1) Stantonbury Campus
The Campus: Stantonbury Campus is a large and successful compre-
hensive school providing education for 2,750 students, including approximately 500 post-16. We aim to include all young people in our community and to help everyone learn from the different strengths individuals bring to the Campus.
The Campus combines superb facilities and opportunities for students with a small school friendliness and care based on five halls of approximately 500 students each. Four of the halls are for students aged 11 to 16, while the fifth caters for our post-16 students. Each has its own Head of Hall, team of tutors and specialist teaching and associate staff. Students are taught in their halls, while specialist facilities are shared with one other hall. Wherever possible, tutors stay with the same group of thirty stu- dents for the first five years of their education at the Campus.
Student Education and Development: We believe that young people
learn and develop best when they and their families are treated with genuine respect and equal value. We therefore do all we can to break down artificial barriers between the adults who work here, students and their families. There is no uniform, everyone is known by their first name and we share facilities. This leads to warm relationships between adults and students. It also means our students are used to being listened to and having their point of view respected.
As our purpose statement makes clear, we are committed to learning in its widest sense. We believe all students can be suc- cessful learners and we work with determined optimism to help each individual achieve personal success. We want learning to be challenging and exciting for all our students. Knowing that learning happens in and out of classrooms, we provide a rich and
varied extra curricular programme. Exchanges with France, Spain, Germany, Tanzania and India offer wonderful opportunities to students and staff.
Source: www.stantonbury.org.uk (visited 4 August 2008). 2) Dulwich College
We are academically selective and our boys are generally in the top 15–20 percent of the national academic range. They come from a wide range of backgrounds and have diverse interests which enrich the life of the College. Nearly all progress to degree courses at British universities.
Our principal aims are to provide:
an appropriate academic challenge which enables each pupil to realize his potential;
an environment which promotes a good work ethos and encourages all boys to acquire an independent and critical approach to learning;
a wide range of sporting, musical and dramatic opportunities and co-curricular activities through which boys can develop a breadth of interests and learn to work co-operatively;
a caring, supportive and well-ordered community which encourages spiritual and personal development where boys from a variety of cultural and social backgrounds can feel secure and equally valued.
The College benefits from historic buildings in a delightful envir- onment; it has a distinguished tradition of inspired teaching and genuine scholarship. We seek to build on this to achieve our aim and so help current and future generations of Alleynians [i.e. former pupils] to be well prepared for life.
Source: www.dulwich.org.uk (visited 4 August 2008). 3) Hampshire College
Hampshire College was founded on the belief that the best educa- tion is the one a student builds around personal goals. Hampshire
opened in 1970, created when presidents of four distinguished New England colleges sought a home for bold, influential – even radical – ideas in higher education. The result: a Hampshire education, shaped around a student’s own interests, rather than the usual liberal arts formula. Advancing through three levels, or Divisions, students explore freely and widely across Hampshire’s five interdisciplinary Schools.
To graduate, every student, with faculty advice and guidance, devises an individual program in which he or she attempts to ask – and answer – a question perhaps never posed before.
Beyond Hampshire’s own substantial academic resources, students draw on those of Amherst, Mount Holyoke and Amherst Colleges and the University of Massachusetts, which together form the Five College consortium. Arguably, no other college in America offers students so much freedom – or so much support.
5
Cognition
This chapter and the three that precede it are based on the view that there are four cornerstones that you can use to support your planning and preparation. So far we have examined three of these – aims, needs and contexts. This chapter examines the fourth, namely cognition – its nature and the way that it is structured.
Most introductions to teaching consider learning. Typically, they consider how pupils learn and what implications this has for teach- ing. This is right and proper, except that often they miss out a stage. As well as asking how pupils learn, we need to consider what it is they learn – and this requires us to consider what cognition is.
The question of what cognition is has a long history in philo- sophy, especially in the area of epistemology, and psychology. It is, therefore, difficult to develop an informed overview. Yet as teachers we do need some model of cognition, otherwise we do not know what it is we teach.
This chapter, therefore, takes a pragmatic view of cognition. It seeks to provide a working model. The model is, on the one hand, intended to be sufficiently simple to be readily understandable, memorable and communicable. And, on the other, sufficiently multi-faceted to help teachers plan ambitiously.
The model divides cognition into four components:
Declarative knowledge: including both empirical and concep- 1.
Procedural knowledge: including skills, techniques and 2.
methods.
Outlooks: including attitudes, dispositions and orientations. 3.
Events: including judgements and decisions. 4.
This chapter outlines, with examples, each of these components and considers how they may be applied when planning to teach.