Loosening the Grip

Description

Behaviour management expert John Bayley assesses the benefits of giving pupils responsibility for their own learning, in this practical classroom-management video for secondary teachers.

Having observed a Key Stage 4 lesson, John feels that alternative curriculum teacher Nils Marckwald, and his pupils could benefit from a different style of teaching at Foulstone School.

John suggests that the KS4 pupils, many of whom lack confidence, would embrace a style of teaching which gives them more responsibility. This would allow them to set their own targets and assess how well they are achieving them.

To get an idea of how such a system could work, John and Nils observe language teacher Sharon Fountain in a French lesson geared towards encouraging children to achieve specific levels of understanding. An action plan for the future emerges from this. But will this new pedagogy work?

By the end of the lesson, Nils says, "I was seeing if I could get comments out of them which I would normally feed into them. They were beginning to think and plan and respond".

Part of the series: Teaching with Bayley