Last month I presented a parents’ workshop as part of my school’s curriculum evenings. My workshop introduced parents to the work the school was doing to create a culture of thinking, drawing on the ideas of Project Zero. In particular I was sharing the thinking routines which teachers are working on embedding into their practice.
When introducing Project Zero, I asked parents the question ‘what do you value more: curiosity or correctness?’. This provoked some good discussion. There is of course a value in correctness: we need to have an accurate, factual knowledge; hopefully, that is going to be one of the outcomes of curiosity. After this discussion, I walked parents through an example of one of the thinking routines – connect, extend, challenge – so that they could the power of what we were trying to do. To create a culture of thinking, we know that we need to get parents involved.
To encourage parental involvement, I finished the session with some homework for the parents. This included encouraging reading at home, having conversations to spark curiosity and making the most of observations of the world around us, for example by talking about what you pass by on a car journey. The final piece of homework was encouraging parents to discuss their own learning experiences, both good and bad, with their children. This helps to show that learning is lifelong. It helps to show that learning is valued as much by adults and the organisations we work for as it is at school. It also helps show that parents struggle with learning too and that it is how we respond to challenges and setbacks in our learning which is as important as right answers on the road to success.
Commonplace 