Pupil Voice

You might be interested  to know that last year the National College for School Leadership and the National Education Trust hosted a day for 100+ primary pupils to work on a pupil learners charter. The day proved to be excellent and the charter can be found by following the link below – take a look – why not think about developing a learners charter at your own school – i would be very interested to hear from anyone who wants to do this.

pupil charter

Screencasting

Screencast-O-Matic is the free and easy way to create a video recording of your screen (aka screencast) and upload it for free hosting all from your browser with no install!

take a look at – http://screencast-o-matic.com/

Why not get pupils to make screencasts as tutorials for other pupils – once uploaded to the internet they can be used anytime anywhere by anyone!

The Outdoor Curriculum

Today I had the privilege of visiting Belgrove Infants School in Aylesbury. This turned out to be a remarkable visit as I can honestly say that I have not seen a school like this anywhere before. Bedgrove is a large 4 form entry infants school with nursery class. What is fairly unique about this school is the richness of its outdoor curriculum. Pupils spend approximately 50% of their lessons outside!

 In order to facilitate this the school has extensively developed its grounds. You can see examples of this development by visiting the school website,

Bedgrove Infant School Website

The outdoor classroom has covered seating areas for activities like writing, areas for creative work, physical activity,  science and environmental studies. The art trail was particularly impressive. This included paintings (created by the children) by Lowry, Mondrian and Whistler. As it was a kind of time line of the history of art the school made their own concrete cave so that the children could experience cave painting. A simple idea that has produced great results.

The school is also a training school and runs an impressive CPD programme. See the training arm of the school’s website.

Bedgrove Training

If you are interested in any of the CPD events you can contact the school through either website.

Pupil driven learning clinics

I recently visited my old school to see how the pupils were getting on and particularly to learn more about learning clinics. These clinics have been set up by pupils (independent of their teachers) to support each other in aspects of their work they find difficult. An example here would be the maths clinics that have been set up to help with SAT’s. Pupils who are confident with an aspect of maths (eg converting fractions into decimals and percentages) set up a lunchtime clinic to support those pupils who feel they need support. Pupils feel that this is an extremely useful resource.  They feel they can ask the same question time and again, something they feel uncomfortable doing with their teacher, no matter how patient the teacher might be.

Plans are in place to make this a 24/7 service through a blog, so that pupils can support each other in other aspects of their work. The pupils are well used to undertaking tutorials prepared by their teachers and it will be interesting to track the development of this idea into pupil initiated tutorials.

Independent Learning

Independent learning is a vital component of a 21^st Century skills set for all learners. Yet it isn’t even on the agenda in many schools. This may change in the light of the 2020 Vision Report of the Teaching and Learning Review Group. Dave and myself were members of the consultation group.The report set out the case for  Personalising Learning and made the following recommendations with particular regard to enabling pupils to be more independent:

2020 Vision 

• taking responsibility for, and being able to manage, one’s own learning and developing the habits of effective learning

• knowing how to work independently without close supervision

 Leading schools engage in the following:

• develop collaborative relationships which encourage and enable all pupils to participate and which develop pupils’ skills of working independently and in groups, enabling teachers and pupils to move learning forward together.

• develop pupils as active partners, with responsibility for participating in designing their learning and providing feedback.

• placeexplicit focus on higher order thinking skills and learning how to learn, using group work, including academic peer tutoring, paired and cooperative learningearning

The school system needs to change because too many youngsters are  totally teacher dependent and too much learning is totally teacher directed. This actually diminishes children’s natural learning abilities. See the excellent poem by Dr. John Edwards, The Things We steal from Children