It's a question that never goes away:

How best to help children maximise their learning?

Yes, suitable resources, technology, sound teaching practices, the best teacher training, a good school environment and parental support matter but as the old saying goes 'you can bring a horse to water but you can't make him drink!'

And you can't make children learn.

At our school we have spent some time thinking about how best to foster independent learning. We felt it was a much bigger matter than simply acquiring a set of skills such as the ability to do fractions.  

Every day we witnessed children's learning being inhibited by other factors .

Some life skills were decidedly underdeveloped.

We were spending more and more time dealing with matters outside the core of teaching and learning - lost books, forgotten homework, petty disputes, indifference, lack of self awareness, communication difficulties - the list could go on and on.  

A group of teachers put together some ideas, surveyed the whole staff (using google docs) and now we have a set of agreed priorities that as a staff we have been  implementing across the whole school.

Google Docs made the survey easily available to all teachers.  And collating of results is done for you!

Now our students get a cohesive, simply understood message from each teacher every day.

So how did we go about it?

First off, we asked all teacher to prioritise the following skills:

• independence of thought and learning
• respect for oneself, the authority of the teacher, fellow students and the school environment
• personal responsibility for one's behaviour, attitude and conduct
• organisational skills in relation to time-management, belonging, homework and learning
• problem solving, abstract and higher order thinking

All very important and of course inter-related but we couldn't tackle all at once.  The teachers voted to first deal with organisational skills and independence of thought and learning.

After a lot of brainstorming we brought these down to two very simple mnemonics. 

S C A T and R A P 

SCAT (meaning 'go away') is what we teachers tell students when they approach us for help - in cases where we know a task has been adequately explained and modelled but the student's listening skills, concentration or motivation might be lacking.  We recognise it might not go down well in those classrooms where teachers like children to work in silence - but a busy buzz or work chat are surely preferable to stagnation!

S - stop and think!

C - check around you, what are others doing?

A - ask a classmate

T - teacher is a last resort

R A P encourages the children to think before they belt out the classroom door at the end of the day.

      R  - Record

A - and 

P - Pack

Simply put - have they noted down their homework and packed the correct books?

Of course SCAT and R A P mean different things in different classes.  Younger children will still need support as will those students who genuinely struggle with organisation, listening or concentration.

And this is not a quick cure.  It will require a lot of perseverance on the teachers' parts and parental support too.

The good news is SCAT and R A P have caught the imagination of the students and they have even been moved to compose their own raps to go with them!  For other students making posters or 
Powerpoints have given them ownership of the terms. 

No one is foolish enough to think we have invented a 'cure all'.  We have made a start while knowing for sure, in education, nothing lasts for ever!