Teaching and Learning @ESA

ESA joins Danes Educational Trust

This blog was originally written for the Danes Educational Trust Teaching and Learning Blog and republished here:

Thanks for inviting us to contribute to the Teaching & Learning blog. We joined Danes Educational Trust on 1st April 2021.  We have been working with DET since 2018, first as part of the teaching schools alliance and then later as partners and associate members.  Our board unanimously voted to join the trust because it was increasingly apparent to us that our philosophy for creative and cultural education aligned so well with the ethos we saw at work within DET, namely an emphasis on caring about the voice and experience of the learner and seeking to authentically engage and empower children to love learning and ‘become’.

 Thanks for having us.  In fact, more than that, thanks for wanting us.  DET never made the inclusion of our school into the trust feel like a business transfer but rather a mutual and relational connection.  We were encouraged from the start to proudly bring our ESA uniqueness, our flavour and ethos and contribute it to the trust.  That generosity is further demonstrated by this very invitation to write a contribution to the teaching and learning blog - to gift something of our approach to the wider trust narrative around growth and progress and ‘becoming’...  So, here goes.

 Any attempt to summarise our whole approach to teaching and learning would take thousands of words and may risk reading a little like a T&L policy, so instead I am going to focus on three things - our specialism, the learning relationship and our recent discovery of ‘split screening’.

Our Specialism

We were founded with a specialism. There are many ways in which we are a school like any other - a relational institution, a community orbiting around the delivery of the national curriculum - but in some ways, we are different and nationally unique.  We launched in 2013, sponsored by Elstree Film Studios to be a specialist college delivering technical and applied creative training in the crafts and disciplines that underpin the film, TV and theatre industries.  This year, we became a UK Centre of Screen Excellence.  Vocationalism is in our DNA.  We are about destinations in the creative industries, about seeing diverse young people gain access into the careers behind the cameras and lights and curtains.  Therefore, our approach to teaching and learning is marked by a ‘hands on’ ethos.  Professional readiness, cultural relevance and industry skills are at the heart of our approach to learning.  

 What does this industry focus mean?  It means employer partnerships, industry placements and engagements, it means real world briefs and projects, it means publishing to audiences, staging productions, having a media content production company on site.  This is often an exhausting and highly dynamic way of working but it is rich.  Rich, both in terms of student engagement, and also in terms of the authenticity of the work often produced.  We try to emphasise this specialism across all subjects and throughout life at ESA. It's hard graft, and like the workforce across the entertainment industry, we stay late, we obsess over the technical and creative details, we get in the pizzas and go for ‘one more take’.  

 We try to invest the magic of our specialism into our core curriculum too… This year we made a ‘Silent Witness’ style forensic crime scene with the Science department in association with special FX makeup and our prop and set department.  Over the last three years, we have put on productions of Lord of the Flies, Jekyll and Hyde, A Christmas Carol and Macbeth in support of GCSE English.  Our PSHE curriculum includes preparing for freelance and making showreels and digital portfolios.  If students can be helped to find a way of pitching their studies to meet the high bar of industry then go for it.  

 The late great Sir Ken Robinson said that “When you’re in your Element, your sense of time changes. If you’re doing something that you love, an hour can feel like five minutes” (The Element: How finding your passion changes everything, Penguin, 2009).  Creatives, teachers and craftspeople everywhere know this to be true.  Of course not all of our students are certain of their ‘element’ yet, but we often find students will commit in a different way, exercise greater independence and curiosity, stick at something that’s difficult when they love what they’re doing.  We summarise this in one of our ESA mantras - ‘love learning, make magic’.

The Learning Relationship

In her book ‘The Learning Relationship’ (Routledge 2006) Biddy Youell explores psychoanalytic perspectives of adolescence and education and family.  What a complex time secondary school is for everyone involved! Youell takes us through a lot of research and it may be something of an injustice to glibly summarise her points as I am about to but ‘in a nutshell’, she says that adolescent learners need a ‘familial and relational’ résumé as opposed to a ‘power’ résumé. It is the relationships that sit behind and under structured routines that actually provide the containment adolescents need to thrive through learning pain, safe rebellion and meaningful growth.  

It may be too simplistic to say it this way but we really like our students and we want them to know it. We love being with them and knowing them and this comes before our passion for our subject, before our office of hierarchical power.  Of course teachers are ‘in charge’, but not because we are superior, rather because we bothered to plan, and prepare, and show authentic interest in the cool young people we get to see try and grow and take risks and make things!  We try to make sure that this subtle but transformational mentality is in our behaviour policy and tangible in classrooms and assemblies and in displays around the school… we want to convey our genuine joy to be with our students.  We saw joy as a fundamental value in the Danes Educational Trust and instantly knew that we’d joined up with the right people… joy is the crackle and fizz that dances through relational learning.

Split Screening  

This one is a bit newer for us.  Last year, I graduated from the ‘Leaders for Impact’ programme - a one year course provided by the Royal Opera House in partnership with Arts Council England designed to ‘strengthen the leadership of cultural learning in schools’.  This is where I met Bill Lucas and started to engage with the Cultural Learning Alliance.  I know that many teachers will have come across Bill Lucas but some of his work on character and culture really helped me think in fresh ways about teaching and learning.  Last summer, I bought everyone at ESA a copy of ‘Educating Ruby’ by Lucas and Claxton.  If you haven’t read it, you must.  It is transformational.  Their work on the 7Cs (confidence, commitment, curiosity, creativity, communication, collaboration and craftsmanship) is simply brilliant.  They present a helpful challenge to the dominant definitions of success across the educational landscape.  In the context of Covid 19 - the suspension of standardised exams and the rising levels of anxiety and disparitas achievement - this work on a different way of conceiving of success has been a welcome inspiration for us.

The book asks us to consider the educational experience of 2 students at school - Ruby and Nadezna.  While Nadezna gets better results, she suffers and struggles with her mental health and wellbeing.  Ruby, on the other hand, is not the highest achiever but has a very positive experience of school.  Their comparative stories lead us to question and re-evaluate our perspectives of what school is fundamentally for and how we judge school as being effective and students as being successful.

Following this reflection, we amended our school development plan this year to put a new emphasis on our approach to teaching and learning.  We call our new approach split-screening.  Split-screening is a pretty amazing visual device often used in art film. Split-screening throws 2 seemingly unrelated images together to create complex new meanings.  We are asking our students to realise and be mindful of the 2 ‘films’ being played at the same time in every lesson.  One screen is the ‘content curriculum’ - it is knowledge and skills - it has real value and forms part of the assessment game. The other screen is ‘character curriculum’ - this is about the 7Cs and the meaning of life and becoming.  As well as acing the test, we want students to pay attention to the development of their fuller selves.  Naturally, we want our students to attain high marks and smash their assessments but even more importantly, we want them to apply the 7Cs to their lives and grow as people of character.

Our staff have leapt at this.  So far this year - even in the midst of a pandemic - our teachers have reviewed their curriculum maps and schemes of work and updated their lesson plans to ensure that their teaching has a learning objective for both screens.  So when a student is learning mathematical formulas, they are also explicitly engaging with their capacity to become more curious.  Or when a class is learning about the scale model making in set and prop design, they are also conscious of their commitment to precision as developing craftspeople.  This more mindful approach to self development as an intrinsic part of all learning, in all subjects, can build greater resilience and reflection and support our learners to be more self compassionate, conscious and fully present to their holistic learning.

Keen to Collaborate

Collaboration is one of the 7Cs and also so crucial to success in our creative industries.  We are big time ‘into’ collaboration - unique magic happens in making stuff up together and ESA is so pleased to be a collaborative and contributory part of the growing DET landscape.  We have already learned and gained significantly from our story with you so far and we are ‘pumped’ to learn, share and shape more.  Thanks for this symbolic invite, to write something of an overview of our current approaches to teaching and learning… it’s a really cool way of introducing ourselves and sharing a little of how we roll at ESA.  We look forward to joyful, relational magic making together!

Your new friends at ESA.