Approaches to Learning Skills

Are the Approaches to Learning Skills hard for your teachers to understand? It has been a challenge for teachers at my school for sure. Once we get the general idea of what they are understood, it becomes especially difficult to understand the explicit teaching aspect and the reasons for identifying them to students. Many teachers felt that they were teaching skills all the time, in every activity. It took a lot of time to understand the difference between using a skill and teaching a skill. Yes, we are always thinking, but are we taking time out from our activity to teach students a specific thinking skill? Are we pausing to teach them the skill out of our specific context? Usually the answer is no, and that is not teaching an ATL skill. 

Think of ATL skills as the tools that we want students to have in their tool box that they leave our school with and are prepared to utilize in the real world. We want to take time from our content and teach them how to use those skills. In the real world, outside of the confines of high school, our interactions and activities are not separated out by category or subject group. We do not encounter math separately from science, and science separately from language and literature. Students need to have these skills and be able to use them effectively regardless of the content that they learned them in. We identify them to students so that they can draw connections between the times that they learned them in one subject to times that they learned it in another. Any cross subject connections deepen the understanding and the application of the skills. 

When you are working with teachers to incorporate ATL skills in their lessons, sometimes it is simply an issue of remembering to pause and explicitly teach them. Having a visual in the classroom is always helpful. Here are two poster resources that can help teachers to keep ATL skills in mind as they grow students' tool boxes: Poster set, Single poster.