Blaze PLTS

The heart of learning

We all know in our educational hearts that the skills and qualities that make up the PLTS form a student’s emotional, cognitive, social and strategic approach to learning. As such students and teachers ignore them at their peril.

Beyond skills

The six clusters of qualities are more than skills that can be trained. The real point is to cultivate them over time into becoming dispositions or habits of mind: they will come to mind and be used whenever needed.

The challenge

Cultivation of these qualities, so that they run through the curriculum, life and ethos of the school like lettering through a stick of rock, is the challenge that many schools are working on.

The bigger challenge

Perhaps even more challenging is finding a user-friendly way of supporting and assessing progression. Teachers, quite rightly, have shied away from simplistic tick box solutions and summative packages that attempt to 'level' learning skill development. What they seek is a manageable way of assessing progression in the PLTS that helps students and teachers get under the skin of these qualities and supports their understanding, desire and ability to develop them further.

A way forward

Blaze PLTS is a web-based self assessment package that is designed to capture students’ perceptions of their current use of their PLTS and to use this information to support the development of these habits over time. It offers:

a student friendly quiz
immediate encouraging learner feedback
detailed feedback notes for teachers
group results
progression tracker

Many uses

This intriguing package has many uses...

to raise students awareness of their use of PLTS
to prompt and support students’ self reflection as learners
to deepen teachers awareness of students as learners
to provide teachers with a rich pool of information to scaffold critical learning dialogues
to track students’ changing perceptions of themselves as learners
to contribute information for students’ eportfolios
to provide an accessible dimension for reports to parents
to provide management data to focus the development of PLTS
to monitor the impact of whole-school development in learning
to inform the school’s SEF and show evidence of progression to Ofsted.

But the most important use.

The information becomes especially valuable when it is used to enrich, motivate and extend students’ learning through critical dialogue between teachers and students. Such learning conversations are framed to the students’ responses to the Blaze PLTS quiz and feedback statements.

How do I use it ?

The Blaze PLTS user guide provides outlines how Blaze PLTS can track the progress of your students
This short video details the product and it's benefits