BLP on Outward Bound

Building Learning Power is a school wide initiative aimed at developing skills within our students to ensure they are better prepared than ever for the rapidly changing world around us. We are preparing students for jobs that don't even exist yet. Therefore what is equally important as learning content is the concept of the skills we learn along the way. 

Within The Arthur Terry School's visits to Aberdovey in Year 7 students have been working hard on understanding the key skills they are developing. As staff we selected the habits they were most likely to be using over their time away and put them together in an easy to use flipbook style pack.

Collaboration:

Learning how to work as part of a team is an important skill to master. Understanding how what you can do to support other people is empowering but also comforting when at times it is yourself that needs teamwork to get you through a task.

Absorption: 

Sometimes learning becomes infectious and there is nothing better to see than students "lost" within their learning. This is often when students generate strong desires to succeed as they immerse themselves in and enjoy the learning experience.

Listening:

Listening skills perhaps underpin everything we do. We use listening skills to obtain information, to acquire new knowledge or to communicate effectively and many  other times that we don't have the space to go into here.  On Outward Bound our students are encouraged to listen to instructions so they can carry out activities and tasks safely and correctly to allow for further activities to take place!

Interdependence:

Sometimes we work really well on our own, and sometime we need a helping hand. When we develop our interdependence skills we begin to recognise when we can offer that extra helping hand to people too.

 Perseverance: 

Sometimes the task in front of us just looks to difficult and never ending. However, by working hard and being resilient in our approach to these tasks we can begin to learn how rewarding it can be when we succeed with this tasks that seem almost impossible at first.

Imitation 

Sometimes we work well when we watch how successful other people are doing and we copy the good practice and try to implement it in our own ways.

Planning

Sometimes students can become fixated on achieving the end goal. However, when we are planning we are stretching ourselves to think about how we are going to get to the end goal and ensure that we do our best to get there.

Revising

Students often overlook the learning experience at the end of activities and by reviewing or revising we are looking at the process and can re-assess and suggest if there needs to be a change in what we are doing. The picture here shows students checking to see if the egg broke in the final flight of their "egg proof flying machine". 

Reasoning 

This learning skill allows us to develop the ways in which we can communicate. When working in groups we often find that the loudest decisions aren't always the best. This skill allows us to express our own opinions and work together to ensure the best ideas the group agree on are the ones that are used.

Managing Distractions

Sometimes in school it is easy for students to get distracted. What we work on whilst on Outward Bound is how important it is to manage these distractions by not ignoring them completely but instead understanding what distractions are important and need attention.