View from the classroom
accordingly. Didn’t they all just choose the easy task to be lazy? I hear you ask. No. The children knew that ultimately they were responsible for their own learning, with thanks to neuroscience lessons we had with them. If they chose to do the easy task then they wouldn’t be growing any new pathways in their brain so therefore their learning wasn’t ‘growing’. It’s amazing how much the children wanted to learn when given the control to do so. They also loved finding out that anyone can grow their intelligence no matter what their age or starting point. Just as TRUST was bestowed upon us from senior management, we bestowed trust on the children, it worked brilliantly! We couldn’t believe how empowering the concept would be for all of them. Quickly, they realised: that a whole page of ticks wasn’t the key to successful learning; they became reflective and self-aware about themselves as learners; they began describing their learning
habits in detail; they all felt successful and they wanted to learn; they discovered that making mistakes fires synapses and in turn increases learning capacity, happily they accepted our brains simply love making new connections.
How do we learn together? Children were seeing their role in the classroom as a team effort. Through Learning without Limits they realised that it wasn’t just the teacher in control all of the time. The fact they were working with a different learning partner each week built up amazing relationships with other peers they might not usually work with.
Each classroom felt unified. At the end of the year, when we sat down to write our reports, for once, there wasn’t one ‘invisible child’ in our class. We knew each and every child thoroughly; we understood what they needed to focus on to improve their learning, and so did they. For us, this was a much more satisfying end to the year than a meaningless level, or a half empty target card sheet. The Year Five team have now shared their findings with the rest of the school and now we are putting an action plan in place where we will concentrate on trying to generate the same successes in the other eighteen classrooms.
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www.education-today.co.uk
September 2015
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