Powering Up Students

The Learning Power Approach to high school teaching

Graham Powell, Guy Claxton

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785834189
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Powering Up Students: The Learning Power Approach to high school teaching, Guy Claxton and Graham Powell detail the small tweaks to daily practice that will help high school teachers boost their students' learning dispositions and attitudes.

Foreword by John Hattie.

The Learning Power Approach (LPA) is a pedagogical formula which aims 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. This approach therefore empowers teachers to complement their delivery of content, knowledge, and skills with the nurturing of positive habits of mind that will better prepare students to flourish in later life.

Building upon the foundations carefully laid in The Learning Power Approach (ISBN 9781785832451), the first book in the Learning Power series, Guy Claxton and Graham Powell's Powering Up Students embeds the ideas of this influential method in the context of the high school.

It offers a thorough explanation of how the LPA's design principles apply to this level of education and, by presenting a wide range of practical strategies and classroom examples, illustrates how they can be put into action with different age groups and in different curricular areas especially relating to literacy and numeracy, but also in specific subjects such as science, history, geography, and design technology.

All teachers can foster the capacity of students to be, for example, curious, attentive, imaginative, rational, and reflective and Guy and Graham provide clear guidance on how this can be achieved. Step by step, they explore all aspects of pedagogy: from how to make learning compelling and challenging, to how best to make use of the environment for learning; from how to coach students so that they become more independent and responsible directors of their own learning, to subtle shifts in teacher language and behaviour that change the climate for learning.

Rooted in the authors' knowledge of international research about how students can and should learn in schools, this practical guide is suitable for both newly qualified and experienced teachers of students aged 11 to 18. It will also appeal to those school principals, educationalists, and administrators who are committed to improving both students' achievement and their preparedness for the world of learning beyond school.

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: An Overview of the Learning Power Approach
• Chapter 2: Learning Power Teaching in Action: Some Examples
• Chapter 3: Safety and Engagement: Setting the Scene for Learning Power Teaching
• Chapter 4: The Environment of Learning Power
• Chapter 5: Collaboration and Communication
• Chapter 6: The Languages of Learning Power
• Chapter 7: Building Responsible and Independent Learners
• Chapter 8: Challenge
• Chapter 9: Thinking Real Hard
• Chapter 10: Reflection, Improvement, and Craftsmanship
• Chapter 11: Coherence: Across Lessons and Throughout the School
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Resources
• About the Authors
• Copyright
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