Practical Personalisation

15th December 2022Website Admin

Practical Personalisation

Loni Bergqvist

Loni was a teacher at High Tech High before coming to the UK to support the REAL-Projects programme in 2014. Since then, as founder and partner of Imagine If, Loni has worked with schools around the world to re-imagine education. Her project-based learning expertise has been used in several international initiatives and yet she finds time to be a source of friendship and expertise to Gesher.

Differentiation is Not Personalisation…

Ditch the word differentiation. Never use it again. Forget it exists.

By default, using the term differentiation causes us to look first at and make assumptions about what’s different about students before designing assessment or a lesson. We weigh these differences against what’s seen as ‘normal’ and by doing so, we categorise without really properly getting to understand individual students. Differentiation is a quick and inadequate way to streamline the process of knowing or categorising our students. We assign them labels so that we feel as though we understand their needs… but do we really?

Personalisation, on the other hand, begins with the unwavering belief that all students are capable of excellence. All. But, in order really to live out this philosophy, it takes a commitment to dig deep into children who enter the walls of the classroom. Personalisation starts with deep understanding. It’s not a term that is used exclusively with students who struggle to read or have learning challenges, or who are identified as being gifted. Personalisation should be done for every single student, such that we can give all learners access to their gifts and mitigations for their challenges.

This is not an over-idealisation. In adulthood, people find, navigate and express their gifts – intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual. We identify with and gain respect for what we can do or enjoy doing. Schools have tended to emphasise, for many learners, what they can’t do.

Personalisation starts in a different and more optimistic place.

Idea One: Create a community of learners

Creating a community where everyone (regardless of perceived academic ability) feels included, valued and comfortable is essential for all students and especially necessary for students who may have been marginalised in the past and felt excluded. At High Tech High, for example, they have a simple mantra: We expect all learners to be successful and to produce beautiful work. It is the responsibility of the entire class to help them do that. THAT is a community of learners.

Things we can do to create these learning communities

Facilitative of Classroom Culture:

  • Knowing students individually
  • Allowing for student voice
  • Teachers openly being learners in the classroom, too
  • Mixed groupings – gender, experience, abilities
  • Encouragement of risk-taking and celebrating it publicly
  • One-on-one conversations with students
  • Celebration, recognition, and affirmation activities.

Techniques, Tools, and Activities:

  • Critique of work activities using peer feedback
  • Appreciations share-out at the end of a class
  • Individual reflection – and perhaps journal use
  • Use of protocols that scaffold learning and contributions
  • Question wall (a Parking Lot for questions and ideas)
  • Think-Pair-Share
  • Ice breakers and opportunities for students to share with each other (non-academic)
  • Show & tell activities that highlight student passions and interests
  • Variety of activities that necessitate different talents (Socratic Seminar, World Cafe)
  • Display of ALL beautiful work where students have invested, regardless of whether it’s ‘the best’.

Idea Two: Focus on what students CAN do, first.

It’s easy to start the year by looking at student deficits. However, any student who has struggled with school in the past, knows whether they’re perceived as being ‘good’ or ‘not good’ at school. The most important thing is to build confidence in students by examining and recognising what students can do, and what they’re already good at, to provide more access points to help with areas that need development.

Ways we can focus on what students can do:

  • Teacher/student interviews
  • Be flexible in the ways students show understanding (dictation, partner writing, pictures, etc.)
  • Take a ‘learning preferences’ survey and design lessons or learning pathways around different types of learners
  • Activate prior knowledge and related knowledge before new knowledge
  • Ask them: ‘What are you comfortable with? What do you struggle with?’ They know
  • Invite other students to celebrate what they value about peers
  • Some of the strategies in Idea One.

Personalisation begins with the unwavering belief that all students are capable of excellence.

Idea Three: Provide scaffolds for students to reach higher. Don’t lower expectations.

When creating scaffolds for students to complete a desired task, it is essential the support matches with the need of an individual student. Determine what the task is, what an individual student may need in terms of support to reach the desired task and provide resources accordingly. We do this instinctively when a student has a visible, physical barrier – a broken leg; a sight impairment – but we are less intuitive about more generic or subtle support strategies.

Ways we can scaffold learning:

  • Graphic organisers (give the option to all students, some will need them without ever officially getting support)
  • Modify assignments to do less if it’s the same skill
  • Allow dictation to a teacher or another student
  • Partner work
  • ‘Workshop Groups’ with a particular task as a theme. (Open these to all students who may need support! They can also be done after school.)
  • Chalk Talk (Protocol available here)
  • Think-Pair-Share (Resources available here)
  • Include visuals with text
  • Untimed Learning Stations, so that students can go at their own pace in a supported context. You can combine this with Daily Checklists.

Idea Four: Honour student interests

This one is really important. Those old enough to remember Barry Hines’s novel (and film) “Kes” will remember the young boy who received no affirmation in school, but who kept, trained and flew a kestrel outside school.  When an empathetic teacher joined him in the fields near his house to watch, he was awestruck.

Our students have rich lives outside our classrooms – they fish, they look after siblings, they go to evening classes, they have collecting hobbies, they are masters at online games, they play the guitar… And the more we can do to bring these experiences into school, the better chance we have of honouring who our students are, what they are passionate about and what they are skilled and knowledgeable about.

Ways we can involve the interests of students:

  • Choice in assignments (what to write about, the theme of a project, etc.)
  • RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, Topic) Resources here: https://www.edutoolbox.org/rasp/840.
  • Conduct home visits and meet with students and their families
  • Have Show and Tell each Friday with different students presenting each time
  • Give open-ended projects where students can include their own ideas for products and exhibitions.

 

End Note: Personalisation, then, is basically about designing learning tasks and environments and classroom culture which optimise every student’s chances of success. It is both as simple and as difficult as that. And if the range of suggested ideas above seems daunting, remember two things:

  • Just as we need to know our learners well to optimise their learning, so we have to know ourselves — and what we feel confident about and where we need help.
  • Teaching is not an individual sport – or at least it shouldn’t be. Teaching with other teachers and/or with support assistants can create a context for dialogue. So, too, can the design and planning process, in which peer critique is as valuable for teachers as it is for students.

Inspired By… Profile of Another School

15th December 2022Website Admin

Inspired By… Profile of Another School

Julie Temperley

In each issue of The Bridge, we will be sharing stories from schools around the world where exciting new learning opportunities are inspiring and challenging us. In this issue, we take a look at Riverside School in India, which was created using a human-centred design approach and where exploring identity and what it means to be part of a diverse community helps learners develop a strong sense of self and agency.

This story is just one of many you can find in FutureSchool: How schools around the world are applying learning design principles for a new era, by Valerie Hannon with Julie Temperley, Routledge, 2022.

Riverside School, Ahmedabad, India

Kiran Bir Sethi, the founder of Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, came into education with a designer’s mindset, determined to create an engaging and empowering learning environment for her young son, who was becoming disillusioned with school at an early age. Drawing on her design training, Sethi’s focus in conceiving her school was not: What is the curriculum and how should we teach it? but: Who are the learners and what do they need to learn?

A focus on learners — their strengths, interests and needs — led Sethi inevitably to contemplate the implications for learning of the unique challenges and opportunities that each learner faces and the diversity of experience of learners and their communities which follow them into school. Here too, Sethi drew on her own experience of arriving at design school where, for the first time, she met people whose lives and perspectives were vastly different from her own.

I was awed by the sheer diversity in religion, culture, demographics and sexuality on the campus. It was here that I began to believe in inclusion as a right and not the privilege of a select few. — Kiran Bir Sethi, 2018

Through their student admissions and teacher recruitment policies, and over a period of ten years, Riverside explicitly set out to create a ‘mini India’ amongst the 390 students in their school, ensuring representation from all communities, demographics, religious affiliations and gender and welcoming learners with special needs ‘beyond any labels and biases’.

With diversity and inclusion so prominent in the school’s design and ethos it is perhaps unsurprising that identity soon became an explicit focus for learning, and Riverside’s commitment to inclusion found expression in their Inclusive Campus Programme (ICP).

Awareness, compassion and engagement are at the heart of the Inclusive Campus Programme.

Centring on nine aspects of identity, the ICP is made up of a range of workshops and experiences that continue throughout a student’s time at Riverside. The nine aspects, categorised under the headings of mind, body and heritage are:

  • Mind — personality, gender and orientation
  • Body — ability, age and appearance
  • Heritage — religions and beliefs, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic class

Awareness, compassion and engagement are at the heart of the ICP. From stories that challenge gender stereotypes for younger children to intentional conversations between a gay teacher and older students; from a collaborative redesign by students of school spaces to accommodate a wheelchair when a disabled student joined the school to regular visits to heritage sites and culturally significant spaces around the city, the ICP explicitly and systematically engages students with alternative perspectives and experiences to challenge them to reflect deeply on their own identity and the role they might play in the world.

Learners are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals in the world; agents with skills and purpose and a will to change things for the better for others.

As learners progress through the school, the ethos of inclusion and the exploration of identity expands beyond the school walls and out into the real world, to support learners to contemplate what other people’s lives are like and how the privilege — not the entitlement — of an education might equip them as Riverside graduates to help others. Learners are encouraged to think of themselves as individuals in the world; agents with skills and purpose and a will to change things for the better for others. “Doing good and doing well” is the Riverside mantra.

Learners stay in rural communities where the relative luxury of city living — sanitation, technology, transport — is missing from everyday life. They immerse themselves in alternative realities, learning how agricultural workers and craftspeople make a living. And how a life without material wealth might be enriching in other ways.

In their final year, learners assume responsibility for leading a real and urgent change, becoming the CEO of a changemaker programme to make a positive difference in people’s lives. This leadership development is the final stage in growing their confidence and humility to take on ethical and practical challenges as adults and to become a force for good in the world.

None of the focus and time spent on identity comes at the expense of academic excellence. Riverside students have consistently outperformed the top 10 schools in maths, science and English and the school has been ranked the No.1 day school in Gujarat for several years.

FutureSchool: How schools around the world are applying learning design principles for a new era by Valerie Hannon with Julie Temperley

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • What most attracts you in this mini-case study?

  • What most challenges you?

  • Could you use this as a think-piece with your staff?

Ron Berger: An Interview

15th December 2022Website Admin

Ron Berger: An Interview

 

Ron Berger is internationally recognised for his educational wisdom and insight. He was a public school teacher and master carpenter in his early career and those craft values now inform his educational leadership. He is Chief Academic Officer for Expeditionary Learning, which embraces over 300 schools across the United States, and he also teaches at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This is the second instalment of our interview with Ron. He is a wonderful storyteller as well as a wise educator — might those things just be linked? Anyway, it is so rich that we are feeding it in small servings! Towards the end, he talks about a lovely project done by ten-year-olds. In the Resources for Teachers section, we have included a teaching guide to that project.   

Critique and multiple drafts

Rowan Eggar, Assistant Head: Curriculum & Assessment at Gesher

How can we best support kids to make critiquing and drafting a dynamic process, as opposed to them being basically annoyed because we are having to review again? So that’s my question: What ways are there to design drafting and critiquing so that you can get the best possible outcome for the students?

Ron Berger

Great question. I think the way I’m most known in the world is the Austin’s Butterfly video. And so people understand I am obsessed with kids polishing their work and doing multiple drafts, but it’s not easy, as you say. So, I can give a few reflections on that.

The first, I would say, is that it’s only useful to keep doing drafts if the work keeps improving, if kids can see improvement happening. After that, there is no need to make them do six drafts. There’s not a magic thing that says Austin did six drafts, so therefore everyone should do six drafts. Austin’s work actually kept getting better, and that’s why it made sense for him to keep pursuing that drafting process in the video. One of the things that we can see in the Austin’s Butterfly video is that Austin had a reason to do six drafts, which was, importantly, that there was an audience for that work that he really cared about.

The butterfly Austin drew went on a card. It was sold across the entire state of Idaho. Wow. And all that money was used for butterfly habitats. And so his drawing was supposed to be so good that people would be able to use it to identify the actual butterfly, which is a reason why his first draft wasn’t that useful because you couldn’t actually identify the butterfly from that draft. Some art teachers have critiqued me for making him do something that’s very mechanical but that’s because this isn’t an expressive art project. It’s a scientific illustration. And so there was a reason for him to care about getting it right. And the kids in the video also had that photograph that they were looking at. So they knew what it should look like and felt empowered to say, ‘I can see what’s different about your drawing from that photograph.’

There’s a couple of things to take away from that. One is just the motivational thing. When kids have a purpose for their work that’s beyond their classroom, a real social purpose, a purpose they care about, then they’re way more motivated to do more drafts. Is there a way that what they’re creating can be used for something that matters a lot to them and where they really want it to be good?

For example, I went into a first-grade classroom where kids were working on letters, writing letters, and they were Y2, second years in the US. And they were still working on some of the basics of capitalisation and punctuation and ending sentences and writing legibly. They were young kids, they were six and seven years old, but they had visited the local fire station where they had met firefighters. And so instead of doing practice, they were actually writing a personal letter of appreciation to each firefighter and each student was assigned a firefighter.

A second thing is, do they have a model of what good looks like? If they have, then they can give critique.

So, if I were assigned Loni to write to, I would think, oh my goodness, I’d better get this letter to be perfect because I’m writing to this woman, who’s a firefighter, who’s protecting us, and she’s going to put it up on her locker and look at it every day. I want it to be perfect. I want my lettering to be perfect. I want my punctuation to be perfect. I want my spelling to be perfect. And so there was not a lot of pressure to say to kids, ‘You have to do another draft.’ It was like, ‘I need to keep making it better.’

A second thing is, do they have a model of what good looks like? If they have, then they can give critique.

So if I’m working on my thank you letter for Loni as a firefighter, and Ali is a peer of mine and she has a model of a thank you letter that we’ve all looked at together, a really good one, she can say, ‘You know, Ron, yours doesn’t have this actually. And notice how this one has it.’ And so it’s easier for her to give critique. And it’s easier for me to think, ‘oh yeah, you’re right, I didn’t do this. I didn’t do that’. And I know that we are often, as a culture, afraid to give kids models because we think, oh, what if they copy? But I have an entirely different attitude towards that, which is that copying is how we learn. So if we, as adults, want to learn to do something new like play guitar or speak Danish or do yoga, what do we do?

We go to a class or we go online and we watch somebody do it, and we try to copy them. And then we get critiques about what we’re not doing. Right? And then we try to copy them again. And we keep trying to copy them. We don’t start by improvising, right? We start by watching how they do a yoga pose, listening to how they pronounce something, watching how they do a chord on the guitar. And then we copy it. And then we critique ourselves and we get critique from others.

Modelling is how all of us as adults learn. We should not be afraid to show kids models of what a good letter is, what a good maths solution is, what a good anything is and to agree together why it is good. And then that empowers the kids to critique each other.

So I think it makes sense that kids get frustrated because they feel like ‘I just wanna be done. And you’re just delaying.’ The dynamic is totally different when you feel that this is what we’re aiming for. It’s about giving kids more power over it, by it not being us, the ones telling them it’s not ready, but them being able to see themselves.

Rowan

Amazing. Thank you. That’s really helpful!

How do we know our children well enough to understand what is relevant or right for them?

Ron

Teaching is about relationships. If you want to draw the best out of each kid in your school, in your class, in your group, it’s really about knowing that kid. It’s knowing what they’re proud of, knowing what they’re worried about, knowing what motivates them, knowing where their heart is. And if you want to draw them out, you have to know when it’s okay to tease them and what you can tease them about as a way of showing that you love them.

It’s all about relationships, but that doesn’t mean that we have to individualise what every kid works on. I think that’s a mistake we make, thinking that knowing kids well and loving them and caring about them means that I have to have a totally different task for Rowan, for Loni, for Ali and for Charlotte because one’s interested in dogs and one’s interested in cats etc., so they can’t do the same task as it’s not their passion. I don’t believe that. I believe sometimes kids should be able to write about their passion, read about their passion, do projects about their passion. But I think there’s a side of all of us that wants to do some good for the world.

So, it’s not just a question of passion. It’s a question of if you’re a human, you also want to do something appreciative for others.

I’ll share another story, a project from year fives (10 or 11-year-olds) in Moscow, Idaho, another rural community in the United States. All the kids were brought to an animal shelter and each kid was paired with an animal. Now, this is not an animal that they’re going to be allowed to take home. Their parents are not going to say: ‘You can take this stray dog home or this stray cat. But the kids learned the story behind each animal. What do we know about this dog? What do we know about this cat, her past, what she likes, what she’s afraid of — what do you know?

So they learned the story of their animal. They took a picture of their animal and then they went back and they did a portrait, an artistic portrait of their animal based on the photograph they had. And they did many drafts because there was a real purpose for this. The purpose was that they wanted their animal to be adopted. Oh, wow. Then they wrote a poem about the story of that animal, what they had learned about that animal’s past. Then they took the artistic portrait they had drawn and they took the poem that they had written about the animal, both of which had gone through drafts and they made a poster of it and they laminated those posters and they put them up all over town.

Now, if you’re in the laundromat, and if you are in the motor vehicle registry where you get a driver’s licence, or you’re in the doctor’s waiting room, there are posters of all these animals with poems and portraits. And once those went up all over town, guess what, people started adopting those animals. Because how much can you look at these beautiful animals on these posters without thinking’ I’ve got to adopt that one right there’.

So there was a tremendous reason for kids to care about multiple drafts of their poems and multiple drafts of their drawings and to get critique from each other and from the teacher and from experts. But we didn’t have to think, oh, that’s not a kid who likes dogs, or that’s not a kid who likes cats, therefore we won’t bring her on this trip. We just assumed, correctly, that every kid would understand the human quality of ‘we can save these animals’ lives — if we’re really good at this.’

… my students would be so motivated by that project.

Rowan

Yes. Purpose and agency. I’m just thinking already, my students would be so motivated by that project. That sounds like a dream project. Absolutely amazing. Love it.

Ali Durban, Gesher Co-Founder

It also emphasises the connectedness to the real world which, especially for our students, makes learning much more tangible — rather than knowledge that floats around that doesn’t actually mean anything.

 

Editor’s Note

A Project Card to support this project has been included here in the Resources for Schools section.

Why is School a Tough Place for Neurodiverse Children?

15th December 2022Website Admin

Why is School a Tough Place for Neurodiverse Children?

Ali Durban

A Short Reflection on Bravery

If all schools were judged by the provision they make for their most vulnerable learners (which feels not to be an unreasonable measure) it could be that there would be more “inadequate” judgements than there are currently. For some learners attendance at school requires reserves of courage.

Bravery is not a word that we would want to define any child or young person’s daily experience of school. After all, school is meant to be a place of safety, fulfilment, and positive relationships, yet for thousands of differently abled children and young people, navigating their normal school day is challenging, complex, damaging even, and bravery is a daily necessity of survival. In his recent book ‘The Inclusion Illusion’, Dr Rob Webster highlights the everyday experience of students with SEND in mainstream school as being characterised by separation and segregation.

School is meant to be a place of safety, fulfilment, and positive relationships, yet for thousands of differently abled children and young people, navigating their normal school day is challenging, complex, damaging even.

‘There are structures and processes ingrained within these settings that serve to exclude and marginalise them (children and young people). The arrangements that led to this might be defendable if they were necessary for creating an effective pedagogical experience. Yet the evidence… suggests that, if anything, they result in a less effective pedagogical experience.’

The Policy Context

Over 1.4 million children in Britain are reported to have some sort of special educational need and we all know that the unassessed number is probably much larger. Three-quarters of these (about 1.1 million) are on SEND support and 365,000 have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). The current SEND Green Paper talks about ‘a clear vision for a more inclusive system’ but gives no real sense of how it will be achieved. To put this inclusive thinking into context, following a consultation on behaviour management policies and exclusion, the Department for Education appointed a “behaviour tsar” to create “behaviour hubs”. Guidance also referred to the use of “removal rooms” in schools as a punishment and to the use of managed moves as an early intervention measure for pupils at risk of exclusion. To be clear, the children and young people most impacted by these measures are the most vulnerable in society. Mostly they are those with SEND.

The Government (and constant merry-go-round of Education Ministers) continues to wrestle with inclusion and SEND system reform, with no clear approach to system transformation in sight. For this article, we set aside the complexities of system change and instead take a grassroots-level deep dive into exactly why life in mainstream education is so tough for differently abled students.

Introduction

Gesher’s Ashleigh Wolinsky, Speech and Language Therapist, and Ingrid Mitchell, Educational Psychologist, have extensive experience working with SEND learners. We asked them to share some insights drawn from that professional experience. It will not be a shock to readers to learn that SEND identification, poor resources, and assessment and diagnosis delays are some of the consistent features.

However, with that as background we have extracted from the interviews three further clusters of issues:

  1. Those that are endemic to ‘school’ — the way secondary school in particular works.
  2. Issues that are unique to the learner — the needs of a ‘differently able’ youngster.
  3. What we have called ‘wisdoms’ — some practical suggestions that may be of help.

End Note: This article is not a criticism of mainstream schools, nor of secondary schools in particular.  Nor is it a eulogy for special school provision. Let’s be clear: we believe that both mainstream schools and special schools can do a great job for neurodiverse SEND youngsters — hence the insights and advice.

What we are also clear about, though, is that hundreds of young people across the country have a potentially damaging and unhappy experience of school and that there is knowledge about how things could be better. This piece is a small contribution to that, drawn from those with expertise.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • What most challenges your school’s SEND practices in this article?

  • Are there things in the ‘practical wisdoms’ section that your school might like to adopt?

  • Might it be of value to your school to create a Learners’ Lens of insights from your neurodiverse children?

How can a Life Skills Curriculum Support Children to Access Learning?

15th December 2022Website Admin

How can a Life Skills Curriculum Support Children to Access Learning?

Danielle Petar

‘More than just practising daily tasks…’ Gesher’s new life skills scheme

The idea of teaching life skills in schools as part of a young person’s education has been formalised since the late 1990s when the World Health Organisation (WHO) introduced its ten core life skills principles. They defined life skills as ‘a group of psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathise with others, and cope with and manage their lives in a healthy and productive manner’. Before that, it was a core mission of the scouting movement (since the 1920s) and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (founded in 1956). We have long known that life skills are an essential thing to have. For specialist schools like Gesher, they are crucial to school success, future life chances and emotional well-being.

Despite this, what the student experience of life skills learning means for day-to-day teaching can be difficult to picture. Is it discrete individual lessons about part of the WHO’s definition? Is it traditional lessons like maths, literacy, and science which implicitly teach these skills? Is it practising skills that young people will need for daily life in their classrooms and beyond? Is it something which teachers teach, or should this learning be happening at home?

What the student experience of life skills learning really means for day-to-day teaching can be difficult to picture.

These are some of the problems that Gesher’s Inclusion Team, (Danielle Petar and Matt Summers), grappled with when they first set out to develop Gesher’s own life skills scheme at the start of 2020 — and they are sharing their experience in the hope that it will be of value to others. Two years on, this scheme, called Bridges: Foundation, has been launched to Gesher’s students and will shortly also be introduced to parents. In anticipation of this, we sat down with Danielle and Matt to find out more about the journey they went on to design the scheme as well as some of its features.

Setting Up The Scheme

‘The notion of creating something which meets all of the WHO definition of life skills was exciting but also rather daunting. In the first stage of the process, we looked at the four key areas in the Government’s ‘pathway to adulthood’ guide. These are employment; independent living; good health; and friendships, relationships and community. However, we quickly realised that we’d need some more focus and to break these down further’. After going through various combinations of themes, the team decided on eight child-friendly themes.

Within each of these themes, there are eleven badges for the students to work towards achieving. In the ‘My Home’ theme, for example, the badges range from ‘Clearing the Table’ to ‘Preparing for Social Occasions’. ‘While each badge is very different they are all designed to focus on developing creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, the ability to communicate and collaborate, as well as commitment to personal and social responsibility.’

The approach is driven by the student’s motivation to learn new skills,  explore their areas of interest and develop their independence, as well as encouraging them to think about their future. Therefore, they have some autonomy in choosing their badges.

‘We were also eager to ensure that the young people themselves were included in the design process and it’s safe to say their feedback was refreshingly honest… It ultimately had a huge impact on the way the scheme looks from a visual perspective. Given that it’s the young people themselves who will be using the scheme, this is exactly what we wanted.’

The final stakeholder group that Danielle and Matt sought views from while in that crucial design phase was parents from the Gesher community. ‘The scheme was designed as an exciting journey that would foster a partnership between home and school, with students completing badges both at home and at school. As parents were going to be a vital part in implementing it, then it was equally important to get their input in the design process.’

Taking Ownership

The design of the Bridges scheme was very much focused on ensuring that students can take ownership of their learning. Within each life skill, there are four ‘steps’ to achieve along their journey that reflect an increasing level of independence and in this way students can see their progress.

As you journey through the different life skills badges, there are different steps along the way that you can take; each step leading you to be more independent.

 

 

 

Each step has a number of success criteria provided, which are visible and accessible to students. These were created by extensive research from the Inclusion team and in consultation with a wealth of other educational professionals (Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Therapists, Educational Psychologists, Art Therapists, Teachers, Teaching Assistants and Dramatherapists).

The different steps are not age-related but rather based on a child’s own stage of development at any given time. Both the approach and the journey navigation are highly personalised.

‘Unlike the way that learning is normally structured, both the approach and the journey navigation are highly personalised. The different steps are not age-related but rather based on a child’s own stage of development at any given time and based on their individual skills and needs. We did this to reflect the fact that a young person’s journey to adulthood is not linear and they will navigate their own winding path.’ Put another way, both the approach and the journey navigation are highly personalised.

Beyond Practising Daily Skills and Student Ownership

Unlike more traditional life skills schemes, Gesher’s reach is broader in terms of the themes it covers and has a greater focus on softer skills like decision-making and critical thinking. ‘We wanted the scheme to be aspirational, more than a means by which to practise daily tasks.’ This is evident in the inclusion of themes like ‘My Imagination’ and ‘My World’, which encompass skills like ‘Making a gift’ and ‘Learning about a religion’.

This breadth means that young people don’t just work on their life skills badges in the classroom but in a home context as well. ‘The success criteria for each level have been designed to include language that is accessible for students as well as the adults in their lives.’ To further promote this, students work on a minimum of three badges at a time. The idea is that one is chosen by their teacher to work on in the classroom and relates to their project-based learning; one is chosen alongside the adults at home; while the last is selected by the young people themselves. This badge they will work on both at home and at school. ‘Obtaining these badges at home and at school should be both meaningful and fun and will hopefully open up new experiences for students as they navigate their own journeys to adulthood. It’s also important to say that there is no limit on how many badges a student can be working on at any one time. The scheme is designed to give them the opportunity to explore and to be ambitious.’

Hiding in Plain Sight

The eight themes ensure that the life skills curriculum is incorporated across the school from the Early Years class to the students in Year 8. This will allow students to become familiar with the skills they need for adulthood as early as possible in their education journey. Each class has one discrete life skills session a week where they work on their chosen badges. This is led by the school’s ‘life skills champion’ and the class teacher. In addition, for students at Gesher who are less likely to graduate with traditional academic qualifications such as GCSE and may follow a more vocational route, life skills sessions are taught daily in small groups.

As well as this dedicated time, the school’s holistic approach to learning means that badges can be worked on during students’ therapy sessions or in-class sessions through project-based learning. What will be obvious is that the approach (student ownership, personalisation, real-world tasks, school and community, etc) has many features in common with the project-based learning approach to the wider curriculum.

Next Steps

Whilst the Bridges scheme is very much underway, it will evolve and the team is already planning to create further resources to support the teaching of each life skill. They are also in the process of creating the next stage of the scheme, Bridges: For Life. This will expand on the four areas of preparing for adulthood and ensure that the students build on the life skills they’ve already developed through the Foundations scheme. This article offers a window into an important aspect of our work, one of which we are proud — both the scheme itself and the process through which it was developed. If you want to know more, please contact Gesher.

Legacy

Gesher is both privileged and humbled that this scheme has been made possible by working in collaboration with the Daniels family in order to honour the extraordinary life of Sonya Daniels, their wife, mother and grandmother.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • We all know how important life skills are for young people. How well established is (a) your curriculum for life skills; (b) your assessment processes?

  • In particular, how coherent is your life skills work with SEND youngsters?

  • Does the idea of badges have any merit for you?

Changing Schools, Changing Lives

15th December 2022Website Admin

Changing Schools, Changing Lives

Sam Dexter

Authentic Voices

Reflecting on the content that appeared in the first issue of The Bridge, we noticed a pattern. There was a lot from the perspective of neurotypical adult experts, but very little from the perspective of neurodiverse young people. This worried us. How could we be creating an educational journal about educating neurodiverse young people, without including the voices of these young people? This is clearly not right.

So, in this issue, and all future issues, there will be a dedicated space reserved solely for pupil voice — featuring the first-hand views of neurodiverse young people. For this issue, we spoke to five young people about how life at Gesher is different from the experiences they had in their previous schools.

Different in the Classroom

All of the students we spoke to described how learning at Gesher was different from their previous schools. One student said, ‘I didn’t learn anything… all I ever did was play around and make things’. When asked what it is like now at Gesher that differs he replied by saying: ‘I have more support here’ and ‘I like learning more… I like learning more so I get even smarter.’

Another  student, also speaking on the theme of support, told us how in his previous school:

‘I was learning, learning, learning but didn’t understand one thing and there was no support for me. They just said, you have to do it yourself… In this school, there is a lot more support, like if you don’t understand something, they explain it in a different way.’

The students told us how things were taught differently at Gesher. ‘I find learning better because it’s taught differently. We get to do PBL (Project-Based Learning)… which is fun and creative.’ For another student, not having the pressure of traditional assessment was a huge relief. ‘They [student’s previous school] had lots of tests. And I’m actually glad that my mum put me in this school because otherwise, I would have had to deal with lots and lots and lots of SATs exams.’

The approach to emotional regulation helps in the classroom.

A common theme related to how Gesher’s approach to emotional regulation also helps them in the classroom. ‘I can ask for a break and that means I’ll go outside and when I’m ready I’ll come back’. Another student described how, if the learning environment was too noisy, he knew to ask for ear defenders or he had the freedom simply to find them himself.

Different Outside the Classroom

Another feature shared was how school life is different outside the classroom at Gesher. Around this topic, two main themes emerged: friendship and the school’s therapy dogs. Relationships are a big focus at Gesher (they matter a lot for neurodiverse young people) and on the topic of friendship, students explained how Gesher provided them with the opportunity to build new relationships. ‘School can help us make new friends if we meet more people.’ [That same student went on to ask if the purpose of TThe Bridge was to bring more students to Gesher, suggesting that if it was, there would be ‘more friends also’.]

Other students felt that Gesher had allowed them to develop new interests and passions. ‘I like the fact that school can help me get interested in different things, [friend’s name] has got me interested in Minecraft and stuff like that.’ Another interviewee emphasised that Gesher provided the opportunity and support to build new relationships.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all students spoke enthusiastically about the positive impact that the visits of Gesher’s therapy dogs, Puplinda and Toby, had on their well-being:

Gesher student: I like it when Puplinda comes to visit.

Interviewer: Why?

Gesher Student: She makes me feel happy and calm.

Others spoke about being excited when Puplinda came to their class and were very concerned that she hadn’t visited for two weeks due to an operation (she is recovering well and will be back in Therapy Dog action before this article goes live).

The improvements mentioned are being followed up.

Always Room For Improvement

As well as hearing their views about what was different between their previous school and Gesher, we also asked what could improve their experience. The most commonly mentioned area for improvement was the playground, with students discussing how there could be more exercise equipment, more swings and slides, and some more creative activities. Another liked that the playground was a ‘very big area’ but felt that the surface material is ‘very tough… every time I slip a bit, I end up with everything in the cut, like rocks and everything.’

This part of each interview was important because it helped to give students agency over the process — not just wanting to hear the positives, but also to learn how we can make things even better. Mindful also of not wanting simply to be a passive ear for young people’s views and concerns, the improvements they mentioned are being followed up by one of Gesher’s Deputy Heads.

For Practitioners: Things We Have Learned 

  • A useful mantra for thinking about ‘student voice’, especially that of neurodiverse young people, is ‘nothing about us without us’. As such, reflect on something within your setting that you want to change/are already planning to change. How might you gather the views of some of your neurodiverse learners about what this change might mean for them?
  • The process of gathering student perspectives and insights with neurodiverse young people can be more time-consuming because there are additional barriers compared to collecting the views of neurotypical young people. We have learned (a) to have a trusted adult ask the questions (quite often not a teacher); (b) to conduct the interview away from the classroom, and (c) to keep it short!
  • The use of visuals can support students to share their views about something, especially where a verbal interview doesn’t play to a young person’s strengths. In the Resources for Schools section of this issue we have included an example of the ‘Three Houses’ model, a simple tool to elicit the view of a young person who finds it challenging to verbally express their feelings.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all five young people who gave up some of their playtime to share their views with us, and to Gesher’s Deputy Head and Dramatherpist, Mr Chris, who was the ‘trusted person’ who conducted the group interview.

Making the Most of Therapies in Your Setting

15th December 2022Website Admin

Making the Most of Therapies in Your Setting

Victoria Rutter

The ever-changing political landscape has seen far-reaching implications for education and health services; spending cuts have been severe and there is currently a real disparity across the country in the amount and type of therapeutic provision available to children with SEND. It is interesting to reflect on the journey of how therapies emerged in schools, and to observe the inherent successes, but also the frustrations; frustrations largely due to ‘not enough’ rather than the quality of provision.

It is abundantly clear, from both research and anecdotal evidence, that the best possible model for effecting quality provision for each child is to do this within a team. In this case, the team would be school, parents and therapies.

Within School, Not Withdrawn

Historically children were taken out of school to attend therapy sessions in local community clinics and hospitals. This obviously disrupted children’s education and meant there was limited opportunity for liaison with school staff, and also that skills acquired in therapy had little chance of being generalised into everyday school life. With the advent of Statements of Special Educational Needs (Statements) — now Education, Health Care Plans  (EHCPs) — the NHS began to place Therapists in both mainstream and SEND schools. Subsequently, Local Authorities (LAs), through joint funding with the NHS, began financially and operationally to support this model and Therapists began to work regularly in schools to see children — both with and without EHCPs.

Therapists as Members of Staff

Schools and parents could really see the benefit of children receiving therapies in their school environment. However, they also became increasingly frustrated by the amount of input they were being offered, with both the NHS and LAs rationing services due to a never-ending series of spending cuts. Schools began to recruit their own Therapists, giving them more control over the frequency of input, and allowing Therapists and school staff the opportunity truly to work collaboratively as part of a team around the children and young people in education.

Cut to today and this model is seen in both SEND and mainstream schools across the UK. Some settings have multi-disciplinary therapy teams on site full-time, while others have Therapists either employed directly by them or contracted via independent Therapists and practices. Therapists may visit weekly, half-termly or termly depending on the needs and budgets of individual schools.

Arrangements in one SEND School

At Gesher, therapy is not seen as an ‘add-on’, instead, it is part of the overall curriculum and is designed and delivered in tandem with the educational and social curriculum. Therapy targets are woven into all aspects of day-to-day school life, and therapies can be delivered in a variety of ever more creative ways. Staff upskill each other and are able to plan jointly and run interventions.

As in most settings, therapy staff work to a three-tiered approach: Universal (for all), Targeted (for small groups) and Specialist (for individuals). It is at the Universal level that the work can really make an impact: devising, teaching, modelling and reviewing whole-school approaches such as communication and sensory-friendly classrooms, signs and visually supported speech, Zones of Regulation, Movement breaks, facilitating lunchtime chats, playground games and Fun with Food.

Some Lessons For Any School

This model can differ from setting to setting, particularly in mainstream schools. So, what can a regular school do to maximise the impact of therapeutic support where provision can be limited in frequency?

Preparation is Key

Identify the key person who will liaise and plan with the Therapist. This is usually the Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities Coordinator (SENDco). The SENDco can then ask school staff and senior leaders to come up with a list of priorities and areas for development with regard to the particular Therapist that is working with your school; this could include:

  • Identifying particular children (specialist) or groups of children (targeted) who may require assessment and/or intervention
  • Identifying areas of universal need for your particular school, for example: vocabulary, listening, play, handwriting, sensory regulation, etc
  • Creating optimal learning environments such as communication and sensory-friendly classrooms
  • Identifying opportunities for Team Teaching to model and embed Quality First teaching strategies
  • You may wish to identify a Teaching Assistant with relevant skills and/or interest to also liaise with the Therapists and who helps to coordinate and deliver the therapeutic interventions in school
  • Identifying training needs for all staff
  • Identifying training needs for identified staff
  • Identifying pieces of work with parents.

Plan For Each Visit

The SENDco and Therapist can make a joint plan prior to the visit, by email, which ensures:

  • The priorities of the school are met in a timely way
  • School staff are aware that Therapists will be in school/class
  • Parents are informed
  • The Therapist knows in advance what assessments/resources to bring in
  • Time is ring-fenced for the SENDco and Therapist to meet
  • A room can be booked in which to assess children and meet with staff and/or parents.

Taking children out for one-to-one work may be necessary if outlined in a child’s EHCP. In these circumstances, a Teaching Assistant should be able to accompany the child to observe and participate in the session and effect meaningful carry-over. If you are unavailable to catch up at the end of the visit, ask the Therapist to send you a summary of who was seen, meetings that took place, interventions/training carried out, etc.

How Do I Go About Commissioning a Therapist?

It may be cost-effective to link up with other local schools to ‘buy in’ Therapists and many independent Therapists and practices have a choice of bespoke packages to suit a range of needs and budgets.

For further guidelines and information on commissioning Therapies in schools, see the links below:

Speech & Language Therapy

Independent Speech & Language Therapists

Occupational Therapy

Dramatherapy

Art Therapy

Educational Psychology

 

Therapists share the frustration and challenges of our colleagues in education regarding provision.  However, as suggested above, there are ways to maximise outcomes and utilise the therapy provision a school does have.

In essence, those universal approaches will have a significant impact and are achievable and sustainable. Investing in staff training and setting up whole-school approaches benefits all students, leaving the precious remaining Therapy time directed where it is needed the most.

Building From Passions and Interests

15th December 2022Website Admin

Building From Passions and Interests

Sam Dexter

In the first issue of The Bridge, we introduced Gesher’s Five Design Principles. These principles were developed by members of the Gesher community, friends and supporters of Gesher, and with input from members of the wider community. They are central to everything that happens at Gesher and as such, across the next five issues of The Bridge, we will look at how they are put into practice.

For this issue, we spoke to Monique Lauder, a Teaching Assistant in the Early Years/Year 1 Class about Gesher’s second design principle; personalised learning informed by young people’s passions and interests. Monique has spent twenty-one years working in Early Years settings and joined Gesher two years ago. In that time she has developed her own approach to personalising sensory trays and tuff trays.

The decision about what to include in the trays is driven by her deep knowledge of the young people.

Sensory Trays and Tuff Trays

Sensory trays and Tuff trays are a regular  feature of many Early Years and Key Stage 1 classrooms.  They promote and support language development, gross and fine motor skills and support children to develop their problem-solving skills. They are typically large plastic trays filled with materials such as shredded paper, coloured rice, pasta, different types of lentils, couscous, shaving foam, or water. They also often include small-world play items or objects linked to a topic. When we sat down to chat with Monique, her latest sensory trays were full of small white stones, tweezers, and what looked to me suspiciously like old Weetabix.

… the personalisation of learning informed by young people’s passions and interests.

Planning and Creating the Personalised Trays

For Monique, the decision about what to include in the trays is driven by her deep knowledge of the young people she works with. ‘I try to get something I know will interest them, maybe someone is really into cars, so I would put cars in that tray… It’s mostly about looking at the children, seeing what they really like, asking them what they like and going from there.’

As well as knowing about the interests of the young people she works with, Monique also discussed how a young person’s individual targets feed into the personalisation of a tray. ‘A lot of our students have targets related to communication and interactions so I use the trays to encourage role-play… the students are seeing their friends or adults playing in a certain way or interacting with an object in a certain way and they’re able to do the same.’ Monique also told us how, if a student is working on a very specific target, that can be practised in the tray. For a student working on recognising numbers up to twenty, for instance, putting objects in the tray and asking students to find them, means the skill from a maths lesson can be practised throughout the day. The student’s Project-Based Learning (PBL) topic also helps Monique to decide how to personalise a tray. A PBL topic usually runs for half a term so one of the trays will also be linked to this.

Monique also shared with us how her approach to planning and setting up the trays has developed throughout her time at Gesher. ‘At first, I was doing two a week but I changed it because I felt that students needed more time to explore’. Now, Monique will change the trays once a week and this gives the students much more time to be curious and work out which different sensory experiences they like and don’t like. ‘The other thing I’m trying to do more is implement what the students are doing in the classroom into the trays.’ At this point in our chat, the young people Monique works with came charging in from the playground. After taking off their coats and putting away their bags, they headed straight for the trays filled with the white stones and Weetabix. One of them grabbed a picture of a mouth and the other immediately picked up the tweezers asking who wanted to be the first dentist to collect the teeth. Monique explained that their topic this term was healthy bodies and that specifically this week they were looking at how to keep healthy (and that I was correct, it was old Weetabix).

Monique’s Tips for Creating a Personalised Sensory Tray

Ideas

The vast majority of Monique’s ideas come from knowing the young people she works with really well, so her biggest piece of advice is to take time to build relationships with the young people. Once you’ve done this you can start including personalised objects in the sensory tray and build the process up from there. Knowledge of a young person’s targets and next steps will also ensure the tray can be further personalised to their needs, as can a broad awareness of the curriculum experiences they are having.

Resources

Monique told us how most of her resources come from things she would have usually recycled, like food containers and packaging, as well as natural materials from the garden like leaves, conkers and acorns. A store of these materials can be built up relatively quickly, especially if more than one person is contributing to it. The materials could then be shared between classes and reused for different topics. Finally, she said that shops like B&M, Tiger, Poundland and Wilko are great places to get inspiration (and often bargains!)

End Note

Whilst the work that Monique does is specifically related to sensory trays, this article is also about something much bigger — the personalisation of learning informed by young people’s passions and interests. The principles are the same whether it is six or seven-year-olds or much older learners — build relationships; know the learner well; involve the learner; connect to the real world; and design experiences relevant to their learning ambitions.

 

Professional Prompt Questions

  • We included this article because Monique’s sensory trays provide a highly accessible example of personalisation in practice. What is the best example in your school?

  • This example is built on relationships — and knowing students’ SEND needs, learning challenges and passions. Who in your school has this relationship with SEND learners?

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

15th December 2022Website Admin

Critical Friendship Groups: Think ‘Fireside Chats’

David Jackson

Gesher School serves children who learn differently — many of whom have had highly stressful school experiences previously.

To do a brilliant job for these children, we want to be the best that we can be — the best in well-being, best in assessment, in project-based learning design and facilitation, in exhibitions, best community links, best staff development, best parent engagement, skilled in the use of technology and so on.  Not best or better in any comparative way — just the best that we can be to serve the young people, adults and families who are part of our school community…

We need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be.

To do that we need to be the most informed and intentional learning organisation that we can be, and one feature of that is to reach out to people who have relevant knowledge and experience to help us with dilemmas or ‘problems of practice’ and to debate with us key elements of our ambition. One strategy for this is Critical Friendship Groups.

Critical Friendship Groups (CFGs)

Gesher started as a primary school and is now an all-through school. For the first 18 months of its existence as an all-through school, it is emphatically in learning mode. We plan to harness the goodwill and professional generosity of the school’s multiple partners and connections to establish a small number of CFGs around key themes that are central to the school’s success.

At the time of writing we have held one CFG so far, on the theme of well-being, when we asked our critical friends:

How do you empower young people to manage and own their own mental and emotional well-being through adolescence and beyond school?

Eight people from backgrounds as diverse as the Anna Freud Centre and Place2Be, and as geographically spread as Bolton to Israel, met online for two hours to engage in a facilitated conversation, the outcomes of which will be featured in Issue 3 of The Bridge. We plan to share both a think-piece distilled from that session and also a tool or framework that might be of practical value to teachers.

Critical Friendship Group Objectives

There are four objectives to CFGs, which are:

  1. To connect Gesher with advanced practice and thinking around issues linked to the school’s ambitions, and to the needs of the SEND sector.
  2. To build relationships with people who have experience, knowledge and insights that can help to advance Gesher’s work and the work of the sector.
  3. To generate usable knowledge and ideas around key ‘problems of practice’.
  4. To create an informal space that allows people to engage and contribute to Gesher’s evolution.

We hope, of course, to learn a huge amount. And we plan to share the things that we learn which are of collective value through the journal.

For the moment, we offer up the idea of ‘fireside chats’ with a group of people who know stuff and who care about young people’s learning, as one that might have value for other schools.