in the Telegraph, Revealed: new teaching methods that are producing dramatic results
Innovative headteachers at schools around the country are abandoning traditional chalk and talk teaching methods in favour of widely differing visions of an educational future. Judith Woods enters a world of spaced learning, praise pods, flexible Fridays and sixth-formers in business suits.
This doesn’t seem all that new to me. The business suits referred to are during a five day block lesson on business studies – we did something very similar at my senior school, ooh, 20 years ago. I remember having my head turned by the boys in suits who looked oh so different to the boys in uniform even though they were the same ppl 😉
and an old friend:
According to Professor Stephen Heppell, an education policy adviser and professor of new media innovations at the University of Bournemouth, the reason why such diverse approaches work is simply because almost anything is better than the factory schooling that preceded it. ‘When teachers do things differently, the alternative is always better and more successful than traditional methods, because the earlier model of education wasn’t built around the best way children can learn, but the best way to organise learning.’
Prof Heppell, parents do things differently. Why aren’t you backing us up, instead of telling us that things have got to change? Things have changed, we have stood up for our children, and we have forged a path of education entirely unlike anything seen in the factory schooling you are so negative about, so why are you not telling us that you will support us in our battle to go on doing what we do so well without external interference?
Also
According to Prof Heppell, getting children interested is always the key to success in the classroom. ‘It doesn’t matter what the idea is, it’s the active engagement of the children that’s the secret,’ he says. ‘When children are engaged with the process of learning, their attitude changes; being a good learner is becoming cool, rather than being the child most likely to fall off the chair or the most disruptive in the class.’
We know this too, it’s why so many of us do home education as child led learning. But our kids don’t do it to be cool, they just do it because it’s what they do. If you let a child learn, they learn. If you build in layers of expectations, testing, standards and requirements, you’ve somehow got to mend learning as well. Why not just stay at the learning stage?
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