The White Wings School is a Nursery, Primary and Secondary school based in Lagos, Nigeria. Currently, the school works with learners aged 4 to 12 years old. The White Wings School is a friendly and welcoming school. We develop a total child, focusing on teaching, nurturing and caring. We use the Montessori base approach, British and Nigerian Curriculum, and have a focus on 21st century essential skills. As part of our school mission, we focus on developing essential skills with our students at all times. Before working with Skills Builder, we would focus on essential skills during assemblies, classroom activities, sports and in the school environment.
This year as a school, we have focused on teaching Leadership, Teamwork, Listening and Speaking. Having a clear focus on teaching these skills has immensely impacted our pupils and students. For example in Listening, pupils and students were able to grasp the concept, and we recorded less distractions during lesson time from pupils. Students understood why they should stop all forms of distractions, focus on the speaker or teacher and process in their mind what is being said. In speaking, we have been able to improve the pupils and students’ presentations using the approach in building confidence, speaking clearly to groups of people they know and don’t know, maintaining eye contact and using gesture and tone to hold attention while presenting a speech. In Teamwork, learners are now able to work in different groups and improve their time management for every given team task.
We had a clear plan for how we would introduce and present each focus skill. In the White Wings School, every term has a chosen theme. This year, we have adopted the essential skills as our theme for every term, for example ’Teamwork’. This focus is used every morning in assembly, to get all learners actively engaged with the skill, while more emphasis is made in the classroom with the classroom educator. The skill names are written up in each classroom. We also created a clear structure for teachers to introduce the concepts to their students. First, we introduce each skill by discovering the area of need through reflective questioning or written assessment. Then we can identify what the students know about the skill. Then we use the Skills Builder Handbook for Educators to identify the relevant step and recite the common language of each essential skill. This ensures that all teachers are speaking the same language of the skills. It also helps our teachers to target verbal praise for good work in the skills. Educators have also gained improvement in organising their lessons by keeping it simple and making skills lessons more interactive and focused in their classrooms.
The school has adopted the Skills Builder Framework as part of the school curriculum. It forms part of the basis of our assembly talk. Every Tuesday 8:30 – 9:30 has been allotted for a Skills Builder session. We plan to build on this again next year. We are planning on using the common language of each skill as part of the enforcing learning environment in all of our classrooms.
