Powering Up Students: The Learning Power Approach to high school teaching (The Learning Power series)

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