Wanstead High Habits: LEARN

Pedagogy and the curriculum

The wider expectations around our teaching and learning can be seen through our Wanstead High Habits for pedagogy – L E A R N which is research informed and has been developed to support and guide our teachers toward improving their teaching practice and to develop our pupils in effective habits for learning. The Wanstead High Habits: Pedagogy Posters provides teachers and pupils with an aide memoire for implementing Habits to focus our teaching and learning and continuous professional development on these key areas. Using the school’s LEARN acronym the Wanstead High Habits Pedagogy Posters provide a number of core consistencies which all teachers and pupils adhere to – aiming to make every lesson engaging and impactful towards progress. LEARN promotes Leadership, Enquiry, Active Learning, Resilience and No Fear and we encourage; pupils to develop habits to lead and take responsibility for aspects of their learning, ask and answer questions posed, remain actively engaged and involved, think hard, prepare to be mentally challenged and to face healthy struggles. Importantly, adopting strategies to develop their resilience and resourcefulness in lessons which includes engaging with their teachers’ feedback for subject specific targets in order to feed forward.

Through our curriculum we aim for pupils to be developed as Leaders of their learning, from the basics of ensuring they are on time to each lesson, prepared with the right equipment and mindset for learning, to developing their memory and metacognition - their ability to remember more and to think about their approach to learning and how they will tackle the task ahead and problem solve.

We encourage our pupils to Enquire. For this our teachers will always ensure that learning intentions are shared and are clear, so that pupils know what they are learning and why. Teachers will always question our pupils to engage them in thinking and to check their understanding. It is also important that our pupils also question their learning. This could be questions about the current topic and also questioning what they are working towards understanding. This questioning should elicit thinking as we encourage our pupils to remain active as opposed to passive during their lessons.

We aim to keep pupils Active in their learning, therefore they will be involved in a variety of activities across the curriculum, this includes pair work, small group work, discussions as well as independent work. Keeping the learning environment inclusive we endeavour to ensure that no learner is left behind and therefore avoids opting out or not taking part.

It’s important that we develop Resilience as pupils will be challenged through the curriculum. We want our pupils to be ready to be challenged and to think hard every lesson, to embrace a healthy struggle in their learning process and to draw on the skills enabling them to draw on their memory (prior learning), to know where to find the help and to keep making improvements.

A No Fear approach is instilled as we want all of our pupils to rise to challenges, set aspirational goals and have ambition in their learning and progress.