Promoting the 3 Rs: Reasonable, Reflective and

Responsive RE

Vivienne Baumfield

Centre for Learning and Teaching

University of Newcastle

Reasonable RE

“Other people’s opinions sometimes make sense - you sometimes haven’t thought of that opinion before.”

15 year old GCSE RS student

Reflective RE

“I’ve learned how to really think about stories rather than just listen”

7 year old in his pupil log

Responsive RE

“I learnt that it doesn’t matter if you are the odd one out”

8 year old

“I learned to say my own opinion with nobody getting in a mood if you disagree”

11 year old

Priest Bishop

Pope

BeginningMiddleEnd

BeginningMiddleEnd

How did Max feel?

Max made mischief of one kind and another.

He was sent to bed without eating anything.

He sailed off through night and day.

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth.

They made him king of all the wild things.

But Max was lonely.

Max stepped into his private boat and said goodbye.

He found his supper waiting for him.

WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK ABOUT LIFE AFTER DEATH?

In March 1979 nearly 1,000 British adults were interviewed about their beliefs in some form of life after death. The

results were published in the Sunday Telegraph and showed the following:

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Heaven Reincarnation Hell

16-24

OAPs

Male

Female

A

People tend to prefer a positive view of what happens when they die

B

50 years ago more people attended church on a regular basis

C

Women tend to admit to thinking about religious ideas more than men

D

The idea of being punished after you die is not really talked about anymore

E

Many people think that talking about death is morbid

F

People in Britain are becoming more aware of different religious traditions

Finding Meaning

Kelly said that we are all scientists because we are always trying to investigate and understand what is happening around us

Different people can understand the same events in different ways

Kelly says that this is because we develop habits of seeing/thinking about things

The way we think about things is based on what we already know and what has worked for us before

Frames and Cages

• Constructs are these ways of thinking about things• They are personal because they are based on our own

experiences• We test them out by checking how well they match up to

what happens - do they help us to make sense of things?

• They can be useful frames but they can also be cages if they trap us into fixed ways of thinking

Beliefs and behaviour

The way we think about something, what we think it means and what we think is going to happen next affects the way we behave

Teachers and students in classrooms have personal constructs about teaching and learning

Developing a better understanding of what we are thinking and what is important to us should help to give us better ‘frames’ and break down the bars of some of the ‘cages’

I’ve learned a lot just from listening to some of these

kids. I’m thinking, WOW, I never figured it out that way.

Positive dissonance

Access to students’ thinking is enhancedStudents give positive reinforcement to

teachersTeachers are surprised by some of what

they discover about their studentsTeachers stimulated to inquire more

deeply into learning and teaching

The Community of Enquiry Approach

Developed by Matthew Lipman from the work of Dewey

We learn through engaging in shared enquiry and discussion

Building understanding and developing argument

Good judgement and thoughtful action

Questioning

What is real?Can wolves change?What makes something true?Are the wild things bad?Is it the feelings or the fact that

makes something important?

Learning through inquiry

Thinking skills approaches are based on principles of inquiry and social constructivist views of learning

Teachers become facilitators and model inquiry for students

Students and teachers as co-learnersKnowledge about teaching and learning is

created and shared

Authentic Instruction

Higher Order ThinkingDepth of KnowledgeConnectedness to the worldSubstantive ConversationSocial support for student achievement

Newmann and Wehlage(1993) Five Standards of authentic instructionEducational Leadership 51 (4) pp 8-12

SEN pupils

Pupils in thinking skills situation had significantly higher on-task rates when compared to pupils in non-thinking skills and control situations

There is a significant and positive correlation between the degree to which a teacher applies a thinking skills approach and mean on-task rates for pupils in that class

Pupils with SEN in thinking skills lessons had significantly higher rates of engagement when compared to pupils with SEN in non-thinking skills and control lessons

Pupils who are gifted in RE are likely to:

show high levels of insight into, and discernment beyond, the obvious and ordinary;

make sense of, and draw meaning from, religious symbols, metaphors, texts and practices;

be sensitive to, or aware of, the numinous or the mystery of life, and have a feeling for how these are explored and expressed;

understand, apply and transfer ideas and concepts across topics in RE and into other religious and cultural contexts. (QCA)

Thinking Classrooms

Work in the zone of proximal development

Support learning through scaffolding

understanding

Build bridges between informal and formal learning

Education as translation

When Education is Translation…

the learner is both the translator and the subject of her own translation

traditional power dynamics are shiftedwe have a flexible, responsive, thought-

and action-turning framework from within which we can not only listen and respond to student voices but also better listen and respond to everyone in involved in education

Main findings (1)

The majority of studies found positive impact on pupils’ attainment across a range of non-curriculum measures (such as reasoning or problem-solving). No studies found negative impact on such measures.

Half of the studies showed immediate positive impact on learning on curricular measures of attainment (where such measures were used).

There is some evidence that pupils can apply or translate this learning to other contexts.

Main findings (2)

Where there is no or small immediate impact on curriculum measures such improvement may appear later or increase over time.

The impact of thinking skills approaches may not be even across all groups of pupils. There is some evidence that there may be greater impact on low attaining pupils particularly when using cognitive strategies.

There is some evidence that pupils benefit from explicit training in the use of thinking skills strategies and approaches.

Main findings (3)

Some of the benefits of thinking skills programmes and approaches derives from making thinking and reasoning explicit through a pedagogical emphasis on classroom talk and interaction.

The role of the teacher is also important in thinking skills programmes and approaches in establishing collaborative group work, effective patterns of talk and in eliciting pupils’ responses.

What I have called ‘critical solidarity’ doesjustice to the distinctiveness of faith while at the same time encouraging the search for religious reality in terms of questions rather than answers. It seems to me to be peculiarly well suited to an age which is suspicious of answers and which is overcrowded with contradictory and evanescent ideas. John Habgood