Future Creative

How can active learning with cross-curricular links engage and stimulate higher-ability pupils and enable the development of critical thinking skills?

The school wanted to target high-ability students who have become 'lazy learners' thanks to the target led/outcome based learning framework, which leaves some teachers feeling pressurised and forced to 'spoon feed' information. The aim was to reverse a trend towards underachievment in these young people. All those involved emphasised the development of a pupil-led project. Although the initial enquiry question focused upon pupil engagement, they hoped to explore numerous additional threads, including documenting the enquiry as it ‘evolved’, in order to measure success throughout, rather than basing evaluation purely on final outcomes. This approach would encourage the school to take risks in its approach to teaching and learning in the future, moving away from the limited and prescriptive nature of purely outcome-orientated teaching. The enquiry would also embrace a large number of general issues, such as identifying pupils' preferred learning styles by allowing pupils to direct the course of the enquiry, developing spiritual, moral, social and cultural awareness through the subject content of the project and developing 'pupils' voices' through the pupil led enquiry.

Another World began by exploring ‘His Dark Materials’, the Philip Pullman trilogy. This introduced concepts of parallel worlds, the tensions between religion and science. Objects were used to inspire imaginative storytelling and pupils became collectively involved in making stories through story-telling games inspired by miscellaneous objects. Pupils were divided into teams to enter their own imaginary world where they were assigned as forensic researchers by a scientific research academy to travel to undiscovered parallel worlds and find the cause of a mystery disease – 'Sudden Imagination Deficiency'. They were to collect evidence that such worlds actually existed. Using some of Pullman’s techniques, they developed ideas about their world that would draw upon their knowledge from other curriculum areas (geography, history, values, science, religious studies). The ideas developed were imaginative yet credible because they drew upon elements of reality. Once the worlds had been developed conceptually and critiqued by other pupils, pupils were asked to ‘create’ their worlds. They took part in a series of workshops that explored environmental awareness, music, physical theatre and visual arts techniques in order to provide them with skills to present a world of sensory experience. Each team produced an installation based ‘world’ that was presented to an audience. The final day included a presentation of pupils' worlds, some of which involved performance.

Pupils were demonstrating improvements in team work with an openness to working imaginatively and thinking more broadly. The ‘worlds’ created by the young people encompassed complex theories that demonstrated application of existing knowledge and the development of a new level of thinking. Pupils were surprised by their achievements and acknowledged that perhaps they were capable of far more exciting futures than they had originally imagined. The Westlands School has applied to be part of the Change School programme from September 2008.