In amongst all the prescriptiveness of our new ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum, the Minister is still asserting that dispositions are important. What’s missing in the curriculum is HOW teachers might go about eliciting them.

Here is something that might help.

In 2023, Guy Claxton, Becky Carlzon and I did work to help teachers with the very question of HOW. This work built on the ideas found in the Learning Power series of books Guy has written (one of which was co-authored with Becky). I recommend those books if you want to go deeper with your dispositional practice.

One of the resources we developed as part of that work was a set of dispositional practice cards. We wanted to give teachers something simple and practical that could help them integrate a dispositional lens into their planning and practice.

These are the seven dispositions we worked from. We called them the Magnificent Seven Positive Learning Dispositions.

Each disposition has its own card. The front of the card is designed to help you notice and recognise the disposition, and outlines what it ‘is’ and what it looks like in a classroom. The back of the card is designed to help you respond to the disposition, and has questions you can ask and learning experiences and strategies you can use to help nurture and grow that disposition in your learners.

For example, here is the Imagination card.

Imagination is a powerful disposition for nurturing a spirit of agency and participation, and learners of all ages, across all subjects, benefit when the learning environment works to elicit its ‘use’.

Read about Imagination ‘at work’ in a Year 11 English classroom.

There are a limited number of sets remaining, and I ship worldwide. To order yours, click this link.