Creative Teaching & Learning

Find Your Talent programme

Finally, the Government is taking cultural capital seriously with a programme to enhance teachers’ and pupils’ aesthetic appreciation and artistic skills. Joe Hallgarten reports on the ‘Find Your Talent’ programme.

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      string(757) "project is beingsupported by the Real Ideas Organisation (RiO) in theSouth West.Telford is working with a group of primary agedpupils at risk of exclusion who spend a period of eachweek at a Pupil Referral Unit. They will work with twovisual artists and an architect looking at how moods,emotions and feelings can be expressed and articulatedthrough art. The pupils will be visiting the Rothkoexhibition at The Tate Modern and then working withthe artists to create their own large scale abstractworks. They will then develop their own collaborativeskills, organisational skills and independence by workingtogether to plan an exhibition of their work for friends,teachers and carers.Contact details for each pathfinder are available atwww.findyourtalent.org"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Culture change

18 Jun 2009

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      string(346) "were most likely to say that information about cultural activities in their area needed to be improved, along with secondary-age children in Tower Hamlets.Action· Increase participation amongst specific groups, specifically older children, boys, those from ethnic minority backgrounds and SEN/disability, and those from low-income and single ..."
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      string(610) "The Find Your Talent (FYT) programme comprising an entitlement to five hours per week of high-quality cultural experiences. The intention was to help ensure children and young people stay on the path to success by participating in positive activities and experiences which develop their talents. This report by the Department for Education provides an overview of the main findings of the FYT programme evaluation. The aim of the evaluation was to assess the impact of the programme and to construct the evidence for future investment.
Leadership Briefing 5.12 (60)"
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      string(1519) "were most likely to say that information about cultural activities in their area needed to be improved, along with secondary-age children in Tower Hamlets.Action· Increase participation amongst specific groups, specifically older children, boys, those from ethnic minority backgrounds and SEN/disability, and those from low-income and single-parent households; this crucially means that besides increasing provision overall, proactive engagement work is required to narrow the gap between experiences, participation and expectations among the high and low engagers.· Shift attitudes about participating in culture among groups that tend to be less engaged and less vocal about their needs and interests.· Encourage peer recommendation and word of mouth for secondary-age children, who tend to be reluctant to go unless they know other children who are attending, and harness the potentially powerful role that schools can play in this regard.· Strengthen how the offer is communicated to children and young people and their parents, using schools to channel this information.· Engage parents and children in planning and designing the local offer.· Promote progression to careers in the cultural and  creative industries, in order to inform decisions about progression to further learning and employment.· Improve the quality of the cultural offer.NotesAuthorRaspal Chima, Imaginative MindsDate CreatedMay 2011Enquiries to:raspal.chima@yahoo.co.uk (Authoring Unit)Month / YearPage 1 of 1©Birmingham City Council"
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Leadership

Evaluation Of Find Your Talent

5 May 2011

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      string(5626) "65www.teachingtimes.com n Vol 3.3AcademiesLeadership DilemmasSchool Leadership TodayIt has always struck me as odd that the best teachers arepromoted out of the classroom. Isn’t it counterintuitivethat we nurture teaching talent, find the mostinspirational and creative role models and then promotethem into administrative, management roles?My passion has always been teaching. Since I joinedDurand as a Newly Qualified Teacher 23 years ago, there hasbeen nothing more rewarding for me than seeing childrencome through the school gates – often at risk of fallingbehind, with English as their second language – and besupported to flourish into ambitious, eager learners. Everyyear we are privileged to teach hundreds of children fromdisadvantaged backgrounds to read, write and achieve overand above national average standards.Yet teaching doesn’t come naturally to everyone and it isa fact that some people just aren’t suited to it. 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I operatean open door policy for colleagues to come and observeme teaching, and have willingly signed up to cameras beinginstalled into my classroom, so that we can start to maketraining videos that capture good practice. This time last year,before becoming an Academy, this simply wasn’t feasible.Effective school management, of course, remains acritical part of my role and is assessed just as thoroughlyas it ever was. This is done through a range of measures,including independent assessments that we commissionannually, through Ofsted’s early warning system and mostimportantly, on a daily basis, by the parents at the schoolgate and on our waiting list, who trust us to deliver for theirchildren.It will come as no surprise after my introduction thattaking the decision to convert for us was always a simpleone and was the logical next stage in our journey ofdevelopment. We had already been a Grant Maintainedschool before becoming a Foundation School, soindependent thinking was a part of our DNA. In the past,this meant that we were often isolated and considereddifferent – but this is something that we are proud of. Wehave never believed that a ‘one size fits all’ approach worksin education, but rather, that individual schools shouldhave the independence to identify their own needs anddetermine how best to meet them.Schools are all so different in their set-ups, intakes,surroundings and requirements that a generic approachis both ineffective and inefficient. Giving greaterautonomy to schools not only gives them more freedomto be independent and innovative, but also allows themto allocate resources where they see fit to best benefittheir school, the education it provides and the futureopportunities that it offers.Immeasurable potentialThe potential that this has given us for our future isimmeasurable. 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Leadership

Academy status: It allowed us to teach again!

2 Nov 2011

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      string(305) "Empathy is inherent in all of us, but for children who experienced a violent or poverty-stricken upbringing, their ability to feel compassion and empathise with others can be seriously stunted. Louise Kinnaird explores the role of schools and practitioners in giving such children the opportunity to care."
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      string(356) "... behaviour, such as helping teachers or peers during school, sports or music.Celebrate empathic behaviour. Recognition for prosocial behaviour is as important as academic or talent recognition. Find ways to value it.Identify shared values and differences in the classroom.Empathic activities to try in your classroom:A situation, a ..."
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      string(5644) "‘Say No to Bullying’, pupils read a story about a girl who was bullied in the playground and learnt about how alone and upset she felt. The story was used to facilitate discussion about how the girl was feeling and what the bullies themselves might have been feeling. It was followed by discussions about strategies to prevent bullying. The SEAL programme is just one of many such programmes that show how schools are taking on the challenge and extending education beyond the traditional focus of knowledge acquisition and the study of standard subjects, towards a more holistic view of education that puts wellbeing at its core and benefits both the individual and society. Indeed, the idea of wellbeing is prominently featured in personal, social and health education (PSHE) in schools in England, and in the delivery of the government’s Every Child Matters framework, which puts empathy at the centre of efforts to promote wellbeing. Imagine if, in every classroom across the UK, children were encouraged to empathise not only within the local community, but also with those in developing countries whose lives are very different from their own. Empathy education need not be restricted to the local. As a form of preventative medicine for society with the power to affect government welfare budgets and the criminal justice system, it has much further reaching benefits. Educators predict that empathic education has community wide and global benefits.  Indeed, the historian Theodore Zeldin said that learning to empathise with people different from ourselves is one of the ‘the most effective means of establishing equality’ that modern societies possess.4 Taking this approach to empathy education, Oxfam have produced teaching resources as part of their Curriculum for Global Citizenship, aiming to encourage pupils to consider the effects of climate change and develop empathy for the people affected by it. The purpose of this project is to broaden pupils’ empathic skills with people in developing countries suffering from the effects of climate change, but also with people from future generations.5 For instance, in one activity, pupils read about a young girl from Tuvalu whose island is being affected by sea level rises and write a story from her viewpoint about her daily experiences, feelings and fears. In another activity, they imagine and write about life in the UK in 50 years’ time, considering the consequences if the climate continues to change.How can practitioners help?Despite the plethora of projects and programmes that provide empathic education, there will be some who still see empathy as a soft skill, one which falls to the bottom of the pile beneath academic subjects. But what if, as so many educators believe, empathy was the key to not only individual but societal and global enhancement? If empathy-promoting projects and programmes have not formally reached our schools, we can take steps to foster it, providing strategies for the classroom. For older children, for example we can promote empathic bonds between the pupils by facilitating conversations that move beyond superficial talk and address the real issues of importance in their lives. Empathy programmes engage pupils in these kinds of dialogues, not only with each other or with other year groups, but with people in the local community who they might rarely come across – asylum seekers, the elderly, people of different religions and perhaps with pupils in schools in other countries too. They’ll discuss topics that unite people as human beings and which give insights into another’s worldview, aspirations, fears, friendship, family, compassion and cultural practices.How to create an empathic environment:Make talking about feelings and emotions part of everyday classroom talk and keep discussions about emotions open and honest. Display pictures showing various emotions and empathic scenes.Ask questions to encourage empathy, and encourage brainstorming to find meaningful ways to show kindness. Be an empathic role model. Demonstrate verbal and non-verbal strategies to let a child know you understand how they feel. Create a safe space – a trust-based environment is core to unlocking empathy.Empathy begins on the playground. Encourage children to learn to solve their own conflicts empathically.Make opportunities for collaborative problem solving. Collaboration builds empathy through shared challenges and victories.Provide children with opportunities to engage in empathic prosocial behaviour, such as helping teachers or peers during school, sports or music.Celebrate empathic behaviour. Recognition for prosocial behaviour is as important as academic or talent recognition. Find ways to value it.Identify shared values and differences in the classroom.Empathic activities to try in your classroom:A situation, a current event, a book or a TV programme can be good discussion points for talking about emotions. Stories challenge our preconceptions, enabling us to wear the shoes of those whose experiences are different from our own. They show us how to have feelings and gives us others’ experiences of empathy and perspective. Use resources that show different expressions and how the expressions help us to identify emotion. Ask about how the expressions help children feel.Look at photos of children in developing countries, and ask pupils to imagine the lives of those in the photos. Ask them to write a story in the first person about the experience of living as those in the photo.Visit a Mosque or"
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Behaviour

Teaching empathy

13 Mar 2017