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    Oops!: Helping Children Learn Accidentally
    Oops!: Helping Children Learn Accidentally
    Oops!: Helping Children Learn Accidentally
    Ebook256 pages2 hours

    Oops!: Helping Children Learn Accidentally

    By Hywel Roberts and Ian Gilbert

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    About this ebook

    The book also shines a spotlight on the role of the teacher and how he or she can do the right things to get the absolute best from students.
    Some of the best learning takes place when, rather than imposing on young people a pre-determined curriculum, you find the stimulus that is relevant and engaging for them and build from there. Then the curriculum starts to emerge in a way that simply hooks students into learning almost despite themselves. There is nothing for them to push against ('What's the point?!', 'This is boring..!') as they have helped shape the direction of the lesson in a way that makes it real and useful to them. All this without them even realising what is going on!
    They have been 'lured into learning' and the process is shared with teachers in this book, with examples as to how it can be done and how the author has done it. Reading this book will support teachers in developing ideas that motivate everybody in the classroom, from infants to secondary and beyond.
    Whether you're new to teaching or have vast experience you will find in this book inspiration to raise achievement, improve behaviour and enhance creativity in the classroom; and you will change the way you approach lesson planning forever.
    Shortlisted for the Education Resources Awards 2013, Secondary Resource - non ICT category

    Oops Book Launch, Waterstones, Sheffield, May 2012:

    Photography by Jane Hewitt www.janehewittphotography.co.uk
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Thinking Press
    Release dateApr 30, 2012
    ISBN9781781350409
    Oops!: Helping Children Learn Accidentally
    Author

    Hywel Roberts

    Hywel Roberts has taught in secondary, primary and special settings for almost 30 years. He contributes to university education programmes and writes regularly for TES as the 'travelling teacher'. A true Northerner, Hywel deals in botheredness, creative practice, curriculum development and imagineering. He was recently described as 'a world leader in enthusiasm' and his first book, Oops! Helping Children Learn Accidentally, is a favourite among teachers. Hywel is a much sought-after educational speaker, an Independent Thinking Associate and has contributed to events worldwide. He also contributes fiction to prison-based literacy reading programmes developed by The Shannon Trust and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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      Book preview

      Oops! - Hywel Roberts

      Stop Teaching Me When I’m Trying to Learn

      When dealing with people, remember you are dealing with creatures of emotion, not creatures of logic.

      Dale Carnegie

      Get a room full of teachers together. Ask them to talk to each other about teaching. Watch their faces fall as they speak. Observe the heads that shake and the shoulders that shrug. Watch them indicate with their hands the current frustrations they feel – kids, government, leadership, time, resources. Listen as the silence falls when they look to you to move the meeting on.

      Right … Get a room full of teachers together. Ask them to share with each other their guilty pleasures (nothing too dark!).

      Teacher guilty pleasures (that I’ve heard from teachers themselves)

      1 Carry On films (in particular Camping, Cleo and Screaming)

      2 All things David Essex

      3 Reality TV

      4 Bon Jovi

      5 A chocolate fountain in the living room

      6 Bubble bath

      7 Dolly Parton

      8 Black-and-white horror films

      9 Line dancing

      10 Musicals (not the namby-pamby modern stuff though)

      Now notice how they behave differently to before. Look at how they chortle and talk. Watch how they animate themselves. Observe how they share funny stuff. Stop them and ask them to move to another conversation partner. Invite them to share their guilty pleasures whilst sharing what they’ve heard from their other colleagues. Let the gossip run and encourage them to wallow in the fun. Listen to the laughter. Notice the engagement. They’re lured in: hook, line and thinker. You’ll have to call them to order. Move on …

      Okay …

      So, what’s this book about? Well, one of the toughest groups you will ever have to engage in learning are your colleagues. As Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners said, ‘Let’s get this straight from the start’. If you can get them hooked into learning then the world is your lobster. Sadly, this book is not about engaging your colleagues. Thankfully, it’s about engaging the children in your classroom. And they’re the toughest group there is.

      When I became a teacher I was given the schemes of work and left to get on with it, which I dutifully did. In a way it was a great way to get a career going in that you learned on the job. A bit like fishmongery. Or debt-collecting. Except with twelve weeks off a year. I taught English and Drama. They are the subjects I’ve stayed loyal to and in which I have seen numerous developments over the last couple of decades. I’ve also taught Media Studies, Dance (I know) and, due to a timetabling error, Music. More recently, I taught as part of a team delivering a ‘blended curriculum’ for 11- to 13-year-olds – more of that later. The reason I’m telling you this is because I am a teacher – I’m not just some bloke in a suit who has done lots and lots of research. I’m not full-time in one school now, but I am part-time in many.

      Looking back to the time when I first stepped into a classroom, a key development has been the movement of focus in education from teaching to learning and teaching. This is what this book is about: engaging teaching that lets the children learn, often in unpredictable ways that no one envisaged, especially them. Hence the term ‘accidental learning’.

      What this book isn’t about

      1 Chucking out your current curriculum

      2 Punching the air and shouting, ‘Come on! Let’s do it for the kids!’

      3 Egg suking

      4 Ignoring the demands of subject coverage and external accountability

      5 Upsetting your head teacher (if you are a member of staff)

      6 Upsetting your staff (if you are a head teacher)

      7 Making stuff up as you go along

      8 Preparing for inspection

      9 Using textbooks effectively

      10 Playing the bagpipes

      What this book is about

      1 Raising your game in the classroom around learning and teaching

      2 Being brave

      3 Enabling independent thinking

      4 Getting children to expect to learn when they’re with you

      5 Getting a bigger boat

      6 Finding conventional curriculum in unconventional places

      7 Tricking children into deep learning

      8 Embracing the unpredictable

      9 The choreography behind an engaging curriculum, tried and tested

      10 Catchy lists

      Here’s a list of people I’ve worked with over the last few months who have helped me to hone the ideas in this book (so don’t tell me they don’t or can’t work):

      • Sixteen-year-olds on their first day as sixth-formers in a brand new building

      • A team of teachers for a session on using the curriculum to manage behaviour. Among the assembled were teachers who teach all ages – from 4 to 16+, home tutors and a bloke who teaches sex offenders life skills. Now that was differentiation and personalised learning wrapped up in a five-hour session

      • Teachers working in a school for children with social and emotional difficulties

      • Children who are in ‘danger’ of failing their final examinations

      • Drama skills for non-Drama teachers

      • A load of timetablers at a timetabler conference (honestly, it was buzzing)

      • A conference for PE teachers

      • Five-year-olds rescuing a really scary cat from a tree

      • A team of artists interested in working more closely with schools

      • A secondary school staff. Nothing out of the ordinary there perhaps, except it was a twilight session. And the inspectors were watching

      The constant theme throughout this list is learning. As professionals we need to keep learning in the same way a shark needs to keep moving, otherwise it’ll die. When we stop learning, cynicism can seep in and pretty soon we start hating kids. This book will help to keep us moving forward and my hope is that it will offer you the opportunity to reflect on your own practice.

      None of what I offer here requires you to chuck out schemes of work that you feel are tried and tested. It does however suggest that you could look at said schemes from a different perspective. Nor am I attacking the need for lesson objectives, thorough planning or measureable outcomes; what I am offering is a different way to offer content to support appropriate coverage.

      I have drawn my inspiration for this approach from a variety of sources, including the late Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert system. This is a fantastic approach to teaching and learning which places the child at the centre of an enterprise by being a member of a responsible team. It’s been a massive influence on me and I encourage you to look at the website www.mantleoftheexpert.com, run by Luke Abbott and Tim Taylor, for more information. The head teacher of my last school invited Dr Heathcote into our school years ago and she had a profound impact on my view of learning, teaching and engagement. She stopped me simply making up plays and enabled me to use Drama properly.

      Now, before you stick this book back on the shelf because I’ve mentioned the D-word, think again; the briefest enquiry into the work of Heathcote, Abbott and others will reveal that the Mantle of the Expert actually encompasses the entire curriculum. It’s a genuine tool for teachers, and there are many resources available on the website I’ve mentioned. This isn’t a book about the Mantle of the Expert; rather, it takes some of its inspiration from it. If the ideas in this book float your boat, then I urge you to seek out the

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