At last, the curriculum is re-focusing on explicitly developing learning habits that underpin the acquisition of subject knowledge. Despite a rather low-key introduction, the personal learning and thinking skills are central to achieving the curriculum’s aims, simply and effectively. They are set to drive far-reaching changes in how a school plans and delivers its curriculum; more, perhaps, than many schools have yet recognised.

Do you feel this as a threat, or an opportunity? A challenge, certainly! We think it offers great opportunities for making your school a more effective, more enjoyable and more exciting place, for staff and students alike.

To help you make a flying start at bringing the PLTS into focus in your classrooms, TLO are offering a pair of practical one-day workshops:

• For school leaders and curriculum planners, we are running a series of four Regional Workshops in November*.
• For teachers and TAs working at Key Stage 3, we can shape a bespoke workshop for teams in your school.

Both workshops are packed full of practical ‘I can do this’ activities to use immediately, in your planning and professional development, or with your KS3 students.

*Bristol (5 November), Slough (12 November), Birmingham (19 November), York (21 November). (The list of venues has changed a bit from our earlier intentions, but these are all now definite!)

Plotting for the PLTS workshops

You can download printable information about the Regional Workshops by clicking the PDF icon below. (PDF, 188Kb) (This includes a booking form)

Getting Started with Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills
in-house days

You can download printable information about th e workshop days for classroom staff clicking the PDF icon below. (PDF, 56Kb)

Email Jan Chesher at TLO or phone 0117 989 8204 for further information, or to talk about how we can shape the day to suit your school. Or use the form below.

Plotting for the PLTS

How can you realise the aims of the new curriculum, deepen your students’ learning capacity, and build on the best of your current practice?

What will your students be like when they leave you — will they be
Curious – Motivated – Engaged – Collaborative – Reflective – Independent?

Although the Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills have made a rather quiet appearance, they can be seen as central to achieving the curriculum’s aims, simply and effectively. Placing the PLTS at the heart of your organisation of the new curriculum is the key to helping your students become successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens.

The Autumn Workshops will explore this potential of the PLTS. They will:

• Link the outcome-oriented descriptions of the PLTS to students’ learning characteristics, which can be deliberately and explicitly developed as part of the curriculum’s process (learning how to learn);
• Consider how to organise lessons, projects, and extended learning experiences so as to blend together both the learning-how-to-learn and the traditional ‘content’ aspects, with benefits for both;
• Look at ways of assessing students’ progress in developing as skilful learners;
• Observe how this approach fits with and reinforces student voice, personalised learning, assessment for learning, SEAL, and others;
• Review how the approach has helped schools to raise student attainment, with improved behaviour and demeanour as bonuses along the way.

The workshops are intended for headteachers, deputy and assistant headteachers, and curriculum planners and managers. The aim is to explore the strategic and practical implications of embedding personal, learning and thinking skills into the curriculum.

Getting Started with Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills

This one-day workshop for secondary staff explores the practicalities of bringing the PLTS alive in classrooms.

The workshop aims to enable the school to experiment with the PLTS and establish them in classrooms, quickly and confidently. It will help participants to:

• Recognise how current good teaching practice forms the bedrock for developing the PLTS
• Be confident to start making PLTS explicit to students
• Introduce a common language for learning across the school
• Design learning experiences that integrate the development of PLTS with subject content
• Be aware of managing and tracking progression in the PLTS.

The day includes:

• Unpicking the PLTS into learning habits
• Learning experiences that build PLTS
• Practical classroom activities
• Teaching routines
• Recognising progression in PLTS
• New ways to scaffold learning

This is an ideal starter workshop for introducing staff to the personal, learning and thinking skills. QCA’s aims for the new curriculum involve deepening and developing students’ learning habits. The PLTS provide a framework for understanding the habits that all young people should acquire as the foundation for achievement at KS4 and beyond. This workshop digs beneath the broad terms of the PLTS framework to uncover the specific qualities that make them up, and explores what staff can do to build lifelong learning habits in their students.