Advancing a Vision for Education that is Rich in Self-Belief, Authenticity and Curiosity.
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Self-belief
I strike a suitable balance between academic progress and well-being to nurture self-belief.
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Authenticity
I meet children at their individual level to embed foundations, working at their pace to develop mastery.
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Curiosity
I capitalise on children’s natural curiosity to support and extend their learning. This may involve drawing on their existing interests or exposing them to new inspirational content.
CALCULATE…DON’T COUNT
Maths mastery is high on the agenda in education. Put simply it is the acquiring of deep, long term, secure and adaptable understanding. Developing mental agility provides pupils with the ability to manipulate number with skill and speed. Numicon is a fantastic resource for providing a visual cue for number and is ideal for developing pattern recognition too. Rather than counting in ones, pupils develop fluency in calculating -increasing speed and eventually embedding number facts into long -term memory. This then frees working memory to work on applying such knowledge to the more challenging elements of mathematics.
CATCH UP? BETTER TO CATCH ON
Learning time may have been disrupted or even lost during school closures but the concept of the term ‘catch-up’ curriculum implies that:
a) Children must succeed in reaching someone else who is ahead
b) Children must achieve something that should have been done earlier.
Learning is (and always has been) an individual life-long pursuit. You do not ‘win’ or ‘arrive’ at education. The ‘catch-up’ concept may create unnecessary pressure which is counterproductive when embedding learning.
As they always have, children need to ‘catch on’ to their learning - to understand what is meant or how to do something. Critically, what children need (now more than ever, perhaps) are safe learning spaces to ask questions, risk failure and develop confidence in themselves. For without the self-belief, authenticity and curiosity of learning they will be at a disadvantage to proceed to catch up ….or on.