Associated Teachers TV programme:

Gifted and Talented Pupil Voice - Lucy

Interview with Christine Mitchell, Regional Co-ordinator, South West Gifted and Talented Education

Below is an abridged transcript of an interview with Christine Mitchell giving some background to the SWGaTE pupil voice project.

The whole issue of involving pupils’ perspectives on their learning, and on their life experiences generally, has been around for about a decade now and is currently part of the Government’s plans for future legislation in education. This set of eight action research projects involved schools in engaging their gifted and talented pupils’ voices in relation to their experiences of teaching and learning. So in the context of these two schools [featured in the TTV programmes] we were looking at specific areas of classroom practice identified by the schools as part of their School Development Plans and linked to element 2 (effective provision) in the Institutional Quality Standards for Gifted and Talented Education.

ExeterRoyalAcademy for Deaf Education

Each of the schools in the research project identified the gifted and talented cohort that they were going to be working with. In Exeter’s RoyalAcademy for Deaf Education (ERADE), some students were clearly more able in relation to their peer group in the Academy but would not be on a par with their counterparts in other schools. For example their level of language acquisition and therefore some conceptual development would not be as advanced as the pupils in mainstream schooling.

In terms of the action research at ERADE, we were very interested in the experiences of dual exceptionality students, in other words, students with both gifts and talents and a special educational need, in this instance their deafness. The school particularly wanted to explore the level of challenge as well as the curriculum on offer to their able students.

Where possible, it is normal practice for able students at ERADE to attend some of their lessonsin their partner mainstream school. Thedeaf students were invited to give their views and perspectives on attending the mainstream school as part of their education. [The research showed that ] the students valued the challenge of going into the mainstream school, but they welcomed the opportunity to attend the school in pairs rather than as a single student visiting this very different learning environment. They also welcomed the opportunity to be able to share with the teachers in the mainstream school some of the things that would be helpful for them in the actual teaching sessions. For example, for the teacher to address the deaf student directly and not just communicate with the deaf student via the communications support worker (CSW) and for the deaf students to have advanced warning of the lesson content so that they would be able to prepare ahead of time for the lesson for example, they could check out new vocabulary that might be needed. Most of the issues arising from this aspect of the research involved making the mainstream experience more accessible to the deaf students.

There was also the need to enhance the deaf awareness of the mainstream students so that mutual respect for each other as people could be enhanced.

Students from the DeafAcademy put together deaf awareness presentations for their peers in the mainstream setting. Engaging in this kind of presentation meant that the deaf students were really being challenged on a number of levels: challenged to put the presentation together; challenged to present it in front of a large group of peers; and challenged to make that presentation acceptable to the peers, to do the job they set out to do to raise the awareness of mainstream pupils as to what it’s like to be deaf; what it’s like in fact to be an able student with a particular special need, and equally able to contribute to the learning in the mainstream school.

One of the ongoing impacts of the action research has been for the school to continue to engage their students’ voices and the pupils’ perspectives on their experiences. So the ExeterDeafAcademy is now engaged in a very exciting new build project for their school. One of the things they’ve done is to ask the students about their ‘vision’ for the learning environment and what they would like to see in the new build. The students have come up with some very creative and practical suggestions as to what would enhance their learning experience. Improvements ranged from having wider corridors to enable them to sign together more easily, to having classrooms where blinds could be drawn at the flick of a switch in order for the students to be able to lip-read their teachers more easily.

One key development as a result of the ExeterDeafAcademy being involved in the research was in fact the need for students to be appropriately challenged. The practical impact of this was for younger students to be put into groups with older students; for the curriculum to be offered in vertical groups in order to really address the needs of the individual student and not to tie educational provision to single age phases classes.

Tipton St John Primary

At Tipton St. John Primary, pupils as young as five were involved in the research project. The gifted and talented pupil-researchers at Tipton were identified as ‘big thinkers’. They are children who like to think about their learning and also to think about thinking. The project explored what it is like to be a pupil at Tipton St. John and what will actually make learning better for pupils. Staff wanted to look at how to enhance the pupils’ learning experience, including the experiences of very young pupils

Interestingly, the gifted and talented students at Tipton were very concerned not only to make learning better for themselves but also to make learning better for all of the pupils. This concern for others emerged as a common theme in all eight of the action research projects. There was a sensitivity on the part of the gifted and talented students who wanted to make it ‘fair’ for all the pupils in their school and an understanding that as a gifted and talented student they might have to wait and listen to some things that they already know and understand in order that other learners might have their own learning needs met.

One of the other overall aims of the project was to see to what extent each school could engage their pupils as researchers in the project. The extent to which this was possible differed from school to school but Tipton St John did initially engage a large number of students as the researchers. The Headteacher then developed research skills amongst the large group of students but eventually worked with a small group of six pupils as the main research team for this particular project.

The research team had to think about designing questionnaires and they had to think about analysing the data and presenting their findings. One of the outcomes for this group of pupils was to present at a regional conference. This was something of a life-changing experience for the pupils because they were challenged to present in front of a large adult audience.

General conclusion

It is clear from completing the eight research projects that one of the values for listening to pupil voice is that it not only impacts on developing the school and the teachers’ classroom practice, but also the pupil researchers’ own learning needs: the process of being involved in the research process impacts on raising the level of challenge in an appropriate way for the gifted and talented pupils. Thus, their own learning needs are more fully met across a variety of areas.

Please note that ‘student voice’ and pupil voice’ were used interchangeably throughout the action research projects.

Note to teachers

This document was not created by Teachers TV but the author has allowed us to publish it here to be used for educational purposes