Learning Without Limits - Alison Peacock at Waltham Forest 23/11/12

I'm at the Prince Regent, Chigwell, this morning, listening to Alison Peacock explaining how she has developed her Learning Without Limits.  I've read her book, and seen her present before, but it still sounds fresh because she is so passionate about it and never loses sight of the real purpose of her school: it's for the children, not the inspectors or governors or Authority, but all the children.

Alison's starting point at The Wroxham was to transform the school into a Listening School - listening to the children and transforming the culture in parts of the school like the midday lunch session where this was not happening and where there were indeed barriers to prevent it.  She also realised early on that parents needed to be listened to as well - confrontation doesn't work.

She also started mixed-age Circle Groups, led by Year 6 children, rather than a School Council which she felt could become elitist.  Having the Year 6s lead it allows them to model facilitative behaviour to the younger (and impressionable) students.  The Circle Groups also allow the children to make friendships in a way that even the playground does not necessarily achieve.

Introducing culture change of the type Alison advocates into an organisation  is only possible where it's a collaborative effort: if you try and change course on your own, it'll just lead to an intensely stressful and untenable situation.

Alison loves it when her staff have the same freedom to learn and engage that their children have: she quoted the example of a teacher who was running a whole-term project on the universe when one child spotted a rainbow, and the teacher took his whole class outside on the spur of the moment.  She said, and I'd certainly agree, that many teachers would be scared to do this because the HT or the schedule would not approve.  The support offered by the HT at that time can be thought of as the 'scaffolding' that underpins learning, and it applies just as much to teachers as to children.

In another example, Alison talked about how to make the concept of 'the dark' meaningful to children, rather than simply reading a book, however excellent.  Her suggestion? a 'let's-build-a-tree' party after school, with teachers building a tree in the classroom which would allow the children to crawl through the roots (polytunnels) in order to get to the trunk.  Cake was offered as a bribe, but teachers would probably have been inspired without it.

This scaffolding is not some kind of mandatory dictat from the top-down, but about thinking about the shared knowledge and intelligence of the whole-group.  Traditional staff meetings don't achieve this, but informal drop-ins and conversations do.  Colleagues shared their own experiences - everybody seemed to have a story which supported this common-sense notion.

Trust and listening are the key elements of this approach.