Helping hands

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John Bayley is working with Liz Pope, a Year 2 teacher at Christ Church Primary School in south London. Liz is very experienced and greatly enjoys teaching from the front. However, she wants her pupils to retain some of their early years independence and finds the experience more stressful when she sends them off to work alone.Liz likes to operate from a central table where she does literacy work with individual pupils but she finds she has to be constantly on the alert, making sure pupils are on task. In conversation with Bayley, she suggests giving children the specific roles of manager, explainer and encourager so that they can keep on eye on each other when engaging in different activities. In a subsequent lesson, Liz tries the idea with remarkable success. The children warm to their new tasks with great enthusiasm and the pair speculate positively on how such a strategy might take the class forward in the months ahead.