Here at Building Learning Power towers we have long been firmly of the belief that learning is learnable – to oversimplify, one aspect of Learning Power is an extension of Carol Dweck’s outstanding and well-accepted work on growth mindsets. But after you have accepted that the mind is a balloon, capable of expansion and lift,…
New Term, New Opportunities
And so the school summer holidays reach their tipping point: heads return to their offices in readiness for the examination results and the ubiquitous Back to School signs appear in all retail outlets. The countdown begins and late summer distractions are welcome before the onset of the new year’s anxieties and opportunities hold sway. Notwithstanding…
Building Dens in Cumbria
How children were empowered to take control of their learning, through investigating effective strategies for collaboration. Some time ago I caught up with some of our learning powered schools, and this gem of a tale was shared with me by the head of a primary school in Cumbria. Children there were taken out to build…
BLP in a new Academy
North Shore Academy opened in September 2010 following the closure of two failing schools in Stockton-on-Tees. The students from these two schools – along with existing staff – were amalgamated on the site of one of the previous schools. A new building was scheduled for completion on a brown field site for early 2013. Vice-principal,…
BLP in an Outstanding school…
Uffculme School is an 11-16 comprehensive school serving a small town in east Devon. It is highly regarded in the local community and performs extremely well in public examinations. Relationships within the school are exceptional and the atmosphere calm and purposeful. The Oftsed inspection of 2007 rated the school outstanding. Headteacher, Lorraine Heath, knew that…
Why does education need to change?
There are many changes, pressures, dissatisfactions and opportunities that are leading thousands of people around the world to ask the kinds of hard questions out of which philosophies and approaches like BLP have sprung. The economic imperative Education is often justified – by governments and others – as an investment in national competitiveness and prosperity, producing a workforce that…
How it’s done
BLP has a clear social, moral and philosophical rationale. It puts at the heart of education the development of psychological characteristics that are judged to be of the highest value to young people growing up in a turbulent and demanding world. And it has a robust scientific rationale for suggesting what some of these characteristics…
Building Learning Power is about
Building Learning Power is about: Helping young people become better learners Developing their portable learning power Preparing young people for a lifetime of learning What is BLP based on? An extensive body of research into learning and the brain Recent research into the key dimensions of learning power Practical trials in schools across the country…
What is Building Learning Power?
International research into how the mind works shows that we are all capable of becoming better learners. Building Learning Power applies this research directly to the work of teachers in classrooms, to provide a practical framework for fostering lifelong learning in all young people. It is the job of education not to assume that learning will…