Risk assessment anxiety and what to do about it
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The benefits of Yoga in schools
Eva Coddington of Sevenoaks School presents the case for the active practice of Yoga in schools as time very well spent.
Monitoring student well-being in secondary
Lorna Conroy describes how Bangkok Patana school has developed a two-track approach to monitor and support secondary student wellbeing.
Dealing with the impact of global uncertainty on a school community
It seems we are now constantly dealing with the effects of local and global uncertainty. Milena Prodanić Tišma describes how one school in Zagreb helped children to cope after two earthquakes during lockdown.
Promoting wellbeing in schools through action
For Nicholas Chaddock, just talking about wellbeing in the classroom achieves little. Doing rather than talking is the key.
Growing through wellbeing in 2022
According to Jim Knight, Rt Hon Lord Knight of Weymouth, dealing with Covid has come at a cost, but significant ways to improve teacher wellbeing are also at hand this side of the pandemic.
A strange place called school
The wait has been a long one, but their needs are not the same. Simon Dunford looks at the gaps in social learning that needs to be closed in different ways on returning to learning on-campus.
Online educational tools and protecting children’s data
Safeguarding is a high priority in any good school, but Huma Shah wonders if we are doing enough to protect children’s data when using well-known online learning resources.
Failure, trauma, recovery and resilience
Do failure and trauma really toughen you up? Not without a process of healing, argues social psycholgist Dr. Helen Street.
Measuring the social and emotional skills of 10 and 15 year olds
A recent study by the OECD strikingly confirms the importance of holistic education. Andreas Schleicher looks at the outcomes of their 2018-20 global Survey of Social and Emotional Skills.
Teachers’ leadership styles and student performance
Do ‘inclusive’ leadership styles in teachers motivate students? A study by Paul Parham and Gloria Moss at Sevenoaks School suggests there is a significant correlation.
Charley Openshaw, IB teacher and Head of Art at Sevenoaks School recommends the virtues of careful observation and drawing as useful techniques for wider learning.
Planning effective pre-clinical interventions for young people
Claire Sewell looks at a new Post Graduate diploma course for 2021 which will help schools – including international schools – become more self-reliant in making a range of positive interventions.
Supporting Year 13 / Grade 12 in uncertain times
Careers and Universities Counsellor, Paul Yap, looks at how graduating students can ‘win the wait’ imposed on them as they plan for the future during lockdown.
Helping Uganda Schools
Set up to provide a great education in self-supporting schools, HUGS is a model for the development of low-cost, sustainable learning, as Dr. Richard Bircher reports.
Get them outside!
Covid has brought home the value of getting outside. Nicholas Chaddock looks at why reevaluating the importance of outdoor education is so important for all of us in 2021.
The importance of sport to a school community in 2020
Far from being marginalised, sport moved centre stage at this UK day and boarding school during a difficult year, as Ed Buck, Director of Sport reports.
Supporting military children in school
As a result of frequent relocations and long periods of family separation, the children of military personnel need empathetic support in school, writes Louise Fetigan.
The foundation we forget to teach
Whatever you teach, argues Richard Evans, helping students know themselves is equally important. Acquiring emotional literacy transforms lives – yours and theirs.
Learning synthesis
Holly Warren describes Think Tank, an innovative studio environment in which children learn to synthesise their learning experiences as new design and art pieces.
The Think Tank environment.
The Think Tank (Warren, 2015) is an immersive, interactive studio setting (atelier) designed by students and an atelierista (art studio teacher) to celebrate, stimulate, enhance, and develop creative thinking patterns that connect children with a range of other experiences, both inside and outside a school. The concept was initially inspired by the educational approaches of pedagogues Loris Malaguzzi, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and Kieran Egan, which allow a child to express ideas, interests, concepts and theories by creating visual narratives without restriction. This approach sets the ground for exploratory adventures that will tell the story of a child’s research and findings and has evolved into what the children have described as “the place where your ideas come true.”
The Think Tank never requests, it proposes, shares, presents, and inspires its community to create art pieces that are expressive of their own experience. A constant inter-action with the students’ environment allows an ongoing dialogue of the parts. Think Tank therefore embraces and celebrates the different environments in which the students work, whether at home or at school.
Materials
Designing and making activities in Think Tank draw on materials which are readily available and are sourced locally either at school or at home. Recycled, repurposed and natural materials are valued, while the language, movement, and sounds that are part of the materials are used to enhance, document, and create narratives.
Think Tank is also a research hub for children’s ideas, concepts, and interests. As a child-centred learning setting it documents the ever-changing processes and themes the children spontaneously engage in.
How experiences unfold.
During Think Tank sessions, the mentor meets small groups of 6 to 8 children in a Pow Wow format to share ideas and thoughts. These can be experiences, recollections of past explorations or new proposals. If needed, a quiet moment of recollection/thinking is proposed as a way of linking with the students’ self. Then the group creates a dialogue and decides how to proceed. This is the three-step process of visible thinking that accompanies the experiences.
The environment is set up with a selection of materials that the Think Tank mentor proposes in different areas of the room. These could be glass bead on the light table, a video installation with sounds and an area for exploration with light such as light pebbles and fairy lights.
Having welcomed each other, participants start a conversation about a continuing project or make an initial exploration of something new. Beads can turn into spaghetti in a make-believe restaurant, the video installation might become a walk in the woods or the lights may turn into a fire requiring firefighters to design a new generation hose.
Recently, due to the requirements linked to the pandemic the students have been given working and exploration areas that are not shared with other classes but are still trampolines of inspiration.
Links with class work and the curriculum
The Think Tank is its own setting, created with the children’s input. It is dynamic and changes according to the moment, the situation and the projects involved. This requires a space that can morph and adapt easily, but its salient characteristic is the mental space needed to create it.
However, there are strong links to what children are learning elsewhere, and which they bring to the studio quite naturally. Think Tank enables them to talk about these ideas and skills in a new context, which is invaluable. Surface learning becomes embedded into deep learning as the children make connections that are meaningful to the projects. Think Tank discussions therefore involve personal know-how and knowledge acquired in class from all areas of learning. Literacy, numeracy, knowledge and understanding of the world, social and emotional skills and predispositions, fine and gross motor skills, creative thinking and problem solving meet in the Think Tank, demonstrating the uniqueness of each student that becomes a vital element in the creation of projects that celebrate multi-perspectives:
“Nothing of me is original, I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve known.” (Palahniuk, 1999)
Celebrating community.
Think Tank therefore celebrates and brings together the school as a learning community. Parents become partners in exhibitions and performance art pieces when everyone adds to the outcome. During the lockdown parents themselves became Think Tank mentors themselves by stepping inside the experiences and working with the children to produce family pieces in a process of incredible educational value.
Student perspective
The richness of the Think Tank experience is best expressed in the words of the children themselves, as in the poem spontaneously presented by a seven year old participant to her parents as a gift:
The Think Tank is full of ideas,
If you listen with your ears, just peer through here,
And maybe you will see a pear,
You will see oysters and monsters.
But don’t worry you don’t need to say sorry.
Now watch this film (Ripples) and you will be surprised
With what your child has learnt.
Holly Warren is an atelierista, or art studio teacher, working in an international school in Italy. She is the creator of Think Tank – a new project environment that links the creative process of art with Montessori, Steiner and Reggio Emilia educational methodologies.
To learn more about her ideas see:
Images kindly provided by Holly
How to thrive as a teacher
Daniel Shindler looks at the core values which has enabled him to take an optimistic view of what we all do.
Achieving deep awareness
For Felicity Gunn, enhanced intercultural mindedness, when practiced by the whole community, can take any school or business to new heights.
Singing in a global choir
Young people in schools around the world are fighting back against Covid-19 with music. Laurie Lewin invites your school to join in.
What lies beneath?
Matthew Savage, creator of the #monalisaeffect® approach to personalised learning and wellbeing considers what other masks children will be wearing in 2020.
Animal power
A new book by Helen Lewis and Russell Grigg explores the way that animals can affect children’s learning and wellbeing.
Whole person virtues
If you are conducting a review of your school values and philosophy, Roger Sutcliffe suggests that you should do so philosophically.
A global mission with International School roots
Matt Harris Ed.D. reports how a significant gap in safeguarding training for schools is being filled by an innovative group of international educators.
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and effective teaching
Discovering CLT was a eureka moment for Steve Garnett – so important he felt compelled to write a new book for teachers. Here he shares 4 key ideas.
Unconscious bias in international schools
In the light of questions being asked about racism in 2020, Gwen Byrom thinks we all need to take a hard look at the cultural climate in which international learning is taking place.
On their own two feet
Whether you are a teacher or a parent, wanting to help or protect the children for whom you are responsible is natural. But there are limits, says Nicola Pearson.
Developing good habits for the next stage of learning
Statistics show that ‘Dropping out of uni’ is getting worse, not better. David Craggs thinks that schools have a major role to play in addressing the issue.
Recalibrating our schools
Education has become a rushed process, and the skills that young people most need are in danger of being left behind. Time to recalibrate, says Robert Lloyd Williams.
Developing constructive confrontational skills and emotional intelligence
Stephen Walshe argues that engaging young people in philosophical enquiry creates an environment conducive to building constructive confrontational skills and emotional intelligence.
Helping children cope with worries
Since children’s worries often interfere with their learning, it is helpful to understand their concerns. Sometime before lockdown, Leah Davies asked 320 third graders to list one or two things they think about when they cannot sleep. Perhaps these worries are even more important now.
Parents and students in lockdown
Janice Ireland talks with Henk van Hout, Global Head of Shell Education Services, about how students and parents are coping with lockdown and the demands of remote learning.
Safeguarding during the lockdown
Jason Tait, Director of Pastoral Care and Designated Safeguarding Lead at TASIS, The American School in England suggests that maintaining student wellbeing during the lockdown is possibly even more important than a school’s online academic programme.
The impact of coronavirus as China’s international schools prepare to reopen
Stephanie Quayle of ISC Research looks at how schools may be coming through the lockdown phase in China, and what we can all learn from their experience.
Don’t worry, we’re happy
Does getting out of the classroom help you de-stress? Caroline Ferguson, Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS) Leader at Bangkok Patana School looks into CAS and stress levels.
Tricky – but necessary?
Making the most of being at home with a family during the lockdown may depend on getting everyone into a new routine. Easier said than done, but not impossible, thinks Orla Redmond.
Going digital
Establishing an effective safeguarding regime can be challenging even on one campus. Primary Principal Graeme Chisholm looks at how his school took on the task of coordinating a consistent programme across four sites in the Czech Republic.
Tattling and tale telling
Leah Davies suggests ways to help children differentiate between ‘tattling’ and responsible ‘reporting’. Here”s her advice for teachers and parents.
The importance of adult role modelling for children’s emotional development
Leah Davies offers educators ten tips for supporting children as they learn how to manage their feelings and grow emotionally.
Should smartphones be banned in school?
Following a decision by the state of Victoria government in Australia to exclude smart phones from primary and secondary schools, Sam Chester looks at arguments for and against banning phones in school.
Emily Melynn Alexander considers how lack of sleep can impact on the lives of teens and young adults: can they study effectively without it?
Language: The Key to Learning – The Importance of Discussion
In the third of three articles on the development of language in schools, Orla Redmond examines the value of discussion as a learning tool.
Movement Activities and Games for Kindergarten & Elementary Classrooms (Part 1)
As former first lady Michelle Obama advocated, let’s get our kids to move. Leah Davies gives us some pointers for getting children to move throughout the school day.
Helping students cope
School personnel need to provide a safe, supportive environment where children feel free to discuss their thoughts and feelings about war. Leah Davies advises that by listening carefully and answering questions on a level students can comprehend, children will learn that they are not alone in their concerns.
The importance of empathy for school leadership
Empathy is a formidable confidante which allows educational leaders to build collaborative communities which influence, innovate and enhance student outcomes. Melissa Etherton explores empathy as a leadership tool and how it can have a positive impact on a school community.
A different type of bullying
Aggression or bullying can be defined as any action that inflicts physical or mental harm upon another person. Leah Davies discusses why girls usually differ from boys in the type of aggressive behavior they exhibit.
Learning is not a competition
Richard Campbell of Effort Tracking looks at how tracking a student’s effort and application using a new formative – based assessment system is having an effect on student motivation and learning.