Session 3 – Safeguarding and Wellbeing

Blog Post 3 – Safeguarding and Wellbeing

So in the third session we looked at Safeguarding and Wellbeing for children, this is an extremely broad topic and I feel that during the lecture we only scratched the surface in regards to the areas that could have been covered or spoken about.

The lecture started off by showing which of the teaching standards safeguarding and wellbeing would cover. I thought this was a good way of starting because it gave us an insight into how we might experience or come across it ourselves when in school. So the next topic of interest that was discussed was the government initiative brought in, in 2003 called ‘every child matters’ which was designed to help support and provide children with 5 main outcomes, these were as follows:

1. Be healthy
2. Stay safe
3. Enjoy and achieve
4. Make a positive contribution
5. Achieve economic wellbeing

To help push through ‘every child matters’ the government set up extra plans to work alongside it, they created and opened sure start children’s centres in well known deprived areas which catered for nursery education, family support and employment advice. They also introduced full service extended schools which opened beyond school hours which helped start the likes of breakfast clubs and after school clubs, this is now a regular occurrence in most school at present. They also increased investment into the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), enabling such services the government hoped to be able to help children before they reached a crisis point. They also aimed to improve speech and language therapy for children in schools along with tackling homelessness and reforming the youth justice system. This was only a small part of the lecture but I think it is a key element that has shaped safeguarding and wellbeing within schools.

We then went on to an area talking about happiness; this was a lot more general information on happiness although it was interesting to see that OFSTED had put out something on measuring happiness. As when they are mentioned you get the complete opposite reaction! It did however produce a useful quote of wellbeing:

“Wellbeing is a social construct and represents a shifting set of meaning – wellbeing is no less than what a group or groups of people collectively agree makes a ‘good life’.” (Ereaut and Whiting, 2008, p1)

The lecture then moved on to relationships within the classroom regarding pupil and teacher, once again the standards were highlighted and mentioned to create and ‘maintain positive relationships with pupils’, it pointed out how you as the teacher must create an aura of professionalism but also show a personal interest in children. I found this part of the lecture interesting as I have often thought during SBT 1 am I carrying myself in the right way, should I be more strict should I be over friendly so that all the children like me, it would be interesting to hear if you have felt this as well?

Resilience was also talked about during the lecture but it was not one of my main focuses that I wanted to write about for this blog post, so if you had anything you wanted to add to that section of the lecture that would be helpful!

We finally moved onto e-safety and I feel this is an extremely important part of safeguarding children, as we are currently living in a very digital age. Most children if not all have a computer with the internet at home and it is also a central component to the classroom as well, so e-safety is a must when talking about safeguarding and wellbeing. E-safety was split into 3 categories; contact, content and commercialism. Each with their own sub headings, I think with regards to school, contact and content are the more important and have areas that are more likely to come up when using a computer and on the internet. Two areas under the contact heading, ‘online grooming and cyber bullying’ are two of the more important that I feel need addressing and protocols and policies should be in place at all schools to try and prevent these from happening.

To Summarise I could have talked far more about e-safety and especially those two categories I brought up at the end (but I was running out of words), but I think we as teachers play an extremely important role in the safeguarding and wellbeing of children especially when they are in our care at school, so it is essential that we know about it and know how to respond and help children if they need us!

Thanks for reading,

Simon

Learning and Development

This week we have been exploring the differing facets of learning and development for primary school children, specifically the three main schools of thought of behaviourism, constructivism and social constructivism.

The behaviourists, such as BF Skinner, argue that learning is achieved through the use of rewards and punishments as motivators, and that the ideal classroom setting would be the children passively listening to the teacher who transmits knowledge to the children. Key features of this theory include the children as passive learners, learning individually and being extrinsically motivated by the use of external factors such as rewards. I think it is evident that there is widespread use of at least some of these features in the primary classroom today, for example the rewards of stickers or marbles for “good” behaviour, and the sanctions of missed playtimes for “bad”. It is also not uncommon to see thirty-two primary school children sitting on the carpet, listening to their teacher explain some piece of information, casting them into the role of passive receptacle of knowledge. However, detractors from this theory such as Vygotsky argue that all learning is “essentially social in nature” (Moore, A. Teaching and Learning), so this behaviourist view of the individual learner is intrinsically flawed. So what then are the alternatives?

One of the more famous child psychologists of the last century is Jean Piaget, and his work on the development of the child led him to promote the theory of constructivism. In his idea, although the child is still an individual learner and at least at first not able to work with others for long, their learning is far more active and uses direct experiences to make meaning from their world. Therefore in contrast to Skinner, the child is intrinsically motivated by their own desire to learn, and the teacher is more of a facilitator to learning than the font of all knowledge. Children assimilate knowledge from experiencing different situations, and accommodate this into their existing framework of knowledge and understanding. However, where Piaget has been criticised is in his belief in set stages of development that each child must pass through, and his inflexibility of timeframes for this. Anyone who has had contact with children of different ages and backgrounds can testify that children all mature at different rates, in terms of both physical or motor skills, their cognition or ability to think, and their emotional responses. Thus although Piaget’s stages of development have been widely accepted (even so far as to have informed England’s national Key Stages) there is an argument that they are not universally applicable and leave no room for children that do not fit this mould, potentially causing them to be branded as low ability and leaving them behind the others.

Which leads us to our third choice, the Vygotskian school of thought of social constructivism. This advocates that as learning is a social activity, children learn best through collaborating and discussing with their peers and adults. In fact, for the best learning, children just need to be working with anyone who is more able than them in that task, creating what he refers to as “the zone of proximal development” (Pollard, Reflective Teaching) through which the expert can lead the novice to create understand. This “scaffolding” can take place either through class, group or one-to-one discussion, and always places the learner in an active role, being socially motivated.

With its emphasis on language and discussion, and promoting deep and meaningful learning built on prior understanding, you might ask why all teaching and learning in the primary classroom today is not based on social constructivism. However, as I (and I’m sure many other student teachers) have noticed through my time in schools, this is not the case. There are scores of examples of behaviourist and constructivist approaches in place (like the reward schemes mentioned above), and I’m sure we have all seen especially younger children who appear to be working together on a task, who on closer inspection are merely working on the same task side-by-side or in parallel, with little or no interaction (echoing Piaget’s theory of the ego-centric learner. So what then does this mean for our future practice, and how we approach our role as the teacher? Well I think there is a lot to be said for adopting a more combination-based approach. I think there is definitely a place for some aspects of behaviourism in the classroom (and we all know how mad children go for stickers), however rather than relying wholly on external factors to motivate children’s learning, this can be combined with working in a socially-constructive way as well, building deeper understanding and creating meaningful thinking. And while perhaps too much emphasis on Piaget’s stages of development can be restrictive, I think bearing in mind the stages children go through can help us as teachers assess their progress and development, and plan for their future learning needs.

 

Imogen Marx