Sharing the Addiction

Yesterday, our cluster visited Brooklyn School as a cluster. It was very interesting to see how the school had structured their curriculum model. They have a set of key competencies but the contexts that these are taught through are decided by the children in the school. At the beginning of every year, time is spent with the children to develop a set of questions that the children want to find out about, these are compiled as a class to find some common themes, and then these themes give the contexts for study for the year. I thought this was a very interesting model but it did raise a few questions for me.
1. The children ‘don’t know what they don’t know’. Would their set of questions be therefore rather narrow in focus at times?
2. Setting up themes at the beginning of the year to last over the rest of the year seems a little long sighted to me. Would these themes still be relevant to the kids by term four? (though the teachers are able to re-negociate these themes at any time)

The school believes that giving children this power over their own learning has benefits across all areas and that behaviour and attendance is improved so I will continue to touch base with the school to see how they are finding the process.

They also use tablets intensively as they have been lucky enough to be part of the digiOps scheme. It was fantastic seeing children using the computers as a tool as they all had enough access to computers to be able to use them seemlessly as part of their classroom programmes. Watching the Year 1/2 writing with the tablets was fantastic.

I also enjoyed my discussion with Dean about the schools use of Web 2.0 on their school’s website. They have used Word Press and integrated it into their existing site. I will be watching to see how they make use of this tool as well