A COMPLETE GUIDE FOR TEACHERS:
Teaching Cognitive ATL skills for academic success
Teaching Affective ATL skills for mental health
Developing metacognitive ATL skills for self-awareness
Full program of classroom exercises for students to learn all the core ATL skills
Full ATL PD program for your school
ATL Assessment and implementation issues
CHAPTER 1 – The global need for ATL skills training
CHAPTER 2 – Design components of successful ATL skills programs
o Start with the end in mind
o Find the time
CHAPTER 3 – ATL Skills frameworks – 14 categories of ATL skills
CHAPTER 4 – Teaching Affective Skills for mental health
1. Teaching Failing Well
2. Mindfulness
3. Practicing Focus and Concentration
4. Developing Mental Quiet
5. Perseverance
6. Practicing Delayed Gratification
7. Reducing anxiety
8. Self-motivation
9. Attribution Retraining
10. Resilience
11. Visualisation, cognitive mapping and transfer
CHAPTER 5 – Teaching Metacognitive skills for self-awareness
1. Identifying understanding gaps
2. Developing self-assessment through normal formative assessment
3. Developing awareness of learning strategy effectiveness
CHAPTER 6 – Teaching Cognitive skills for academic success
1. Understand sensory learning preferences (learning styles)
2. Making effective summary notes from written work
3. Develop memory and remember key information
4. Time and Task Management
5. Achieving Goals
CHAPTER 7 – Designing your own ATL skills program to suit your context, your students and your school
• Task 1: Choosing your Core-Generic ATL skills
• Task 2: Defining Mastery
• Task 3: Mapping out Core-Generic ATL skills to meet learning challenges
• Task 4: Designing the teaching exercises
• Task 5: Choosing which exercises to teach
• Task 6: Teaching the exercises
• Task 7: Choosing your Subject Specific ATL skills
CHAPTER 8 – Developing Self-Managed Learners
The MYP ATL Skills Student Workbook contains 93 individual and unique ATL skills exercises.
Exercises that cover all five Categories, ten Clusters and 134 skills Practices that make up the full ATL framework for MYP. These exercises have been designed so that each one can be used by any teacher in any subject. The idea with this workbook is for all MYP students to have one each, which will last them all the years of their MYP. Teachers can use the indexing of exercises to plan out an MYP-wide programme of ATL skills introduction and development to cover all students as they progress through the MYP.
This book will enable all schools to be able to create and deliver their own unique ATL programme to suit their school, their country and their particular mix of cultures.
Each exercise has been designed for students to improve in one very specific aspect of learning in general. The aim of this book is to help students improve their own success – however they define success.
Students need to practice the ATL skills exercises the same way they might practice a musical instrument, a sporting pursuit or a new language. First, they need to work out exactly how to do it well and then do it over and over again making small improvements every time until they get it. Students will know they have got it when they can do it without thinking and are perhaps even good enough to teach someone else.
Teachers can pick one ATL skill that they most want to develop with their students, find the correct exercise in this book and get as many teachers as possible to have their students practice that same exercise in their subject class. Using student self-assessment to monitor progress. Once teachers have one skill exercise working well across the student body, they can pick another, make a plan, create a framework.
Each exercise gives students an activity to perform to practice the skill and it also gives students what is called a “Mastery” statement. This is a definition of what someone who was at the Expert Level in this particular skill would be able to do. Students can use this statement as something to aim for.
First students need to work out what they want to achieve (see Achieving Goals) and then look for the specific skills that might help with that. If it is school work, what might the student be having trouble with – what might help that student improve? Is it making good notes in class? (see Note Making). Is it meeting deadlines? (see Deadlines). If that is the case the student may need to look at (Perseverance) skills and maybe learn how to deal with Pressure and Stress.
This book is a self-help manual for all the skills students need to succeed – however they want to succeed.
The DP ATL Skills Student Workbook contains 188 individual and unique ATL skills exercises.
Exercises that cover all five Categories of ATL in the DP programme – Communication, Social, Self-Management, Research and Thinking skills. These exercises have been designed so that each one can be used by students and teachers in any subject area.
The idea with this workbook is for all DP students to have one each, which will last them for the whole of their DP programme. Teachers can use the indexing of exercises to plan out a DP-wide programme of ATL skills introduction and development to cover all students as they progress through the DP. This book will enable all schools to be able to create and deliver their own unique ATL programme to suit their school, their country and their particular mix of cultures.
Each exercise has been designed to help students to improve in one very specific aspect of learning in general. The aim of this book is to help students improve their own success – however they define success. Students need to practice the ATL skills exercises the same way they might practice a musical instrument, a sporting pursuit or a new language. First, they need to work out exactly how to do it well and then do it over and over again, making small improvements every time until they get it. Students will know they have got it when they can do it without thinking about it and are perhaps even good enough to teach someone else.
Teachers can pick one ATL skill that they most want to develop with their students, find the correct exercise in this book and get as many teachers as possible to have their students practice that same exercise in their subject class. Using student self -assessment to monitor progress. Once teachers have one skill exercise working well across the student body they can pick another, make a plan, create a framework.
Each exercise gives students an activity to perform to practice the skill and it also gives students what is called a “Mastery” statement. This is a definition of what someone who was at the Expert Level in this particular skill would be able to do. Students can use this statement as something to aim for.
A logical flow of student ATL skill development would be to have them all start with 3a) Metacognition 1 - to learn how to accurately self- assess their own skill development and then move to 5g) Hard and easy choices – to learn how to make good decisions while making a well informed decision about their own future post-school. To do this they need to complete 3h) Become aware of own values and virtues and it would be very useful for them to master both 3c) Achieving immediate goals and 3d) Use an effective goal-setting process to successfully achieve long-term goals so that they stay focused on high achievement and manage the time that they have as well as they can. To be fully effective in a digital world all students also need to practice the strategies of 2a) Representing yourself on social media and 2b) Control your own data and keep your social media identity secure and in order to cope with the pressures and stresses of DP life they also need to learn how to 3g) Use the process of ‘failing well’ to help achieve academic and other goals and 3i) Deal effectively with pressure, stress and anxiety.
Once they have completed these exercises they can then pick out and do the other exercises as they need them to achieve subject and qualification goals. The ones they need throughout the DP that correlate best with subject tasks given to them by teachers.
This book is a self-help manual for all the skills students need to succeed – however they want to succeed.