Educational Approach
The Our Hut educational approach has creative learning at its core. Our aim is to build knowledge and curiosity about the built environment; to develop skills, including language as well as design; and to engender a creative mind-set. We use a range of techniques that are designed to engage and increase confidence levels in a subject area that isn't taught in schools but that we all experience in our daily lives.
The educational element of all our projects include a trip, to get participants to look up, discuss and engage with the built environment in a variety of ways that link to different areas of the curriculum - history, geography, science and maths. From there we build on developing further observational skills including drawing and contextual and historical knowledge. Finally there will be a creative design response and model-making. The model-making element provides opportunities for group work when all sorts of meta-learning can take place such as listening to others, problem solving, resilience and learning to use resources both human and physical.
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“Simply wonderful - as a teacher I have really enjoyed every second of the project. Every child has been fully engaged. I would very happily work with Our Hut again.”
Neil Moorcroft, Herbert Morrison Primary School
CPD
Our Hut is experienced in providing Continued Professional Development (CPD) training as one-off sessions or whole INSET days, or a series of workshops. The session(s) is designed to support your staff's creative approach and planning, providing a deeper understanding of how architecture and the built environment can be linked to all areas of the curriculum: maths, science, literacy, history and local area studies as well as design and technology.
The focus of our teacher CPD ranges from specific skill development, especially around 3D model making, to providing practical tool kits of lesson plans and Powerpoints to take away. Depending on who they are for CPD sessions are either linked closely to an existing project or could take a more general theme such as mapping or how to use the built environment as a teaching resource.
Feedback following NQT (ECT) training sessions included the following:
Denis O' Regan, the head teacher at St James the Great was pleased that the existence of the online resource meant that cross curricular learning about Peckham and visiting the locality would be easier to embed in the school curriculum throughout the primary phase:
“Everyone I spoke to found it useful and had a definite idea as to how they would be able to take something from the session into their own practice.”
