Prep Head's Blog: Learning

 

Dear Felsted Families,

I wanted to stay with the theme of learning this week as I have had the pleasure of working with our team and with Year 8 pupils to begin to collect ideas and thoughts about how we can define learning. What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we learn best?

I would like to leave you with some of the early definitions created by the groups and I would like to ask a question as you read through them. Can you identify which definitions have been written by teaching professionals and which have been written by pupils? 

“Learning: Discover, practising, new skills, discussing, engaging, knowledge.”

“Improvement of knowledge and skills of new things or solidifying your knowledge and skills of something you already know.”

“Involvement, participation, understanding, discussion, confidence, speaking out, fun, interest, awe and wonder, enjoyment, creativity, meaningful, relatable, linked, reflecting, revisiting, reminding, passionate, collaboration.”

“Learning is developing and consolidating new skills; like learning new languages or methods and practising them.”

“Learning is a continual process to acquire knowledge and skills through personalised and differentiated experiences and positive relationships.”

“Learning: 

• Finding out something you didn’t know!

• Making new connections

• Experiencing new things

• Changing your mistakes

• Experiencing failure

• Always new things to discover”

“Effective learning is the process of developing new skills and knowledge through being open-minded, curious and independent.”

The goal for any school is to ensure that learning remains at the heart of decision making and the recent discussions about learning have been a joy to be a part of. The responses from our Year 8 learners are linked to their daily experiences of learning and this will continue to deepen as they continue throughout the school.

The take-away for me is the alignment and similarities contained within the responses from both our pupils and our adults and it ‘solidifies’ our shared commitment to learning.

As I complete this piece today, the visiting T-Rex has wowed our youngest pupils, I have already had an in-depth discussion about global perspectives within our History curriculum and I have spoken to a prospective pupil about their thoughts regarding AI - it is not yet 10.00am!

As always, I feel incredibly privileged to be part of the Felsted family and this evening I look forward to sharing a meal with our class reps and talking through exciting up and coming events for the Spring Term. Rest assured, I will aim to follow by sharing the content of this evening’s meeting with you all.

In the meantime, I wish you a restful weekend ahead with your families.

Warm wishes,

Miranda Norris