Yesterday I spoke at the Havering Festival of Education

Yesterday I spoke at the Havering Festival of Education, great colleagues collaborating to bring thoughtful ideas to improve experiences and outcomes for young people.

My theme was Deepening the Curriculum:

Drawing on the headlines of the research to help learners know more, remember more and be able to do more.

I underpinned the session with three ideas: challenge, concepts and narratives.

In relation to challenge, there’s plenty of evidence that pupils enjoy demanding work.

I think, as a sector we can be inclined to make things too easy for too many of our pupils, in the mistaken belief that they can’t cope.

They can!

In ‘Respectable’ Lynsey Hanley talks about a teacher who made a real difference to her and her classmates.

‘He took us seriously: not in the sense that he treated us like miniature adults, but in the way he acted upon his belief that we had a right to be heard, and that we were as much a part of society as any adult or any middle - class child, whose right to be heard – to form and express an opinion and have it interrogated

At the beginning of the year, Mr. Bowell instigated two weekly institutions, the general knowledge quiz and the classroom debate. In hindsight, the reason these felt so special, so invigorating, was that both were vehicles for verbal reasoning and for testing abstract concepts, neither of which our previous teachers had paid particular attention to.

I never saw stronger evidence that you are taught how to be inarticulate, and you learn how to be ignorant, through what is withheld from you. Mr. Bowell gave us a chance to talk and to reason before our ability to do so was allowed to wither from inattention.’

I expand on the theme of high challenge, low threat in the classroom in a new webinar on Myatt & Co, access with an annual or group subscription.