Harris Manchester College, Oxford
In discussion with Headteachers I have explored the challenges faced in putting their values into practice. The circumstances, the difficulties and the questions arising. These findings are considered in the light of the Church of England’s Vision for Education.
Within our culture, three waves crash together upon our young people: a premature media self-awareness, peer-measurement, and self-promotion, external and internal higher expectations of themselves, and a huge need for healthy mental health to have the resilience to thrive, not just survive. These young people need those they can trust, whether it be a parent, a leader, a peer who has the confidence to help them, and the faith in them to transform lives to journey beyond culture’s dictates, towards self-efficacy. VIVA GO! is a powerful tool to raise a young person’s life chances through listening, relationship and supported encouragement. […]
Podcasts are becoming an increasingly popular medium of entertainment and method by which people access information. Could they be popular in education? During this project I researched how to create a podcast, what information would be most gleefully received for teachers and students from A-Level specifications, recorded and edited a podcast series focused on virtue ethics, and collected feedback on the series to make improvements in the future. All this with a view to looking at the efficacy of podcasts as an educational tool in the future.
In 2016 CCEA introduced a revised Religious Studies A Level specification. A change in specification, combined with a change in Board, meant increased planning to resource this new course. As the teacher responsible for delivering the Philosophy of Religion Unit of the Course, an element many students find academically challenging, I was keen to create simple resources for teaching difficult topics. This inspired me to apply for the Farmington scholarship with the aim of producing engaging and accessible resources for topics such as Life after Death, Religious Language, Religion and Morality and the Synoptic units of Study.
A headteacher has a fair amount of autonomy, in that almost everything comes down to your discretion. However, there is no shortage of input from a range of sources – official and unofficial – informing you what you must, should and could be doing. It is also hard to define the role of headteacher or the expectations on the headteacher; suffice to say that generally “no news is good news” – nothing is said if things are going well, but when things go wrong it is the headteacher’s fault. Being a school leader is a great job – I love […]
The aim of this Farmington Scholarship was to develop a number of units of work that can be delivered as part of the key Stage 3 RE Curriculum and promote effective thinking skills. A large bank of practical resources is attached for others to use; three units on Human Rights, Sermon on the Mount and Moral Decision Making. Every day teachers say, “pupils just can’t think for themselves” or “they can’t apply their knowledge to different situations”. It is widely recognised that students today are very effective at rote learning facts but application of knowledge can be problematic. I felt strongly […]
My Farmington time has been invested in reading, researching, collating and applying the ideas, recommendations and thinking of a range of RE Specialists. In providing teachers with an immediately accessible collection of resources, my aim is to empower practitioners in facilitating learning experiences that build on Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) across the primary school. Using the writings of Vivien Baumfield, Trevor Cooling, Benjamin Bloom and Howard Gardner, alongside the published findings of Ofsted’s own research reports, I set about developing an easy to use, practical set of working lesson ideas. My vision is that this set can be taken […]
The reason for this project was in response to the Government’s request for all schools to each children about British Values. This report is an investigation into whether pupils and their families from other cultures and faiths can assimilate these values easily. Was our British Value teaching causing confusion for our pupils with their own religious or cultural values? Since 2014 it has been a requirement of schools to each British Values to children and their promotion has been inspected by Ofsted during their inspections since this date. At Highbury Primary School in Cosham, Portsmouth, where we have children from […]
Since the beginning of my teaching career, I felt a lack of awareness and knowledge of Church Tradition and Early Church History from the students I taught and even a lack within the curriculum. Ofsted reports noted that students became disengaged when lessons would deal with Christianity as opposed to the other world religions that were being taught. I think this is because the students think they already know everything about Christianity, but the other religions seem ‘exotic’ and different to them. I was excited and happy about the content of the new GCSE, which looked a lot more theological, […]
The main aim of my Farmington project is to increase the use of active learning in my classroom, particularly at GCSE level. As a non-specialist RE teacher and Head of Department, I have found that introducing meaningful active learning has been more difficult, and less obvious than in my previous subject area of Modern Languages. I have used this project to research a wider range of active learning methods and write a new scheme of work with accompanying resources to reflect my findings. With the added pressures of exam results and time limitations at GCSE level, too often I feel […]