Education Show


In light of the need to prevent these issues, on Thursday 15 March, visitors can attend ‘Safeguarding Children’, a unique pan-public sector event available to anyone attending the Education Show. Designed to bring together all the key stakeholders responsible for prevention, early intervention and protection of vulnerable children, this event will provide key advice, guidance and discussion to develop solutions for improved safeguarding.


To attend the conference, register for free entry at www.education- show.com/safeguarding


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‘On your marks’: Competition in the classroom M


any young people have a natural sense of competition which can bring about a strong desire to succeed, important in motivating learning. Justin Sycamore is founder of Vocab Express, an online modern foreign language vocabulary learning application. Here Justin discusses the benefits of encouraging friendly competition during the learning process for students, and how teachers can introduce this in their classroom in a constructive manner. The need to engage children in their learning is vital if it is to be successful; taking an active role in their learning helps motivation and to strengthen end learning goals. This can prove a challenge in some cases, but adding an edge of competition to the process can work wonders. It is for this reason that it has been used for many years already in education, primarily in PE lessons: think of sports day, or rounders and football games. It is natural for children to wish to compete and, therefore, understandable that competition is put to educational use. If you have heard the saying ‘you’ve got to be in it to win it’, you may realise that establishing friendly competitive activity can prove an effective way of engaging hard to reach children, or for developing interest in a subject that is considered a more difficult option such as modern foreign languages. Schools can often find that the introduction of exciting goals to reach as found in competitions can give students a real drive. A points and scoreboard


March 2012


system is a strong method for allowing this, enabling students and teachers to track their ongoing progress at a glance. Jon Day, Assistant Headteacher and director of specialism, Lord Grey School, explains how this can benefit: “One student was recently describing how she keeps missing out on points just because of forgetting the umlauts in German - we’ve never had that level of concern about accuracy before from “average” students.”


Friendly competition can play a key role in the classroom to stimulate, engage and create a sense of enjoyment around learning, as well as establishing interaction with peers. This can give them the chance to develop communication skills as they share their excitement in results, yet an ability to work independently to attain these in the first place which is crucial for future success in the workplace.


Healthy competition is for example also often found in the workplace in later life: think of the bonuses or prize incentives offered by many companies for reaching performance targets. These ‘drivers’ not only help individuals to reach targets (in education’s case, successful learning), but can egg people along, motivating them through to their end goal, be it a bonus, or a better exam result.


This can also be turned around to competition with oneself- can you beat a previous score/time/outcome of yours? Keeping a log of these can not only motivate students,


www.education-today.co.uk 17


but can be an effective record of progress for teachers to monitor.


Of course, it is important to stress that this is not taken out of hand – competition should never be the be all and end all of activity, but it can act as a significant friendly ‘push’ along the way to help achieve success if used correctly.


uVocab Express u01392 357 530 uwww.vocabexpress.com


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