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SNAIL ACADEMY OFFERS YOU...

What is innovative pedagogy?

 

Teachers come up with new ways of working with children all the time; on the fly, tweaking a learning activity to suit a certain group of children or inventing a new approach as the children’s attention flags. Or they devise a set of activities to engage their children or cherry-pick new texts to teach a dry topic such as grammar. Perhaps they add a trip to a local museum or spot in nature to expand the relevance of a book-based course or take the children out to the school playground for a body-based learning activity.

 

Innovative pedagogies arise every day in the intersection of teachers, topics, children, and places, and while some are used only once, others go on to become a treasured part of a teacher’s tool chest. These pedagogies are essentially local and tailor-made to specific teaching situations.

 

Paradoxically, despite the innovative nature of working with children – for example, adapting preset curricula, implementing mandated approaches or topics, or working inclusively – teachers do not consider themselves innovators and nor is the teaching profession understood as a locus of innovation.

 

Snail Academy works to change this state of affairs.  

 

All too often, pedagogical innovations serve the moment or the individual teacher, rather than aiming for an overarching goal (of course, both are possible at the same time). Teachers spend little time evaluating or sharing their innovations, and schools seldom have procedures to support innovation and to integrate innovative pedagogies into their stores of organizational knowledge. This means that many innovations are lost or restricted, which represents a huge knowledge loss for the organizations. This could never happen in private businesses!

 

Snail Academy offers lectures and workshops to support innovative pedagogy and the processes that anchor them in the institutions.

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Snail Academy offers you:

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Snail Academy facilitates pedagogical innovation. We help schools develop a shared, evidence-based language around innovating and create their own structures for assessing and anchoring innovations.

  • you will articulate your team’s shared vision

  • you will take stock of the strengths and the needs of the team

  • you will establish structures for capturing, assessing, and integrating innovations, and

  • you will set manageable goals for the next steps

 

The goal is to support teacher teams in qualifying and developing their pedagogically innovative work. Many schools wish to support teachers’ innovations, and furthermore to anchor these innovations so that they benefit other teachers. We can help both at the team and at the organizational level, creating an overview of team resources and developing a supportive structure and a shared language. In this way, pedagogical innovations at the local level can support and improve children’s learning and help teachers fulfill internal and external goals.

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Click here for a case description

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