St Matthew Academy Priorities (from 15-16 January Training)

• Engagement and support of Senior Leadership Team.
• Create a school council - only if the above happens.
• Identify opportunities and groups.

St Matthew Academy Learning Away Team

Thomas Tallis Priorities (from 15-16 January Training)

• Communicate the Learning Away vision to the whole staff and engage a wider audience.
• Meeting of everyone who wants to be involved - and identify the different strengths of the team.
• Carry out an audit of our current residential offer.
• What are the priorities to 'fill any gaps'?
• Who is the learning away residential for and why are we aiming at them?
• Develop a menu of activities that can be used to unlock deeper learning away.
• Check our plans against the PHF guidelines (and action plan).
• Engage student voice through the Year and School Councils (and student governors) - what do they think of current residential offer? What do they want from future residential experiences?
• Plan the programme for a group of Y10s in detail for this year.

The Thomas Tallis Learning Away Team

5 Principles to Underpin Learning Away

At the first training event organised on 15-16 January 2010, staff from the three schools and Widehorizons Trust agreed the following principles to underpin the innovative framework we are developing for residential learning:

• Allowing structured time for ongoing quality reflection.
• Having clear aims for the residential and planning varied activities to meet them accordingly.
• Allowing all participants ownership of the entire experience.
• Allowing chaos and risk within safe boundaries.
• Planning next steps together on how new skills can be used.

Launch Presentation

A Short Film Evaluating the First staff Development Event

In his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, Peck says that community has three essential ingredients:
- Inclusivity
- Commitment
- Consensus

Based on his experience with community building workshops, Peck says that community building typically goes through four stages:

Pseudocommunity: This is a stage where the members pretend to have a bon homie with one another, and cover up their differences, by acting as if the differences do not exist. Pseudocommunity can never directly lead to community, and it is the job of the person guiding the community building process to shorten this period as much as possible.

Chaos: When pseudocommunity fails to work, the members start falling upon each other, giving vent to their mutual disagreements and differences. This is a period of chaos. It is a time when the people in the community realize that differences cannot simply be ignored. Chaos looks counterproductive but it is the first genuine step towards community building.

Shedding (Emptiness): After chaos comes shedding. At this stage, the people learn to shed themselves of those ego related factors that are preventing their entry into community. Shedding is a tough step because it involves the death of a part of the individual. But, Scott Peck argues, this shedding paves the way for the birth of a new creature, the Community.

True community: Having worked through shedding, the people in community are in complete empathy with one another. There is a great level of tacit understanding. People are able to relate to each other's feelings. Discussions, even when heated, never get sour, and motives are not questioned.

Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity in Education

Our Learning Away Partnership

We are partnership of three schools in London sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in the UK to develop new ways of organising and running residential experiences for young people. This blog will record some of our thoughts, experiences and findings as we explore new ways of collaborating, creating and coordinating learning away experiences.

Our three partner schools are Thomas Tallis School (Greenwich), St Matthew Academy (Lewisham) and Elliott School (Wandsworth) and we are working closely with Widehorizons Trust - a residential and outdoor adventure provider working with both primary and secondary schools.

The goal of our partnership is to find new ways of running residential experiences, based on giving students a strong voice in the design and organisation of the experience. Each school has its own priorities but our overall objective is to focus our activities on raising the achievement of particular groups of students, and to use the template and practise we develop to transform learning in the curriculum and across a partnership of schools.