Fearless Fridays - Sydenham High School

Fearless Fridays

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Following the staff INSET on bringing an element of fearlessness into classroom practice, lessons have been amended to try out new ideas and techniques such as allowing the pupils to draw out maths formulae on wipe-down desks to work through equations, using Virtual Reality headsets to transport a Geography class and getting the girls to sing conjugations in French to the tune of the Pink Panther.

Students had to learn the pattern of irregular verbs, according to their preferred learning style. Some of them realised that they may have wrongly selected their learning style or that they preferred two not just one way of learning. In the end some acted out the conjugation of verbs, some chanted it, some made some shapes where they wrote the various words to form the conjugations and some listened and repeated. They all learnt in their chosen way …and had fun!

– Ms M. Belardo, Italian Teacher

Each student took on the role of one of four key members of the Pop Art movement – Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg or Coosje Van Bruggen. They acted out a scene (devised by me), complete with wigs, and props from one of the key points in their lives and careers. It was a loud and exciting lesson. I was certainly fearful at first but it soon fell into place!

– Adam Dunne, Head of Art

Approaching the topic of miracles, in order to engage them with the question of what a miracle is I told them that I would be performing a miracle. I used a willing assistant from the classroom and performed a magic trick using a deck of cards. The questions that I then got them to work on in groups was: Was what I did really a miracle? If it wasn’t, what is the difference between a real miracle and what just happened? This sparked some interesting and quite fiery debate on how to define a miracle which was a good way in to the topic.

– Robin Stevens, Head of PRE

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