Mentor materials
Understanding pupils as learners
Learning intentions
Your ECT will learn that:
- The ability to self-regulate one’s emotions affects pupils’ ability to learn, success in school and future lives.
- Teachers can influence pupils’ resilience and beliefs about their ability to succeed by ensuring all pupils have the opportunity to experience meaningful success.
- Building effective relationships is easier when pupils believe that their feelings will be considered and understood.
- Pupils are motivated by intrinsic factors (related to their identity and values) and extrinsic factors (related to reward).
Your ECT will learn how to:
Motivate pupils by:
- Supporting pupils to master challenging content, which builds towards long-term goals.
- Providing opportunities for pupils to articulate their long-term goals and helping them to see how these are related to their success in school.
- Helping pupils to journey from needing extrinsic motivation to being motivated to work intrinsically.
Topic introduction
Introduction
In their self-directed study session this week, your mentee explored the role of resilience, self-regulation and motivation in pupils’ learning and behaviour. They learned about strategies for motivating pupils; they reflected on pupils they teach and drafted vignettes that encouraged them to think more deeply about pupils as individual learners.
In this ECT mentor meeting, you will work with your mentee to review their planning and explore opportunities to improve their pupils’ resilience, self-regulation and motivation.
Meeting activities
Throughout the session, try to refer explicitly to the Learning Intentions, and encourage your mentee to record key points in their Learning Log. Tailor your use of the Theory to Practice activities below in response to the Review and Plan sections of this session.
Review: 5 mins
- Start this session by briefly following up the actions that the mentee set at the end of last week’s session. Ask your mentee to summarise
- what they did
- the impact of this on pupil learning (including how they are evaluating this)
- what they will do going forward to build on these actions
- Clarify the Learning Intentions for this session with your mentee.
Plan: 5 mins
At the start of this module, you looked at all of the learn how to statements for Standards 1 and 7 and conducted a module audit with your mentee: in some areas, they will already be confident and skilled; in others, they will want more practice and support from you and others. Look back at this audit now and use it to help decide how you and your mentee will make the most productive use of the suggested Theory to Practice activities below.
Theory to Practice: 35 mins
- Analyse artefacts/discuss with mentor
Review the vignettes that your mentee drafted in their self-study session this week. Use your knowledge and experience to discuss with your mentee why this sort of in-depth reflection on pupils is valuable, including why it is a necessary starting point for teachers who want to develop their pupils as independent, self-regulating learners.
To support this activity, you could:
- highlight strengths and areas for development in how your mentee has approached the vignettes
- if you know the pupils concerned, help your mentee to expand the vignettes by drawing on your knowledge of the pupils
- discuss possible strategies that would help your mentee come to know their pupils better over time so that they are in a position to understand more about their resilience, self-regulation and motivation
- discuss the value for teachers of undertaking activities like this one, in helping them to reflect on the progress of individual learners in their class(es)
- Collaborative planning
Use the notes made by your mentee in their self-study session and the outcomes of the first activity in this session as a starting point for some collaborative planning. Work with your mentee to plan how they will incorporate into their teaching in the coming week strategies for developing pupils’ resilience, self-regulation and motivation.
As you work through this activity, you could:
- check that your mentee is clear about whether they are focusing on a single pupil, a group of pupils or a whole class
- connect the strategies they select to their understanding of the relative strengths and areas for development of the pupil(s) selected
- relate planning back to the research and practice summary in this week’s ECT materials, and the strategies identified that help to develop pupils as independent learners
- encourage your mentee to be specific in detailing the actions they will take, including scripting any key interactions with pupils that would benefit from this level of detailed preparation
- Rehearsal
As appropriate, support your mentee to rehearse key interactions that will be part of their teaching as they put their planned strategies into practice.
You can support your mentee’s learning in this activity by:
- taking the role of the pupil(s) concerned and ‘acting back’ as they typically might so that your mentee can rehearse their chosen strategy
- giving feedback to your mentee about how well they enacted their planned strategy, including positive steps to improve their practice
Next Steps: 5 mins
Agree with your mentee how they will now put their learning from this week’s session(s) into practice in their teaching. Help your mentee to clarify:
- the action(s) they will take and how these action(s) are expected to contribute to improved pupil learning
- what success will ‘look like’ in relation to these action(s)
- how they will evaluate their success in taking these action(s)
Note the date of your next mentor meeting, when you will check on your mentee’s progress.