Editor's Blog: The answer to a more engaged classroom? Give children the slippers...
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It has dropped French in favour of Mandarin,
children wear their own slippers in lessons and there are 60 pupils
to a class.
Welcome to the educational revolution that is
New Line Learning Academy.
Children and staff are settling into their
smart and modern learning environment after years of preparation
and building. The site looks slightly unfinished with constructors
still there but to all intents and purposes it’s fully functional
and open for business.
And in fact business is the operative word as
much of the innovation in the way children are now being taught at
NLL is taken from the world of commerce. The academy has a strong
relationship with Apple, which has had an influence on the
design.
I was invited on a tour of the academy by the
head Guy Hewett and you can’t fail to be quite awestruck by what
going on.
Whether it will benefit children in the long
run remains to be seen. The school is convinced it will improve
results markedly (to be fair it’s starting from a fairly low base
from a couple of years ago).
Much of the teaching is based around large
groups of children taught in ‘plazas’ by teams of three teachers.
The classes are then given tasks and pupils split into smaller
groups.
Toilets and locker areas are integated within
the learning environment to prevent potential ‘enclaves’ where
misbehaviour and intimidation can occur. Each pupil gets an
all-encompassing fob which gets them around the building, buys them
lunch, and opens their locker. A recipe for disaster given
children’s knack of losing things, I suggested to Mr Hewett, but he
was confident it wouldn’t be a problem.
NLL executive head Chris Gerry suggests the
academy is setting the trail for modern teaching away from the one
teacher addressing rows of desks occupied by bored and disengaged
children. We’ll see if he’s right.
Tuesday, September 14 2010
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