Reach for the Stars Induction Programme

Overview
What's included
The benefits

Primary
Secondary

The blended package of materials consists of:

Books (by Professor Claxton)
- Building Learning Power
- Learning to Learn - the 4th Generation
- What’s the point of school?

PLTS At A Glance cards
- 10 sets of six cards which offer teachers lots of practical ideas for infusing PLTS into lessons

A CDROM full of resources

The CDROM contains intriguing materials for students, staff and school leaders.

Section One - Making the most of the materials - a ‘how to’ guide for combining the material to meet your needs

Section Two - Why build Personal. Learning and Thinking Skills? - includes stimulus materials for discussion by strategic leaders as they consider their policy for meeting the statutory requirement to develop learning habits in young people.

Section Three - Induction programme for students - provides extensive resources for an initial induction programme for use with Years 7 and 8 or Year 6 primary.

The material is organised around an astronomical theme ‘Reach for the stars’, has been designed to engage young people with a series of challenges that stretch their learning capacities and reveal habits that they need to develop in school.

There are four units each lasting about 75 minutes

Unit one: An introduction to essential learning habits. (download PowerPoint)
Unit two: Self management and team working
Unit three: Creativity and sound decision making
Unit four: Independent enquiry and reflectiveness

Each unit consists of a scaffolding PPt presentation, all printable resources and full guidance notes for the teacher. The units can be taken as separate and discrete experiences, or all together as a learning induction day or part of a year 6 activity week.Grouped together they make a five hour day.

The section also contains a Star-Log which is used in each induction unit helping students to plot their learning capacities and set targets for improvement.

Details of Blaze PLTS on-line tracking instrument are also included in this section.

Section Four - Bringing staff of board - offers six CPD units designed to Introduce teachers to the learning habits that lie beneath the surface of the tought curriculum

Encourage staff to try things out in their classroom, observe the impact on students, and share and learn from each others experiments
Introduce staff to some of the classroom activities in Section five
Encourage staff to adapt these classroom activities for use in their own subject areas
Enable the design aid implementation of a cross curricular project around an astronomical theme.

Each unit can be used with either the whole staff or a group of staff.Each unit takes 45-minutes to an hour to complete but they can be combined and sequenced to fit the school’s needs.

The units consist of a scaffolding PPt presentation, full tutor guidance notes and copies of all necessary resources.

Section Five - Classroom based activities - consist of four classroom based activities which extend and deepen he learning habits introduced in the induction programme.The activities focus on specific learning habits and provide exercises that can be done in tutorial sessions or in specific curriculum areas.They are formatted to act as a stimulus to the development of similar activities by teachers.

Activity one - students work through a series of activities to cultivate their capacity to notice details and patterns below the surface of things.

Activity Two - a series of activities to cultivate enquiry mindedness and investigative skills

Activity Three - a collaborative activity, challenging students to work interdependently and make decisions that will affect other people.

Activity four - a series of activities to stretch students’ listening capacities, cultivating their ability to listen with empathy, inference and discernment.

Each activity consists of a scaffolding PPt presentation, full printable resources and extensive guidance notes for the teacher

Section Six - Where to next - offers three big strategic areas for development in tackling the next stage of the schools’ learning journey