HEADLINES

By Mrs Bansropun

HOW OFTEN ARE YOU ENCOURAGED TO ‘THINK HARD’?

‘Thinking hard’ is something that we all need to feel comfortable experiencing because this is where the most impactful and long-lasting learning takes place. But how often do our children avoid really engaging their brains until they ache? How often do they experience a problem and vow to solve it? Whether that be a maths equation they are completing for Independent Study, a level they just can’t pass on their Xbox game, or getting the proportions of a portrait they are drawing correct? My view is that many avoid it whenever and wherever they can - they give up, or look for the easy route.

The cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, stated that ‘memory is the residue of thought’, and if we are not providing and encouraging opportunities for hard thinking, we are preventing learners from remembering all that is necessary, for passing exams, yes, but for life beyond Honywood too.

MOVING FROM ‘GOOD TO GREAT’.

As you would have seen from our recent Ofsted report, we are a ‘good school’ and the education we offer is ‘broad’, ‘ambitious’ and supportive of all needs. Learners are ‘polite and respectful’ and teachers have ‘high expectations of behaviour’. Now that we have solidified the foundations of a ‘good school’, we are now on the trajectory to becoming ‘great’, and that involves raising expectations of the quality and quantity of thinking and learning that takes place in the classroom - and beyond. But how will we go about this?

One mission we are set upon achieving is encouraging learners to develop a love for reading. As you have read from Mr Smith’s headlines entry earlier this year, the benefits of reading go beyond just exam success and future earning potential, we know that it is incredibly important for sustaining good mental health too. But reading also educates us about the world, and encourages us to think more deeply about our function and place in the world.

Another focus is the acquisition of language. Alex Quiggley (a big-wig in the world of education) mentions in a blog post about thinking hard that ‘We [teachers] can help by using classroom strategies that explicitly teach vocabulary acquisition. We can teach, model and encourage word learning strategies, identifying root words and exploring the fascinating etymology of words, telling the stories of our rich linguistic history. We can also explicitly teach an effective and realistic use of a dictionary, a thesaurus, and other useful research tools. By modelling the reading of books with unfamiliar and complex vocabulary, alongside developing an explicit ‘academic vocabulary’ for each of our subject domains, we can help scaffold our Learners’ hard thinking. Ultimately, we cannot teach every word in the dictionary, but we can teach our learners the skill of interpreting new vocabulary more successfully.’ Perhaps this process of modelling ‘thinking hard’ and avoiding the easy route when faced with a difficult problem could be something that you could emulate at home too?

In a world where the answer or the solution is a Google search away, it is essential that we highlight the importance of taking the path less often travelled - the tricky route, the brain-achy route, so that should our children be faced with a problem Google can’t solve, they are equipped with the skill set and resilience to tackle the obstacle head-on.

Have a restful half term break.

Mrs Bansropun