☰ Teaching and Learning

Teaching and Learning

Posted on: November 28th 2014

 It strikes me what an exciting and productive place Norfolk House is and how well our staff and children are geared up for teaching and learning; and I mean that in the very sense of the phrase - that the children will happily teach (each other/ their younger buddies) and the staff are dedicated to their own ongoing learning.

As much as I’d like to say that I engineer it all, there is definitely a culture of our staff being hugely independent in their own excellent ideas and initiatives and I think what is empowering for them is their knowledge that they are trusted to try new things and be innovative. Mrs Holt’s amazing assembly on Growth Mindset last week - something that she had been researching and felt was an excellent idea for the children to understand and work on themselves had a real impact; I had a mum stop me in the street to tell me how inspired her child was and that he had decided he ‘was going to have a growth mindset’! That in itself is almost miraculous - that a parent actually gets a conversation out of their child about school in the evening - let alone one so cerebral! 

And popping along to Mrs Cannon’s classroom, where she had been focussing with her children on intrinsic rewards - looking at all the little things that could make an accumulative difference to their learning, was equally inspiring and has made an impact on the way that the children are viewing their own efforts and learning as a result. 

Walking around the school with visitors and just popping into classes, I see this culture in each and every classroom - the more the teachers learn during staff meetings, training or their own research, the more they apply this in the children’s learning and the more ambitious the opportunities (higher order questioning, philosophical debate, independent problem solving and investigation, collaborating on projects such as our great Anti-Bullying week focus) and the more the children relish them and rise to them. The presentation of their work in Anti Bullying week, put together by Mrs Gormley reflects all of this amazing learning, and special mention must go out to the impressive work a group of Form 5 children did on producing and editing a video on Cyber Bullying - Marissa is certainly a dab hand with iMovie!

There are always so many things that I could write about in each and every blog; I think the newsletter speaks for itself in what we do, but sometimes, I think it is very important just to mention the staff and pupils and their continuous hard work, enthusiasm and dedication in making our school the place that it is and the culture that we have. 

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