My Learning Agenda

With the new term beckoning, and a summer of pondering, I have finalised what my learning agenda for my classroom will contain. This will be the purpose of all the pedagogical decisions I make. this year. I have based it upon two things. Firstly, where I want my students to be at the end of the year in terms of them as learners, not as what they have learned but how they learn. Secondly, I have considered where my students currently are, I am fortunate enough to already know over half my classes for the next year.

I am Au courant that the agenda I set must be manageable and actually improve my teaching/ creation of learning opportunities and develop my students as learners. I am confident that I am not creating extra work for myself bur in fact making my job easier.

So here are my priorities, which may change over the discourse of the academic year. ( and so they should if need be!)

1. Develop independence of students during enquiry based learning tasks.
2. Develop quality work, through quality feedback using the SOLO taxonomy.
3. Plan all new lessons and Enquiries based around Blooms Four learning dimensions.
4. Increase reflection in Sixth from students.

So what strategies am I planning to use to achieve each one.

Developing independence

What I really mean by this is ownership. Ownership of the learning and ownership of the learning strategies employed in doing so. To do this I will make clear every time the class is using a strategy, giving it a name to aid the development of a shared learning vocabulary. Each strategy will be displayed, labelled, annotated and classified as part of the reflective and meta cognitive process.

So when we get to work in a more independent environment (such as during enquiries)the students will find it second nature to choose to use a tool or a strategy to help them, rather than being passive learners they will seek and organise knowledge. If this happens currently, its lineage invariably involves me. I want to be increasingly out of these decisions.

Isaac Newton provides suitable inspiration for this one. When asked who made his telescope and where he got his tools he responded by saying " If I had (..) other people to make my tools for me, I had never made anything of it." This is exactly what I want my students to appreciate.

Developing quality work

The SOLO Taxonomy is based upon how students use knowledge and encourages students to apply and link concepts. Consequently, students operating at the upper reaches of the taxonomy are producing high quality work that not only has breadth but depth too.

My day to day assessment and feedback will not only focus on the content but look to assess the use of their knowledge. I have constructed a large wall display to place these qualities at the heart of my classroom and assist in making the language of the taxonomy part of everyday dialogues. I have planned an introductory activity and a self assessment opportunity in the first week that utilises the taxonomy. I have also planned large assessment tasks for the second week back that is based on the SOLO taxonomy which has specific content attached to each level, so that the taxonomy will also be seen with a subject specific context. I am aiming to do this regularly, as I can see the quality of my feedback improving too.

Research into the impact of the SOLO taxonomy demonstrates that it not only affects academic success but also the meta cognitive too. Students are more aware of their learning and how to improve. I want this for my students.

Planning using Blooms Learning Dimensions

Nothing fancy here, just a statement of principle. The balance that the four learning dimensions of factual, conceptual, procedural and meta cognitive knowledge will give to the curriculum of my classroom is just irresistible. It just make sense. Hattie ranks meta cognitive strategies as the 13th most effective "strategy" relating to achievement. This is clearly something I can do something about by planning to teach how and when to do it and not just giving students meta cognitive tasks. This will not just happen, I need to plan the development of these skills.

Increasing Reflection

As far as I am concerned Sixth form students do not regularly sit back and reflect upon what they are doing and why. Our school also dedicates a lot of the Sixth form curriculum time to independent study, although difficult to set up, manage and to make effective it does have a hugely positive impact on student success. (Hattie quotes its at around d= +0.75.) So the pedagogical purpose of prioritising reflection is to indirectly improve the students ability to learn independently.

Now, as a self confessed and very proud and cognisant Luddite, I am embarrassed (a little) to admit that I am intending to use Blogging to encourage this reflection. Although lets make this clear, with all the Web 2.0 shenanigans going on in education at the moment, that Blogging is not in fact the tool being used here. It is merely a way of making the student thinking visible, it is presentational. It allows me, an educator, to make a decision on what support, guidance or task my students do next. So, with this in mind I have planned strategies such as PEELS reading log to actually develop and engage my students in meaningful reflection. It is essential that students do not blog in superficial way or just write what they think I want. They need to learn how to do this. This is why teacher knowledge of pedagogy and teachers having a purpose to their teaching is much more important that teachers knowledge of Web 2.0 applications.

This Years Teacher Record Sheet

Last year I was determined to make the most of the informal observations that I would make as a matter of course during teaching. I thought long and hard about what I would see in my class, part of this was to catch the students doing something right. So last year I redrafted this four times to get it right.

So, it is therefore obvious that I have started a fresh this year. Although I have definitely learned something. I am hopeful that this years model, is more focused on the learning my students are doing and will inform the next teaching/ learning step easily. This will be shared with my students at the very start of the year. Every student will have one that I will fill in during lessons and when I look at their work.

The first section is all about improving on task behaviour, students work better if they think you are watching them, hence my insistence in not solely recording if homework is completed, but class written work, learning tasks such as a card sort and their involvement in discussions. The final one is so important to record as all students should be involved in this, for many reasons some students will struggle to complete all written tasks. I also want to add value on task discussions.

The second section is all about the quality of their learning, and, again this will completed during and after lessons. It is based around my own interpretation of Biggs Solo Taxonomy. It is one of my key focuses of my learning agenda this year, so it should be helpful to centralise this. I must stress that this is not just for written work and sitting in and listening to conversations will be just as valid.

The next section is a relic from last year, which is the ANECDOTES section, a hugely powerful classroom management tool. Poor learning behaviours being recorded and then recited back to students changes behaviour. Take for example " This is the third time this half term that you have not had a pen, you did not have one on the 12th and 19th of June!" Students very quickly get embarrassed into doing something different. More importantly the recording of good learning behaviours turns out to be a reward in itself, all with the added benefit of basically writing your reports as you go along. The anecdotes will include significant events and notes taken form random classroom scans.

I have added my schools Five R'S of good learning characteristics. These being Reasoning, Reflectiveness, Responsible, Resourceful, and Resilience. To reflect upon afterwards, possibly through discussion with the students. I intend to classify them positive or negative for each characteristic. The motivation for this is that this makes up a big part of our student monitoring and reporting system. So I want at least some evidence to reflect upon rather than just a gut feeling.

Then finally comes the assessment section, the things I would normally record in my record book, exam scores and grades for individual tasks but also a grade based upon topic specific observations made per topic. (More on this too follow.) The other novelty included is a record of science specific thinking skills which I am currently developing in place of the new APP's.

So there you have it draft one of this years record keeping, hopefully learning focused, dialogue fueling, and evidenced based decision guiding. Any comments on improvements are gratefully accepted. I'm sure draft two is just around the corner.

Some Teacher Benefits.

The Purpose of a "purpose" is that it will lead you some where, something must change, something must improve. So, if you don't set an agenda, how do you and more importantly, your students know what they trying to get better at. This is also true for teachers to develop their own skills and knowledge. So, part of the reason I want to establish pedagogical purposes in my lessons is entirely selfish. Geoff Petty in Evidence Based Learning summarises these teacher benefits succinctly as..

A. If you understand why a teaching strategy works well.

B. We can then adapt the strategy if we know why it works

C. If we understand the general principles we can use these to evaluate our own teaching methods and to design new ones.

My priorities for my students in the last three weeks of term have been:-



1. Appropraite use of IT in lessons, tail and dog stories
2. Increase independance and decision making
3. Increase the amount of higher order thinking.

4. Developing a specific Science thinking skills.



These are based pretty much on gut feeling and several formal reflections about my teaching, my students learning and the curriculum that I am teaching too. (Which can be seen above in an enquiry cycle.) Some of these ideas I have already blogged about. So what benefits will I get by challenging my students to these targets? I will scrutinise the first two to highlight how and why I am attempting to do this.


1. Appropriate use of IT.
This big irritant to me, I too often find that students will spend hours being totally distracted by the use of IT in my lessons. I am not talking misuse of the IT, like gaming, as this is less irritating, as it is a behaviour issue and I will deal with it as I would any behaviour issue. The two biggest worries I have are firstly, that most stuudents think that being on Google is actually researching, and that it is a thinking tool to help them research and learn. What a ridiculous proposition. Consider this all too real dialogue.

Mead: What are you doing?

Student: I'm researching about fair trade food.

Mead: and what thinking tool are you using?

Student: I'm googling, sir!

Mead: (In head. B*#lls another one!) Would you mind me having a look at your search criteria.


The student clicks back to reveal a not unreasonable input.

Mead; I agree with what you've typed in, but how does 69.5 million hits help you?

Students: ( Silence)

Mead: ( Good use of wait time, so, even more silence)

Student: So shall I use the webpages you have recommended?

Mead: What will that allow you to do?

Student: Find out what I want to know?

Mead: (raises eyebrows) Why were you on Google then?

Student: Errrrr.. I just was.


This is not what I imagined when I planned this lesson. Where are the conversations like this..


Mead: what are you upto?

Student: I'm researching about fair trade food.

Mead: how are you doing that?

Student: I'm using a PMI at the moment, I'm reading about a Ugandan Coffee farmer and what his daily life is like?

Mead: Learned anything new?

Students: I've decided that Fair trade is definately worth a few extra pence, and what Organic food is.

Mead: What helped you decide?......



The second problem is more insiduous, despite the instruction that "we are researching2 and a clear overview of the lesson plotted out on the board. Inevitably,I find half my class are on PowerPoint , while another quarter are choosing fonts for their wordart titles. Modern day colouring in. I'm not having this.

Strategies to help.

I have a few ideas that may help me out. Firstly, it is the relationship I have built with my students, so that I can give them honest feedback. I know that some students will actually follow my instructions, so I make a point of stopping the class to see "good practice". I also know that large numbers will head of into Google land and Font world, so I am planning a ten minute blitz at the beginning of the lesson. Again stopping everyone with yells of "Wow! everyone gather around to see what Giles has done!" Before then actually being more helpful but encouraging the class to give constructive feedback. After this ten minute spell I will return to the analogy of the tail wagging the dog. Other strategies include making clear the process of research with a over view of

Read/watch -------> Thinking Tool--------> Research.

and having explicit success criteria of "use a Thinking Tool of your choosing".

Finally and probably most important is to build in this problem and solution into the reflection. I will blog about this when I have compiled their responses.

So what are the benefits to me in overcoming these IT barriers to learning?

Well, I have spent an inordinate amount of time planning this lesson/ experience. I want to know if it works, have I structured it in a useful way? are the resources good enough? what tools do I need to reinforce in class? am I teaching the students the way I want them to do enquiries? is the content coming across? In a way I'm in the process of doing what Geoff Petty describes at the start of this blog.
Secondly, I much prefer to be useful during lessons, guiding prompting, questioning and providing mirrors for students to reflect about all of the above. I don't want to be solely responsible for keeping the students on task and not just busy. Ambitious I know but its a journey worth taking and its a lot more fun than being solely responsible for 25-30 peoples learning.

Which leads directly into the second item on my learning agenda.

2.Increase the students independence and decision making

I hope it is obvious that these things are connected and in fact entwined. So part of the problems I have been dealing with IT, are actually part of this. I can now ask the questions what decisions have you made today that has helped you learned, and seriously expect to get a considered answer. And decisively I can give praise for doing so. If a student has acted independently and avoided a distraction they will feel like the success is theirs, and that I have just caught them doing it. I feel they will be more likely to continue this positive learning behaviour than if I had of DEMANDED they do it my way. I also feel that these methods speed up and strengthen the trust between student and teacher. A worthwhile pursuit.

Although this is not my biggest tool in achieving the above, which is to teach my students how to enquire. I know this is not a quick thing, and have plotted two years worth of stepping stones to help them do so. But, the small things will add up over this time.Here's hoping!