At Southway Junior School, the “three Is” are integral to teaching and learning.
Some may assume this refers to “intent, implication and impact”: the three Is mentioned in Ofsted’s 2019 inspection framework. But at Southway, they stand for something very different: “inside-out learning, interactive learning and independent learning”.
These three phrases are at the forefront of every teacher’s mind when planning: if they produce a lesson which includes all three, it’s considered a “gold-standard” lesson, which will be used in the school for years to come.
What is so special about these three Is? And how, exactly, did this approach come about?
It was a collaborative effort involving all the staff, explains Alice Navarro-Hunt, a Year 3 class teacher and the maths lead at the school. They were led by Pete Newbold, the headteacher, who wanted to improve on the school’s Ofsted rating of “good with outstanding features”.
“We wanted to build on our offer and ensure our children had things which help them to become better learners,” Navarro-Hunt says. “We chose these three Is because they all foster resilience in the children and allow them to take control of their learning. It’s the children in our classrooms who should be working the hardest, not the teachers, and when the three Is are embedded, this is the case.”
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The three Is: how they work in practice
In practice, then, what do these terms mean?
Inside-out learning, Navarro-Hunt explains, is all about getting the children to go away and discover something for themselves.
For example, when teaching speech punctuation a few years ago, she might have explained the “golden rules” of speech and then encouraged pupils to write a sentence that included dialogue, using the correct punctuation marks according to the rules.
However, now, she might put sentences that include correctly punctuated dialogue around the room, and tell pupils to analyse the sentences and decide what the rules are for themselves, before then discussing it as a class. Navarro-Hunt believes that this journey of discovery helps make the learning stick.
Interactive learning is all to do with surroundings. As a school, Southway has large grounds, with a substantial pond and sensory gardens. Across all the year groups, they incorporate these facilities into lessons as much as possible.
Previously, when teaching creative writing about meerkats, for example, Navarro-Hunt may have shown the children some videos of meerkats in the wild before asking them to write a postcard, pretending they are a meerkat who has arrived at the school.
But in the new approach, the children are led outside and are encouraged to act like meerkats. They scurry around the pond and the field, and every so often Navarro-Hunt shouts that birds are about to attack and they need to duck for cover. This exercise then serves as a prompt for the subsequent creative writing task and, as a result, Navarro-Hunt has found that students’ writing is much more imaginative.
Independent learning is perhaps the most obvious: this is all about children teaching themselves, and trying again and again if an initial approach fails. To illustrate this, Navarro-Hunt, describes a sewing lesson in which pupils made puppets.
Traditionally, these lessons were very teacher led, using direct instruction as the class made the puppets together. However, there were always tears from the children who really struggled to keep up, remembers Navarro-Hunt.
Now, with independent learning in mind, once the children have been taught how to make basic stitches, there are different bases set up around the classroom. One base looks at threading a needle for example, another looks at sewing on buttons, and a third looks at tying a knot. Children are given the time to move from base to base at their own pace, and are encouraged to keep going until they’ve mastered the skill.
The impact on teaching and learning
Is it an expectation at Southway that each lesson should contain all three of these types of learning? Absolutely not, says Navarro-Hunt; sometimes, the curriculum doesn’t lend itself to these approaches, and there will always be topics and skills that are best taught through direct instruction or other more traditional approaches.
However, there is another factor that prevents staff from embedding the three Is into every lesson: the amount of time it takes to plan these lessons.
But, once a “golden lesson” has been developed, it’s added to a bank which can be used year after year, if still relevant. As more “golden lessons” are made, the bank grows and, ultimately, the school hopes that the majority of foundation lessons will cover all three Is. At the moment, it’s about one every fortnight.
There will, of course, be those who read this and are sceptical: discovery learning and interactive approaches are not suitable in every context, as mentioned above. However, when used judiciously, Navarro-Hunt believes that the impact of these approaches is obvious.
“The children are more engaged, they take ownership of their learning and they become far more resilient,” she says. “Coming back to school after lockdown was tough for them, and the golden lessons are really effective in developing their learning skills and knowledge.”
Teachers, too, are benefiting, she says: keeping the three Is in mind encourages them to take risks with their planning, be more imaginative, and make better use of the resources around the school building and site.
If others were looking to embed the three Is into their curriculum, Navarro-Hunt says that success ultimately comes down to careful planning and keeping one crucial question in mind.
“When thinking about these lessons, always ask yourself, ‘who is working the hardest in your classroom?’ If it’s you, you’re not likely to be hitting all the three Is.”
