Practically delivering CARE lessons

Abstract

Within each of our CARE sessions we must ensure that pupils are motivated and positively engaged in learning. It needs to be our mission to facilitate a love of learning in all 4 domains. In order to support this, we always try to encourage our pupils and players to be curious and creative. We aim to develop independent thinkers and so we need to manipulate the lesson context to allow this to happen. The first stage of this method is to ensure that the learning objective of the session engages interest from the pupils – that it presents a problem for the pupils to investigate and explore. The next stage is to consider the level of challenge that the problem presents. Too difficult and the pupils will try for so long but then inevitably they will give up, too easy and the pupils will quickly get bored and disinterested, which could even lead to behaviour issues. After setting the scene, the teacher’s role then changes to become a guide and mentor, rather than that merely instructing the children on what activities to perform and how to undertake them. We appreciate that this can be challenging for some and may be at odds with how the teachers have been trained in the past and it may require different skills to those in which they have gained expertise, i.e. such as demonstrations and knowledge of skills and techniques. The key departure from a traditional approach is the acceptance that knowledge can be co-created in a learning partnership between teacher and pupils and the use of language is essential. The tool that allows this to occur in our lessons is the effective use of questioning.