Teachers and school leaders across the globe are working increasingly within a Neoliberal policy framework and this influences classroom practice (Kumar & Hill, 2009). The influence of the Neoliberal agenda on Education is particularly well-developed in England (Ball, 2013) during what might be characterised across the global education community as an ‘age of accountability’ (Cochran-Smith 2003) that appears to distort understanding of the purposes of Education (Biesta, 2011). This study investigates regular use of independent learning activities with children aged 4 to 11 years within a Primary school in England. During regular afternoon sessions children in two combined classes, with only a minimum of adult supervision, choose activities from a range of independent tasks. The children move from one task to another when they feel they have completed a task to their own satisfaction. This independent activity allows the two teachers and a teaching assistant to work intensively in the same learning space on teacher facilitated tasks with small groups.  This approach was developed by the school partly in response to an engagement with development of thinking dispositions (Claxton et al. 2011) and self-regulated learning (Zimmerman, 2002). However, it was also response to concerns about the general motivation of children and the perceived benefits of freeing up teachers and teaching assistants as a teaching team to be able to spend more time working closely with small groups of children. This study uses a cultural historical activity theory perspective (Williams, Davis & Black, 2007) to investigate the intentions of the teachers and the learning of the children during these independent learning activities. The overall project aims to develop as far as possible within the acknowledged constraints of teacher workload a practitioner action research approach with teacher researchers collaborating with a research mentor based in a local university McNiff & Whitehead, 2000). The project design and facilitation is informed by a situative metaphor for teachers’ professional learning as ‘interplay’ between the vertical hierarchical domain of public knowledge and the horizontal situated, social and segmented domain of teachers’ practical wisdom (Boyd & Bloxham, 2014). This perspective recognises the expertise of teachers and the possibility for knowledge creation by teacher researchers within the workplace. In the first action research cycle of the project it seemed necessary to clarify to some extent the thinking dispositions element of the school’s approach because the teachers had engaged to different degrees with a complex commercial package (Building Learning Power, Claxton, 2002). Following a suggestion by Costa and Kallick for teachers to develop their own thinking dispositions frameworks (2014) a nominal group technique was used to develop a more easily shared understanding of thinking dispositions and a set of accessible statements attempting to capture the school’s ambitions in relation to developing self-regulated learners and intended to be child, teacher and parent friendly. This thinking dispositions document became one of the prompts for planning and evaluating the learning activities. The research question is: what is the impact of the independent learning activities on learning and learners and to what extent does this match the intentions of the teaching teams? The research method involved audio and video recording of teacher planning of activities, video recording of a small sample of children and copying of any work or artefacts that they produced during the independent learning activities, and recording of teaching team evaluation discussion and semi-structured group interviews with each teaching team. The emerging analysis highlights some of the dilemmas which the teaching teams manage as they design activities and deploy available resources to frame learning in different ways for their children (Lefstein et al., 2013; Boyd, Hymer & Lockney 2015). 

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