Focus: Equal Opportunities
This Tuesday was Year 4's assembly day, which changed the whole day around. Instead of their usual academic work, the class spent their time preparing their assembly, the point of which is to present what they had been working on to the rest of the school. In Year 4's case, that meant presenting their work surrounding the Take One Picture.
One of the most interesting parts of the process was seeing the extent to which the Picture had been integrated into their other subject learning. In literacy, they read about knights and castles. History featured the evolution of weapons. Microwriting (three sentences based on a picture) images featured the same material. Even PE had become part of the process, where they had been working on play swordfighting all week.
I gathered 9 students who had decided that this was something they wanted to present, and together we transformed their PE into a creative movement-style dance. I let them take the lead as they moved through a battle in slow motion, separating into two "armies" and deciding who would win. A, one of the smallest boys in the class, decided that since his team was going to be the "losing" side, he wanted to be the one who died. His swordfighting partner RJ happily agreed to stand above him with her sword held high in victory. This served as the jumping off point for the other students to create their ending pose, which included two boys still locked in battle. As they rehearsed, I talked about different ways they could incorporate levels as well as guiding them through the musical cues for the ending pose.
In the middle of the morning, a photographer arrived to take a school photograph for the local paper. The paper plans to run a story on the school's latest Ofsted report, which moved them from "satisfactory" to "good" in all categories and has been a source of school pride in recent weeks. This improvement becomes more remarkable when considering the backgrounds from which these students come. The percentage of students at the school who have Special Education Needs, who receive Free Lunch provisions, or who are English Language Learners is higher than the national average, and the school has committed to increasing the one-to-one attention each of these students receives. The Free Lunch provisions have been one of the most interesting policies for me to learn about. Instead of the US system in which a child from a poor home life or disadvantaged background receives a free meal at school, schools in the UK receive additional funding for these students in order to provide resources that the student may need in order to succeed. Although this policy, based on the idea that a child with a less-than-ideal home life requires additional support in order to thrive at school, seems intuitive, it doesn't exist in the US and seeing it here makes me wish that it would.
Aside from the PSHE lesson I observed on my first day on discrimination, the subject hasn't been discussed in the classroom. Nor, I've discovered, has it needed to. Perhaps because it is both small and diverse, St. Andrews has thus far been void of any discrimination or even bullying aside from the typical drama of pre-pubescent boys and girls.
In the few cases of bullying I have witnessed, the nearest teacher has stepped in and proposed a solution that focused on identifying the emotions felt on both sides of the disagreement. All the staff members emphasize the respect that the students should have for each other, their teachers and faculty members, and the school. For example, when a few of the boys in the class decided to hold a side conversation while one of the girls rehearsed her piece of the assembly in front of the class, Mr. Barry pointed out that they were being disrespectful to himself, the student presenting, and the rest of the class. Suitably chastised, they apologized both to Mr. Barry and the student presenting.
At the end of the day, Year 4's assembly went off without a hitch. They presented beautifully, proudly displaying all their hard work to the rest of the school community. Mr. Barry and I watched delightedly from the sidelines, and he was quick to express his praise when they returned to the classroom at the end of the day. We reviewed the day briefly after the students had been dismissed, collecting the peaks and troughs of behavior and noting that R, the student who has autism, had done remarkably well considering that his normal routine had been disrupted.
This Tuesday was Year 4's assembly day, which changed the whole day around. Instead of their usual academic work, the class spent their time preparing their assembly, the point of which is to present what they had been working on to the rest of the school. In Year 4's case, that meant presenting their work surrounding the Take One Picture.
One of the most interesting parts of the process was seeing the extent to which the Picture had been integrated into their other subject learning. In literacy, they read about knights and castles. History featured the evolution of weapons. Microwriting (three sentences based on a picture) images featured the same material. Even PE had become part of the process, where they had been working on play swordfighting all week.
I gathered 9 students who had decided that this was something they wanted to present, and together we transformed their PE into a creative movement-style dance. I let them take the lead as they moved through a battle in slow motion, separating into two "armies" and deciding who would win. A, one of the smallest boys in the class, decided that since his team was going to be the "losing" side, he wanted to be the one who died. His swordfighting partner RJ happily agreed to stand above him with her sword held high in victory. This served as the jumping off point for the other students to create their ending pose, which included two boys still locked in battle. As they rehearsed, I talked about different ways they could incorporate levels as well as guiding them through the musical cues for the ending pose.
In the middle of the morning, a photographer arrived to take a school photograph for the local paper. The paper plans to run a story on the school's latest Ofsted report, which moved them from "satisfactory" to "good" in all categories and has been a source of school pride in recent weeks. This improvement becomes more remarkable when considering the backgrounds from which these students come. The percentage of students at the school who have Special Education Needs, who receive Free Lunch provisions, or who are English Language Learners is higher than the national average, and the school has committed to increasing the one-to-one attention each of these students receives. The Free Lunch provisions have been one of the most interesting policies for me to learn about. Instead of the US system in which a child from a poor home life or disadvantaged background receives a free meal at school, schools in the UK receive additional funding for these students in order to provide resources that the student may need in order to succeed. Although this policy, based on the idea that a child with a less-than-ideal home life requires additional support in order to thrive at school, seems intuitive, it doesn't exist in the US and seeing it here makes me wish that it would.
Aside from the PSHE lesson I observed on my first day on discrimination, the subject hasn't been discussed in the classroom. Nor, I've discovered, has it needed to. Perhaps because it is both small and diverse, St. Andrews has thus far been void of any discrimination or even bullying aside from the typical drama of pre-pubescent boys and girls.
In the few cases of bullying I have witnessed, the nearest teacher has stepped in and proposed a solution that focused on identifying the emotions felt on both sides of the disagreement. All the staff members emphasize the respect that the students should have for each other, their teachers and faculty members, and the school. For example, when a few of the boys in the class decided to hold a side conversation while one of the girls rehearsed her piece of the assembly in front of the class, Mr. Barry pointed out that they were being disrespectful to himself, the student presenting, and the rest of the class. Suitably chastised, they apologized both to Mr. Barry and the student presenting.
At the end of the day, Year 4's assembly went off without a hitch. They presented beautifully, proudly displaying all their hard work to the rest of the school community. Mr. Barry and I watched delightedly from the sidelines, and he was quick to express his praise when they returned to the classroom at the end of the day. We reviewed the day briefly after the students had been dismissed, collecting the peaks and troughs of behavior and noting that R, the student who has autism, had done remarkably well considering that his normal routine had been disrupted.
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