Active ACE Fridays
Sep 12th, 2007 by Don Ledingham
Innerwick Primary School are leading the way in exploring alternative curriculum models.
Check out Head Teacher Angus McCrury’s blog for more information. All East Lothian schools run an asymmetric week which means that the pupils finish on Fridays at 12.30pm.
I’ll let Angus explain it further:
We have decided to abandon the traditional Friday routine which was. Finish stuff that you couldn’t do/wouldn’t do Monday-Thursday. Go to assembly to listen to the HT drone on about schools rules and other boring stuff, go on to Golden time which was always cut short in order to get lunches out onto the buses before they went away without half the kids. (happens often).
What we have moved to is ACtivE ACE Friday.
What is this all about, I don’t really know as it is evolving every week into a bigger and more successful animal. The children are all here, with no absences so far. They are brought to the school hall put into groups and set 4 challenges or tasks, these have to be completed with the help of a member of staff and parent volunteers.
I’m excited by this innovation and will be very interested to find out what impact it has upon children’s attitude to school and the quality of their learning at other times in the week.
It will be interesting to see what methodology is used to establish whether these sessions impact positively on children’s learning. Changes to routine can often bring about a surge of enthusiasm and one such indicater might be whether this enthusiasm is sustained. Proving that problem solving skills and thinking skills (depending on the challenges set) have improved might be harder to quantify.
In larger schools could we perhaps try smaller scale versions in individual classrooms ?
It certainly sounds like a great idea. I only wish we didn’t have to measure outcomes, because the really desirable outcome will only be visible at the end of secondary school with more pupils having a positive attitude to learning and an ambition to work hard and do well for themselves.
In answer to Dave we are currently negotiating, (Initial discussions toook place yesterday) with our Educational Psychologist to devise a strategy to measure outcome and impact and devise a statgy for sustained growth and sustainability. This would be achieved by a joint piece of action research over a whole academic session. Our initial approach is to ask staff, pupils and parents what they think they have got from the change in approch so far. We have discussed using SELS to enable this to happen and we are organising a further meeting to set out exactly what we want to ask/measure.
Angus