – for themselves.
Traditional teaching doesn’t reliably produce this second set of outcomes. On the contrary, some students learn how to get good marks in a way that makes them more, not less, reliant on the teacher. They can become more interested in getting right answers than in really thinking and wondering about the things they are exploring. They grow more conservative and cautious in their approach to learning, rather than more adventurous and resilient.
… some students learn how to get good marks in a way that makes them more, not less, reliant on the teacher.
So whether you like the LPA or not will depend on your values. If you don’t think independence, resilience, and curiosity are important characteristics for the next generation, then you can stick to more conventional teaching methods. Nobody can force you to change your style. But if you think, as we do, that such dispositions are vital if our students are to flourish in a turbulent and fast-changing world, then the LPA will be more likely to appeal.
The Goal of the LPA
Put more formally, the goal of the LPA is this:
To develop all students as confident and capable learners – ready, willing, and able to choose, design, research, pursue, troubleshoot, and evaluate learning for themselves, alone and with others, in school and out, for grades and for life.
All of the words in this statement matter.
Develop reminds us that cultivating these character traits takes time. We can’t just throw students in at the deep end and expect them to be powerful learners straight away. We have to constantly provide them with manageable opportunities to stretch and strengthen their confidence and ability to work things out for themselves.
All says that this is vital for every student, regardless of their background or their “academic ability”. High achievers need it if they are going to cope with the demands of their academic/vocational pursuits beyond school. And low achievers need it even more, because without these dispositions, they are condemned to stay in the slow lane of learning.
We need to help students become ready and willing to learn on their own, and not just able to. We want them to be keen to learn, as well as capable of learning. It is not enough to train students in learning or thinking “skills”, because a skill is just something you can do, not something you are inclined to do. And we want students to be inclined to be resourceful, creative, and cooperative, not just able to be when prodded. Earlier work on teaching thinking skills often found that, while students enjoyed their thinking skills lessons – and were indeed able to think better in the classroom – as soon as they found themselves in a different setting, these skills seemed to go inert. They didn’t appear when they would have been useful, and they didn’t transfer to new situations.2 That’s why we think it is important to use words like attitudes, dispositions, or habits of mind to describe the outcomes we are after, and not just to call them skills.
The next string of words – choose, design, research, pursue, troubleshoot, and evaluate – begins to unpack what it means to be a powerful learner. In a traditional classroom it is the teacher who does most of the choosing, designing, troubleshooting, and evaluating of learning, thus depriving the students of the necessity – and the opportunity – to learn how to do these things for themselves. The “Mission: Possible” of the LPA teacher – should you choose to accept it – is to teach in such a way that you gradually do less and less managing and organising of learning, and the students become more and more confident and capable of doing it for themselves.
Alone and with others stresses the importance of being able to take charge of learning both on your own and in collaboration. In the adult and out-of-school worlds – in a project team, a special-interest chat room, or a friendly staffroom – groups of people naturally get together to figure things out for themselves, so learning to be a good team player, a skilled conversationalist, and a respectful sounding board are as important as knowing how to wrestle with a difficult book on your own.
In school and out reminds us that the whole point of the LPA is to prepare students not just for the next stage of their formal education, but to give them a broad, positive orientation to learning – to grappling with things that are hard or confusing – whenever and wherever this may occur, for the rest of their lives. So we have to not only try to cultivate these attitudes, but also help students to appreciate their relevance to any of the widespread tricky stuff that life throws at them.
And for grades and for life tells us not to see “life skills” and “good grades” as in competition with each other. The LPA wants the two side by side, and the research shows that we can indeed have both – if we design our classrooms in a particular way.3
How Does the LPA Work?
At the heart of the LPA is an understanding of how to develop students’ resourcefulness and independence through the creation of a particular classroom culture.
There are lots of ways in which schools can try to incubate the attitudes that underpin powerful learning. Some of them involve changing the content of the curriculum – for example, by having more thematic or cross-curricular topics. Some involve changes to the structure of the timetable; giving students more opportunity to figure things out for themselves may work better if lessons are longer, for instance. Some may need a shift in policy about the use of smartphones or tablets in the classroom, as students are encouraged to find their own answers on the Internet when faced with a challenging question.
But none of these changes work reliably without the presence of a flesh and blood teacher who lives and breathes the ideals of the LPA. Indeed, such a teacher can breathe new life into quite traditional-looking lessons. You do not need half-day sessions, a roomful of tablets, or a maths teacher and a geography teacher working together to create a learning-power classroom. At the heart of the LPA is an understanding of how to develop students’ resourcefulness and independence through the creation of a particular classroom culture. Many small details in the way in which a teacher designs their classroom turn out to have an impact on the way the students behave and grow as learners. It is these details – all of them under every teacher’s control – that this book is going to tell you about. Many of them can be implemented right now, without any major upheaval, and without any risk to the conventional “standards” of achievement and progress against which schools are regularly judged.
The Strands of the LPA
The LPA is unusually coherent as a philosophy of education. It tightly knits together a clear vision of the purposes of 21st century education, a coherent scientific rationale for the approach, a set of teaching methods or pedagogies, and a view of assessment. The LPA is also underpinned by a well-founded psychology of learning, more of which in the next section. Here is a summary of what these strands look like.
In the era of social media and fake news, everyone now needs to be not just a knowledge-consumer but a knowledge-critic, and a knowledge-maker as well.
The vision is to give all young people the knowledge, expertise, and especially the attitudes and dispositions towards learning that are needed to thrive economically, socially, and personally in complex, fast-changing, multicultural societies. Individuals need to know a lot of things in order to function well in their culture, and they clearly need a variety of skills or literacies: literary, mathematical, scientific, digital, graphic, and visual, for example. But more than that, they need to be good at discovering, critiquing, customising, and creating things. In the era of social media and fake news, everyone now needs to be not just a knowledge-consumer but a knowledge-critic, and a knowledge-maker as well.
The scientific rationale for the LPA rests on recent changes in our understanding of the make-up of the mind, and especially of what we mean by intelligence. Research shows that the intelligent mind comprises – in addition to some basic structures and constraints – a set of malleable habits that are picked up from the families, friendship groups, and schools to which students belong. Our personalities and mental aptitudes are not set in stone. They change and develop over our lifespan, meaning that teachers have the opportunity to deliberately influence the development of these habits and dispositions in positive directions.4
The LPA pedagogy comprises a set of powerful design principles that create a classroom environment in which young people naturally strengthen a spirit of adventurousness, determination, imagination, reflectiveness, criticality, and sociability when faced with difficulties and uncertainties. Adopting this teaching style does not prevent teachers from expressing their personalities and interests in a whole variety of ways. We don’t want to turn teachers into robots or inhibit their creativity – far from it. But there are some tried-and-tested ground rules that will steer students in the direction of becoming more independent and resourceful.
The LPA approach to assessment combines a concern with sound knowledge and important literacies with the ability to evidence the growth of students’ learning capacities and dispositions. In particular, there is a focus on evidencing improvement and progress, rather than just achievement.
The LPA Psychology of Learning
This is how the LPA sees classroom learning. In every classroom there are three different kinds of learning going on: knowledge is being accumulated; specific skills and techniques are being acquired; and more general attitudes and habits of mind are being formed. We find it useful to think of these as different levels or layers in a flowing river.
On the surface, quite fast moving and most visible, are the subjects of the curriculum – the knowledge. As you sit on the bank, you can watch the different topics floating by. There go the Tudors. Close behind come simultaneous equations. Ah, here come figures of speech. And so on.
Then, just below the surface of the river, come the forms of expertise that enable students to acquire and make sense of that content – linguistic, numerical, and digital literacies; the skills and disciplines of mathematical and historical thinking; the ability to read musical notation; and so on. Both of these layers are very familiar to teachers, and of great concern.
Figure 1.1: The Layers of Learning in the Classroom
Source: By kind permission of Juan and Becky Carlzon
But lower down in the depths of the river, slower moving and less easy to see, the attitudes that shape students’ engagement with learning more generally are being formed. Questions we might ask ourselves about these attitudes include:
Are students becoming more able to sort things out for themselves as they go through school, or less?Are they becoming more imaginative in their thinking, or more literal-minded?Are they learning to question what they read, or becoming more uncritical?Are they learning to enjoy digging deeper into questions and problems, or becoming more focused only on the marks they get on tests?Are they becoming more subtle in their thinking – and able to handle more complex material – or are they only interested in the “right answer”?Are they learning to appraise their own and each other’s work in an honest and respectful way, or becoming more fragile in the face of feedback?Learning at each of these layers is going on all the time. They don’t compete for time and attention. You don’t have to stop practising essay-writing in order to work on your resilience. Resilience is being strengthened – or weakened – by the way in which the teacher is “doing essay-writing” with the students. Some ways of doing essay-writing encourage the students to be more tolerant of mistakes, and more able to spot and fix them for themselves. And other ways make the students more passive and dependent on the teacher. As a teacher – or as a parent, come to that – you can’t not be affecting the habits of mind that are slowly developing at layer 3 in the river – for good or ill.
What Does the LPA Ask of Teachers?
Different aspects of teaching are important at each of the three layers of learning. Whether students are developing secure and accurate understanding at layer 1 depends on the quality of the teacher’s knowledge; we have to “know our stuff ”. And we have to explain things clearly and make sure that the students have understood them by marking their work carefully and asking good diagnostic questions. At layer 2, where we are building skills, the activities we design for the students are obviously the most important. Just as an expert coach designs practical exercises that will develop the skills of an electrician, a chef, or a guitarist, so we design activities that stretch and extend our students’ literacy and numeracy. A good activity starts from where the students are and moves them on.
But down at layer 3, where more general attitudes and habits of mind are being developed, it is not the telling or training that matters so much as the culture of practices and expectations we create – the atmosphere of our classrooms. You can’t just tell someone to be more resilient or creative – though, as we will see, a little explicit instruction does help. A student might be able to tell you what resilience is, or even write a good essay about it, while not becoming any more resilient in the face of real difficulty. And you can’t just train creativity. There are a few techniques that can help you to generate ideas, but being creative-minded depends on attitudes such as curiosity, playfulness, and determination, not just on a bit of brainstorming.
Small details in the way in which classrooms and schools operate cumulatively impact on the development of these critical attitudes and habits of mind. How we teach slowly shapes the way students respond to the unknown – to change, challenge, complexity, and uncertainty. As a teacher, you are always creating these undercurrents – through your words, your reactions to the students, the activities you design, the choice of what to display on your walls, the things you notice as you mark the students’ work, and dozens of other details that contribute to their experience in school. This shaping is not inevitable – some students are “bent” more than others by routines and expectations, and some resist being shaped at all. But the culture that a teacher creates acts like a magnetic field that attracts, stimulates, and rewards certain habits of mind and not others.
How we teach slowly shapes the way students respond to the unknown – to change, challenge, complexity, and uncertainty.
You can teach the history of the First World War, for example, in a way that engages the students’ scepticism of historical accounts, their ability to research independently, their collaborative skills, and their empathy. You could get them to assess the reliability of different accounts, to research new information for themselves, and to write about the Battle of the Somme through the eyes of three contrasting participants. Or you could use the same material as an “exercise machine” to develop the inclination to accept what you are told without thinking, to depend on others to tell you “the truth”, and to believe that there is always going to be one right answer. All you have to do to achieve the second effect is to get your learners, day after day, to copy down pages of notes mindlessly from the whiteboard, plough through prescribed pages of a textbook on their own, and sit tests that focus only on the right/wrong recall of factual information.
Different lessons will, intentionally or not, affect different dispositions at layer 3. Learning to remember and recall things accurately is useful, so you might sometimes focus on helping the students to develop good memories. But accurate retention is just one mental capacity among many, and we should not work that mental muscle monotonously day in, day out. Just as important are the readiness to question knowledge claims, the ability to stay focused despite distractions, and the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and consider their side of the story. You might be aiming to develop the disposition of collaboration in one lesson and reflection in another. Over time, if your students have a good mixture of learning experiences at layer 3, they will get a thorough all-round mental workout. You will help them become mind-fit for life.
As we say, every teacher’s classroom conveys messages about the kinds of learning dispositions that are expected; you can’t avoid influencing at layer 3. What you can do is be conscious and intentional about what you want to be happening down in the lower layers of the learning river – and that is what the LPA asks you to be. Which habits of mind would you wish for your students to develop? Which ones will stand them in good stead, not just for the high-stakes examinations they will face but for
