Hayley Wood, Assistant Director of Alexandra Park Research School describes how her school have been implementing a whole school approach to developing learning behaviours in the first of a series of blogs.
As a teacher, how many times have you stood in front of a class questioning whether this is actually the first time they have heard the concept you are explaining? Or whether, actually, you taught the same thing yesterday? I am guessing more than once. As a teacher, it took me a long time to deepen my understanding of the difference between teaching something, and the children learning it. This blog describes the journey we are on as a school as we implement a whole school approach to developing the children’s learning behaviours, with the hope of creating confident, motivated self-regulated learners, equipped with the skills and behaviours they would need to achieve throughout their school life and beyond.
Engagement could be described as the ultimate aim for teachers and is discussed in such terms because it has been linked positively with desired academic, social, and emotional positive learning outcomes both inside and outside school on numerous occasions. When we use the word‘behaviour’ we can quickly assume that it relates solely to strategies to manage misbehaviour in the classroom. Crucial as these are, there is another element: how teachers can also explicitly support children’s learning behaviours. Recommendation 2 of the Improving Behaviour in Schools guidance report states that as we explicitly teach these, developing and strengthening learning behaviours in our pupils, they become more motivated and determined to succeed (EEF, 2020).
