Deep Learning

We partner with James Nottingham, of Challenging Learning, to embed the "Learning Pit" across our school. The Learning Pit supports the ways in which we think about, and articulate, our learning. The model helps build students’ resilience, growth mindset, curiosity and collaborative skills. Students are supported to embrace challenge when learning new concepts, and to be comfortable with being uncomfortable when making mistakes and learning from them to build conceptual understanding.

The Learning Pit is:

  • An ILLUSTRATION OF LEARNING to help students identify how much progress they have made so far 
  • One way to ENCOURAGE POSITIVE ATTITUDES TOWARDS CHALLENGE 
  • PLAYFUL, SHARED LANGUAGE that can support conversations at home as well as in school          (James Nottingham: https://www.learningpit.org/)
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Learning Pit Simple

 

We are working with James to engage our students in Deep Learning through having high expectations, providing feedback as advice, effective questioning, desirable difficulties, dialogue, and using the SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) to focus the learning intentions and success criteria of learning tasks.

The SOLO Taxonomy clearly identifies levels of learning of a concept: from surface learning (level 1 & 2) to deep understanding (levels 3 to 5).

  1. Having no idea or knowledge 

  2. Knowing a bit

  3. Knowing a lot

  4. Understand

  5. Apply

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Learning Pit Lego

We hold high expectations for EVERY student to make superb progress EVERY year.