Building Learning Power

The purpose of education is to supplement the upbringing provided by families with a more systematic preparation for the future, involving cultivating attitudes, skills, knowledge, values and beliefs that we think young people are going to need to be brave and confident lifelong explorers and navigators in the 21st Century.

At Shipston we are committed to building young people’s learning power; not just what they are learning, but more importantly learning how to learn. One of the major developments recently for our school has been the introduction of Professor Guy Claxton’s pioneering work on helping young people become better independent learners, which suggests that there are four learning dispositions- Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflectiveness and Reciprocity.

 

Just as people go to a gym to develop their physical fitness, pupils come to Shipston Primary School to develop their learning fitness. Just as bodies can become fitter, so too can minds. The four R’s have various ‘learning muscles’ which can be stretched, trained and made more efficient:

 

Resilience -

being ready, willing and able to lock onto learning

Perseverance, Managing Distractions, Absorption, Noticing

 

Resourcefulness -

being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways
Questioning, Capitalising, Making Links, Reasoning, Imagining 

 

Reflectiveness -

being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning
Planning, Meta-learning, Distilling, Revising

 

Reciprocity -

being ready, willing and able to learn alone and with others
Imitation, Interdependence, Empathy and Listening, Collaboration