I attended the STARME Festival of Learning last year, where I sat in on a session led by Ross McMaster regarding the use of the STRIDE method for learner conversations. It was something that caught my eye of a way to have learner conversations that was meaningful and not where we tell pupils to revise more every single time.
Following the festival, our school embarked on a whole-school focus on improving the quality of feedback and deepening the impact of learner conversations. We decided this was the perfect opportunity to pilot the STRIDE method within our Higher class.
Initially, we set up a collaborative document on Microsoft Teams, formatted with the STRIDE headers to guide our discussions. It required a bit of upfront training to get the pupils accustomed to the structure, but once we established the routine, the shift in the quality of dialogue was noticable. It transformed our conversations from general check-ins into targeted, actionable sessions.
The success of that trial was significant enough that we have decided to embed STRIDE as a permanent fixture for our certificated classes this year. We have created a booklet that will be on their Showbie account that we can access throughout the year and add into.
We’ve also included
- Meta-skills: a dedicated section where pupils can track the development of their meta-skills as we progress through the curriculum.
- Global Goals: These are added as they arise naturally through our class discussions, helping pupils connect their learning to the wider world.
- My Achievements: This section is designed to be highly personalised, allowing pupils to log individual successes and milestones that matter to them.
Because I’ve found this approach so effective for fostering inclusive, structured, and targeted conversations, I’ve created a set of classroom posters and a downloadable STRIDE template. I’ve shared them below for anyone who would like to trial this method in their own setting.
(Please note: I take absolutely no credit for the creation of the method itself—that is all Ross’s brilliant work!)
How do you structure Learner Conversations? And what do you do in the BGE where we see so many pupils in such a short space of time?