Co-design Project - Our new space for learning!

We're creating a new space for learning. We hope that it will reinforce and extend our school community’s understanding of new educational futures- through accessing learner voice.

We've had a fantastic chance to rethink what is needed and wanted from education and schools.

Project Aims:

• The design process – to involve the whole school and explore new ways to communicate, combine ideas, make decisions, and promote participation and learner voice.

• Learning space design for our educational future – to develop a new space for learning and teaching which reinforces and extends the school community’s collective understanding of new educational futures, and facilitates the pedagogies and approaches to teaching and learning which might underpin these visions.

• New learning relationships – offers opportunities to promote different learning relationships between teachers and pupils and also to support learning with peers (across ages), parents and siblings, the local community, and with external experts. Teachers and students working as equal design partners will provide opportunities to research, problem solve, develop ideas and make decisions as a team.

A group of students have driven the project collaboratively with a member of staff. We've visited Large BSF projects, worked with Futurelab, and practised our negotiating skills and learned a fair deal about designing, budgets and how to order furniture!

... Building work has just started, we'll be posting some updates on here over the summer to show students, parents, staff, and anyone else interested how the work (their hard work) is going on. Watch this space...

Here are the latest pictures

Wallwisher - what would you use it for?

Wall wisher is a great, and easy to use too which allows the collation/ collaboration of ideas and thoughts from many people. We think it has potential to enable more student participation in terms of school decisions, and in the ways they contribute to a task in class.

Wordle

Wordle is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Here is our Marches learning mission statement and growing minds curriculum statement.

Creative Learning

“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
Sir Ken Robinson

TED Talks: Sir Ken Robinson makes a thought provoking case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity. Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children, advocating a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Whole education and their blog also make a compelling case for spreading a different approach to learning throughout the community and throughout people's lives. They want:

'all young people to receive a well-rounded education that they can relate to... all to learn practical skills such as communication and teamwork, to develop qualities such as resilience and empathy and to acquire knowledge that goes beyond literacy and numeracy to an understanding of our culture. A Whole Education will comibine practical skills with theory, vocational and academic study for all young people whatever their ability.'

Partners behind Whole Education include Oxfam, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, RSA, Innovation Unit, Human Scale Education, UK Youth, Futurelab, ASDAN, Co-operative College, Food for Life Partnership and Campaign for Learning.

A follow on from Ken Robinson's talk is this blog - well worth a read!

Explorers

Thanks to Thomas Tallis School of creativity, who introduced us to "How to be an explorer of the world". In the book, the author Keri Smith provides the following advice:

1. Always be looking (notice the ground beneath your feet)

2. Consider everything alive and animate

3. Everything is interesting. Look closer

4. Alter your course often

5. Observe for long durations (and short ones)

6. Notice the stories going on around you

7. Notice patterns. Make connections

8. Document your findings (field notes) in a variety of ways9. Incorporate indeterminancy

10. Observe movement

11. Create a personal dialogue with your environment. Talk to it

12. Trace things back to their origins

13. Use all of the senses in your investigations

Team working/ project working

Working collaboratively, in teams, is an important skills for learners to live successful lives in 21st century. We are developing activities and frameworks which will facilitate the development of skills for working together, including many different strategies for debriefing the process.

Last year in Learning to Learn, staff and pupils developed a framework (with the help of ICA) for working collaboratively on projects. We called this 'Steps to Success':

•Leader – someone to keep as eye on how the process is going and direct it.
•Brain storm – all ideas and thoughts at this stage are useful and recorded (Brain drops is also used as a term)
•Outcomes – what do they want the end result to be – projects can only end well if everyone agrees what it is they are aiming for.
•Key actions – what do they need to do to reach the outcomes. How they will space out their time – a time/action plan.
•Who will do what – everyone in the group should have role.
•Time keeper – someone who ensures the task does not run behind
•Evaluation and reflection – we only get better at doing anything if we stop and think about how we did this time, what are the lessons to be learnt?

At the moment we are looking at ways to develop this further.

TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context), a process developed by Belle Wallace. Like the Futurelab Enquiring Minds Model, learners are encouraged to develop a cyclical approach to their enquiry. This begins with gathering and organising information, proceeds to idea generation and implementation and culminates in sharing, review and debrief. Central to the ethos of TASC is the acknowledment of multiple forms of intelligence and knowledge which in turn will foster increased engagement and improved self esteem.

There is also a Project Management tool - called Busy Lizzie is a good way of creating a timeline for projects.

eSafety

Students recently partcipated in training with Futurelab, which in part focused on how we might harness digital media and new technologies to access a wider base of learner voice, and a wider variety of learning opportunities. What immediately became clear, was that we live in a world with many new opportunities for communication.

It's important then, that learners are supported to utilise these, but even more crucially, how to use these opportunities safely, appropriately and creatively.

A key skill for the future will be the ability to manage, organise and select useful information, what we refer to as being 'Reasoning'. Much of this information is likely to be digital in nature and may not be restricted to the written word. In a recent report (Knowledge, Creativity & Communication, April 2009), Dr. Carey Jewitt of the London Knowledge Lab suggested a number of trends that may define our experiences of the world in the next 20 years; such as dealing with increasing ease of access to increasing amounts of information, increased collaboration, its effects on communication and creativity, the ways in which literacy and information practices are changing, and its impact on the role of writing and the emergence of new forms of literacy.

We know that Web 2.0 tools have enormous potential for enhancing learning. We're really interested in ways new technologies can be used, especially as a way to harness, and develop creative learning, increase learner advocacy, and aid a move towards an enquiry pedagogy. Howevever, there are some very important safeguarding issues which need careful consideration before moving forward. Below are some links to sites which explore this further:

Primary Bits and Bytes - esafety

Ofsted Safe Use of New Technologies

Welcome to Marches Growing Minds

Welcome to the Marches Growing Minds blog. We are developing a new transition curriculum for students in Year 7 starting in September 2010. For two days a week, students will experience 'integrated' lessons, where Geography, History, Science, English, ICT, RE, PSHE and Citizenship will be delivered through a series of projects.
Growing Minds will develop a range of learning attributes and skills neccessary for life in the 21st Century. Learning activities will encourage independence and confidence. Learners will take greater responsibility for their own learning and develop creativity in thought, and expression.

We welcome feedback and ideas, please contact us.