Centre stage papers – Days 3, 4 & 5: Extending the vision

Approaches at Comberton Village College to combining the personalising learning strands to create deep learning

Background

Comberton Village College (CVC) is a rural 11-16 mixed Foundation community school in Cambridgeshire with approximately 1250 pupils on roll. A sports and modern foreign languages specialist college, CVC is also a training school. The school has a strong ethos of ideas and innovation in teaching emerging from the staff and not being imposed by senior staff. All staff are highly motivated to continue their own development and to continuously look to improve their own practice and enhance the learning experiences of all students.

Mechanism of development of deep learning

Over the last five years, the main mechanism for progression in teaching and learning has been through the formation of a staff teaching and learning group. A voluntary attendance working party at the college, this group has a wide range of members from initial teacher trainees, those on the graduate teacher programme, newly qualified teachers, middle leaders and senior staff. It is co-chaired by the director of staff learning and the assistant principal with responsibility for deep learning at the college. The group has the brief to investigate, research, trial, develop and promote excellent practice and innovations in teaching that will have real impact on pupil learning. As the ideas surrounding deep learning developed from the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, it became clear that they coincided very closely with the areas we have been working on and that, in fact, the teaching and learning group here has been working on developing the strands of deep learning. We shall focus on two of these in more detail.

Developing Learning to Learn at CVC

Learning to Learn (L2L) was one of the first areas researched by the teaching and learning group, and developed by a small working party of interested volunteers. Background work included reading, attending seminars and conferences and visiting other schools involved in the work. It became very apparent that to embed L2L within a school, the understanding and support of all staff was needed. We decided that a cross-curricular approach, with subjects contributing to the development of pupils thinking about learning, was preferable to a ‘bolt on’ approach where transfer to lessons might not be so easily achieved. This was not a ‘quick fix’ model but required the training of staff, and spreading the ethos and understanding about the need for pupils to ‘Learn to Learn’ (in a school regularly achieving 85% and above 5A-C this is not immediately apparent). It therefore took a long period of preparation. This was felt to be essential and, looking back, can be seen to underpin the success of the current model of delivery, which I will briefly describe.

The college runs a system of collapsed timetable days for the delivery of Personal Social Health and Citizenship Education (PSHCE). On the first of these, early in the autumn term, year 7 focus on developing themselves as learners. They have a brief and humorous talk introducing them to ideas about their brains and how they work, how to look after the brain, how to work ‘smart’ using the whole brain and to the idea of difference in learning using the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic (VAK) model. It was decided to use VAK, because, although we recognise its limitations and simplicity, it is easily understood by pupils and applied and described by non-specialists without staff feeling overwhelmed by ‘jargon’. This talk is followed up by a range of activities designed to stimulate pupils to discuss the ways in which they learn best and the ways they need to develop more to become rounded learners. The approach chosen by staff at CVC was not to categorise students in any way; although the use of learning styles questionnaires and software was trialled, it has not been implemented. Instead, we focus on raising the students’ awareness of how they learn and showing them how to develop the range of strategies they use in order to learn more effectively.

After this initial day of input, the continuation of the L2L input is through departments. Over the autumn and early spring terms, all departments are asked to have L2L focus weeks with year 7. During this two-week period, the department will focus on discussing learning with year 7 pupils during their lessons, seeking to engage them in active debate about ways of learning and in using the vocabulary laid down during the initial input (this is circulated to all staff, for consistency across the school).

At the end of the department focus weeks, an important part of the L2L has always been student evaluation of the input given throughout year 7. This is done in the form of a questionnaire, discussion groups and an opinions card-sort activity. This is always followed up, with the next year’s input being changed if necessary, in the light of pupil feedback. Pupils are encouraged to be reflective and honest about the input and how their learning has developed over the year, relating this where they can to examples from lessons of practice which has helped them. In reading and summarising these evaluations each year, I am struck by the maturity of pupil responses and reflection and the way so many can easily use and apply vocabulary to their own learning - for example, these quotes come in answer to the question: ‘Have you learnt anything about learning which will help you in the future to become a better learner?’

• ‘We know how to combine different types of learning and using both sides of the brain.’
• ‘You can approach learning from different ways. You need to find the one that best suits you.’
• And the very memorable: ‘If we were learning and we had learned how to learn, it would be easier to learn than if we were learning and we hadn’t learned how to learn!’

A visiting headteacher, who sat in on a year 7 lesson late on in the year, expressed his surprise when, on asking a year 7 boy what he thought about the lesson, he received an answer giving it a critique in terms of the teaching styles used and how this boy had related to them!

Developing the role of student voice

Although student voice has been a developing theme across the school through department work and the school council, our focus this year is to strengthen its role in looking at learning in the school. Rather than the more traditional school council activities, such as recycling (the pupils have planned and brought in a school ‘green scheme’), gaining permission for water in lessons (now actively encouraged) or campaigning for better toilet and social facilities (now in place after a refurbishment scheme this summer), we hope to give pupils more of a voice and a genuine forum for input on their own learning. To this end, we are in the process of forming a pupil learning group to complement the current staff teaching and learning group, the purpose of which would be to provide a forum for pupils to put forward their views on how they learn best and to have some influence on classroom practice.

Inviting student voice on teaching is a more sensitive and possibly contentious step which needs careful preparation with staff to ensure grassroots support and allow for real input bringing about change, rather than tokenism, which would devalue the whole project. To this end, the proposal has been discussed in various forums and the new group will have defined ground rules within which debate may take place.

It is foreseen that this will be a process of evolution, but in the first instance, the plans are as follows.

• A group of 20 pupils, four from each year group, are to be recruited using stratified random selection and will be invited to form the first Comberton pupil learning group. (Individuals can, of course, refuse this invitation, in which case further ‘random’ offers will be made until the places are filled.) Although it would be easy to select a group of articulate, enthusiastic pupils, this random selection will ensure that the views of the widest possible cross-section of pupils will be heard.
• Initially, the group will meet once per half-term during lesson time, but we also hope to offer ‘open meetings’ at a time when any interested pupil could attend.
• Reports of all meetings and other learning group activities will be well publicised and made clearly available around the school, to all staff and pupils.
• The pupil learning group will be coordinated by a senior member of staff who will, at the outset, chair the meetings. 

It must be stressed that this group is in no way intended to supplant or replace the wide range of pupil learning investigations already taking place in many school departments at CVC. Rather, it is intended to provide an immediate body of opinion to respond to staff suggestions or new initiatives concerning learning, and hopefully, in time, to encourage the students to develop their own thinking and to voice their own opinions about what works best in the classroom. As well as being approached by members of staff seeking pupil views on specific learning issues, it is intended that the group will develop its own dynamic, coming in time to chair its own meetings, set its own agendas and undertake research and further activities beyond the regular meetings. Above all, it should raise the profile of learning with the pupils at Comberton and encourage the notion of the reflective learner.

Bringing it all together

The creation of a deep learning experience for pupils is a complex and lengthy one, which must evolve over time to fit the needs of the learners and the staff. The interactions between the development of effective classroom practice, models of teaching and learning and the professional development of staff as reflective learners actively engaged in research and evaluation need to be combined in the development of personalised learning. At Comberton this is coordinated through a professional development steering group, which brings together these various strands so that development is focused and unified.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ms Irayna Owen is Assistant Principal at Comberton Village College, in Cambridgeshire, in the UK. Ms Claire Coates is also Assistant Principal at the same school. Ms Owen and Ms Coates work closely on all issues to do with teaching and learning at Comberton. Ms Coates is Director of Personalised Learning and coordinates all aspects of personalised timetables, alternative curriculum pathways and student voice. Ms Owen leads at the college on the Learning to Learn programme and co-chairs the teaching and learning group, which is instrumental in leading developments in personalising learning.

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