Building Learning Power

At Briar Hill 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. This suggests that there are four learning dispositions:
Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflectiveness and Relating (The four R’s)

Just as people go to a gym to develop their physical fitness, pupils come to Briar Hill Infant School to develop their learning fitness. Just as bodies can become fitter, so too can minds. Building Learning Power is an integral part of lessons, assemblies and all that we do at Briar Hill.

The four R’s have various ‘learning muscles’ which can be stretched, trained and made more efficient: -

Resilience - Perseverance, Managing Distractions, Absorption, Noticing
Resourcefulness - Questioning, Capitalising, Making Links, Reasoning, Imagining
Reflectiveness - Planning, Mete-learning, Distilling, Revising
Relating - Imitation, Interdependence, Empathy and Listening, Collaboration

Your children will use these words when they talk to you about what they have been learning in school. Children now have a greater understanding about attitudes to learning, how they learn and that learning is something that they can be actively involved in and is not a passive activity.