Learning Outside the Primary Classroom

Fred Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136320606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"We believe that every young person should experience the world beyond the classroom as an essential part of learning and personal development, whatever their age, ability or circumstances. Learning outside the classroom is about raising achievement through an organised, powerful approach to learning in which direct experience is of prime importance."

LOTC Initiative manifesto

In Learning Outside the Primary Classroom, the educationalist and writer Fred Sedgwick explores in a practical way the many opportunities for intense learning that children and teachers can find outside the confines of the usual learning environment, the classroom.

This original work is based on tried and tested methods from UK primary schools. The author draws on current concerns in the educational world regarding outdoor learning as exemplified by the eight sector Learning Outside the Classroom (LOtC) initiative (supported by Ofsted), but remains refreshingly independent in approach.

Using a metaphor of concentric circles Learning Outside the Primary Classroom starts with a brief opening chapter based in the classroom itself before moving outwards to explore the learning possibilities presented by the immediate environs of the school – playgrounds, gym halls, sports fields etc. Later chapters move beyond the school gates to explore the local shops, parks, religious centres, libraries and town halls and the myriad learning opportunities they represent. The final chapters explore the possibilities of larger scale day trips to major galleries and museums and more ambitious field trips.

Chapter

1

Writing and Thinking

1 Writing and Making it Better

This book is concerned, above all, with words. This is because of my certainty that writing is the most powerful medium for learning about almost anything. It enables children to explore not just the words that they consider, reject or use; not just the subject they are writing about; but, critically, they are learning about the relationship they have with both their language and the subject of their writing.

Writing is not, pre-eminently, a record of learning. It is a part, and a vital part, of the process of learning. Thus, it doesn’t merely record our thoughts, our discoveries, our meditations, though it does do that sometimes. It modifies them; it enriches them; it makes them clearer and yet, paradoxical as it might seem, it adds to them and makes them more complex. However confusing those thoughts, discoveries and meditations are, writing words down makes them graspable. While before we wrote there was an intangible cloudlike presence in our head, writing has given that presence a shape on which we can meditate further. We look at the paper, and discover that our thinking has at last some kind of local habitation, some kind of name.

I will emphasise in several places in this book the importance of the different stages of writing: getting some words down fast, before they are forgotten; then jotting in the margins and in the gaps between these initial notes; redrafting. Our first words written down – even on a shopping list – are almost always provisional. Those words are never, or are rarely, quite what we meant to say. They are, as football managers say of inexperienced players ‘not the finished article’. Much of what we learn as we write is done at the stage when we examine what we have written with a pencil in hand, ready to add and score out; all this with questions in mind. And when we do this, we find that we write better: we find more appropriate words, words that convey a thought as lucidly as possible. The second draft comes into being, not in copying out with spelling and punctuation corrections, but in the margins of the first draft; or in the spaces between the lines; or in rings at the bottom of the page, with arrows showing where new words, or sentences, or parts of sentences, are to go. Then we can make a second copy of our work.

To help this second-drafting we might, as teachers, usefully encourage the children to ask some open-ended questions:

Is What I Have Written True? Have I Said What I Meant to Say?

Teachers need to teach children that, just as in life we should all tell the truth, so they (and we) should tell it in our writing. This teaching can be given extra force by the fact that a lie written down sometimes hangs around for a long time and does even greater damage than a spoken lie. (The obvious problem with this – that all of us tell lies in life, whether with good or bad intentions – need not detain us here.) The poet Wendy Cope once said on Radio 4 (quoted in the book As the Poet Said, edited by Tony Curtis) ‘When a poem doesn’t work, the first question to ask yourself is “Am I telling the truth?”’

One of the most common untruths that children fall for is caused by the forced rhyme, as in this example from a ‘poem’ a child wrote on ‘Water’ for a national competition: ‘It comes to us as rain hail or snow / And when it is finished then it does go’. When children ask me in the normal course of things ‘Can I make it rhyme?’ there are two possible responses. The first is: ‘If you tell the truth with your rhyme, yes.’ This is only any use when the class is experienced in writing well; when their thinking about writing is sufficiently sophisticated. The second response is ‘No.’ The poet Seamus Heaney once demurred on hearing praise for one of his earliest poems. He had, he said, been seduced by the rhyme. The story is told in Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll. Heaney had overcooked an emotion by ending a stanza with ‘hate’ because earlier lines had ended with ‘wait’ and ‘late’.

It isn’t really fair, perhaps, banning rhyme for children. After all, they are surrounded by it in advertising; in songs; in nursery, playground and counting-out rhymes; and, indeed, in most of the poems teachers introduce them to. But it is difficult to teach them the difference between the plonking irrelevance of the rhyme quoted above and the natural rightness of, say, this one anonymous example:

How many miles to Babylon?

Three score and ten.

Shall we get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again.

We shall get there by candlelight

If your heels are nimble and light.

With its alternative ending:

Open your gates as wide as the sky

And let the king and his men pass by.

Or in Scotland:

Here’s a beck and here’s a boo,

Open your gates and let us through.

(For hundreds of other such traditional verses, see The Singing Game, by Opie and Opie.)

I explain two other techniques, alliteration and assonance. The children usually know about the former but not the latter. These techniques are relatively easy to understand and they are less open to abuse, we might say. Like rhyme, they make a kind of music, and once children accept that putting ‘goat’ at the end of a line because the previous line ends with ‘throat’ or ‘float’ or ‘moat’ or ‘boat’ or ‘note’ is not such a good idea, they make good use of repeated consonantal or vowel sounds. A famous line of Tennyson’s – ‘murmuring of innumerable bees’, from ‘The Princess’ – illustrates these two techniques; there is a more subtle example from Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ in Chapter 3 (see p 21).

Have I Written Any Clichés?

I don’t know why it has never been part of the national curriculum to teach children first to recognise clichés and then to delete them. In children’s writing, ‘birds twitter prettily’, lions ‘leap upon their prey’ and babies are ‘cute’, much as football managers ‘take each day as it comes’ and duplicitous politicians ‘make things abundantly clear’ even as they blow smoke over the truth. I mock these and other clichés, and then deliver a brief lecture on news ‘spreading like wildfire’ and the like. Sometimes we have cliché-hunting sessions with newspapers. It surprises me sometimes to see clichés on classroom walls presented as examples of good practice: ‘Here is one way to begin a story: “Once upon a time in a country a long way away there lived a beautiful princess . . .”.’

Could I put This Better?

I call this activity ‘Editing Friends’. I ask children to read their writing to each other in pairs. They should do this at least twice, with one child at first listening, and then, on the second and further readings, asking questions that will help her partner to improve the work. Often this helps them sharpen the focus. Someone has written ‘trees’, for example, or ‘birds’, or ‘flowers’, and their editing friend asks, ‘What kind of trees (or birds, or flowers) were they? . . . What colour were the roses?’ When one child has written the lion/prey cliché, the other should insist on her naming the prey – just by thinking about it, or by going to a reference book about animals. Or by using the Internet. Then I get children to think of details that will add colour to their writing; to check to see if they have used the same word more than once; or to see if there isn’t a better word than the one they’ve used. Children should get used to doing this for each other as editing friends.

Are There any Unnecessary Words in My Writing?

Many classrooms have notices on the wall with ‘a list of interesting adjectives’. But in fact fluent writers in primary schools often use too many adjectives, often pairing one with another that has a similar, if not identical, meaning, or else pairing two adjectives where one covers the meaning of the other, as in the famous example ‘It was a dark and stormy night’: all stormy nights are dark, except during the lightning flashes. These children need not to be alert for more adjectives but to make sure that their nouns and verbs – the bones and muscles of writing respectively – should be well chosen. Many adjectives (and adverbs) are surplus fat. Other unnecessary words are nouns repeated when a pronoun would do the job better: this is easily dealt with if children are taught to read their writing back to themselves for the sound of it. ‘My Dad’, for example, is often repeated when ‘he’ would work.

2 Really Thinking

The words ‘think’ and ‘thought’ will come up many times in this book. But all too often, when teachers ask children to think, they really mean ‘guess’, as in (looking at stained glass in a church, for example) ‘What do you think those windows are for?’ or ‘How are those windows different from the ones at school?’ Hands shoot up. Can a child with his hand in the air think? I believe it is unlikely: his or her mind is entirely focussed on getting attention. A class of children faced with (a) a question and (b) the expectation that one of them will come up with an immediate and correct answer is competing, not learning, not thinking. The children are not reflecting on objects – those stained glass windows, say – and relating what they are learning about them to what they know already. And that is what I mean by thinking: it is the bringing of old knowledge into the presence of new phenomena, and interpreting the new in the light of the old.

I try to introduce into the classroom a kind of purposeful silence. This has nothing to do with the kind of silence we impose on a class while we call the register, or take part in a fire drill, or quite simply when we find that the level of noise is hurting our ears. It is a time when there will be no sound except that of pens moving on paper or (rather obscurely, I admit) the sound of brains working. The sound of feelings about something being explored. I often say to children: when I clap my hands, I am going to change this classroom from being a classroom into being a study – a study where twenty-odd writers (I always add one, for me – I am going to try to write too) are working. In silence. No talking. No music. Nothing. And the minds think. And the pens and pencils move. This doesn’t have to last long – ten minutes say – to have a beneficial effect on writing. One poem written in the grip of this silence went like this:

Silence is when you can hear things.

Listen!

You can hear a rose growing.

Listen!

You can hear a cat breathing.

Listen!

You can hear an ant stop, looking to see where it is.

Listen!

You can hear yourself blink!

Chapter

2

At Home

Eloise’s news January 28th

Our babby brother jams Michel

was born on crismas day

and I rote about it in my news

but all my teacher did

was put in capitals and full stops

and corect my spelling

(FS)

‘Nil on entry.’ I saw this written at the foot of a report on a five-year-old. She had started the week before in the reception class in the primary school where I was the headteacher. It reminded me then, as it does now, of that bleak instruction most of us have seen clipped onto the ends of hospital beds: ‘Nil by mouth.’ The latter instruction is imperative and necessary in its context, but the nihilism of the former is hard (even to this day) for me to forgive.

Or, as you can tell, to forget. This was over twenty years ago. And things have, of course (or so I have heard and do in part believe) improved. But even so, I have often heard the same judgment made about children since, if in more subtle terms. When coffee time arrives on the first day of term, teachers and learning support assistants (LSAs) congregate, apparently caffeine-parched, in the staffroom. Then somebody is sure to tell the Special Needs Co-ordinator, ‘You’ve got plenty to work with in my new class.’ Somebody else says, ‘I’ve got someone special for you . . .’.

Someone? And that child’s name – Cheryl, say – is exchanged, and her reputation, tainted on her first morning in school, will go before her. From now on she is defined not by her intellectual ability (though that would be bad enough) but (and this is far worse) by how that ability was assessed before morning break on the first day of her first term. Innocent as she is of the fact, she is in a similar position to a football team running onto the pitch already 0–2 down.

These comments were made about children diagnosed as having ‘special ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Writing and thinking
• 2. At home
• 3. On the playground
• 4. In the town
• 5. Bringing something out of the earth
• 6. A day on Seaham Beach
• 7. In the gallery
• 8. The Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia
• 9. Where people worship
• 10. Two school journeys
• Epilogue
• Booklist
• Index