Today was an excellent and spontaneous CPD day, made all the more exciting by the fact that it started off as a mum coffee, at which I expected to talk mostly about sleep patterns and baby clothes.  How foolish of me to underestimate my old teaching pal in this way. “I need to hear about this thing you’re doing,” she said as she sat down, and after hearing all about The MTPT Project, she told me of her hesitant plans to visit schools offering different approaches to learning – the Steiners and Montesorri’s, privates and PRUs – in order to make a more informed decision about her return to the classroom. Now this was a spooky kind of fate: not only had I spent the previous evening transferring Dawn Stow’s inspirational story of visiting different schools whilst on maternity leave the night before, I’d also noticed that October is the season of Open Evenings, and intended on this very day to visit my local Steiner school – a school I had walked past almost every day pre-maternity leave and glared at curiously.  What is this Steiner approach, anyway?  I would think, as I walked through their rose garden.  And why aren’t their students wearing uniform? Over-excited, as always, to find a teacher as excited by CPD as me, I almost shouted, “YOU SHOULD COME TO MY HOUSE AND WE CAN GO AND VISIT A STEINER SCHOOL!” and rather than be taken aback or slightly intimidated by my love of professional learning, this wonderful friend asked for the bill and jumped on the bus with me and we had a very delightful afternoon in the grounds of my local National Trust in the autumnal sunshine. The visit itself was fascinating.  As a state school teacher with a slight understanding of the Steiner model, I am sceptical of how effective such an approach would be with some of the students I have taught – who arrive in year 7 with limited reading abilities, little academic support at home and all sorts of other things going on that manifest themselves as significant barriers to their education – but there’s a lot to be said for the focus on children as individual, emotional human beings, especially at a time when student wellbeing and mental health is a hot topic in education. The structure of this particular school includes a zero exam approach, but still enables students to attend excellent universities through a UCAS agreed project-work framework.  It is also rated as Outstanding by Ofsted.  This obviously raised a million questions in my academy-chain, Big Brother observation culture, data-rich brain:
  • How can a school be deemed ‘Outstanding’ if there are not reams and reams of spreadsheets that track data and progress and outcomes?
  • What do the teachers do if a child exhibits poor literacy skills if these are not explicitly taught until a child is 7 or 8 years old?
  • How does a teacher assess and mark work if the emphasis is on the effort, engagement, pride and character that students present in their outcomes?  A spelling mistake, for example – how does one do something as simple as correct spellings without enforcing concepts of success and failure that this model tries to avoid?
  • What is the impact on a child’s wellbeing when they transition from a highly nurturing environment like this into the big, scary, mean real world?
I came away with enough questions to warrant a request to come and observe some year 7 lessons – a plan that will involve a very exciting CPD partnership with my friend, whereby one of us drinks tea and walks around the park with the babies before swapping to do half a day of baby-free observation – but also with a real sense of the importance of aesthetics and pride and beauty in learning. The classrooms, environment and students’ books were beautiful, but this isn’t a longing for the superficiality of pretty things, but rather a confirmation of Montessori’s theory that in surrounding children with beautiful environments, we are giving them a very clear message that they should be confident, considerate, careful individuals.  If a child spends time and energy over a piece of work, they are not simply producing a pretty picture, they are taking the time to digest whatever learning is taking place – the labelling of a beautiful picture of the respiratory system; the decoration of a piece of creative writing.  The more time they spend on one aesthetic task, the more time they have to reflect on what they are learning through it, as well as making connections with associated thoughts. Take a similar task I often use when teaching poetry – asking students to create a visual interpretation of a piece of figurative language.  Not only does this exercise embed understanding of a simile or metaphor, it also allows students to enrich their own visual interpretation of the language being used, in order to see the poet’s implied meaning, or their interpretation of it.  They are more likely to remember this quotation to explore in exam conditions or to savour later in life.  The time spent on this image will live in their memory and allow them to make all sorts of connections with context, emotions, related learning and other literature whilst poring over the very calming task of creative expression through art. When I discussed this idea with my friend later (over tea in the garden – we are on maternity leave, after all!) we remembered that in reality, such activities result in some students completing the task in the idealised manner described above, and some drawing stick figures and then throwing pencil crayons at their friends.  The visit has therefore left me with a new CPD target: if this idea of creative learning and aesthetics is now so important to me, and I want to weave this Steiner/ Montessori approach into my academy chain, mainstream, challenging school, low literacy classroom, then I need to visit our Art department and observe how these skilled specialists structure lessons to ensure that every child is encouraged to produce something beautiful that enriches and consolidates their learning and leaves them feeling proud and valued as a human being.