It’s week 5 of Term 4, time to stop and reflect on all the ways that my Stage One students have grown and changed. A word that keeps playing over and over again in my head is “empower” which I then connect to “student voice and choice”. There are many different ways that this is evident within our learning space but one of them is how we begin our mornings, through our social skills program.
This week our social skill has been on showing “Respect for the environment” with a particular focus on our Witness and Relate pillars
-Share equipment, learning spaces and furniture
-Make people feel welcome when they visit our school
-Look after my own, others and school property
The students are in ‘Tribe Groups’ of up to 5 students and this week I gave them the challenge of thinking about the best way they could show how to ‘share equipment, learning spaces and furniture’ as well being able to ‘look after own, others and school property’. As a whole group we acknowledged that we felt very confident with welcoming others to our school so the decision was made that we would focus on the other two indicators. So instead of myself as the teacher creating activities I thought the students would benefit from, they were given the responsibility to co-create ideas with their tribe members. The students were totally engaged in discussing and problem solving within their tribes to work out the best possible methods to show the Pillars in action. Each tribes communicator then shared their ideas which were recorded on an action plan in preparation for the implementation of these activities by each tribe. The ideas included playing a broad range of board games, dominoes, fishing game and drawing. The next step was for the supply manager to gather all the resources that each tribe needed for their activity. All the students had to agree within their tribes in regards to the activity selected and the space within the room for the learning and play to occur. At no point did I need to intervene as the students took total control of their own learning. What I did do was take some photos so that the students could reflect on what they saw taking place around them. This process takes place across the whole week.
The next step was for the students to choose which tribe they felt had displayed the best practice around the indicators for the Witness and Relate Pillars and the photos representing these will be added to our Pillar displays. The posters are used by the students to help them make direct connections with their daily learning. What was fantastic was the reasoning that students provided for their choices around the most successful tribe.
You know when something works well because the students take total ownership over their own learning, they are fully engaged and a visiting teacher makes comments on the students capacity to independently manage themselves! All of this shouts “EMPOWERMENT = STUDENT VOICE and CHOICE”…this empowerment hasn’t happened over one week or even one term because we have been working on the student capacity for independent thinking and learning all year! What has become most apparent is that the students obviously enjoy being able to choose that activity they feel connects with the social skill indicators they are currently working on. ‘Play’ for these students is important learning and it enables them to action not only responsibility for sharing equipment, learning spaces and furniture but valuing each other as important contributors to an ever changing world. Every day they are asked to solve problems, some of them small while others can be more challenging. Therefore the more opportunities we provide them with for practising these skills will definitely continue to empower them.
Learning at its best! 