Developing Learning Dispositions

An important part of establishing our new neighbourhood community centres around supporting children to develop a range of dispositions that will support them as lifelong learners. These dispositions include but are not limited to perseverance, curiosity, bravery, focus, independence, resilience and emotional intelligence. Our inquiry approach at PHPS offers the perfect opportunity for the development of these dispositions. As teachers, we realise that we can further enhance children’s learning by deliberately drawing their attention to the situations in which specific dispositions may be useful. With this in mind, the children in the year 1 neighbourhood have begun to work on building their focus to enable deeper engagement, bravery to have a go at challenging tasks and cooperation to support them in working successfully with others. In order to do this, we have made a deliberate effort to use the language of focus, bravery and collaboration during conversations with individual children and groups of children. 

Focus allows our children to slow down and notice the details. This, in turn, enables them to deepen their understanding of a concept, map out a fresh new idea or begin to articulate it through language. This idea of focus has been critical through provocations and workshops this week, and we have even had a group of children take on the role of documenters, capturing moments of focus across the neighbourhood.

Focus feels calm, its like your mind is moving but your hand and body is very still. – Dexter

It takes a huge amount of bravery to learn. We have to be okay with making mistakes, not knowing something and communicating questions. The disposition of bravery has emerged as particularly important for our year 1 cohort, as their learning journey last year involved so many weeks of individual learning and mistake making. We are focusing on sharing, trying, getting things wrong and going deeper. By doing this, knowledge can be built, shared and grown.

When you make a mistake, you learn! – Saskia

As much as we begin focusing on identity, we are now building cooperation and collaboration, seeking to question – what is our role in our neighbourhood? The children have been working on a range of collaborative tasks and at each moment show communication and adaption in their learning.