Oops!

Helping Children Learn Accidentally

Hywel Roberts, Ian Gilbert

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781781350096
• eBook ISBN: 9781781350409
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The book also shines a spotlight on the role of the teacher and how he or she can do the right things to get the absolute best from students.

Some of the best learning takes place when, rather than imposing on young people a pre-determined curriculum, you find the stimulus that is relevant and engaging for them and build from there. Then the curriculum starts to emerge in a way that simply hooks students into learning almost despite themselves. There is nothing for them to push against ('What's the point?!', 'This is boring..!') as they have helped shape the direction of the lesson in a way that makes it real and useful to them. All this without them even realising what is going on!

They have been 'lured into learning' and the process is shared with teachers in this book, with examples as to how it can be done and how the author has done it. Reading this book will support teachers in developing ideas that motivate everybody in the classroom, from infants to secondary and beyond.

Whether you're new to teaching or have vast experience you will find in this book inspiration to raise achievement, improve behaviour and enhance creativity in the classroom; and you will change the way you approach lesson planning forever.

Shortlisted for the Education Resources Awards 2013, Secondary Resource - non ICT category

Oops Book Launch, Waterstones, Sheffield, May 2012:

Photography by Jane Hewitt www.janehewittphotography.co.uk

OR Holes and Branches …

OR Finding the Curriculum Whilst Meeting the Needs of the National Curriculum (which, remember is only a suggested curriculum)

Accidentally Learning

There is no need to be joined together at the head, as long as we are joined together at the heart.

Margaret Wheatley

The earth without ‘art’ is just ‘eh?’

Seen on Twitter

Things to stop children in their tracks:

1 You start singing Puccini’s aria Nessun dorma: Why start singing an aria? Because, after the initial shock, the lads in the PE lesson I was covering all started joining in. Showing my age a bit with this one, but Nessun dorma was part of a cultural hangover from Italia ’90, along with Gazza’s tears, and was still being sung on terraces years later. Belting out this beauty enabled me to get on with the lesson rather than getting taken to the cleaners as I suspected I was about to be.

2 You juggle cats: I don’t mean juggle actual cats. That would be cruel and potentially dangerous. The great comedian and banjo player Steve Martin would use cat juggling as part of his stand-up routine in the 1970s. The bizarreness of the act would be enough to have audiences in hysterics and utterly gripped by what might be coming next. That’s essentially what we want in our classes, isn’t it? Well, maybe not the hysterics, but we want the gripped-ness, the sudden tension that will lead to positive learning tension. When I did this most recently, the cats were left stranded high up in three different areas of the classroom and needed rescuing. The class of 5-year-olds I was working with were just the people to mount the rescue and invented an array of weird and wonderful contraptions in order to get the cats down safely. Buzzing.

3 You are a wiz with a Diablo: A Diabolo is a Chinese yo-yo and my colleague was ruddy great at using it. He could’ve been on Blue Peter. If the kids were good, had finished their work and were successful in meeting the lesson objectives, he’d whiz out the Diabolo and chuck it around for a bit. They loved it.

4 The classroom has been rearranged so the desks and chairs face the back: Children can be flummoxed by a change in the usual.

5 Change your hairstyle: Children can be flummoxed by a change in the usual and can be visibly shaken by a teacher’s attempt at an aggressive comb-over.

6 Turn the classroom into a CSI-style crime scene: You can’t beat a gaffa-tape outline of a body in the middle of your floor. It might not necessarily be the outline of a human …

7 Be seated at the front with a dog: Every so often, the drudge of day-to-day school life is powerfully awakened by the arrival in school of the Littlest Hobo; stray dogs should always be approached with caution but are a great way of altering the moods of children. More dogs in school I say!

Seriously (kind of), we had this situation where a dog ended up with me in my classroom as I was awaiting the arrival of my class. It belonged to a boy in my form who was en route to collect it. When the class came in they were of course completely surprised by the vision of One Man and his Dog at the front of the classroom. I told the children he was a witness to a miscarriage of justice and that they needed to interview him (the dog that is, not the man).

8 Speak a different language: What languages do dogs speak? Well you can figure it out for yourself, can’t you? If a dog barks loudly, what is she saying?

Stop!
No!
Be careful!
There are a number of children trapped in the collapsed mine …

Or if the dog whimpers, is she saying:

Sorry.

Why?

I liked him but it’s over now.

If she snarls and bares her fangs, is she saying?

That’s the last time you hit me.

I’m warning you.

I’ve seen stuff I need to tell you about and you’re not listening to me.

You can basically create a vocabulary for a dog made up of sounds that children can then translate. I saw this done by Warwick University Drama Professor Joe Winston and it worked a treat. It inspired me to go out and buy a puppet dog which I was determined to shoehorn into my teaching somehow. It worked and here she is:

It’s a prop that stops kid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Stop Teaching Me When I’m Trying to Learn
• The Human App
• Liberating Your Subject
• Accidentally Learning
• Inspector of the Lure
• Room with a View
• Leave the Baggage by the Door
• Holding Your Nerve
• Useful Resources
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright