Parental communication survey

Question?

How can teachers best communicate new approaches used in learning and teaching that pupils are being exposed to so that we can gain understanding, reinforcement, repetition and support from parents?

Background

At Peebles High School we are currently running a course on metacognitive skills, (thinking about thinking). This is being done through the approaches of Instrumental Enrichment, Philosophy for Children and Enterprise. We are training staff, exposing pupils in dedicated lessons for S1 and supporting the spread of these ideas into all lessons and all year groups.

Techniques to improve thinking and learning work best with reinforcement and repetition but as the current approaches are different from those of the past how can we engage the support of parents who have not experienced these approaches themselves?

Please spare a few moments to answer this question  by clicking on the link below so that we can get your ideas on how we can best communicate with yourselves and gain support from the parental body.

Click here to take survey.

Thinking, like climbing, can be done well or poorly. There are the experts whose thinking takes them to academic, artistic and technological heights; the proficient, whose thinking helps them negotiate life’s up and downs; and the novices, who are fortunate if they escape injury on the stairs. Happily, novice thinkers can become more expert because thinking skills like climbing, can be learned, practised and improved.

Teaching pupils to think about being more precise, not to give up, think about issues from varying views, work independently and in teams, stick to timescales, solve problems creatively, etc.

For example understanding how one phenomenon is similar or different from another helps you to describe it clearly and associate it with other related information. So to develop pupils ability to process information you can ask students to pick the odd one out from three words or pictures on the board. (Remember there is always more than one possible answer).