Month: September 2012

Letting Go: Student Designed Project Based Learning

Listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors is always inspirational, but today (Tuseday 25th September) was more enlightening than usual.

Along with colleague Rosie Sheldrake, I took a group of Year 9 students to an oral history event at Essex University, in memory of the late Dora Love. The original plan was to give students access to quality material for a Holocaust project that we would define later, however, as the day unfolded, we decided to hand over the whole process of project design to the students – something we have not done before.

Below is a quick explanation of how we went about it… Continue reading Letting Go: Student Designed Project Based Learning

Dramatic Resources for Reading Texts in the Classroom

In June I had the pleasure of spending some time with Avner Segall from Michigan State University. He talked about how teachers try very hard to add layers of pedagogy to lessons and often ignore the pedagogy implicit and hidden within the texts they use. He demonstrated how unpicking text, its motives and choices can give teachers all the material they need to create exciting learning. This made a great impact on me, but I was unable to fully translate it into classroom practice. Then, in July I completed an in-house coaching cycle and spent time working with a fantastic Drama teacher called Alex. In the lesson that I observed, she had eight ‘Explorative Strategies’ on display around the board. Students were given a scene from Oliver the Musical and asked to explore it using one or more of the strategies. The students were obviously familiar with the process, but the results were stunning. They were digging deep into the text and asking some very precise questions about its purpose and significance. Continue reading Dramatic Resources for Reading Texts in the Classroom