TELL group project: resilience

Since our last meeting, we have been trialling some techniques to promote resilience and ultimately independent learning in our classrooms. Some kindly teachers have volunteered to video examples of this in their lessons, which feature below. Many thanks to Dan Spencer, John Shepherd and Louise Sullivan for offering to video lessons :-)

John Shepherd: structuring indepedent and resilient skills needed in preparation for controlled assessments at GCSE

Dan Spencer: supporting indepedent group work and team building skills

Year 9 top set Geography The lesson was based around team work, communication and, planning and leadership skills. The idea was based upon the Japanese car firm, Toyota and how they work together on production lines effectively. Their model is now used all across the world as it is so effective. To start with we looked at a news article which showed how fast and effective the Japanese were at repairing a road, ripped up by the earthquake and we talked about what skills and resources were needed to fix the road in just 6 days. The outline of the lesson was to produce a variety of cars based upon the production orders. We went through the instruction or how the cars needed to be built. The students only had 2 pairs of scissors, 1 glue stick and 3 colours between 4 of them. They were given 1 minute to decide how they were going to best do the task and then I set them off on their task.

To start with production was slow and they didn’t fully start working in a team, until they found their rhythm and talked to each other effectively, outlining who was doing what etc. In placing the cards in the board students could see how well they were doing against the other teams. This also added the competitive edge to the task. The group that worked most effectively all had singular roles and talked to one another about what they were doing at each stage, which meant that they won the task.

To finish we used the reflection sheets to highlight the skills they had developed in the lesson as a group. They highlighted the skills they thought they had learnt and then provided an example. This was effective as they could then see what skill they had learnt as well as being independent and reflective in their practice. We also had a brief class discussion on what went wrong with their task and how it could be improved. The group was then split and they were asked individually what they had learnt (using the reflection sheets) and to provide an example. This worked effectively as it showed students what skills they had learnt as a group and individually from the lesson, but also helped them become better independent learners.

Louise Sullivan - using the '4 Bs'

Louise has been trialling the use of the '4 bs' in lessons to support and structure resilient behaviour in students - see videos below!