Kath Murdoch - Learning to Learn

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom” - “What is the wisdom in the room?”

Learning intentions are great but framing the learning intention as a question and using questioning during the teaching is more powerful. Some questions could be:

How do you think you are going?

How do you know you are going well?

What can you do next?

Try using a split screen learning intention (what and how / content and process) and refer to it throughout the lesson. Focus on the progress being made and refer to previous thinking, asking “what do you think now?”

At the end of the lesson children could make a question as their ticket out of the door.

Children need to build their learning muscle and learning capacity. They need to learn how to learn and understand their learning style. Research shows successful people are reflective and self aware. 

To be a better learners children need to be in the right head space to switch onto learning. This can be done by:

• asking children before a task “What are you going to need to BE and DO to be successful in this task?”
• getting children to complete a starter card with an I statement of what they are going to do
• having think bubbles with goals that relate to learning that applies across the curriculum
• referring to KC web statements and get children to select a focus for the task

A good inquiry is to inquire into learning styles. This can link to art (e.g. relate learning to an animal, make a face mask with colours and images to represent the learning). This can help students to be more self aware, can be shared with peers and other teachers for greater understanding of differences, and shared with home too.

Accessing prior knowledge can really help to build learning capacity - both at the beginning of units but also at lesson level. This can be done by:

• brainstorms
• concept maps
• continuum
• classifying

Classifying into common themes/ideas helps to make the task more manageable for the teacher, finding ideas to focus on and to identify outliers. One option is to use two different coloured post-its to begin a task: 1. What do you know or what have you found out? 2. What do you wonder now? Often some of number 2 can be answered by some of number 1 before you begin.

Children can TPS (think pair, share) or 1-2-4 (self, pair, pair of pairs) to share ideas. When doing this they need to reach a consensus of ideas and be able to explain the connections. 

Planning is important but it’s the teaching that makes the difference. Get the students to do more of the thinking more of the time. Leave direct instruction until later in the lesson and only if it is needed to get students on track.

We need to teach children to be better learners.

Compiled by Ryan, Alice and Kent