Steps reunion

How often do you see teachers giving up their precious weekends to spend time learning more about their work? Not often, because most teachers spend what little free time they have marking, preparing lesson plans and generally trying to catch their breath. And yet this weekend I was very privileged to take part in a weekend away with teachers from Saltash.net Community School at the Engage and Inspire staff development event in Bedruthan Steps Hotel, near Newquay.  The hotel plays host to the event every year, and I recall with fondness being invited last year by Dan Roberts (aka @chickensaltash) to keynote the event alongside the likes of  Sugata Mitra. Well, Dan Roberts has moved on to warmer climes, but the campaign to aspire to better pedagogy continues. Saltash.net is a remarkable school and quite unique in the ways it harnesses technology to engage and inspire. That is one reason why Microsoft has decided to sponsor the Bedruthan Steps event time after time. This year at the Steps the invited speakers included Stephen Heppell and Steve Bunce, both of whom challenged their audiences to reach further using technology to inspire and engage learners. And what an inspirational weekend it turned out to be.

Stephen Heppell, in his inimitable way showed his audience a range of innovative new ways to engage learners in school, including shoeless education, olfactory schools, sound scapes, mirror walls and 100 faces.  Stephen talked about how mood lighting can psychologically influence learning. Provide red lighting in the morning, and it wakes students up, whilst blue lighting after lunch has a calming influence. Just changing the positioning of chairs can have a positive influence on how the students respond, he said, while converting tabletops to whiteboard drawing surfaces can raise the levels of creativity in the room. Many of Stephen's ideas don't rely heavily on technology, and we were warned that technology on its own does not solve problems, but he did suggest that where technology is involved, everything goes exponential, especially the quality of learning. Many of Stephen Heppell's tried and tested ideas have been shown to transform the learning experience in a variety of different cultural contexts in countries around the world.

A session led by James Edwards (Saltash School) and Ray Chambers (Lodge Park School, Corby) exposed the many ways in which games based learning can be harnessed in secondary education. The session became a dynamic workshop where teachers were given the opportunity to try for themselves some of the non-touch, natural gesture driven tools powered by the X-Box 360 Kinect.

The session by Steve Bunce was focused on challenge and mission, and involved the teachers splitting up into several teams as they tackled all the activities they were given to complete. One mission involved the teams trying to recreate and capture a famous movie scene and a scene from history using modelling clay, tiny figurines and anything else they could get their hands on. Links to several stop-go motion movies and digital images soon began to appear on the #saltash12 twitter stream as teachers shared their fun. Another task was to create a 1-1 scale map of a beauty spot somewhere within the spectacular surroundings of the cliffside hotel grounds. Many of the missions and tasks were taken from the Mission Explore collection of learning resources.

It was great to see teachers leaving the event enthused and inspired, armed with innovative new ideas to try out to see how far they could go in enhancing and enriching their students' learning experiences. I don't think there was a single teacher who regretted going the extra mile and spending their weekend learning a little more about how to be an inspirational teacher. Thank you Saltash.net for inviting me to share your experience this weekend.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Steps reunion by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.