How To Be Outstanding

How to be Outstanding

On the 8^th July a group of Y8 Humanities students got to experience a taste of China, quite literally, to enhance their learning abilities and also develop their outstanding learner skills.

The Y8’s spent some of their morning creating presentations about the benefits of China and whether they would like to live there or not. This encouraged teamwork skills as the pupils were paired with people that they usually wouldn’t work with or even talked to. The students also learned what it meant to be an independent learner as they were exposed to different cultures and beliefs which they may not be familiar with. This led to thought provoking questions such as ‘Would you like to live in China?’

When asked, these Y8 students had some comments to make about China from their morning experiences. “Today I’ve learned about the army fighting against their people and about the culture and geography of China. I’d go on holiday there but I wouldn’t live there because it gets so busy and crowded.”-Abbie

“I wouldn’t live there because people don’t have enough rights”. “The culture is too different but I think I’d go for a short trip. I didn’t know much about China before today’s lesson and it’s been so interesting.” –Kayleigh

Organised by teachers Miss Dent and Miss Robinson and assisted by Miss Beilsten, the 13 year olds made impressive presentations that showed clear information about China and went into great detail. This showed that they had been an ‘active listener’ throughout the lesson and were already applying their new found skills. The Y8’s learning didn’t stop there. For their lunch, they had the opportunity to try food from China and they were pleasantly surprised by the varied tasty snacks. They had to discuss with the people next to them all the different ideas they had learnt which stimulated verbal communication skills and also enabled them to reflect upon their work, both of which contributed to being an outstanding learner.

When speaking to Miss Beilsten, we found out more about what it meant to the pupils to have this lesson and show them how to be outstanding; “The students were exposed to a different culture today which they had no knowledge of prior to the lesson. Not only were they able to research different beliefs and ideas, they were also able to experience them first hand as well. Through this different way of learning they were able to obtain new skills that will be extremely beneficial to them in the future.”

The students all informed us that they would like to do another event like this as they loved the environment and really enjoyed this way of learning. This is the second time that an event like this has been run, and building on the success of these lessons the students hope that they will be continued in the future.