Matthew was recently interviewed by TES magazine about his approaches to teaching during Lockdown and which ones he would be keeping as children returned to the classroom. You can find the published article on TES by clicking here. Below are the questions and full answers from the interview.

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Why do you think it is so important to let children direct the pace and order of their learning?

Letting children direct the pace and order of their learning gives integrity to the process. Children move from being passive grazers to active consumers of knowledge. It removes the concept of being “good” or “bad” at a topic by the crude measure of if you understood it within the 1-hour lesson. If a child wants or needs more time on a concept they can have it then and there. Their interest in a topic is only curtailed by their own enthusiasm. Conversely, if a child is secure in a concept they can move on, without loosing time waiting for their peers to be ready. Our education system was modeled on a Victorian factory yet now we work in a just-in-time bespoke design economy.

Letting children direct the pace of their learning democratic rather than dictatorial. Children can be leaders of their learning rather than having to be rebels.

How has this worked during remote learning and how do you plan to transition the approach to being back in the classroom?

During Home Learning, we gave children a menu of activities and self-guided lesson presentations reflecting the amount of lessons we would have given the subject in school (5 for maths, 1 for Geography etc). Crucially, we did not put a time requirement on each activity, just a suggestion. Want to spent 10mins on fractions? If you got all the answers correct, go for it. Equally, if you want to spend a whole day researching and writing about Costa Rica, go for it! For some activities we also gave more than one approach to the learning. With reading we offered both structured reading comprehensions as well a menu of activities to build inference skills.

I have brought this pedagogy back into the classroom when Year 6 returned in Bubbles and will be trialing it again with the new Year 6 in September.  

If you have already tried this out in the classroom, how has it gone? What have you learnt?

“Back in the classroom this menu/work-flow approach can still be followed, and I have trialed it with my Year 6 Bubble. Our day is now three sessions rather than 5 lessons. We will, for instance, all start maths together but if children finishes before others then they are allowed to go back to learning from Foundation subjects and add to their work or to follow a choice of further activites. The only limit in some cases is access to technology for research or resources. Having been at home learning with siblings of different ages, children have become use to peers studying different subjects in the same room as them.

Our return has also reinforced the importance of self-initiated conversation between students. During Home Learning, children organised themselves into informal video study groups. I would receive an email from one child Cc-ing in the friends they were working with so everyone then received my reply. Quite impressive to see Year 6s using office skills borrowed from their parents. Back in the classroom, this has meant allowing more chatting and less silent work than I might have otherwise. It’s taken some getting used to, as a teacher, moving from being the main speaker in the room to a conference facilitator.

This afternoon, children have been drafting a travel article on Costa Rica whilst some revised maths as they have written what they think befits the requirements I gave for the article.  Like any new democracy growing from beneath an old dictatorship, it has taken time to adjust but it’s a new way of living that could be here to stay.