Collaborating to build learning power

Collaboration is taking place between four South Devon schools: South Dartmoor Community College (Sports College), King Edward VI Community College (Performing Arts College), Coombeshead College (Media Arts College) and Knowles Hill School (Technology College).

The focus of the collaboration has been the notion of ‘building learning power’ as part of our Leading Edge Partnership, established in the autumn of 2004. A number of staff have been involved over the past few years, reflecting the distributed leadership ethos of the partnership, with main scale teachers working alongside senior leaders, subject leaders and students. The last four years has the seen the project evolve from an involvement of 16 students and eight teachers, through to conferences for more than 1000 students and more than 600 staff, to an evaluation structure that includes staff and students.

The beginning of the collaboration saw a group of 16 year nine students (lead learners), four from each school, selected to work with Professor Guy Claxton to investigate strategies for building learning power. Each school selected a specific area to work on; these ranged from ‘stuck posters’ to the use of mnemonics to help learning. The challenge was how to enable the lead learners to share these activities with the year 8 populations of all four schools. We wanted this to be a very different event that was out-of-school for all four schools and mixed up the year 8 students. We decided to hold a learning conference for year 8 in the Riviera Conference Centre, at Torquay, over three days, with Guy Claxton as the keynote speaker but run by the year 9 students. Logistically, this involved transporting over 1000 year 8 students. For the staff involved, this provided a huge range of rich experiences and the year 9 students developed beyond all expectations, but what about year 8? What was the impact on their learning and how would they use the ideas they had seen on the day?

In building from the student conference, we felt that future events had to be more practical and actively involve the participants in activities that modelled building learning power. The main scale teachers supported the development of a ‘roadshow’ for year 7 prepared by the year 9 students. This involved student representatives from each partner school creating and delivering building learning power activities to year 7s across the four schools.  Each day, one of the partner schools hosted the event led by the year 9 student leaders. The ‘roadshow’ was followed up by activities in tutorial time. This has been refined and developed with new lead learners each year and has been successfully repeated annually. This year’s event was the most successful yet as the lead learners were able to bring their experiences as participants of the roadshow to the planning of the day and the activities we used.

However, the analysis of the student responses after the conference indicated that, while they enjoyed the experience and the event had impacted on the understanding of how they learn, we needed to embed this in everyday classroom practice. This meant that we had to involve more staff, preferably all of the staff in all four schools.

The staff event, Spirit of Learning, was aimed at teachers and learning support assistants in all four schools - in excess of 600 staff!  We had total support from the senior leadership teams and governors in all schools but the most difficult task was to find a date across the four schools within our planned non-student days.

Again, we felt that the event had to include some modelling of best practice. The aim of Spirit of Learning was that staff would leave with some practical examples of what aspects of building learning looked like in schemes of work and, if possible, time to work on their own schemes of work. Each school took responsibility for two curriculum areas; their speciality and another. The management team allowed three terms for planning; this time was taken up with collaborative planning by curriculum team leaders from each school meeting on a regular basis.

The most fulfilling aspect of the day was seeing four curriculum teams working together on aspects of building learning power that they had agreed on. The role of the senior staff was that of facilitator only, with the keynote speech given by Graham Powell of TLO. The feedback from staff was very positive and they reported that their key learning included a commitment to develop schemes of work that challenged students in their learning by the use of open-ended tasks and in lessons time for students to explicitly reflect on the students learning, and how effective that learning was. The need for a common vocabulary was identified early on in the collaboration and we adopted Guy Claxton’s 4Rs (reflectiveness, resourcefulness, resilience and reciprocity), but again, these have been unpacked and adapted to support students understanding of how they learn and possible efficient strategies.

As with any innovation, the greatest challenge is how to evaluate the impact on everyone involved and everyday classroom practice. The impact on the lead learners was easy to see – they became much more confident in class and were willing and able to take on other tasks in school. The ‘junior’ staff benefited hugely and this experience enabled them to go on to take other responsibilities within their school or to successfully seek promotion. We decided to carry out an audit into the learning of students through observing the learning in action - but who should carry out the audit and what happens afterwards?

In March 2008, we planned to investigate two methods of evaluating the impact on teaching and learning and exactly how explicit learning to learn techniques were being used in lessons. Two schools invited Graham Powell to conduct an extensive learning review through lesson observations designed to measure the ‘deep learning’ taking place. 

The other two trained their student lead learners, with the support of TLO, to carry out the audit through observing students’ learning in classes. Again, the lead learners were full of enthusiasm. They developed their own observation form and then trialled it in two year 8 lessons. Even at the end of a very intense day, they were still buzzing and suggested that the next step was for them to go to the next lesson and give the feedback to the year 8 students about their learning activities in the lesson. They also commented on how they were going to change their use of learning skills in lessons to impact not only on their own learning but also the learning of the rest of the group.

The students felt so strongly that, on the next day, they sought out the teacher that had been working with them to tell her ‘yesterday had been the best day of time at school and we can’t wait to go into more lessons’. She agreed – she had found the day stimulating and inspiring to see students involved and so positive about learning.

We feel that this collaboration has worked across all aspects of school life and has developed true partnerships between staff and staff, students and students and staff and students. This has been a very exciting collaboration and has had a dramatic impact on the teaching and learning in all four schools. The future?  Sustaining this level of collaboration is the next challenge and ensuring that schools continue to learn from one another, and with one another, is key to improving schools for the future. With the curriculum reform beginning in September 2008, we feel ready to continue the learning conversations with our students, with an aspiration that students begin to work more with their teachers and their peers on designing and shaping the curriculum.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

This has been a collaborative effort from all the senior staff involved and it would be unfair to single one out. For further information, the contacts are: Martin Burt (South Dartmoor Community College, Ashburton); Sue Manning (Coombeshead College, Newton Abbot)

Chris Chisholm (King Edward VI Community College, Totnes) and Mr Steve Kocur (Knowles Hill School, Newton Abbot). All schools are in England, United Kingdom.

 

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