You know how when you want to do new things, but don’t realise the old tools won’t help you until you get given the right one for the job and you think, Ah? Yeah, that.
I’d been uneasy with things for a while, and knew I wanted engagement that came from the learner not from my expectations of them. I couldn’t work out why things weren’t really changing in that regard, no matter what I tried, no matter how much I tried to emphasise learner agency, creativity and exploration. And then Sarah and Linda from Longworth Education were gracious enough to speak to me.
“Try the ‘spray and walk away’ strategy,” they said.
I laughed at the name. But then thought, What?
It was the tool that changed everything. You see, ‘spray and walk away’ is all about Vygotsky. You offer the thing that allows the learner to get to the next stage in their development, but in a short way so they have the opportunity to deal with it on their terms. You spray the ‘gift that lifts’ and walk away. That gift can be a question, or an object, or a book, or a short conversation, or an invitation to something, or some instruction … Get the idea?
An example. I was observing two Year 11 students fiddling about, making pigs with play-dough. They’d read Animal Farm. Things weren’t really going anywhere. I thought about what might lift things, take their thinking to the next level.
“I wonder what the evolution of pig might look like?”
That was my spray - a question - and after a quick exchange around that idea I walked away. When I checked in later on the students had created five realistic play-dough pigs, each representing different stages of pig evolution, unpacked in writing on an A3 sheet. They talked excitedly to me about the ideas they had reached in the creation of this. Ideas that were there already, drawn out by the ‘spray and walk away’ strategy, and now driving engagement.
To get a new kind of engagement new strategies are needed. ‘Spray and walk away’ was the one that helped me start to build a new toolkit.
Thanks for reading.
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