The following is a personal, slightly rambling, piece of blue-skies thinking about where we could take smart in the future. I’d be interested in your thoughts. If you think I’m living in cloud cuckoo land, please tell me. Just make sure you do it nicely! ;0)

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The current discussion in certain quarters seems to be about how to take Smart forward into year 8 and beyond. I guess the easiest way would be to try and ‘integrate’ the ideas across the curriculum. I’m all in favour of this, and it’s clearly something we should be doing anyway, but I can’t help wondering if our smart lessons at the moment offer something more that can be achieved within lessons.

Certainly the 8 lessons a fortnight model isn’t viable beyond year 7, but I think two things we have in smart probably can’t be duplicated within the subject-based curriculum.

The first is the emphasis on motivation. A lot of evidence seems to suggest that pupils with high self-esteem go on to do well at school. I have heard it argued that this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, after all it’s the bright kids who get good self esteem by doing well in school. And they’re the ones who’ll do well in their exams. But what about those kids who’s natural abilities don’t lie within the traditional confides of school, and so spend the five years up to their GCSEs being given the message that they’re not very bright. Sure, it happens a lot less with us than at some other schools. But it still happens. What might happen to those pupils self esteem if there was a place in school where they COULD do well, because they got to set the parameters of what doing well meant?

The second is the focus on the process rather than the outcomes. These ideas are becoming embedded in subject areas (I know in history at the moment there is an emphasis on ‘meta-cognition’ following the subject review), but subjects can only take it so far. We may learn best by failure, but how many departments are willing to provide opportunities for pupils to fail?

So how can we move forward? How can we provide a space in which we can focus on the process, provide self-esteem and motivation (and study skills, and places to fail and learn from it) but in a realistic and sustainable way? I would suggest two lessons a fortnight could be found from somewhere in which the smart program could be carried on. As for what to include in that time, well I’ve got an easy option or a hard option. The easy one is to carry on with the thematic approach. It would obviously be different with only 1/4 of the time, but I believe the approach is still valid. Especially if that time could be arranged into a double lesson, and the focus of the work could be increasingly passed over to the pupils. Which brings me on to the harder option.

I was recently watching (during another bought of insomnia) an RSA lecture by Professor Stephen Heppell, entitled ‘Learning 2016’. (You can watch it online at Teachers TV - http://www.teachers.tv/oneOffProgramme.do?transmissionProgrammeId=415051 - I might stick it on the patch as well once we’ve got some more room!).

His view was that in the next ten years, a new model of teaching and leaning will develop from what he called the ‘20th Century model’. Fundamentally, this sees education changing from subject based, one-to-many system that focuses on delivered wisdom, to one that is project based, peer-to-peer and focuses on user-generated content. That isn’t to say there will no longer be teachers. But our role will be changing. In a world where information is no longer scarce, the purpose of education may no longer to be deliver ‘the facts’ to pupils, but rather to equip them with the skills to work out what information they need, know where to find it, and evaluate and critique what they find.

He gave examples of international projects that are starting to do this, and I started to think that this sounded like a path along which smart could develop. What if those two hours were based around whatever the pupils wanted? Developing the round the world journal idea, why couldn’t pupils who were interested in making a video about the progress of the sports team be able to get together and do it. While those who were inspired by a comic relief documentary get involved in some fund-raising while another group build a web-site about what they’re up to. Why restrict ourselves to form groups? If the smart afternoon for the year group fell on the same day, why not allow pupils to where interested in similar topics to work together. 12 months down the line, lets have year 8 and 9 working together on projects.

Sound like a logistical nightmare? Well, there would have to be a system. Each project would maybe take a half term. Plans would have to be approved; journals of progress could be kept online for us to check. Some ideas would have to be turned down. But think of the positives. How much self-esteem could pupils get from doing this? (I suspect the answer is ‘loads’) Some of them wouldn’t achieve what they wanted. But they’d achieve something and we’d be giving them a safe space to fail, pick themselves up, reflect on their mistakes and go and succeed the next time.

Sound heavy on the technology? It would be. But technology gives us the opportunity to achieve these things. Not just to create things, but to work collaboratively on ideas, and to publicly display them afterwards. And public displays and celebration of what was being achieved should play a key part in this.

And I can’t be sure, because I have no idea where I filed the bit of paper, but I’m pretty certain this ticks many of the ‘personalized learning’ boxes that were on Hugh’s second sheet at the start of the year.

I know these ideas are sketchy, but go and watch the lecture, it’s a fascinating and inspirational insight into the path our jobs may be headed down. These are initial thoughts, of a blue sky variety. But I’m convinced we have the expertise and the dedication to make something like this happen. The question really is, do we have the courage?

So comments please! Easy route? Or the one that moves us further out of our comfort zones but offers our pupils so much more, in so many more ways?