The Learning Powered School: Pioneering 21st Century Education - Softcover

The Learning Powered School... speaks in a voice that is at once authoritative, visionary, engaging and accessible. Its message is passionate and urgent, its intellectual underpinnings are beyond reproach, and its multitude of suggestions for action are imaginative, practical and tested by real teachers in real schools. --Professor Patricia Broadfoot CBE

Building Learning Power is a superb, innovative, and important program. The approach builds on my work and translates the idea of growth mindset into powerful and practical ways of organising 21st century schools. These schools will turn out not just high achievers but great all-round learners and leaders. --Professor Carol Dweck, Stanford University

I love your book. Here are some reasons why:

1. It is extremely readable with lots of stories, classroom examples, clever vignettes, appropriate quotes and practical suggestions.
2. It is very well organized. The format of the text alerts the reader as to what to expect.Color-coding, main topics are titled, diagrams and charts all help with understandings, comparisons and applications.
3. You raise the level of thinking about the purposes of education by:
   • Encouraging schools and communities to raise their level and broaden their scope of curricular outcomes by focusing on more essential, enduring lifespan learnings.
   • Enhancing instructional decision making to employ content not as an end of instruction but as a vehicle for activating and engaging the mind.
   • Using feedback to guide students to become self-assessing and to help school teams and parents use assessment data to cultivate a more thoughtful actions.
   • Forging a common vision among all members of the educational community from kindergarten through post-graduate work: teachers, administrative teams, administrators, librarians, staff developers, teacher educators, school board members, and parents. This vision describes the characteristics of efficacious, creative thinkers and problem solvers so desperately needed now and in the future.
4. The many strategies for ways to assess student progress both immediately and in the long-range was eye opening and very helpful.
5. You honor me greatly with your frequent references to the Habits of Mind and the similarities with your 17 dispositions. Is it by chance that there are such similarities? I think not. Both your work and mine stem from years of emersion in skillful thinking, synthesizing concepts, strategies and definitions from respected leaders in the field, conducting and sponsoring research in the effects of implementing these ideas and working in the reality of schools and classrooms. It is very reassuring that we both advocate and cherish dispositional outcomes for students and staff--the bigger, more panoramic outcomes are what education is and should be about. As you eloquently state, the world is waking up to the need for these attributes.
   

--Professor Arthur L. Costa, California State University

Guy Claxton's classic Building Learning Power: Helping young people become better learners presented both a distinctive goal for education, and a set ofpractical ideas to help schools and teachers attain it. Now, in The Learning Powered School, Guy and his co-authors look at how the ideas and practice have developed, and flourished, over the intervening eight years. The book is rooted in the experience of schools and teachers who have seen the promise of Building Learning Power and have taken up the challenge of realigning their classroom practice, their professional development, and their engagement with parents, sometimes quite radically. Many examples of that trail-blazing experience are described here some as cameos and vignettes, others as extended studies with in-depth discussion. The book also deals with the ideas of learning power, and the science and evidence behind them, which underpin the classroom successes. And of course it reviews the impact including that on results and Ofsted grades. Learning power, and the importance of building it in all young people, could be the keys to transforming education to make it truly fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. The Learning Powered School describes a work in progress, to be sure, but the progress so far is substantial and the future directions increasingly clear.