What the Student Wants v What they Need

If the student is a customer or consumer of education, then should we look at what they want? Or should we, as possibly being wiser and more knowledgeable, dictate what is to be learned? Or, with effective school leadership, can we have our cake and eat it?

I guess this comes down to the curriculum offered in our setting. If we are secure in the key skills and knowledge that each student needs to acquire, then we can be confident in listening to the student’s interests and curiosities and build the teaching around this. This is about combing the two aspects outlined above. We will also want to ensure that wherever children are growing up that they need to broaden their understanding of tolerance and respect and show this in their day to day lives. 

This leads us on to consider how we can best challenge students’ current thinking and understanding to build towards desired academic, and indeed personal and social, goals. In turn, this can move us into considering disciplinary knowledge.

Disciplinary knowledge might be viewed as questions and answers based on truth, evidence and reason. It is the knowledge that continues to be revised by scholars, artists or professional practice. For each subject disciplinary knowledge is an ongoing truth quest, whether through empirical testing in science, arguments in philosophy or history, logic in mathematics or beauty in the arts. In more practical terms, how we look at art is very different from how we look at science. Explanations in history are different from explanations in mathematics which are again different from those in geography or music. We need to be able to look at the world in all these different ways.

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More About BST…

The BST process enables you as school leaders to articulate your ambition for pupils in your school and identify clear processes that will bring this from vision to reality. This approach to school development and self-evaluation places ambitions, like effective school leadership, at the centre of your school thinking. Used wisely, it will complement current monitoring and evaluation work.

There are three versions available; Primary (including Early Years), Secondary (including Sixth Form) and All Through.

If you are interested or would like to find out more about BST, you can find more insight here. Alternatively, you can get in touch with the team directly, and we would be happy to discuss BST with you.