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Welcome to my personal blog, which I hope will develop over time into a useful and challenging collection of thoughts. I have tried to be organised and have a contents page for you to click on any items of interest.
Please feel able to comment. That way, ideas develop. While ideas are free, please attribute anything "borrowed". In that way, I'll keep sharing. Since my early training I have been convinced that the greatest service any teacher can do for children in the earliest stages of education is to instil a love of learning, to enjoy enquiring and to generate questions which they can then seek to answer, by a variety of means, and share with others. To learn to think, to talk and to question is the birthright of every child. This simplification of a much broader approach has been my guiding principle both as a classroom teacher and as a head teacher, seeking to harness children’s interests to become dynamic learners in and out of school, both in school and all other settings. The development of learning through making explicit appropriate cross-curricular links, starting from relevant first-hand experiences, gives children both thematic overviews and the ability to explore, discover and place relevant individual items of information within a wider context. This is often now described as a metacognitive approach, learning about learning, but I would argue that it is, and always has been, good education practice. Children need to have a grasp of where their current learning fits into the wholeness of their knowledge, to know where and how to store this for future use, and to have skills of rapid recall, so that the information or skill can be applied in other contexts. Children should learn to become solution finders. |
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