Building Learning Power | Inveralmond CHS Professional Learning Blog

On Thursday 21^st May I attended a Youth Achievement Awards assessor training event. This event allowed me to take the first step in becoming an assessor for the school and the youth achievement awards. To become a fully qualified assessor I will need to attend 1 more event and externally verify award folders from all over Scotland. This will have great benefits to the S1 inspire learning program (ILP) as it allows me to have a deeper understanding of the requirements in meeting the standards for the Dynamic Youth Awards (DYA) which the S1 pupils will achieve this year through the ILP. This award requires S1 pupils to build on skills they have used across the curriculum and it links very strongly with building learning power which several members of staff are interested in taking forward in the school.

Mr J.McNee

A group of teachers met this week to discuss how we can implement Building Learning Power theory (Guy Claxton) into our classrooms and across the school. We all have one of these posters in our classroom- but do we know how to use it???
Building learning power is about helping young people to become better learners, both in school and out. It is about creating a culture in classrooms – and in the school more widely – that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable young people to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently and creatively.

By identifying learning behaviours at the start of a lesson, alongside your learning intentions, you can help pupils understand the broader life skills they learn in the classroom. Using this poster to help you identify key skills area is the first step, then getting pupils to reflect on how well they did at the end of the lesson is the next step. A group of teachers are going to trial a reflection grid with students over the next month to see how it may help pupils understand the soft skills that they are developing. Interested in getting involved? Please send me an email (Jen McKenna), or read more on our West Lothian Blog: https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/wl/buildinglearningpower/

Want to make your classroom a BLP classroom? Take a look at these displays for some inspiration…