For the last three years the Centre of Excellence has worked alongside Wormley School in Hertfordshire supporting the development of a whole school approach to embedding the ‘social learning agenda’. Over this time the school has introduced a significant number of very effective, innovative and creative approaches to teaching and learning that are having a positive impact on the children’s abilities. The last two developments have focussed on developing ‘children as researchers’ and more recently on providing children with a breadth of language; that they know, understand and can use, to support their skills in reasoning. The ‘children as researchers' day explored three of our five building blocks namely; lead, speak. and act. The day provided the children with the opportunity to develop their own skills with regard to research namely; questioning, data collection and interpretation and then to lead a project of the their own. The children took full responsibility for their actions. The three key questions that the children explored were:
The most recent day focussed on reasoning we used a range of stimuli to explore the language of reasoning including;
- artefacts,
- mathematical challenges,
- texts,
- historical contexts.
