Powering Up Students

Book excerpt: In Powering Up Students: The Learning Power Approach to high school teaching, Guy Claxton and Graham Powell detail the small tweaks to daily practice that will help high school teachers boost their students' learning dispositions and attitudes. Foreword by John Hattie. The Learning Power Approach (LPA) is a pedagogical formula which aims to develop all students as confident and capable learners ready, willing, and able to choose, design, research, pursue, troubleshoot, and evaluate learning for themselves, alone and with others, in school and out. This approach therefore empowers teachers to complement their delivery of content, knowledge, and skills with the nurturing of positive habits of mind that will better prepare students to flourish in later life. Building upon the foundations carefully laid in The Learning Power Approach (ISBN 9781785832451), the first book in the Learning Power series, Guy Claxton and Graham Powell's Powering Up Students embeds the ideas of this influential method in the context of the high school. It offers a thorough explanation of how the LPA's design principles apply to this level of education and, by presenting a wide range of practical strategies and classroom examples, illustrates how they can be put into action with different age groups and in different curricular areas especially relating to literacy and numeracy, but also in specific subjects such as science, history, geography, and design technology. All teachers can foster the capacity of students to be, for example, curious, attentive, imaginative, rational, and reflective and Guy and Graham provide clear guidance on how this can be achieved. Step by step, they explore all aspects of pedagogy: from how to make learning compelling and challenging, to how best to make use of the environment for learning; from how to coach students so that they become more independent and responsible directors of their own learning, to subtle shifts in teacher language and behaviour that change the climate for learning. Rooted in the authors' knowledge of international research about how students can and should learn in schools, this practical guide is suitable for both newly qualified and experienced teachers of students aged 11 to 18. It will also appeal to those school principals, educationalists, and administrators who are committed to improving both students' achievement and their preparedness for the world of learning beyond school.