Lance King - Teaching with the ATLs in Mind

Saturday, October 20, 2018

7:27 AM

What is the ultimate purpose of school based education? To help them become:

- Pass high stakes exams? - Self motivated

- Gain good qualifications? - Self managed
- Autonomous
- Get into a good university?
- Lifelong learners?
- Prepare well for 21st C careers? >> jobs that don't exist now
- Learn how to make a positive difference in the world?
- Develop into expert learners? >> can learn from anyone
anywhere in the world

If all your students were all self-motivated, self-managed, autonomous learners …

- How would you know - what would they be able to do?

- What could teaching be like then? >> showing the pathway for learners, channel the learning
- Why are they not like this now? >>
○ They don't know how --> lacking skills?
○ It is not important to them - lacking motivation?
○ They have limited opportunities to practise self-managed learning - lacking autonomy? >>
opportunities to fail to come back up again

Start with purpose - what is the purpose of any ATL of 21st C skills programme? >> students possess the
learning skills to be able to solve future problems

- To improve student learning!

○ Through developing proficiency in a full array of 21t C thinking and learning skills
○ Through applying those skills to all their school subjects'
○ By becoming a fully self-managed learner

- Helping students to realize that they do have control over their own success

What do school students have control over?

1. How much effort they put in Any ATL skills programme is all about focusing students on factors to improve
2. What strategies they use for: success that are in their control
- Time management
- Listening and concentration
- Note making and summarizing www.oecd.org/pisa/test-2012/
- Reading for understanding
- Remembering well What makes Finnish Education so good? - edutopia
- Setting and achieving goals - Children are assessed for learning difficulties since very early - to be taught skills
- Dealing with pressure and stress and strategies to overcome their difficulties
- Failing well

ATL skills - Process not Content

- ATL skills are not subject matter in themselves, they are tools - skills, techniques and strategies
needed to learn any and every subject
- ATL skills are not more content to learned they are processes to be noticed, experienced,
developed and improved

What is a skills? >> a collection of strategies and techniques unified for a specific purpose, that
with practise

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 Four steps? Four levels of skills proficiency?
How do you teach a skill? - The purpose - what is it for?
- In pairs: - Checking prior learning
○ One person teach the other a skills, any skills -
- Demonstration Watch
eg. Tie a tie or lace a shoe etc.
○ The other person must pretend to have no Copying Copy
knowledge at all of that particular skill
Practice, learning from Do
○ Notice what the steps are in the process
mistakes, improvement up
○ Are there universal steps needed to teach any - to mastery level
skills - up to mastery level? What are they?
Self-regulation, teaching Teach
others

Skills Teaching - Theories

- Abraham Maslow:
Unconscious Conscious Conscious Unconscious
Incompetence Incompetence Competence Competence

○ You don't know that You know that you don’t You know that you You know how to
you don't know how don’t know how to do know how to do do something and
to do something something and it something and it takes it is second nature;
bothers you effort you rock at it

- John Stephenson
○ Zone of Competence
○ Zone of Capability

Highest purpose o school based education?

- Do you agree that achieving student self-management of learning is the highest purpose/goal of
any 21st C school?
- How can you make the self-management of learning the highest goal students can aspire to in
your school? >> What is the highest goal our students can aspire to in our school?

Significant historical influences on thinking:

- In the East
○ Confucius - moral code
○ Gautama Buddha - harmony and balance
○ Taoism - yin and yang

- In the West
○ Socrates - arguments, questioning
○ Plato - perfect categories
○ Christianity - right or wrong

Western skills for Eastern students - for success in Western schools and universities:
- Eastern students need to be taught how to:
○ Develop arguments based on evaluating evidence for and evidence against and defend their
pov in deate

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 pov in deate
○ Use logical structure in scientific writing: background - problem - hypothesis - testing -
evidence - argument - refutation - conclusion - recommendation
○ Practise both critical and creative thinking to become a good problem solver
○ Practise causal analysis, logical, sequential thinking
○ Write structured 3 paragraph and 5 paragraph essays

How many people think that Donald Trump …

- Is likely to move the world closer to the world peace?
- Is likely to move the world closer to world war?
- Can you now make an argument against the one you believe to be true?
- Could you hold that argument in a debate?

Skills selection:
- Start with student needs - use diagnostic assessment:
○ Skills they need to learn well in your academic programme
○ Skills they need for success in their summative assessments
○ Skills they need for their future - university, business, employment, career success

2 groups of ATL skills:

1. Core Generic Skills - what is the most basic skills? To turn up, then getting into with proper
equipment/stuff
2. Subject-Specific skills should not include the core generic skills

One ATL implementation option which works well:

- Combine social, affective and key organization and study skills together into a core generic
programme - social, emotional and learning skills
- Separate core generic from subject specific ATL skills
- Teach core generic skills separately, 15-45 minutes a week for every student Gd. 1-12, using any
examples
- Have teachers reinforce each Core Generic skill once it is introduced
- Have subject specific ATL sills developed and taught within all subjects

2 questions to be considered:
- When does each skill need to be introduced?
- Will it be mastered by Gd. 12

Eg. Teaching effective classroom note-making

1. Definition of Mastery:
a. Recording the most significant information from a classroom experience in summary form
with enough detail to b able to clearly explain it to others - in your own words.
2. Establish Purpose
3. Test Prior Learning - can they do it already?
4. Decide when to Introduce acceptable methods, techniques
5. Practice - what is a simple practice exercise that any teacher could use to have students practise
this skill in any subject?

Note Making in Class - exercise to practice effective note-making up to Mastery level

1. Give your students a piece of writing or short presentation in your subject
2. Ask them to pull out and record the key points using any approved note-making structure
3. Ask them, in pairs to explain the meaning of the key points they have writen down, to their
neighbor in their own words and give each other feedback on accuracy
4. Use feedback from teacher and class discussion to make sure everyone has accurately recorded
the key points (30 mins)
5. Within 24 hours ask them to do part 3 again with a different partner (10 mins)
6. After one week aske them to do part 3 again with another different partner (10 mins)

Developing understanding on the lecture, not after.

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CG Affective or "Character" skills
- Mindfulness
- Perseverance
- Emotional management
- Self-motivation
- Resilience

Which of these 5 character skills or traits is the most important in enabling students to learn
at school?

Why is that? Defend your corner.

All those skills are interrelated, none is more important than any other.

Resilience - first define the skill - what do we mean by resilience?

When you're focusing on 1 of this character skill, others also comes with it

Does the ability to overcome adversity predict academic success?

- Maintaining integrity, self-worth and self-confidence in the face of adversity = high academic
achievement?
○ Sometimes
- A useful but not a necessary condition for

Resilience - Grit?
Long term goals + perseverance

Resilience - learning from mistakes?

- What are the necessary pre-conditions for learning from mistakes?

- Fail well

When you experience failure, what do you do next?

Failure - the state or condition of not meeting a desired or intended objective

Think of a time when you experienced success - you set a goal and you achieved it
- What do you think was the cause of that success?
- What did you do next?

Then think of a time when you experienced failure - when you set a goal but did not achieve it.
- What do you think was the cause of your failure?
- What did you do next? >> the most important question to differentiate between the top and the
bottom students: how to fail well

Key practices of failing well:

1. Before any assessment:
- Get children to set their own goals for the outcome

2. After the assessment:

- Have a conversation about the difference between failing well and failing badly
- Build in class time for the re-processing of every mistake
 Give marks for using feedback to reprocess the mistake

Discuss how you could implement this idea.

Can you allocate classroom time to re-processing the results of all assessments?

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Can you allocate classroom time to re-processing the results of all assessments?

Practical ideas:
- Ask students to identify 'why' they're making the mistakes >> put the control back to the students
so they know that they can do something about it.

Subject Specific ATL skills are:

- Specific thinking and learning skills that characterize and are a natural part o individual subjects
- Ways of thinking and learning that create significant advantage for academic success in that
subject
- Most teachers don't recognize them as skills

Eg.
In English language - critical reading, writing in different g3enres
In other languages - intercultural understanding
In sciences - building evidential arguments, writing scientific report
In maths - logical, analytical thinking

Task 7 - skills selection 1

Work in pairs, discuss each question briefly, compare answers:
- What first attracted you to teaching the subject(s) you presently teach?
- When you were learning that subject(s) yourself when did you first notice success in learning?
- Which aspect of your teaching do you enjoy the most?
- How would you describe the thinking and learning skills your students are employing when you are
are teaching this aspect?
- List those skills - List 1.
○ Reading
○ Logical, Resilience,
○ Share idea

Task 8 - What skills will your students need to pass their assessments?
Successful learning is demonstrated by:
- An increase in knowledge >> recalling skills
- An increase in skills
- Making meaning, achieving understanding
- Being able to transfer understandings, knowledge and/or skills

In your summative assessments, what is being tested?

- In subject/programme groups
- Analyze each question in the last summative assessment exam in your subject as to what each is
primarily teaching:
○ Knowledge
○ Skills
○ Meaning
○ Transfer
- Generate rough percentages of each

What skills do students need to practice to have an advantage in your subject's summative
assessments?
- Knowledge questions - recalling, memory processes, review exercises, memory techniques
- Skills questions - what are your subject specific skills?
- Meaning questions - critical analysis
- Transfer

Task 9 - Skills you already teach:

- Get into subject groups and then programme sub-groups
- Save one copy of the Subject Based ATL skills spreadsheet
○ With you programme and subject name at the top
- Work in pairs, go through the whole list of ATL strands and put an x alongside any that
○ You already teach or
○ You consider important to teach, in your subject
- Make a list of those that have the most 'x's

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Metacognitive Knowledge - Think Alouds

The Student - tries to solve the problem and describe their own thinking and their problem solving
processes - outloud

I see, I think, I know, I imagine, I notice, I am trying to, I'm having trouble with,

A revolution in education through student self-management of learning is now possible due to:
- A focus on teaching the skills of effective learning across all IB schools and in the national
of at least 12 countries
- The acceptance of self-managed inquiry-based learning as the necessary pedagogy for the
development of 21st C learners
- The proliferation of high quality school subject based websites
- The availability of internet accessible devices and high speed broadband
- The high level of comfort your students all have with the digital world

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