As Khurshid Khan, managing director of Britannica Digital Learning UK, put it: “Engendering a love of learning through expanded content, personal research and creative approaches will lead learners into an appreciation of education beyond the strive for certification.” If you’re keen to accelerate creativity in your school, the new Innovate My School Guide is a must. Here are five educators working to make ingenuity a part of everyday teaching ...
Art has the benefit of being not only enjoyable and relaxing, but of encouraging personal reflection, expression and growth. With this in mind, how can we nurture creativity across the curriculum using artistic methods? You may be surprised where and how often art can be made a feature of a lesson. Here are some school crafting ideas that allow children to enjoy all of the benefits of arts and crafts.
The only time black history is celebrated is in October. This connotes a separatism between stories in history, which creates an implicit understanding of ‘our’ history and ‘their’ history. I do not agree with treating the black experience as a separate entity. The black experience should be interweaved throughout the curriculum when possible.
I am entering into my 11th year teaching. Looking back on my journey, it is clear to me that my fascination with technology and its role in the classroom has been the most transformative element of my teaching career. Embracing new tech tools and dreaming up ways to effectively implement them in the classroom has been a truly creative outlet for me, and one that has pushed me to be ...
From my adventures running architecture sessions with kids, there is a lot I have learnt about creating the best facilities to support young creative geniuses. Here is a series of recommendations to create and manage an exciting hub of architectural discovery:
The Kindergarten Starters has embarked on a unique approach to teaching Social Studies - we’ve turned the UAE’s 47 museums into our very own classrooms. Students began the Museum Project by visiting the Sharjah Islamic Museum to gain a deep understanding of Islamic Art, inventions and culture.
A while ago, in the 2016/17 edition of the IMS Guide (both this and the new edition are available here!), I wrote of my approach to getting children interested in Coding / Computer Science, beyond the usual hour a week lesson which most schools timetable for. My approach was very much focused around encouraging children’s existing hobbies and talents, and finding ways to incorporate Computing into those interests.
In recent decades, much research has been conducted on the structure of children’s education, and how the format of the school day impacts their ability to learn and grow. People in general benefit from regular brief breaks from desk work, and children, who are constantly growing and developing, need this time off from work more than most. One recent study, the results of which were written up for The ...
Have you heard people talking about “making” in schools, or “makerspaces”, or “maker education”? What about 3D printers, squishy circuits or arduinos? The idea of making to learn is a philosophy of education that goes back to the late 1800s/early 1900s and the writings of John Dewey. “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; ...
Project-based learning (PBL) changes how we look at education and the best ways to engage young people in learning. Learning is all around. It is in books, in classrooms, outdoors, at home, in museums and workplaces; everywhere all the time. We learn through reading, listening, engaging, but mostly by doing. When we apply what we learn to something tangible - something interesting to us - we remember it. We want ...
Despite all the educational changes that have happened since I started teaching History just under a decade ago, one thing has remained a constant. Source analysis is the hardest component for students to understand. This is part of my ‘why’ in that I do not remember any lesson in Secondary, A-level or degree that asked me to develop my ability to use sources. This may be me being incredibly disingenuous, ...
My eyes were streaming as I walked through the streets of Kathmandu. Not because I was crying, but because it was so dusty! The lack of roads and volume of vehicles whip up air that is painful to breathe. Small children with no observable adult supervision are everywhere. I know children are small but this is a different kind of small. We’ve all done the child protection training that ...
