Deliberate Practice Target
Sky Maths Class (Y6) have been introduced to this pictorial idea of viewing their learning experience at any one point in the lesson. With the diagram’s help, they have been able to recognise and talk about how they feel about their learning experience, and therefore take action themselves to move their learning on.
They recognise that ideally they need to be in the yellow Learning Zone to maximise the learning opportunities and outcomes. There will be times that they cross over into the Comfort Zone (central green area) or the Panic Zone (outer red area). However, once recognising this, they feel more empowered to do something about it (i.e. take on more or less challenging ideas). This supports Growth Mindset and the idea that Learners take more responsibility for their own learning.
After Mrs. Hodges recommended this, we tried it in Year 3 Maths. We love it and refer to it daily now during maths. When we try something new, some of us get panicky. We decided to try having an addition ‘buffet’ last week. We had to select from the buffet, an activity that looked at the right level. We decided that if we got too comfortable for more than 5 minutes and whizzed through the work, we had to go back to the buffet and get something more challenging. It we then, for example, chose the tarsia and found that after 5 minutes we hadn’t answered a single question (panic zone), we would go back to the buffet and choose something a bit easier. There was a good range of pictorial and abstract activities as well as reasoning and problem solving challenges and we always have equipment to hand (numicon, diennes, unifix). Something for everyone! The target has become embedded in out deliberate practice.