Future Creative

What is confidence?

Through a collaborative process, a principle objective was decided upon, namely to develop pupils' self-esteem and their ability to make a positive contribution to the school community. This was followed by several sub-objectives; to ensure the school becomes an emotionally literate community, to develop more ways of giving the pupils a voice within the school and to develop our understanding of low self-esteem and its effect on pupil behaviour. The school especially wanted to focus on these objectives in relation to periods of major change within wider lives of pupils and the coping abilities of pupils leaving the school.

Practitioners worked with pupils from year 6 (targeted because they will soon make a major transition into the secondary stream of the school), and year 11 (targeted because they will soon leave secondary education entirely). The year 11 pupils took part in a range of dance, drama and storytelling activities, all aimed at enabling them to read emotions more effectively, whether in themselves or others. The students used ideas discovered to carry out their own role-play and mirroring work. They also made use of video cameras and Polaroid cameras to explore facial expressions. The year 6 pupils worked with the idea of the brave and shy sides of their personalities, identifying confidence and a lack of confidence in others, before creating artwork that represented braveness and shyness. The teaching staff were also involved in their own day of creative professional development, provided by the practitioners. This focused on ways to engage pupils and explore behaviour and feelings. Many teachers reported using these new techniques in subsequent lessons.

Children involved will pass on the positive outcome of the project to other pupils within the school.