Seven Habits of Everyone Learning

At Wheatley Park, we use the best educational research to ensure that our teaching is as effective as possible.

Together, our teaching staff have read and discussed research into the ‘ingredients’ that are proven to make learning successful. We have distilled what we have read into our whole-school approach to teaching and learning, which we call the Seven Habits of Everyone Learning. We chose the title both as an echo of Steven Covey’s famous book about what makes individuals very successful - The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - and also to link to our school value of Everyone Learning.

Our Seven Habits are not a tick list, or a way that we insist teachers of different subjects approach their very different work. Rather, they are a set of educational approaches, grounded in respected and up-to-date research into education and cognitive science. Our aim is for our teachers to apply these principles in their different contexts, in the way that they can demonstrate is most effective for our students at Wheatley Park. 

Together, we will continue to collaborate and review these principles to ensure that every one of our students receives the most effective teaching possible.

Below are a list of publications that have influenced the evolution of our Seven Habits so far:

1. Why Don’t Students Like School? (Daniel Willingham, 2010)
2. When the Adults Change, Everything Changes (Paul Dix, 2017)
3. RLT Core Principles of Teaching and Learning (RLT 2020)
4. Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies that All Teachers Should Know (Barak Rosenshine, 2012)
5. Rosenshine’s Principles in Action (Tom Sherrington, 2019)
6. Great Teaching Toolkit, Evidence Review (Coe, Rauch, Kime and Singleton, 2020)

The Habits themselves are listed in a one-page document here.