AISZ Teaching Dispositions*
All learners, including teachers, should possess these dispositions:
Reflectiveness: being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning.
Meta-Learning: Being aware, and taking control of one's own learning. Having an awareness and understanding of the phenomenon of learning itself as opposed to subject knowledge.
Planning: Working out learning in advance and a strong ability to plan effectively.
Distilling: The ability to distill information in order to extract the essential meaning or most important aspects.
Revising: The ability to reconsider and alter practice or beliefs in the light of further evidence.
Reciprocity: being ready, willing and able to learn alone and with others.
Interdependence: The ability and desire to work interdependently.
Collaboration: Highly developed collaboration skills.
Empathy: A high degree of empathy and the ability to actively listen.
Imitation: The ability to recognise and imitate exemplars of practice and pick up others’ habits and values.
Resourcefulness: being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways.
Questioning: The ability and desire to inquire and seek answers.
Making Links: The capacity to recognise connections and make links to previous knowledge, concepts, practice and understandings in order to generate new ways of working.
Imagining: Being able to imagine a changed state and the multitude of hypotheses that can be generated from which to select a course of action or mentally rehearse something new.
Reasoning: Thinking rigorously and methodically.
Capitalising: The ability to make good use of resources.
Resilience: being ready, willing and able to lock on to learning.
Absorption: The ability and desire to be rapt in learning; to be absorbed in one’s own learning / work and to bring this “flow” to teaching students.
Managing Distractions: A strong capacity to manage distractions and set priorities.
Noticing: Really sensing what is out there and taking notice of what is possible
Perseverance: The ability to persevere as learning happens and recognising that learning can be hard work.
*Guy Claxton: Building Learning Power