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- Herausgeber: Independent Thinking Press
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Written by Jackie Beere, The Complete Learner's Toolkit: Metacognition and mindset - equipping the modern learner with the thinking, social and self-regulation skills to succeed at school and in life will empower teachers to transform their pupils' learning. Jackie Beere knows that schools have a much more important job to do than simply to prepare children for exams. In this book she hands busy teachers the tools they need to weave personal development into the curriculum in powerful and exciting ways. The Complete Learner's Toolkit focuses on the most important skills identified by the World Economic Forum - including critical thinking, emotional intelligence and judgement and decision making - and presents 36 lessons that can either be used as stand-alone sessions or be incorporated into a topic or subject context. Furthermore, they can be employed in whole-class lessons or when working with individuals/small groups who need extra support to become more independent, confident learners. Jackie has devised each lesson to develop the habits of reflection and metacognition in all learners, setting them up with the skills they will need in order to thrive and the emotional intelligence that will help them pursue a happy future. To make the most of the material in this book and create the best outcomes for students, Jackie suggests teachers also treat these lessons as personal CPD. Doing so can help embed in teachers' day-to-day practice the skills and mindsets which this book promotes, and so model them for their students. Teachers can also consider how best to adapt the lessons in this book and how to incorporate the World Economic Forum essential skills within their subject specialisms. Suitable for use with learners aged 7 to 16. The lesson plans in this book are available as editable PDFs sold under an annual licence. For more details contact [email protected]. Parts of this book were previously published in The Learner's Toolkit, ISBN 978-184590070-0.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Praise for The Complete Learner’s Toolkit
Jackie Beere’s books are always worth reading. She has an eye for what works in classrooms and provides practical examples for busy teachers tackling tricky interdisciplinary issues outside their subject expertise. The Complete Learner’s Toolkit is a veritable cornucopia of ideas for lessons – and any school wanting to enrich their PSHE offer or tutorial programme will want at least one copy in their staff library.
Sir Tim Brighouse, former London Schools Commissioner and Chief Education Officer for Birmingham and Oxfordshire
This welcome book is another sign of the rapidly changing view as to the nature of learning and the focus on the skills and strategies needed by learners. Jackie Beere has produced a detailed, exhaustive and authoritative guide that combines a clear overview of the topic alongside supportive activities and case studies. Most importantly, the resources in this text provide a bridge between principle and practice.
The Complete Learner’s Toolkit is to be welcomed because it goes into the detail that is so often missing, and it will give teachers and learners the confidence to apply the ideas and develop alternative ways of thinking and working.
John West-Burnham, Honorary Professor, University of Worcester
The Complete Learner’s Toolkit is a vital resource for effectively equipping the modern learner with the 21st century skills required to succeed and thrive in our fast-changing world. This insightful toolkit is essential for school leaders, teachers and parents to help them provide children and young people with the very best possible education and start in life.
Justin Blake, UK Country Lead, HundrED, and education consultant
The Complete Learner’s Toolkit outlines lessons to develop the language of, and strategies for, learning, and focuses on the most important aspect of learning: teaching students to become their own teachers. Surely, if lifelong learning is to be realised, being able to teach oneself is essential. This entails knowing when and where to get help from an expert, how to evaluate the myriad of information now available, knowing how to prioritise, and using evaluative thinking in order to determine where to go next in the learning journey.
John Hattie, Laureate Professor, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne
In recent decades we have learned an awful lot about how learning happens through a focus on ideas such as mindset, memory and metacognition. Generally, these ideas are talked about – and fiercely debated over – among adults. In The Complete BLearner’s Toolkit, Jackie Beere has created a treasure trove of activities that bring these ideas to life in a way that children can get to grips with – all rooted in an expansive vision of education that stretches beyond employability skills and into the realms of self-regulated learning and self-actualisation.
As we edge inevitably into an age characterised by algorithms, AI and autonomous vehicles, I am sure The Complete Learner’s Toolkit will be of great use to teachers, parents and young people themselves for many years to come.
Dr James Mannion, Bespoke Programmes Leader, UCL Institute of Education, and co-author of Fear is the Mind Killer: Why Learning to Learn Deserves Lesson Time – and How to Make It Work for Your Pupils
The Complete Learner’s Toolkit is an essential book for every school because it provides lessons for children that will help them be more resilient, become more motivated learners, and improve their skills in readiness for working life.
As a school governor with decades of experience in business, I welcome this exciting package of ideas that will help the next generation thrive in an even more demanding work environment. For school leaders and teachers, Jackie Beere’s book provides a crucial addition to the curriculum offer so that they can support and develop the essential skills for wellbeing, collaboration and rising to the challenges of 21st century life.
Gill Watton, Vice Chair of School Governors, the Elmwood and Penrose Federation
In The Complete Learner’s Toolkit Jackie writes and shares from first-hand experience of what really matters and what should be at the heart of all outstanding classrooms. Addressing the needs of teachers and students alike, it will equip everyone who reads it with the intrinsic tools to make lifelong learning a success.
In addition, the book is a valuable CPD guide to help teachers of all levels of experience model positive attitudes and behaviours so that their students can excel and emerge from school with a skill set that will set them up for lifelong success. Jackie offers a multitude of practical advice and easy-to-follow lessons, all crafted to sit alongside the skills identified by the World Economic Forum. Emotional intelligence (EQ), growth mindset and metacognitive strategies are the irrefutable pillars of the book’s content, all made so easy for practitioners to access through these well-designed resources.
Overall, The Complete Learner’s Toolkit is a great addition to any teaching and learning library, and a resource that will surely stand the test of time.
Helen Boyle, Advanced Skills Teacher, Teacher of Religious Studies/Humanities, St Christopher’s School, Bahrain
CThe world is changing and, if we’re to solve the problems facing our planet, schools must change too. The Complete Learner’s Toolkit is the essential companion for teachers and school leaders who are ambitious about a better future for humanity.
Getting good grades is no longer enough; metacognition, mindset and character are essential in developing a purposeful disposition to the world. The ideas set out in this book are infused with the shrewd wisdom born out of Jackie Beere’s extensive school experience. Not only do the book’s activities help teachers to foster essential and in-demand workplace skills in children, they also make them more confident, empathetic and creative citizens. Being creative means breaking the rules – and finding solutions to complex problems, such as catastrophic global climate change, pandemic control and extreme poverty and violence, requires expert problem solvers.
The Complete Learner’s Toolkit gives children the confidence to lead, the adaptability to learn and the values and generosity of spirit to make good choices and sensible decisions in life. This book is about no less than human flourishing and encourages every teacher and school leader to harness the enormous power of the next generation on a now-fragile planet and in an increasingly unequal world.
Ian Loynd, Head Teacher, St Teilo’s Church in Wales High SchoolD
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For all the heroes of the NHS and other key workers who served the country so fearlessly during the 2020 pandemic. They are our role models.H
Foreword
Like all head teachers, I am always searching for resources that will equip our teachers to deliver the best possible learning experiences to our students. The Complete Learner’s Toolkit does exactly that, while delivering so much more.
I have had the pleasure of working with Jackie Beere, as we are both Associates of Independent Thinking. I have always admired her philosophy in relation to teaching and learning over the years – that is, putting the students at the heart of teachers’ planning, thus responding to their emotional and social needs, which also has a positive impact on their academic achievements.
Jackie is an educator who passionately believes in students developing a growth mindset and a self-belief in themselves as learners. In this book she draws upon the current research available around growth mindset, resilience and communication – and, in a rapidly changing world, these are essential for students to have in order to develop their workplace skills.
As a school that puts values-based education at the heart of its work, the outcomes we desire for our students are centred around the values of respect, responsibility and resilience. Using The Complete Learner’s Toolkit will enable our teachers to fully explore with students what resilience is and how to develop it as they grow. Each of the lessons builds these skills and enables students to develop a deeper understanding of self and of how to apply their new learning – helping them to thrive and not just survive.
Respect from others emerges once students understand how to respect themselves. The activities in this book are planned to enable students to understand themselves and their relationships with their peers, and to explore the most effective ways in which to learn. Ultimately, we are all responsible for the decisions we make and we want our students to choose what they know is right for them in the different contexts they find themselves. The Complete Learner’s Toolkit makes students consider ways in which they can build the courage to take necessary risks and be responsible for those choices.
Schools that explicitly teach students to develop a growth mindset reap the rewards when students are faced with challenging situations academically and are able to demonstrate that they can persevere. It also raises achievement in the classroom as students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills improve. The Complete Learner’s Toolkit takes this understanding even deeper when it teaches students about their iiamazing brain. To have some basic understanding of the neuroscience that underpins how we work as humans is powerful for students – and to be able to ‘identify parts of the brain’, talk about ‘neural pathways’ with their peers and discuss the work of Piaget, Pavlov and Dweck empowers students to deepen their understanding using accessible language.
Students are naturally curious. By asking the kinds of enquiry questions that feature throughout The Complete Learner’s Toolkit, it reinforces the idea that asking questions is a strength – and we, as teachers, should be encouraging our students to remain curious about the world they are growing up in. It also empowers pupils to ask such questions when they may feel pressurised by their peers: ‘What are we doing?’ ‘What impact are we having on our community?’ ‘How will this make us better people?’
If there was one thing I would give as a gift to all students, it would be confidence. So many students are influenced by external pressures, especially through social media. The Complete Learner’s Toolkit focuses on students gaining an understanding of their emotional intelligence – which, in turn, encompasses self-awareness and self-management skills and, in doing so, builds tolerance and confidence. These are fundamental attributes that can empower students to become the leaders of the future. Everyone is a leader in their own right, and to own confidence in self while understanding and trusting others forms the basis of excellent relationships.
Ultimately, The Complete Learner’s Toolkit will help shape students’ attitudes towards themselves and provide them with a better understanding of how they learn. If the tools and lessons contained within this book are shared effectively and with compassion, then the students of today will be well equipped to make the world of tomorrow a better place to be.
Julie Rees, Head Teacher of Ledbury Primary School
Acknowledgements
In my long career in education I have worked as a teacher, school leader and trainer. I must thank the thousands of children, teachers and colleagues I have met along the way. They have inspired me and reinforced my realisation that passing on the skills and attributes covered in this book will make a difference to our children. I particularly want to thank the inspiring and aspiring school leaders who put children at the centre of their mission and who know that teachers have the power to make a difference and are brave enough to give them a chance to do so.
I would like to thank all the staff at Crown House Publishing and Independent Thinking Press, who have been so patient and supportive through the development of this book. From Ian, who inspired me with ideas to reinvent this toolkit, to Louise who trawled through the copy so many times to help improve the content. A very special thank you also goes to Mandy Fry for spending so much time creating the illustrations and responding to my endless requests.
Most of all I would like to thank my wonderful family: Mum, Di, Les and Rob, who are always there for encouragement and support; my three inspiring daughters – Lucy, Kirstie and Carrie – and the pure joy of my grandkids, who remind me every day that the future is theirs.
Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to my husband, John, who is ‘simply the best’. He has supported, critiqued, edited and simply given me all the love I need to do what I do.iv
Contents
Introduction:
Why this book is essential for our children
We know that schools have a much more important job to do than simply prepare children for exams. This book adds personal development to your curriculum in a powerful and exciting way. It contains 36 lessons which have been devised around the World Economic Forum’s projections of essential and in-demand workplace skills for the 2020s.1 Teaching these skills is necessary if our children are to grow up with the resilience, confidence and communication skills that will help them to thrive in an ever-changing world and workplace. Research shows us that socio-emotional skills have declined in the last 30 years, especially for boys.2 Further research shows us that children who are taught these skills as part of the curriculum or as discrete courses show improved behaviour and attainment:
Treated children become less impulsive, less disruptive, and display less opposition to teachers and parents. In class, treated children become less likely to disturb lessons and more likely to focus on the teaching content.3
Each lesson in this book can be used as a stand-alone or incorporated into a topic or subject context. The lessons encourage the habits of reflection and metacognition that give children the power to manage their thinking. They also include many practical strategies that will help them maximise their learning potential and improve self-regulation. 2
The context for teaching these skills
New tasks at work are driving a demand for essential skills that are not always a focus in the curriculum.
The world is changing. The skills required to perform most jobs are constantly evolving, as reflected in the World Economic Forum’s ever-shifting projections of necessary workplace skills. They have gone through several updates, even as I have been working on this book. I remain confident, however, that the skills targeted in these lessons will be of use to children throughout their lives – in the classroom and beyond it in the world of work and in their daily lives. In three decades of teaching students and teachers, I’ve seen how the skills identified here have had the most powerful impact on developing outstanding learners. I have witnessed this in students, teachers, myself and my own children. These lessons aim to develop the social skills essential for students to work together in groups and allow them to tap into the synergy found in collaborative learning.
Rapid technological advancement certainly has an influence, but proficiency in new technologies is only one part of the future skills equation. ‘Human’ skills such as creativity, originality, initiative, critical thinking, persuasion and negotiation are expected to increase in value, as is attention to detail, resilience, flexibility and complex problem solving. Emotional intelligence, leadership and social influence are also set to see a marked increase in importance.4 Developing these skills will require learners to have confidence, high levels of self-awareness and a mindset that relishes challenge. These skills are most powerful when taught in the context of the knowledge domain so that they are transferred effectively in practical applications every day.
A lot of these lessons focus on how learners think about learning, and about themselves, informed by Carol Dweck’s extensive research on growth mindset. She concludes that those who believe that they can grow their intelligence through struggle and effort make more progress.5 However, the strategies around growth mindset don’t provide a single ‘magic bullet’. We are all a mixture of growth and fixed mindset, so it is vital to help our students know when to use growth mindset thinking to avoid giving up when facing a learning challenge.
3Jim Collins highlights the importance of having the ‘right people’ on the bus in a business context to make your enterprise a success.6 He emphasises that being the right person has more to do with character traits than with knowledge or skills. With a growth mindset, we understand that such character traits are not set in stone but can be nurtured and developed.
Children (and adults) with a growth mindset believe that their basic qualities can be developed through dedication and hard work. They believe that struggle equals growth and that effort is the path to mastery. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that I have seen is essential for lifelong success.
The activities in this book will help children become aware of how their thinking influences their mindset, so that change and growth in their emotional intelligence becomes possible. A growth mindset also affords us a level of emotional literacy that enables us to develop useful learning habits such as resilience and self-management. As children develop an acceptance of failure as an essential part of learning, they become the fearless learners they need to be in times of uncertainty.
Teaching about growth mindset – how and, particularly, when to use it – creates motivation and raises achievement in the classroom and the staffroom. It turns mistakes into learning experiences and it also enhances wellbeing and relationships. A growth mindset approach is fundamental to developing the skills which the World Economic Forum identifies as essential and on which this book focuses. These are:
Active learning and learning strategies.Complex problem solving.Critical thinking.Creativity.Leadership and social influence.Emotional intelligence.Judgement and decision making.Service orientation.Negotiation.Cognitive flexibility.74The lessons in this book are for teachers to use with students aged 7–16 (Key Stages 2–4 in England) to help them become aware of their own strengths and personal challenges and give them an insight into how to develop these lifelong learning skills for themselves. This book can be used as a course for the whole class or dipped into when needed with groups or individuals. The bonus is that this resource will not only develop great thinking habits in the young people but also in ourselves. In teaching these lessons, we can learn so much!
Developing and embedding a learning culture
There is a continuing debate about whether we should teach the skills of how we learn in addition to the content of the curriculum. However, there is no such dispute about the importance of the quality of teaching, and teachers’ mindsets, to school improvement. By using this book as an integral toolkit for developing outstanding learning, you can improve learning and teaching.
Including lessons on learning skills in the curriculum can help teachers to understand the barriers to learning that some children face. It helps children to develop more strategies for learning in every subject, and supports more independent learning in every lesson. As James Mannion and Kate McAllister discover in their book Fear is the Mind Killer, this is especially true for disadvantaged children:
there is an abundance of compelling research evidence to suggest that teaching pupils in ways that engage and develop metacognitive and self-regulatory processing leads to demonstrable, statistically significant gains across a range of pupil outcomes.8
In Sea View, one secondary school cited in the book, learning skills lessons were introduced as a complex intervention across the curriculum. Leaders prioritised a learning skills culture and teachers developed their own crucial skills of self-regulation, metacognition and oracy as part of the whole-school continuing professional 5development (CPD), which also helped them to model a learning mindset in their own classrooms.
If you are to deliver a bespoke learning skills curriculum that suits the context of your school, the leadership must back it. In my experience, as a head teacher leading a school which implemented this course, it must be a school-wide priority for the skills to penetrate every aspect of teaching and learning. All staff need to be trained in the skills and their purpose, but there must also be dedicated teachers to deliver discrete lessons in the skills. The teachers who deliver these lessons must not be conscripts but evangelists who have a passion for developing independent learners. This was also the conclusion in the Sea View experience:
if you really want your students to become effective, self-regulated learners, you need to provide them with dedicated lessons in which this work can take place.9
The exciting result of the Sea View project was to transform a school in special measures into one that closed the gap for pupil premium students more effectively than any other school in the region. There were also real gains in GCSE outcomes for all students who experienced learning skills lessons in Key Stage 3:
the results followed a very similar pattern to the interim results at the end of Year 9, with statistically significant gains in subject learning among the Learning Skills cohort as a whole, and among students from disadvantaged backgrounds (i.e., those eligible for the PP).10
To make the most of the material in this book and create the best outcomes for students, teachers should also treat these lessons as personal CPD. Doing so can help them to embed the skills and mindsets which this book promotes in their teaching, and so model them for their students. Teachers can also consider how best to adapt the lessons in this book and how to incorporate the World Economic Forum essential skills within their subject specialisms. In my own experience, teaching these skills to 11- to 14-year-olds made me a much more flexible and successful teacher, achieving outstanding examination results in my subject, and enabling me to become an advanced skills teacher (AST) and eventually a teacher trainer.
6No doubt the debate around skills and knowledge will continue. However, I hope that this book will provide a useful resource that will help students – and teachers – to achieve their true potential.
A teachers’ guide to understanding the skills developed in this book
Active learning and learning strategies
We know that learning changes brains. Learning grows new neural pathways, enabling us to develop new skills and solve problems. If we want our learners to retain new knowledge long term, they need to embed these neural pathways by applying the knowledge in novel situations, using it to problem-solve while enjoying the process. The terminal examinations that currently dominate many curricula require confident mastery and retention of the knowledge, not merely rote learning which is shallow and short term. It is essential that we teach our students how to review their learning, maximise their memory and grow their neural pathways so that they can perform in these examinations and – beyond them – be prepared and able to tackle new challenges.
One of the most important research discoveries about knowledge and memory, according to Peter Brown et al. in Make It Stick, is that active retrieval is the most powerful way to strengthen learning.11 Making a determined effort to recall your knowledge and test yourself on it works. And the more challenging the test, the more beneficial the impact, so struggling to remember and working very hard at it really does grow your brainpower. By finding out more about how their brains work in these lessons, students will understand how important it is to persist in finding strategies that will increase their ability and potential.
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When learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer
Peter Brown et al.12
Discovering how their brains work will encourage our students to see that they need to use it or lose it! Research by Stanislas Dehaene, professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, suggests that a baby’s brain is far from a blank slate: it is, in fact, a sophisticated structure with its own innate language of thought.13 Education hones our abilities, and improvements in learning rely on attention, active engagement, error, feedback and sleep, among other things. These lessons encourage active learning and raise awareness of strategies that will help motivate students and stimulate brainpower. Dehaene suggests that ‘no dyslexia or dyscalculia is so strong as to be beyond the reach of rehabilitation’, because of the amazing power of brain plasticity.14 This means we should never underestimate children’s ability to learn. The most important message for our students is that we all have truly amazing brains – and that learning fuels our brainpower – so the harder we work, the smarter we become.
Metacognition – the ability to know oneself, to self-evaluate, to mentally simulate what would happen if we acted this way or that way – plays a fundamental role in human learning. The opinions we form of ourselves help us progress or, in some cases, lock us into a vicious circle of failure.
Stanislas Dehaene15
In addition, Part 1 will help you to help develop students’ personal wellbeing by getting them to understand why they become emotional, frustrated, angry or excited. These lessons help students to develop metacognition as a habit that will create natural resilience. As John Hattie stresses, ‘Resilience is the ability to react to adversity, challenge, tension, or failure in an adaptive and productive manner.’16 It is an essential quality for learning and for life.
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