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

Are we meeting the needs of learners? Using Learning to Learn, mentoring and coaching to develop a common language to promote learning independence

In order to answer this question coherently, we need to be clear about the learning needs of the children in our schools. For me, if we are considering this in the light of deep learning, then there are at least two core strands. There are probably many more but, in order to ensure that this essay has clarity, I will focus upon helping the learner understand their learning needs, and supporting students alongside the curriculum structure, and engaging them in the co-construction of a language that describes their learning experience.

The challenge we face in the UK is to restore the balance between the content-driven national curriculum and the skills-based approach that leads to autonomous learning. The changing nature of the 14-19 curriculum means that the skills for learning that students needed a decade ago have changed. Students need to be able, not only to understand their preferred learning styles, but also to see how these can be deployed in different contexts, as well as working within their comfort zone and outside it.  

Children need to be team players and team leaders and know how best to use the range of information and learning solutions that can impact upon their development. How do you accomplish this in a school of over 1000 and classes of 25 to 30?

At John Cabot City Technology College (CTC), we have created a curriculum for our year 7 students that is entirely competency-based. The Cabot Competency Curriculum (CCC) is taught throughout the student’s first year in secondary education and gives young people the chance to develop a broader range of skills that underpin their development towards General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), A Level, and beyond.  The national curriculum has been suspended for them, and replaced with a project-based curriculum that provides a context for the learning they are involved in. For two days each week, each tutor group works in the same home base, with the same teacher, and fellow students working on a cross-curricular theme, such as Finance and Enterprise or Community Celebration. Yet, at the same time, they are developing their team building skills, their thinking skills, learning competencies and leadership skills.

The difference has been profound, with students taking these skills into year 8 and 9, and completing key stage 3 in two years. At the same time, every student has started a full GCSE a year early, in year 9. The chance for GCSE students to begin AS level courses has extended the choice and diversity beyond key stage 3. Effectively, this approach has started to remove the artificial key stage 3 to 4 barrier. We have also seen an improvement in behaviour and motivation, as students are accessing more of their learning each week. If we are correct in assuming that some of the needs of the learner concern the ways in which they can access learning, then the CCC programme provides clear evidence that this is working.

To ensure accountability and to provide a framework for assessment, each student has a competency passport, which enables the students to self and peer assess, as well as giving teachers and parents a clear outline of the skills development of each child. This has been transferred into year 8 and 9, where the competency passport has been extended to subject passports that outline not only the core knowledge and skills needed in each curriculum area, but also the competencies from year 7 that support learning in that area most effectively. Ensuring that students continue to practice the skills from CCC as they grow older is an essential part of the programme.

We realised that this type of learning was creating a demand for a different style of support. We wanted to take advantage of the fact that students were developing a clearer vocabulary to describe their learning and that, through a range of student voice activities, self-assessment and class presentations, the students were becoming more and more adept at describing their learning. In order to develop this further, we introduced a whole-school mentoring system that enables students to talk about their progress, the targets they are working towards and the improvements that they want to make. Student voice in this one-to-one approach has really enhanced the planned group interactions that are a regular feature of our school calendar.

Every teacher, along with a dozen support teachers, is a mentor. Every adult has an allocated slot on the timetable where their mentoring is scheduled to take place. During this 40-minute session, each adult will meet with two students from their tutor group. In order to facilitate this, we have allocated two adults to each tutor group of 28 students, so that the reduced ratio means that students are mentored more frequently. During the 40-minute session, students will leave their timetabled class and bring to the session evidence of work completed that exemplifies a target having been met. The mentor will update the individual learning plan for the student on our database, and communicate a new target that has been negotiated with the subject teacher involved.

For every year group, there is an agenda for each term, which provides the focus, as well as helping to ensure consistency. The agenda links the mentoring focus to what is happening at that time of year. It could be that the agenda looks at GCSE or VI form choices, or the transition from key stage 3 to key stage 4. Whatever the focus, the students have a chance to talk about their own personal learning and to bring together once every six or seven weeks, their own personal reflections on their most recent assessment.

These two innovations at John Cabot CTC are closely linked. If students are going to deepen their understanding of the learning process, they need to be able to describe and articulate what it is they do that enables them to learn. If they can do this, we have the potential to help them describe the blocks to their learning. This is the power of a common language about learning that teenagers can access and understand. For us, linking mentoring directly to teaching and learning, as well as restructuring the curriculum in year 7 to cement the core learning competencies, has meant that we are deepening the learning experience and are creating autonomous learners who are working in a different environment to that which was experienced by their older siblings and friends in the past.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr David Carter is Principal of John Cabot City Technology College, in Bristol, Avon, UK.

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