Enquiry & Immersion; Thank you too!

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Thank you to the headteacher for committing her RE coordinators and to all the teachers and TAs who participated, helped and gave valuable feedback.  And especially a big thank you to the children for coming and being to open and engaged from Hajja Fatimah, Hajj Tariq Amin and myself.

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As for the pupils, responses were overwhelmingly positive, and I was very pleased to receive these letters written after the event.

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More samples are found in this gallery.  All videos found here.

Interested schools should contact ihsan.mosque.school.visits@werdelin.co.uk for more information.

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The basic plan was to use structural Cooperative Learning to:

1. activate schemata and generate interest through a series of relevant open questions through an icebreaker. See staging of this CLIP here.
2. allow individual teams to investigate our materials,
3. present a finished product to other teams (Day One in the form of a spider diagramme, Day Two in the form of individual papers).
4. final written self-assessment of learning and feedback.

• Two assessment units were slotted in on Day One, only one on day two, to provide us with concrete evidence of learning and feedback, and to provide children with a chance to reflect on their own learning and inspire future interest.

More on Cooperative Learning, please see this presentation, including video, to RE teachers on the previous day.

(I have duly noted their suggestions for improvement, and have some reflections to share about the reliability of using specific cooperative learning interaction to ensure honest comments – the acute reader who compared the thank you letters written later will notice the teacher’s modeling, which undercuts its validity as autentic feedback – Get notifications of related posts on twitter).

In summary, Day one was kept relatively open and exploratory. Day Two then integrated feedback from children and my own observations. Main aims here to provide initial narrative framework, tighten individual accountability, and assure all information was fed back to hosts, and  (which was an issue for some children on day one, where visitors had been allowed to choose which tables to visit based on interest).

“I learnt so much about the religion through the game and the mind map…”

Finally, once again, I cannot express how grateful the community is to Avenue being the first school to commit time and energy for this pilot. These days, with media storms and everything else, it really matters, and makes us, as Muslims, feel we are valued as equal citizens. Thank you so much.

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“I had so much fun, the games and tasks were brilliant. I learnt so much!”

– Avenue Junior School pupil, Y6

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