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| Building
learning power |
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Do you know your learning habits and attitudes?
As public officers strive to be lifelong learners,
recognising your learning traits — your strengths
and weaknesses — can make your learning journey
more fruitful. Professor Guy Claxton, a leading
UK expert on learning and creativity, conducted
a workshop called “Building Learning Power:
How to Help Young People Become Better Learners”
for the staff of Singapore Polytechnic when he was
invited to be the keynote speaker at the institution’s
Global Conference on Excellence in Education and
Training 2004. Below is a reprint of “What
makes a good learner?” from the workshop.
Good learners vary a lot, but they tend to approach
challenges and problems with a core set of habits,
interests and attitudes. One way of “mapping”
these qualities is in terms of the Four Rs: resilience,
resourcefulness, reflection and reciprocity (relationships).
Each of these in turn can be unpacked into a number
of features.
Resilience — is being ready,
willing and able to lock onto learning, even in
the face of shifting feelings and distractions.
It includes:
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Absorption
— being able to lose yourself in learning;
becoming rapt or engrossed |
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Perseverance
— keep going in the face of difficulties;
channelling the energy of feelings like frustration
and confusion productively |
| • |
Managing distractions
— knowing how to deal with external
distractions; creating your own best environment
for learning |
| • |
Attentive noticing —
learning is more than thinking — it
involves immersing yourself in the patterns,
details and nuances of what is going on; being
perceptive |
Resourcefulness — is being
ready, willing and able to be proactive and flexible
in learning; to make smart use of both internal
and external resources to learn in different ways.
It includes:
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Questioning
— being curious; wanting to get to the
bottom of things; puzzling things out |
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Making links
— being alert to connections between
different events, experiences or areas of
learning; looking for the “big picture”;
using analogies and metaphors |
| • |
Imagining — using
the sensory “rehearsal studio”
of the mind; playing with possibilities; sensitivity
to the intuitive gleams and glimmerings of
creativity |
| • |
Reasoning — knowing
when and how to think rigorously, and to critique
other people’s arguments; organising
information systematically |
| • |
Capitalising — drawing
on all kinds of external resources to support
learning: books, the Internet, libraries,
emails, other people… |
Reflection — is being ready,
willing and able to be strategic about learning,
and to have a good sense of yourself as a developing
learner.
It includes:
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Planning —
thinking about where you are going, what you
will need, and what obstacles you might need
to overcome |
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Revising —
monitoring, reviewing and evaluating as you
go along; being flexible and alive to unforeseen
opportunities |
| • |
Distilling — mulling
over your learning, pulling out the essential
features and lessons for the future; being
your own learning coach |
| • |
Meta-learning —
thinking of yourself as a growing, developing
learner; learning to talk about the processes
of learning |
Reciprocity — is being ready,
willing and able to learn from and with others,
as well as on your own.
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Interdependence
— not losing yourself in company; having
the courage of your convictions; knowing what
balance of social and solitary life suits
you best |
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Collaborating
— being a good team learner; knowing
how to
draw from the strengths of a group, and also
how to help build
that strength |
| • |
Empathy and listening
— being ready to put yourself in other
people’s shoes, to enrich your own learning
perspectives; hearing other people accurately |
| • |
Imitation — being
open to other people’s smart ways of
thinking
and learning; picking up the values and habits
that develop your
own learning |
© Guy Claxton 2004. Printed
with permission. |
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