Resourceful Workshops Year 7's at Hitchin Boys School are currently completing a year-long program to help them adapt to secondary school...
Resourceful Workshops
Year 7’s at Hitchin Boys School are currently completing a year-long program to help them adapt to secondary school life. The program considers four R’s: Resourceful, Resilience, Reflective and Reciprocity. We are delivering workshops each half term helping expand on what these R’s mean and how the pupils can grow in each of them.
Last half term the focus was on being Resourceful and we did two workshops with each year 7 form. In the first workshop the boys were given a test to complete. The one catch, that we didn’t tell them, was that they couldn’t find the answers while sitting in the classroom. Slowly they got frustrated and began to question how they were meant to answer the questions. As they started to work it out they were told that they needed to be resourceful and could go around the school to find the answers. A couple of example questions are; how many members of staff are there in the school and how many classrooms are there in the school. This really challenged them and helped them to see for themselves a range of ways that they can be resourceful as the students all found different ways of working out the answers.
In the second session we looked through ten ways that they can be more resourceful using practical illustrations. An example of this is that I asked a student to throw a paper ball into the bin. It took 5 or 6 attempts for them to succeed with them changing their technique each time. This was designed to help them think about how we need to learn from our mistakes.
The students really engaged and enjoyed the sessions, with one student commenting that ‘it had been really fun and challenging to think about things in a different way’.
Head of year 7 said ‘this original way of teaching a lesson really motivated the students and helped them understand the topic in a new way’.
We will be starting workshops about Resilience next week.
