I’ve attended 15 different Y6 Open Evenings during my 15 year teaching career, and our recent one was an event where I hardly spoke! As Head of XP East some may think that this would be an event where I talked all night about our curriculum, ambitions and current learning expeditions. Instead however, our students did all of the talking.
Mr Smith came up with the idea of setting up different work stations in one classroom where students showed their exercise books, described the processes behind our current expedition, explained scientific experiments, discussed our fieldwork, presented on what ‘Crew’ is, and took questions in the form of a panel from parents.
All students volunteered. None were ‘cherry picked’. I gave them no instructions to talk about anything other than their work. No tricks. No gimmicks. Their honesty and courage in being truthful about their development over a period of 7 weeks was breathtaking.
Some spoke about how how their behaviour had improved from Y6, and explained how their confidence was growing to the extent where they were able to present in front of several hundred parents over the course of 2 days. Some spoke about how hard their work was, but in a way that was good, and made them really productive. Others spoke about how Crew was affecting their ability to support others, and be supported. All students answered questions from parents in an open and honest manner.
I must admit, I was a tad nervous. What if they said something like the work was easy, and that lessons were dull and boring? I knew that this wouldn’t be the case of course but I was anxious nevertheless. From this however, I learned a lot from the Open Evening event. I learned that if you are authentic in everything that you do with students (every single day – and I mean every single day), and if we are explicit about the detail of what they are learning, and where it fits within our culture – they are with you.
A massive well done to all of our students who presented!