Learning Power: Catalyst to Transformational Teaching Practice, thereby Steering Student Learning for Life
Our ability to transform and track Learning Power proficiency with such a high degree of authority and accuracy has had a transformational effect on teaching styles, teaching practice and business strategic planning. It allows us to unmask the learner and make a sustainable contribution to their personal growth, their life choices and chances and their contribution to the demands of citizenship in a rapidly changing world. Such an unmasking enables the learner, with our assistance, to take ‘ownership’ of the learning process, understand the underlying drivers of their behaviours and manage the rigours of change.
Teachers and managers across the world have been working with Learning Power to turn a formidable piece of academic research into a methodology that is capable of revolutionising the performance of not only teacher and student but the labour market and individual employability within an entire community.
Transformational Teaching Practice
Discovering and tracking the developing Learning Power of their students has motivated teachers to create a series of pathways to share their experience more widely.
They have distilled their observations of student learners into a number of recognisable dispositions which in turn have led to the isolation of the most prominent habits and behaviours. Of particular importance has been the development of an understanding of how best to address the challenge of a lack of resilience and persistence when students are faced with difficulty.
These teachers have uncovered the truth about ‘how’ their students learn, found that learning is learnable and made enormous strides in improving student performance in the classroom and beyond. Students are better motivated and have become better learners.
The Social Imperative
The world has changed a great deal faster than even the most illustrious scientists, economic and social forecasters and astute pundits could ever have predicted. However, there are some changes to the wider society that have less to do with changing economic circumstances and the pandemic than they do with underlying trends that have been with us for more than a generation.
The populations of the world’s more advanced countries are ageing as healthcare and living conditions favour longevity but bringing with it an increasing gulf between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Indeed, environmental and humanitarian disasters associated with climate change, earthquakes and the like contribute to the more rapid spread of disease, crop failures, malnutrition and poverty in the third world. These nations increasingly depend for their very existence on the financial and charitable support of the sources of global wealth.
So, what does this mean for today’s populations and generations to come?
With unprecedented access to massive banks of knowledge distributed by the emergent digital, electronic and social technologies, all of us are having to develop an enhanced Learning Power to equip us to meet the challenges of a global community, a community devoid of its traditional borders and boundaries.
Creativity, innovation and productivity have become the hallmarks of competitive advantage at every level and a direct reflection of our ability to harness collective intelligence and translate learning into purposeful action.
Learning to learn begins in the school classroom but its mastery has serious implications for life.
Ageing, healthcare, public services, climate change, technological advance, and environmental issues are but some of the g
rowing demands on future citizens.
Citizenship, however, no longer respects national borders and boundaries as information technologies ensure that none of us is immune to global extremes
The Economic Imperative
2020 and the Covid 19 pandemic created a world in which life’s former order changed irretrievably within a few short months. Governments found themselves in circumstances where their economies had become embattled by debt, poverty, unemployment, an unprecedented surge in the use and abuse of technology and a serious disconnect between education systems and the young people they had hereto been designed to serve.
Lockdown had delivered an emergent generation deprived of the social and academic disciplines of classroom convention with both parents and teachers reluctant to return to an environment whose safety was constantly being called into question. However, confronted by, and learning to live with, a new norm had caught nation after nation off-guard and every generation was found ill-equipped to adapt to such instant and material change.
Now, as never before, the ability to learn, and learn fast, will challenge even the most resilient among us and call on our resourcefulness, our collaborative working and our propensity to accommodate new knowledge without the bank of experiences on which we could rely previously
The Personal Imperative
Learning how to learn by using Learning Power productively creates personal identity. There is no more valuable legacy than the schooldays of the 2020s have to offer …
Growing up in the 21st Century amid the complex currents of globalisation and the struggle for economic and social sustainability at home means exposure to the multiple pressures and uncertainties that challenge mental and physical well-being. Young people are confronted by a struggle for identity with such as livelihood, sexuality and loyalty a source of public scrutiny.
Whether the young person flounders or flourishes depends on their mental and emotional development.