Giving Learners the Language of Skills: Building metacognitive awareness through codified, contextualised learning opportunities — Dr. Zoe Elder
How do we help learners recognise and talk about their own skills? This interactive session explores how we can provide learners the language to understand and developed their own learning approaches. We will use the ASDAN Core Skills Framework as an example to investigate six broad and interrelated elements of learner effectiveness: Learning, Communicating, Decision Making, Thinking, Team Working, and Self Awareness.
Drawing on 30 years of experience in curriculum design at ASDAN and wider research on metacognition, we'll discuss approaches to embedding skills in learning contexts. This is vital for all learners, but recent research from the EFF has shown that is particularly powerful for vulnerable learners, who often struggle to recognise their own achievements. In this, we will consider practical approaches to enabling learners to see, name, and build on what they do well within a range of subjects and contexts.
We will explore practical approaches to making skills concrete and meaningful, sharing some of our newly developed curriculum resources currently being co-developed and piloted in our research and innovation projects.
This session will offer the opportunity to join ASDAN's ongoing research and development work and get involved in helping us shape a curriculum that engages learners from where they are and elevate and empower them to where they want to be.
We're actively seeking schools and practitioners to co-construct these approaches with us through our collaborative research and innovation projects.
Come ready to:
Share your current challenges and successes in developing skills across the curriculum
Explore pedagogical approaches to enhance explicit skills development
Discuss assessment approaches that work for all learners
Consider and share thinking on how these ideas might work with your learners in your setting
Connect with others doing similar work
About the speaker:
Zoe Elder has worked in schools in Oxfordshire and the South West as a teacher, head of department, G&T coordinator, Advanced Skills Teacher (AST) and as a Local Authority Adviser. She is a Specialist Leader of Education (SLE) with the National Teaching Schools Programme and a consultant and speaker for National Association for Able Children (NACE). She works with schools around the country. She is currently the Director of Education, Research & Innovation at ASDAN.
