When creating our unit planners we document the Approaches to Learning (ATL) skills connected to our unit. It can be easy to just select a lot of ATLs that students practise, demonstrate or use in a unit, but this can leave us with a long list of skills selected, with little information about how we are helping students to develop those skills. For example, students probably ‘give and receive meaningful feedback’ every lesson, so selecting this in our unit planner is not going to be useful. Imagine if every unit had that skill selected – it would become redundant or superfluous!

When we select ATL skills to document in our unit, there are two questions we can ask ourselves to make sure we are only selecting the relevant skills: