Within Great Britain the concept of exploring thinking, learning and their associated processes is rising in popularity. Alongside the Teaching and Learning Programme’s (TLRP) ‘Learning how to Learn’ (for example, James et al. 2007), the Learning to Learn in Schools Project represents an empirical exploration of this practice in schools (for full details see Wall et al. 2010). Running from 2003 until 2010, involving four regions and over 50 institutions, including primary, secondary and special schools and representing pupils from the age of 4 to 16 years this is a wide ranging project with many objectives and multiple research questions. Tying it together is the umbrella term of learning to learn and the main objective of supporting and developing pedagogies which help make the process of learning explicit for all learners (Wall et al. 2010).

Over the duration of the project, participant teachers have indicated that a L2L pupil has awareness of the processes of learning; is psychologically prepared for learning; and is a good communicator (Hall et al. 2006). Associated with this growing appreciation, there has been an increased amount of consultation of pupils about their experiences of L2L. This has reflected a growing academic engagement with the concept of  pupil views; however, although studies go some way to considering the complexities of learning, few extend beyond generating more than a snapshot of pupils understanding (for example Bullock and Muschamp 2006; Black et al. 2006) and most rely on a version of learning that is limited and performative with few venturing into the realm of metacognition (Flavell 1979). This metacognitive dimension is important in a project such as Learning to Learn as it represents the move towards pupils’ active thinking about learning and has been shown to be linked to improved student outcomes (Prins et al. 2006).  

This paper extends work completed using pupil view templates (Wall and Higgins 2006) which successfully showed how a visual data collection tool could support pupils, even of a young age, in moving from the concrete to the abstract when thinking and talking about learning processes (Wall 2008). Previous data collection and analysis within the L2L project has shown how the visual tool and the scaffold it provides (Baumfield et al. 2009) has been productive in allowing new insight into pupils’ metacognition. This has been highly influential in the Learning to Learn project in answering questions about the extent to which pupils involved in learning centred pedagogy think differently about the process and outcomes of learning. However, the pupil views templates have the same criticism as research mentioned above: they ask the pupil to focus on one moment in time and miss opportunities to explore the processes involved. The focus of this paper will therefore be an attempt to tackle this gap in the literature; exploring the question: How do students in Learning to Learn schools describe the story of a learning episode?

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