Process

The #LearningFirst Conference is a few months gone now, but there many more in the pipeline! Check them out! As part of the workshop I delivered, I wanted to present five ideas to put learning first in your classroom.

Previously, I've blogged the first 2 ideas. You can catch up on them below (all resources and videos are included):
1. Believe in Life Without Levels
2. Take Charge of Assessment

The third idea, to put learning first, is probably the most common sense, but the least used, and below reveals the all-too-common reason why. I've coined it...
Process Over Performance

What does that mean?
Believing in 'process over performance' means that you're going to put the needs of the learners as a higher priority. Allow me to illustrate; when I first came in to teaching, I would sit for hours with all the learning objectives I needed to teach, and the number of weeks I had to teach them. Then, with the 'Week Commencing' date, I would map in any key dates or observations and build the objectives around them. We'd find ourselves tailoring lessons for the sake of our own performance, rather than creating a sensible order of learning for the children - a process.

Upon reflection, it's a ridiculous thing to have done in terms of making good progress with the children. But the pressures were such, that as staff, we knew what would be held in favour by observers.

​For example, there's no such fury as an uptight leader watching a Shape or Measure lesson where the children might not be sat at their desks in near silence. Equally, 5 minutes taken out of writing time in order to complete some drama (a great scaffold for the writing), would be cast aside too! 

It's madness to think that we would sacrifice the next logical step in the learning process, the very key to making progress, for the sake of how this, as a lesson, might appear. We would try and cram the steps we know to be necessary, into what little time available, so that we could appear to be at the point required for the observer - forgetting that by skimming all the previous steps in the process, learners were left unstable for the lesson being observed!

In this business, there is no time to waste to appease the assumed beliefs of others. Take your class, look at what they need, and teach it to them in a way they understand; promote a sensible learning process, above the tricky mind-games of proving your own performance. It takes bravery, but the progress will speak for itself.

Follow these links for examples of how Process Over Performance will benefit:
In Writing
In Reading
In Maths
...Foundation Subjects - Coming Soon!
In thinking this through today, my brain has raced with a list of Process Over Performance strategies which I'll share another time - once I've translated them from a no-doubt garbled mess.