Why Leading My Learning & Peer Tutoring?

The Progression Code in Wales describes five principles which must underpin the curriculum in every school.  The first of which is Increasing Effectiveness - As learners progress, they become increasingly effective at learning in a social and work-related context. As they become increasingly effective they are able to seek appropriate support and independently identify sources of that support. They ask more sophisticated questions and find and evaluate answers from a range of sources. This includes increasingly successful approaches to self-evaluation, identification of their next steps in learning and more effective means of self-regulation. 

In progressing through our purpose-driven curriculum from 3-16, learners will systematically develop their knowledge and understanding of how they learn best, and develop effective learning behaviours and habits to become increasingly independent and interdependent.  As well as being central to learners' capacity to be ambitious and capable, these beliefs, strategies and habits are central to growing and sustaining wellbeing and addressing the attainment gap.  Each AOLE has a particular slant on increasing learner effectiveness; the overview below shows how the composite parts contribute to an effective learner.

Peer tutoring involves learners tutoring other learners, usually two years younger, regularly over a period of time, to learn literacy and/or numeracy skills that have previously been taught by a teacher, but not yet mastered by tutee.  Effective peer tutors have the knowledge, beliefs and skills to be at the advanced end of the learner effectiveness scale, but might not yet have developed the consistent behaviours, goal-setting and habits to operate at their most effective.

Peer tutoring is well-evidenced to impact significantly on the skills and learning dispositions of both tutor and tutee, even more significantly for lower attaining learners.  The opportunity to tutor and be tutored can support all learners to not only improve their literacy, numeracy and digital skills etc, but also become more effective, confident and resilient, as long as tutors are well-trained and supported in line with the evidence.  

In order to support clusters in developing increasingly effective learners 3-16, an evolving draft profile is offered below.  If clusters develop and agree their own profile, they can establish where their learners are on the continuum towards the profile and, through backward design principles, establish how learning experiences need to be designed, implemented and assessed in order for learners to progress towards embodying the profile and the four purposes.  The profile below defines what an effective learner knows, understands and believes, and through training and practice in new contexts, the habits and dispositions that they develop and apply successfully in new and increasingly complex situations.  

(Feedback welcome to further refine the profile)

Schools will need to work with pupils and families to develop a shared understanding of learner effectiveness.  The profile above provides one way of interpreting the expectations of CfW.  

To identify a baseline and evaluate the progress of each pupil and groups of pupils as they become increasingly effective, pupils can reflect on how often they exhibit the habits above and staff and parents can consider how well these habits are developing.  You are welcome to use this MS Form survey duplicate to edit/use as you see fit:  Effective Learner Habits

There is also a page in the eBortffolio template to support pupils in selecting and reflecting up on their learning: https://sites.google.com/hwbcymru.net/e-bortffolio/arwain-leading and, of course, this approach does not need to be limited to their oracy work.

The Peer Tutoring resources are supplemented by training videos recorded by Manjit Shellis.  This training can be delivered to learners who have not followed the Leading My Learning (LML) programme, but would become even more effective if learners have the deeper understanding and learning behaviours grown through LML.  A Team of the full peer tutoring resource bank is available.

The Leading My Learning resources within this site provide a starting point for schools and clusters to consider how they could develop increasingly effective learners by focusing on years 5-8.  This work draws upon CfW documentation and a wide range of evidence available related to this aspect of education, including EEF, Great Teaching Toolkit, and Visible Learning MetaX.  Across each workshop, teachers will see a range of the 12 pedagogical principles blended throughout.

There are five strands that spiral across years 5-8, but can be adapted to support learners develop from their current starting points in younger and older year groups.  There is a suggested order but this is not prescriptive, as schools and clusters will design their curriculum according to prior learning and learners' existing understanding, beliefs, behaviours and habits.  In each strand, the resources are presented to be delivered as 2-hour workshops, but the activities can be delivered in whichever way teachers feel the concepts will be best understood and practised by classes.  In essence the resources scaffold and guide learning to enable learners to lead their own learning as well as leading the learning of others through collaboration, peer tutoring, and on to leading in their communities.   

It is of critical importance that this knowledge, understanding and associated behaviours are taught with transfer to new contexts in mind and that extensive practice and reflection are designed into future learning experiences.  Increasingly effective learners do not learn how to learn within defined boxes of individual lessons/subjects, they understand how to develop these effective learning behaviours in a holistic sense.  (see notes below on transfer)

The five strands of LML are:

Transfer is the fifth principle of the Progression Code and is goal for all effective learners and the best evidence to evaluate whether learners are effective or not.  It is the proof of the pudding of developing learning skills and key to progression 3-16.

Past efforts at teaching learning skills have failed when learners have not been taught how to transfer this knowledge, skills, behaviours and habits into their wider learning and life.

It is of critical importance that the resources/activities/workshops, however they are delivered within a school's curriculum, are not treated as isolated learning.  Teachers must consider in their planning and delivery of this content how the concepts and strategies will be referenced and transferred, during and beyond the sessions, to ensure the knowledge and skills can become learning habits and dispositions across the curriculum.  For learning skills to be transferred into and applied well in wider learning, learners must have regular and relevant opportunities to practice and reflect on how well they help their thinking, understanding and learning.  To support this, there are suggestions for follow-up/reinforcement/application after each workshop; these are not exhaustive and teachers are far better placed to select relevant opportunities for their learners.  For each workshop there is a brief summary of the 'why' of the aims and concepts, as well as links to wider reading and research evidence that support teachers in adopting a 'tight but loose' implementation - adapting activities/resources to meet the needs of their own learners without straying from the evidence-informed purpose.