Moving minds at Wheatley Park School – addressing pupil behaviour through kinesthetic learning
Does implementing a heavy focus on kinesthetic learning have an impact on the attainment of children with special needs?
Objectives
Wheatley Park School in Oxfordshire, decided to focus their 2009/2010 Change Schools project on their Key Stage 3 children with special needs and appointed an experienced dance, drama and physical theatre practitioner to work with six groups of pupils: a Year 8 maths group and their teacher, the Year 7 Achievement Group, which had low levels of literacy, and their English and maths teachers and three music groups.
Their enquiry linked to Wheatley Park’s School Development Plan and SEF in a number of areas:
- Raising attainment: in particular the school wanted to ensure students with special needs met their personalised targets by the end of the school year.
- Improving behaviour – by enabling students to learn kinaesthetically the school hoped to eradicate some of the low level disruption to classes. They also hoped to be able to motivate and enable students with special needs to participate more in their own learning.
- Improving the impact of teaching and learning on student progress: Wheatley Park wanted to improve the quality of lessons for students with special needs by incorporating kinesthetic learning into their planning.
Planning
The enquiry began with a rich period of planning, which was undertaken collaboratively
between the creative practitioner, Haley Radford, the school co-ordinator and the teaching staff. The pupils involved in the project also contributed to the planning by helping Haley understand their experience of school:
The project
In the Year 7 group, working on maths and English, the team chose to link learning in both maths and English to current curriculum topics by using the theme of Roald Dahl stories. Pupils used role, play, physical theatre, art and design, practical maths applications, creative writing, poetry, reporting, scriptwriting and filming to explore the story of James and the Giant Peach. Maths work was also linked into the story and pupils devised board games to reinforce and explore more deeply their learning. Hayley and teaching staff at Wheatley Park saw improved engagement with the work and pupils participated more in lessons, often supporting each other in their learning.
With the Year 8 maths group the focus was to develop a more active classroom and to encourage more group work. Through the group work pupils worked in teams and developed approaches to discussion to problem solve. Activities included a mock horse race and betting game, a pretend lottery and a treasure hunt.
The Year 8 group found classes became less paper and worksheet-based and more about practical maths application and achieving tasks in order to progress.
With the music groups Year 7 and 8 pupils worked with the creative practition to look at drama and physical theatre representations of the story of Pandora’s Box. Pupils worked in small groups on a section of the story and used a layering process to develop their ideas to include physicality, choral speaking and musical composition using percussion, voice and soundscapes and the end work was recorded as a performance.
Impacts and outcomes
Impacts on pupils
- The pupils found they built better friendships with their peers through increased participation in group work. They learned to work as a team and became more cooperative
- They enjoyed the physical activities and having the opportunity to move around and discuss problems and tasks with others rather then working by themselves
- The pupils enjoyed the extended range of activities that appealed to their differing preferred learning styles
- The pupils’ learning was re-enforced through exploring topics across different subjects and making cross-curricular links, particularly in maths and English
- The pupils enjoyed being set tasks where they were encouraged to make their own choices and decisions and choose their own interpretations
Impacts on teachers
- Teaching staff commented that risk taking and ‘losing control’ in the classroom had been a good experience helping them be more aware of individual learners and learning styles
- Trying out new activities was identified by the teachers as been challenging, but often the things that seemed most challenging were the areas in which the pupils thrived
- Working on listening and comprehension skills in English helped pupils attainment in maths
- Teachers referenced times when they had used new teaching skills and ideas with other groups not involved in the project
- Teachers saw Hayley as a ‘catalyst’ that supported them in thinking outside their normal parameters and enabling them to be creative and take risks with their teaching
- The project reinforced the theory mixed ability teaching can help all learners providing a range of learning styles are catered for
Outcomes
The school co-ordinator said: "We feel this project has enabled us to focus on and discover a key challenge to creativity - enabling pupils to work as a team. We aim to make this the focus of next year’s work. The challenge now is for the school to merge consistent practice with creative approaches and to aim to involve all staff in this process even those reluctant to change practice."
She continued: "We are working on ensuring that all staff know about the benefits of active learning, looking at planning to engage all learning styles and trying to focus more on pupils’ achievement than their behaviour to promote a positive classroom."
"We have ascertained that kinaesthetic and active learning does help pupils with SEN. The new focus area that has emerged from this enquiry is that pupils need better teamwork and co-operation skills in order to think and be more creative in all subjects".
Wheatley Park intends to look at more collaborative and team-based learning working with the whole of the next Year 7 cohort and a focus team of Year 7 teaching staff. The concluded that teamwork and collaboration skills are essential to creative practice and need to be embedded and planned to share their learning with the secondary school’s feeder schools with the following year’s Year 7s working with the current Year 7s.
