We Replaced One-off Lessons with a Collaborative Five-Week Project and the Results were Astounding
“The children were so certain of what they had learnt that they couldn’t stop talking about it”
- by Teachwire
Before the summer break, I had a few of my best days ever in primary education. With a colleague, I had the privilege of looking at the efforts of 10 schools that had taken part in a joint curriculum project to explore children’s learning and the teachers’ role. It was an incredible uplifting experience.
We were met with hundreds of tangible examples of children learning.
The quality, range and standard of the work was indescribable.
We saw singing, choral speaking, dance, animations, maps, models, painting, needlecraft, experiments, writing, mathematics, poetry, stories, non-fiction, drama, construction, drawing, cartoons and more.
It wasn’t just the spread, but the depth of quality and the clear evidence of the impact of these on mathematics, writing and reading. Then there was the impact on the way children had worked collectively, responsibly, decisively and methodically.
Then there was the building of qualities of concentration, determination, creativity, resilience and critical thinking.
My colleague and I were moved, sometimes to tears, as children explained how they had conquered problems, understood new concepts, found out facts and developed ideas to create unique outcomes. The pride in their accomplishments spoke volumes. We were humbled by the adults who had created the conditions for all of this to happen.
The background
The schools were all academies supported by Wolverhampton University and were a fairly typical group; the good, the bad and the ugly in terms of Ofsted rating.
What we had found in reviewing the curriculum was that while teachers were putting lots of effort into planning the curriculum, there was general disappointment with the learning that was emerging.
It was difficult to sustain enthusiasm for new areas of study and much of the planning was unused and fell short of intentions. While there were efforts to include educational visits, special events and visitors, there was the nagging feeling that they were not always fully exploited for learning.
Clerical work was dominant: history was often literacy under another name, there was very little geography and science lacked experiments.
Most of the more-imaginative work done occurred as versions of homework.
Classrooms reflected common teaching pressures; little children’s work on display to provoke ideas of quality or act as a stimulus for wider study, but lots of random words and number lines along with exhortations to use complex sentences and celebrations of growth mindsets.
Teachers were well aware of the shortcomings. In some schools, the picture was of short one-off lessons with little ongoing extended work, limited use of equipment and weak development of specific knowledge, skills and understanding.
Children had a limited range of engaging experiences or things to produce and all seemed to produce a version of the same thing.
What was driving all this, of course, was the perceived need for ‘evidence’ when books were scrutinised by visiting inspectors. In turn, this was leading to the over-use of printed sheets. Pupil initiative was under-used, which in turn meant that the growing maturity of children was not exploited.
These are examples of the defensive pedagogy that has emerged as teachers have become more constrained by the accountability framework. There was plenty of effort on the part of teachers.
They were putting energy into long term planning, but the same energy was not available for preparation and so the best laid plans were set aside as teachers resorted to short term planning.
The quest for evidence led to short term teaching with an outlook that asked, ‘What shall we teach the children?’ rather than ‘What do we want the children to learn?’
From this review, several suggested steps forward were proposed to improve things but one of them was immediate, collaborative and challenging: a project for pupils which would come together as a ‘joint and shared’ exhibition to provoke thought in staff about a range of issues to do with expectation and achievement.
The plan
Teachers spent three hours planning a five-week project for Upper KS2 children entitled Exhibition 250 (10 schools and 25 days). Two hours a day would be spent on it.
The teachers had already planned a series of ‘themes’, ranging from London (to accompany a visit), to space, Mexico, migration, transition and fairgrounds.
The teachers agreed though that only a fraction of the planning they had ready was likely to bear fruit if the current practices and pressures remained in place. We needed to raise the stakes. We needed a bigger repertoire than short one-off lessons with everyone doing the same thing.
The brief for the project was written directly for the children. In 25 days, there was to be an exhibition about their project involving all the schools.
The thing was, each exhibition had to include a number of specific items (see panel, right).
As well as this list, the children were given two special extra tasks. The first was to build a model of an iconic building or structure to scale that was bigger than anyone in their class.
The allocation was done by lot, but the Mexico group negotiated an Aztec temple and America got the Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge.
The other challenge was to build a structure from 100 sheets of newspaper to carry an egg for ten metres. The structure was required to be a cubic metre in volume.
The result
Classrooms became learning machines, with children working in sub-groups generating learning at a rate the teachers sometimes found astounding.
Teachers gave the children the brief and took on a different role from usual.
The children were organisers, contributors, checkers and time managers, researchers and producers.
The adults offered inputs but their role became that of advisor, with the use of their expertise being negotiated.
The sheer quality of the final exhibitions and the commitment to them was significant, with the use of children’s work as stimulus for further learning very evident.
The outcome was an enormous range of products of the highest quality. The children were so certain of what they had learnt that they couldn’t stop talking about it.
Four schools were inspected during the five weeks; in two the inspectors commented favourably and in the other two they appeared not to notice, focused as they were on evidence through data.
Most vital was the reawakening in adults of the purpose of teaching. The pride in the eyes of staff as children showed their work was heartening.
The way adults talked of the children ‘coming alive’, ‘getting their teeth into it’, ‘having brilliant ideas’ and ‘doing it for themselves’ showed how much had been achieved in terms of making learning matter and the quality of the outcomes was valued as much as the quality of the process.
It was learning with purpose and joy – the essence of primary education.
The project brief
For the exhibition, each school had to create the following items, based on their topic, over a five-week period:
- one dance, song, instrumental piece or choral speaking
- details of three different experiments and the findings
- two annotated aerial photographs
- four 1000 word pieces of writing
- three 250 word pieces of writing
- two mathematical patterns
- two pieces of needlecraft
- reviews of four novels
- two scale drawings
- two ‘junk’ models
- two animations
- three paintings
- some cookery
- two drawings
- two poems
- two graphs
- two charts
- two maps
- a poster
Mick Waters is professor of education at Wolverhampton University.
