Top Ten Tips From Riverside

Rigour...Relationship....Relevence ....Three Common Sense Notions from The Riverside School.

I continue to be hugely impressed by the Riverside approach.... here's some tips for other enthusiastic educators on how to adopt their style. www.schoolriverside.com

1. Reflection and checking understanding - every day "close the loop". Let the students express, in their own words, what they have learned. Next morning, make sure you recap.
2. Teaching as Learning - ask them to explain their learning to the rest of the class or to their parents - parents then send in detailed feedback about what their child has learned.
3. Involve the parents - in getting feedback, coming on school trips, keeping them in the loop on learning topics - this expands the number of stakeholders.
4. Use a variety of learning languages - e.g. Year 2 are exploring their characters - they have found new adjectives in the dictionary to describe themselves. They then made a visual colour chart to demonstrate the amount of each characteristic within their personalities. Then they got into groups and made a chart for the character of the group. Today they are making sandwiches reflecting character traits, using a range of food and mapping their tastes to each characteristic e.g if i am strong i need a strong taste like pickle.
5. Share WHY you are learning something - find a "hook" that explains and gives context before learning starts e.g. If you are learning about weather, show the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth
6. Learn using interactive methods e.g. Shadows - trace around your shadow with a chalk, how does the shadow move and change and why does it move that way?
7. Report findings in a variety of formats.
8. Use buddy pairs - each year group works to solve problems working with students 3 years younger than them. This develops responsibility, communication and partnership.
9. Design for Change - have the children develop and implement their own solutions to social problems using a design framework.
1o. Encourage mistakes, prototypes, experiments...amongst both staff and students.