At home yesterday evening, one of my sons asked me ‘Daddy, what do teachers actually do on INSET days?’ And it got me thinking that this is probably quite a universal question, so now that we have completed our two days of learning, we thought we would highlight to you what we have been up to!
On Tuesday, 16 of the team spent the day being trained in the ‘Management and Administration of Medicines’. This training was delivered by the Hampshire Teaching and Leadership College. The rest of the team were given a full introduction to the background theory and application of Philosophy 4 Children. P4C builds higher order thinking, questioning, speaking and listening skills. Research found that by using P4C children saw their reading skills improve by four months, their maths results by three months and their writing ability by two months. Feedback from teachers throughout the trial suggests that Philosophy for Children had a beneficial impact on wider outcomes such as confidence, patience and self-esteem too. We are very excited to start using Philosophical enquiry in our classrooms and look forward to hearing your feedback!!
Today we started as a whole staff by exploring Equality and Diversity with Nathalie Sherring from the Dorset Race Equality Council. We talked about the challenges of supporting young people to grow up in an increasingly diverse world where we are all as different as we are the same. We explored issues of race, gender, sexuality and discrimination and had an opportunity to think about how to support the children and each other when managing situations where potentially hurtful or upsetting things have been said or done. After this we had a break and then followed by discussing some of the feedback from the recent parent questionnaire and thinking about how to take Marvellous Me forwards and continue to develop the effectiveness of the website as a tool for communication and information.
This afternoon we all gathered for our final session, led by Mrs Allen, our SENDCo, who talked to us about ensuring that our classroom environments were suitable to meet the needs of all learners and we carried out an audit to look at our practice and see how we could continue to improve and get better. All in all a pretty packed and thought provoking two days – we’re back up to speed and ready for the children again now – let us at ’em!!!!
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