BBC NEWS ¦ Education ¦ No ‘hands-up’ call to help pupils

BBC NEWS | Education | No ‘hands-up’ call to help pupils

For many teachers and TAs this advice will come as no surprise. Anyone who has read the work of Sally Clarke (Buy it from usefulwiki bookstore) will be familiar with these ideas.
In fact the Better Reading Partners programme targets exactly these undemanding, under-performing children, often with remarkable results.

Comfort zone

“Invisible children”, the report finds, are quiet and undemanding and do not mind if they receive attention or not.

The research suggests helping these pupils by avoiding asking for children to put their hands up, instead choosing who should answer.

These pupils, the report adds, would also benefit from having 30 seconds to consider their answer.

“We need to make sure that no-one is left behind at any point”
Alan Johnson
Education Secretary

These are also the children that the Network Learning Community I worked for until quite recently were focussing on. We had pinpointed the transition from Key stage 1 to Key stage 2 as the moment when children like this start to fail. They seem to come to a sort of standstill and withdraw from engagement in the learning life of the classroom.

I’m going to write more about this and the approachs being taken to combat it in a series of blog post over the next couple of weeks.

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