A huge thanks to colleagues at Harlington for welcoming and inspiring us last month. We are setting up Lead Practitioners at Haydon and came away really inspired, with a number of approaches to the role that we aim to embed over this year. Mark Fisher has already set up a blog: http://haydonlearningblog.com which we are building up, ready to launch to staff in the new year.
It is always useful to step back from your practice and reflect on why you are doing this job in the first place. Even our car journey was a moment to reflect on pedagogy! We discussed Growth Mindset, which was the inspiration behind an action research project at Harlington, and the pitfalls of over-praising children. Mark had been to a Growth Mindset conference at Vyners the previous week and said that one of the speakers never praises his children, ever. This seems a bit harsh on the surface of it, but he said that when he praised his son and told him he was an amazing artist, he never wanted to do art again. What Carol Dweck’s research shows is that praising the person instead of the process is counter-productive. “If I’m good at art, what happens when I get stuck? What if my experiments and work in progress look rubbish? People have such high expectations of me! I’d better not fail, so I’d better not even try.”
This made me think about my son, aged 22 months. He gets praise ALL the time from all different directions: “You put that away, HOW CLEVER!!” “You used your spoon, you’re such a bright little boy!!” I’m not suggesting he’ll never use a spoon again if he’s praised for it, but what if the need for praise one day outweighs the joy of learning? When he’s just got to get on with stuff by himself or comes across something he can’t do, or doesn’t understand, he’ll need his own inner strength and sense of worth to fall back on. We need to discuss the strategies used instead of just the outcome: “Well done! I like the way you tried different methods to make it work.” Or “What would you do differently next time?” See Mark’s blog entry for more reflections on this…
http://haydonlearningblog.com/questioning/wwidd-reflective-questioning/
Our first year as Lead Practitioners at Haydon is rooted in Growth Mindset – we have run sessions where staff are encouraged to develop their own practice and return to share ideas, successes and failures at subsequent sessions. Inspired by the work we’ve seen at Harlington, we hope that some of these will develop into action research projects and make a difference to our students.
Thank you for hosting us, for giving us so many ideas and biscuits.
Rebecca Skertchly
harlingtonteachingandlearning 