Independent

Learning

Why are we looking at this?

We are not yet outstanding:“Although teaching is good overall, it does not yet enable all pupils to make outstanding progress. Teachers’ use of questioning is not helping them to check how effective their teaching has been.”

“Pupils are not always given sufficient opportunities to develop their independence or to manage their own learning.”

We are addressing both these issues and the one that you can help us with is the independent learning.

What is independent learning and what does it look like?

It doesn’t look like this!

But it is:

The active involvement of children in their own learning.

This is what we already do :

• Learning objectives• Success Criteria• Effective

questioning• Self & peer

evaluation• Marking &

feedback

This is what we are going to do

to develop independent learning :

Put children’s evaluation of their own work (both self and peer) at the heart of their learning.

This will be done by:

whole class modelling of success and improvement linked to quality work and success criteria

children in pairs ‘success and improvement’

children individually using green and red marking

teaching children to include next steps when evaluating the work of others (this will have been modelled by the teacher first)

building in time for children to improve their work during their evaluation

Increased emphasis on

developing thinking skills through:

Further developing the use of mind mapping

De Bono’s thinking hats/CoRT thinking skills

P4C

The aim of a thinking skills programme such as P4C is not to turn children into philosophers, but to help them become more thoughtful, more reflective, more considerate and more reasonable individuals.

P4C Created by Matthew Lipman

Encouraging a ‘growth mindset’ What is this you may ask?

It is:

The belief that intelligence is not fixed i.e. everyone can get better at something if they work at it .

How can we stop children developing fixed mindsets?

By being very careful in the language we use to praise the children’s learning i.e. – praise the learning and not the child.

We believe our home learning projects encourage independent learning because they put no limits onto what the children can learn and they allow them to present their learning in a way that they enjoy.

Recently we have also been encouraging ‘pre-learning’ through our blogs, because research shows this has a bigger impact on children’s learning as opposed to the traditional homework.

Taking on board what you have heard today, what do you think you might do to support independent learning with your children?

Over to you