As our students’ progress through their years of learning, not just from Year 7 to 12, but as life-long learners, we would hope that they would become increasingly reflective in regard to their own practices.  One of the ways we encourage this at St Clare’s is through making Learning Walks a key priority.  These occur as staff visit classes and speak to students about what they’re learning and to ask students to reflect on their approach to that learning.  This occurs through an evidence-informed series of questions – and we’re constantly surprised at the insights students are able to offer.

As a parent or carer, there is also significant opportunity to change the conversation with your young person – and to mirror the conversation we’re having with your students to reinforce their learning about their own way of learning.

1. What are you learning? Why?

This question is a question which students might answer in two ways – they might approach the question around content, you might hear about plants in Science or about a particular event in History.  But this is also an opportunity to dig a little deeper and to get your learner to think about process – perhaps instead of content, they’re learning about scientific inquiry or about analysing source material.

The follow up question then becomes ‘Why?’, and this is a key question to reflect on the purpose of their own learning.  The easy answer we hear quite often is, ‘It’s on the exam’.  But again, if we were to dig a little bit deeper our students can start to apply that learning to real world contexts. In Mathematics for instance, the ‘Why’ of calculating perimeter for some of our students may have transfer into construction or building projects.

2. How are you going with your learning?

This question is really about setting up question 3.  There is an old saying, ‘If I had a dollar…’ that you could readily apply to this question.  Usually, the answer that we’ll hear is, ‘Good’ or ‘Alright’ and despite the answer feeling a bit limited, it’s not a bad place to start.

3. How do you know?

This is my favourite question, and probably the one where you will start to make your learner really think about what they’re doing. But be warned, the answer will need some teasing out.  You might need to ask, ‘What does ‘good’ look like?’ and you’ll need to prompt for the evidence and then the fun part – keep asking, ‘What else?’.  You might start off hearing about a mark on an assessment, but the conversation might develop into them explaining their understanding of a concept in Religion, or improvements they’re making in their analytical writing in English. You might hear about bookwork being up to date or the metric might simply be feeling more confident that they’re on track.  With this question, you might need to re-phrase what you ask a few times, but this is all a part of the strategy as we work towards our learners becoming accountable for their own learning practices. 

4. How can you improve?

With this question, the hot tip will be to go back to the answer offered for ‘How are you going?’ and where they see opportunity for their own growth.  This could be framed as, ‘At the moment you’re going ‘good’, what would you need to do to do even better?’  This is where the reflective thinking takes over and another chance for you to dig deep into the answer.  For instance, you might well hear, ‘I need to try harder’, but this again allows opportunity to prompt, ‘What does this look like?’  For the adventurous questioner, you might even consider bringing in a rating system and asking your learner to rate themselves out of 10 – the follow up becomes, ‘And if you were to move from a 7 to an 8, what would this look like and what might happen?’. 

5. Where can you go for help? 

This question is all about rounding out the conversation, but again, it’s an opportunity for your learner to think about the resources they have available to them. You will likely hear your learner offer that their teacher can help them, but this question is also an opportunity to recognise their peers as co-learners and different resources available to them. It might be that they go back to their OneNote in Geography or review their learning intentions and success criteria they created in PDHPE.  It may also be a great chance for you to share your own wisdom and experience! I was talking to an art student in Year 8 recently who couldn’t quite figure out how to mix their colours quite right; when they in turn offered that their mum painted regularly, the lightbulb certainly came on! 

To help this conversation become one of the routines in your classroom, fridge magnets with these questions have been placed in the front office foyer.  When you’re in the school next, feel free to pick one up – and, if you’ve had a conversation using this five question structure, we’d love to hear how it went, please feel free to share by using this form:

Tim Masters
Leader of Pedagogy