Magic does the trick for classroom confidence

Few people, including adults, can perform magic. Any child who learns how has a rare skill – they can do something amazing that their peers cannot.

Award-winning trainer and close-up magician Robert Newgrosh realised what a boost this can be for some children psychologically. In 2008, he established Magic Skills for Schools, a high-quality developmental programme for children in Years 4, 5 and 6. The underlying concept at the heart of the programme is simple – learning how to do magic increases a child’s self-belief. When a child learns how to do something amazing and unusual, it has the potential to change their whole outlook!

Does it work?

Since inception, hundreds of children from 18 schools across the North-West have taken part. Evelyn Community Primary School in Prescot, judged Outstanding by Ofsted on three occasions, has run the programme seven times.

Evelyn's headteacher, Carole Arnold, said: “Robert worked in our school with groups of children from each key stage class. Not only did the children thoroughly enjoy the sessions, but their confidence and communication skills were much improved.

“Children were selected from those highlighted in the PASS survey (Pupils Attitude to Self and School) as moderate to high risk. Several children came out with a lower risk when retested after the sessions, and the others were more self-confident as witnessed by the class teacher.”

Aside from the boost in confidence and self-esteem, the programme also helps to develop other skills such as manual dexterity, co-ordination, memory, presentation, reasoning, numeracy and verbal skills.

Carole Arnold adds: “The experience enabled rich learning to take place, such as problem solving and development of concentration, in an imaginative and stimulating way.’

How does it work?

All the tricks in the programme are very high calibre – easy enough for a child to learn but good enough to entertain and amaze family and friends. This is often a big surprise to adults who make the assumption that a child would not be able to fool them. Based on professional card magic, the methods and secrets taught ensure the children can perform confidently, knowing they won't be caught out.

At the end of the programme, the children perform a show for classmates and parents, further boosting their confidence and self-esteem. This provides a tangible end-result, plus a real sense of achievement. As well as performing great magic in the show, the children also demonstrate professional-looking card displays. This often produces audible gasps from the audience, which is further confirmation for a child that they really do have an amazing new talent which few people possess.

Another headteacher commented: "All the children who took part gained a great deal from the experience. It has increased their self-confidence and instilled in them a ‘can-do’ attitude. 

“At the end of the four sessions, the children were able to take part in a performance to classmates and family in a wonderful exhibition of skills, flair and confidence. I was very impressed by the standard the children were able to achieve in such a short time. 

“The feedback from staff and family has been positive, and I would highly recommend the programme to any school wishing to develop children's self-confidence and self-esteem, as well as numeracy, memory and concentration skills. We will be holding these sessions again in the future. In fact, we have a waiting list for them!" 

Could magic do the trick for your pupils?

Magic Skills For Schools delivers high impact in just a few weeks, and the cost per pupil is classified as ‘very low’ by the Education Endowment Foundation. Outcomes are well-matched to the government's concept of a ‘targeted enrichment activity’ making the programme ideal for Pupil Premium investment. Children are highly motivated to participate, and really enjoy taking part.

The company also offers a Magic Day format, which is for a whole class rather than selected children. Here the emphasis is on reasoning, lateral thinking and fun. This makes a great reward or treat, and since the tricks are different to the developmental programme, it doesn't matter if a child has already participated.

For further details, please call Robert on 0161 428 1069 or email new.skills@ntlworld.com.

Have you cracked the code of the new computing curriculum?

The new computing curriculum came into force back in September, so the pressure is now on to deliver outstanding results. Here, primary deputy head Anthony Sharp explains the steps his school has taken to successfully deliver new terrifying topics such as algorithms, logical reasoning and debugging.

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In a recent survey from CPD for Teachers, 52 per cent of headteachers who responded said that they felt their school was not successfully delivering the new computing curriculum.

And it's not surprising. There have been seismic shifts in what we expect from teachers to deliver the new computing curriculum. ICT used to focus purely on computer literacy, teaching pupils how to use software packages - for example, creating PowerPoint presentations or producing documents in Word - and e-safety. With the new curriculum, the focus has changed to understanding how computers work, including how to program them.

We have good teachers here at Midfield Primary who are competent and can teach ICT to a more than acceptable standard. However, when we reviewed the new computing curriculum and compared it with our current teaching programme, clear gaps emerged. Quite quickly for example, we saw that there was a gap in programming skills in our school, as well as a lack of confidence from our teachers who were concerned that they would not be able to deliver parts of the new curriculum.

My suspicions were confirmed by the results of the aforementioned CPD for Teachers survey, which showed that we were in the same boat as many others. Forty-four per cent of schools who felt they were not delivering the new computing curriculum effectively had also not received any face-to-face training.

First steps
It was clear that our teachers needed more guidance. We needed to prioritise computing curriculum training to re-set teachers’ thinking, eradicate the fear of programming and give them further information on how to deliver it effectively. We selected a course that met our needs in terms of being practical and hands-on from the start. It covered the fundamentals of computing programming through exciting tasks such as drawing computer graphics, creating simple games and interfacing with the real world.

Resetting thinking
When you talk to someone who doesn’t like maths, there’s often no particular reason they don’t like it - they just don’t. The same applies to a lot of teachers and adults with computers. The approach taken in the training course really helped to break down those feelings and reset their thinking.

Now, for example, the teachers explore how they can engage the children in programming, rather than the preconceived idea, which was along the lines of opening up a computer and looking at wires. This gave them the confidence to approach it. Now, far less concerned about what they don’t know, they focus on what they do know. The cross curricular content from computing compared to science, English and maths is quite extensive, so using the skills and working with these experts to help deliver programming was a great starting point for our school.

Bringing coding to life
Much to our surprise, we didn’t even go near a computer at first! The course instructors had us push all the tables and chairs to the side of the room and literally walk through a program.

One of the methods we used was to create an obstacle course which was navigated by answering/asking questions. The responses to the questions determined the player's next step. This brought programming to life and helped us to understand the way that coding works. It was a simple way of demonstrating binary logic, and we will use this to introduce basic programming to our primary pupils.

In the afternoon, we applied the knowledge from the activities of the morning to digital situations. Overall, the face-to-face training was great and broke down any aversions teachers may have had about how to engage the children. It was fun, engaging and very motivational.

One tricky area for us in teaching the new curriculum to primary school children was making it engaging and fun for children of a young age. The course gave us some really innovative methods of delivery, which has helped us engage children so that they enjoy it.

Confidence to deliver
The feedback so far has been very positive. We now deliver and prepare for lessons as teams so that we can share the knowledge and use a collaborative approach. It has made our teachers less nervous and has increased confidence in the classroom, as it gives them ways to approach it and they are far less concerned about what they don’t know. The focus now is on what they do know and what other existing skills they can draw on to help them deliver programming.

Embrace the IT geniuses
The fear at our school for many teachers used to be that once you set children on their way, it’s possible that they will steam ahead of the adults. This is natural, as adults are scared to press the wrong button, whereas children don’t have that fear so are free to explore. We’ve learned not to fear this situation - in fact, the opposite! We are embracing the possibility of this as a positive outcome, and we can use those skills and even channel them into our own teaching.

We are still at the start of our journey but, I believe, in a good place to move forward in delivering the new computing curriculum with confidence.

Five top tips for delivering the new computing curriculum:
1. Focus on what the teachers already know.
2. Explore curriculum crossover from maths, English and science.
3. Invest in face-to-face training to give teachers confidence.
4. Team up in a collaborative effort to engage your class.
5. Focus on making it engaging and fun for both teachers and pupils.

Anthony Sharp is deputy headteacher at Midfield Primary School in Bromley, Kent. Midfield chose to prepare their teachers for the new computing curriculum with the CPD for Teachers 'How to teach programming' course. Find out more at: www.cpdforteachers.com.

Looking for a short but thorough introduction to programming? In this free training video and accompanying article, Chris Thomas explores the basics of programming and two tools that will make teaching it a lot simpler.