Warts and All

It’s exhilarating being part of a new school.

I love that the focus is on what is best for student learning, rather than simply doing what has always been done. It’s exciting to start with a blank slate and endeavor to create the very best learning environment we can without all the baggage of “we’ve always done it this way”. Most of all I love that I’m not alone in doing this.

I talk constantly with the amazing people I team teach with. We share our thinking, ideas, problems, solutions and laughter with teachers in the other hub. I ponder pedagogy and future focus areas with the leadership team guiding the school. We discuss issues with the students and ask them to try things out with us and feed back how it’s going. Parents follow our blogs and planning sites. Students share their google docs and wiki sites with parents. We get lots of feedback online and in person. We find out what’s working, what’s exciting and engaging the students, what isn’t going so well and what’s causing children to feel anxious and concerned. I’m certainly not lonely on this journey!

I love the transparency of what we are doing. Everything is out there for people to see, follow, understand and comment on. I strongly believe that this is the way forward in creating an open and collaborative learning environment, but it is a brave step to take. It means that people now get to see what they often haven’t had access to before; the raw and unpolished learning process. They can follow the journey we are taking as we learn new things, make mistakes and take risks, rather than viewing the final polished product once understanding has been developed, consolidated, edited and published.

I watched a student in an inquiry group meeting earlier this week. She was perched on a stool furiously typing as other students in the group talked and bounced around ideas at lightening speed. She was working on her inquiry wiki page, taking notes about what the group needed to achieve over the next few days. As I stood there I saw a student who could type and contribute to a conversation at the same time, something I have yet to achieve! I saw someone who could collaborate, accept ideas from others willingly and respectfully, rank tasks in order of importance, break down jobs into steps and delegate responsibility. In short, I saw a future leader. When I went back afterwards and looked at the typing she had completed I saw that she had not used full stops in her ideas, she had transposed a few letters in her haste to type ideas and there were quite a few spelling errors.

I didn’t talk to that student about her typing. Nor did I ask her to go back and edit her work. What would be the point? It was never supposed to be a polished piece of writing, that was not the purpose of the meeting. The point was to ascertain what needed to be completed to allow the group to move forward in their inquiry and to have a shared document where students could revisit ideas and check what needed to be done. Goal achieved. Later in the week the same student attended a writing workshop where the goal was to use punctuation appropriately to allow her writing to make sense to the reader. At that time she was asked to go back and edit her work, as the focus of the task was her understanding and use of
punctuation.

At Amesbury School people can share our learning journey with us. They get to see the whole messy, exciting, scary process warts and all. I think that’s fantastic, but I also think it’s important for people to remember that they are seeing the process, rather than the finished product. Take the time to consider the focus of a task and what it was supposed to achieve rather than judging it as a finished piece of work, because it frequently isn’t.

By Urs