Last week, I introduced a new style of session to’my’ placement class- ‘Talk and Thought’ sessions, using the amazing resources from Rising Stars.
The session was basically a whole class speaking and listening session, based around one still picture. If we had a carpet area it would have been great for us to do the session there, but it worked equally as well at tables. I also utilised my thinking dice to create different questions at different levels of thinking (and it also added an extra bit of ‘fun’ and randomness to the lesson which the children loved.) We utilised a vareity of individual, paired, group and whole class strategies to develop discussion stemming from the picture and this was the first time for a while the whole class had been involved in a speaking and listening activity.
So how did it work/what did we do?
Starting with a picture of 2 sumo wrestlers (one rather larger than the other!) within 40 minutes we had covered a plethora of topics, including
- What does strength Mean?
- Is it only physical strength that is important?
- How do you feel if you are bullied?
- Are adults always stronger than children?
- Are adults thoughts more important than children’s?
- Should adults always be responsible for the actions of children?
- Should adults always have to look after children?
- Do children’s opinions count?
- Should children be able to vote?
What was great was that this progression was entirely student lead. They did follow roughly the suggested structure in the materials, but that was purely by coincidence I just let the discussion go where it felt natural, and asked questions which developed and expanded thoughts etc…
The quality of responses was amazing and I was genuinely impressed. We also had some really insightful and ‘deep’ comments. The children listened to each other well, developed and challenged each others thoughts and opinions and were all very keen to contribute. It was a shame we had to finish the session to go to whole school singing- as the children were keen to continue! I’m defiantly going to continue with these sessions in my other placement school (if I’m allowed) and it’s also given me some really interesting suggestions to make in my english assignment!
This got me thinking- all this was acheived from the simple and non- techy use of one image, and a tiny bit of teacher input/development. Prehaps in this technology rich age we could be tempted to always make everything ‘all singing all dancing but we should be careful not to overlook the power and education potential of a simple, still, non-flashy image.
TH
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I know I promised to put my Primary Pad’s up today- but the children were keen to keep working on them- so I’ll put them up at the end of this week. As people may have seen from twitter- at 20:30 tonight I still had 5 children on primary pad working- it is so great to see children so interested and enthralled with their work!!
I’m really looking forward to tomorrow I’m teaching for the full day, but have lots of ‘fun’ things to do including Big Writing with lots of space sound effects, Moon Buggy making in D+T and my first foray into the world of Voki in french- should be fun!! 
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Just thought I’d say how much I enjoy reading your posts, I’m due to start a Primary PGCE in September and your blog both excites and terrifies me! You’re so innovative in your lessons, I think I’ll definitely need to develop my imagination when I come to teach!
Thanks Gemma!
Bet you can’t wait till september! All I’ll say is get rest when you can on the PGCE- as some points (like now for example when I have 2 large assignments and am on placement teaching,(+ planning, assessing and evaluating) a fairly full timetable) you don”t get much chance(!!)- but it’s worth it!
I’m pleased you enjoy the blog! And thanks for commenting- it’s great to know there are people out there reading what I write
Remember I mainly blog (naturally) about the lessons that inspire me/leave me feeling exicted/buzzed! There are plenty more lessons that I think are just ‘normal/run of the mill’ that I (try to) teach too! And of course the ones that don’t go at all to plan (more of those in a blog post at some point this week!)
Sounds like a great lesson! Lessons like that are always a bit magical, I don’t know why we don’t/can’t follow such ‘student led’ structures more often. These kind of sessions always stand out in my mind as the best, probably because the children usually naturally follow avenues of learning that are most engaging to them, and most in their ‘zone of proximal development’.
At our school we are implementing ‘negotiated learning’ (http://neilhopkin.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/ssat-and-inet-make-global-learning-work-for-your-school/) and whilst this is not full time in Year 4 I am trying to incorporate the principles as much as possible into my curriculum. Often just introducing a provocation and letting the children follow their natural interests, along with some challenging questioning (for which the thinking dice are great), results in the most exciting and satisfying learning.
I think it is a danger (just as with the satisfaction of the occasional unplanned lesson that goes OK), that such events might only be satisfying because of the excitement of achieving something out of what is apparently nothing. In that case even a mediocre something could “feel” better than a more substantial expected outcome, so I find you have to constantly question the rigour of what you are doing.
Sounds like your lesson was on the right side of this fence though, your doing some great work.