I have decided to make my next few blogs the emails I send to friends who are interested in Breakthrough to Learning. They are a record of some of the things I learned on my visit to the above school last week. The school has adopted BtL throughout the school.

(1) Just for starters: The first BtL I attended was with a year 11 (mixed ability, like all the classes). They were in a lather of excitement because two of them had just done the passive in the Fasttrack and they had used it in their controlled assessments (one in RE, the other in Science) and had got their best marks ever. The Head of Science had been in the BtL lesson and had said he wished he had known about it a long time ago!

The students gave me a round of applause and thanked me publicly and, what was even more astonishing, kept quietly thanking me as I went round the class! (I wonder as I write this if I’m making it up!)

There’s more to it than me having a lovely time, which I’ll email about later.

(2) Suddenly last Wednesday, as I was discussing General Particular with some Year Nine boys, I had to leave as the taxi was waiting to bring me back to Birmingham. As I left, the Deputy Head introduced me to a tall girl, who couldn’t let me leave without meeting me and thanking me for BtL!

The really important thing about this is not that I had a lovely time (though I did) but that it’s clear that the learners have taken on responsibility for their own learning. This is one of the secrets to the success of the school, and I began to see how it has been achieved. I managed to visit a Year Eight lesson in the My World project. I haven’t got my head round this, but it seems to run for the first three years with a lot of time given to it.

The class were embarking on an individual project investigating their family history. It was real research: they had been given photocopies of genuine documents (e.g. a marriage certificate from nineteenth century Rochdale) and the teacher showed a brief video clip indicating how much information could been gleaned from such a source.

I was given a copy of the document they had filled in at the beginning of the term reflecting on their successes and failures in the previous year’s project work. (See Carol Dweck.) In this lesson they were mostly working alone at their own pace making a plan of how they intended to proceed with investigating their own families. I can’t begin to say how impressive this was! Above all, there was no hasty covering of a pre-determined syllabus, none of the awful time pressure that bedevilled most of my own teaching, and no escape from the hard work of thinking and being responsible.

There’s a lot more to it than this and I have to read more books. At MMHS they have a little room with multiple copies of books for the staff to read and I came away with a few of them:

Chris Watkins: Classrooms as Learning Communities

Chris Watkins, Eileen Carnell and Caroline Lodge: Effective Learning in Classrooms

Ron Berger: An Ethic of Excellence

I’ve already read the following (downloaded free from the London Institute of Education):

Chris Watkins: Research Matters: Learning, Performance and Improvement