7
Inside an INSET session at Frogmore Junior School
Jerry Goddard, Director of Standards, University of Chichester Academy Trust
One June afternoon, whilst the pupils of Frogmore Junior
School were enjoying enrichment activities including toxophily
(archery to you and me), the teaching staff were busy
discussing how to make learning even more effective in the
school in the future.
Planning the session with my Academy Trust colleague,
Rebecca Webb, we kept top-of-mind the most fundamental
aspect of a school's work - to instil a love of learning in
children.
Headteacher Sarah Thorpe and her deputy Gill Richardson
skilfully led an afternoon that considered the Academy's
vision of learners and learning, what key attitudes good
learners should adopt and how, as teachers, we can provide
opportunities to develop those attributes and skills. We
challenged ourselves with questions such as: 'How do pupils
learn best?' and 'How do we ensure pupils' learning is not
superficial?'
We then looked at current classroom educational research on
supporting pupils' learning and discussed how to develop
resilience, perseverance, creative thinking and 'growth
mindsets'. Carol Dweck, a notable researcher of growth
mindsets, suggests that believing that you can succeed and
having the resilience to do so are very high on the list of
ingredients that you need to be effective in any learning.
After a thought-provoking afternoon, we resolved to develop a
classroom 'language of learning' where teachers plan time in
lessons for pupils to talk about not only what they've learned
but how they've learned it, and to continue to develop
explicitly a 'can do' growth mindset in pupils, exemplified by
the staff, so that all our pupils at Frogmore Junior School will
be successful 21st century learners.
"It is continuous effort - not just strength or intelligence -
that is the key to unlocking our potential."
Winston Churchill
Growth mindsets in practice at Frogmore
Junior School's gardening club