Magenta Principles

As part of our School Development plan, we have been focusing on the ‘Ignite’ strand of our learning making sure that children are engaged, curious, challenged and taking ownership of their learning.

We focused on these ‘Magenta Principle’ approaches to learning: reduce, change, arrange, assemble and connect. These are all different methods for organising information and verbalising the rationale behind it. Here’s some examples of the first three: reduce, change and assemble

Reduce - reducing text and summarising its key points or identifying the most important character in a story, the most important decision Churchill made to win the war, the most significant colour in a painting, or here are three paintings - which one is the masterpiece? Reduce encourages children to make a judgement, give an opinion and answer the question ‘why’?

Change -. Can you change….text into a diagram…..music into a painting….a poem into a line graph….a written story into a play-doh model. Asking pupils to convert information into different forms deepens their understanding.

Assemble - involves constructing meaning - pupils build up or assemble their understanding of an issue or concept. Techniques such as ‘snowballing’ was how we orchestrated our teacher Inset day. For example, we took each magenta approach and gave one area to each member of a group. Each group member then met with others with the same subject area and they researched their concept and decided on an activity to run with their group to aid their understanding. The snowball effect is that every member of the learning group is the teacher and the information has been spread widely. The teacher becomes the facilitator and all the pupils are the teachers. Miss Sophie ran her Science lesson this week using the ‘snowball’ technique when teaching pupils about rocks and she was buzzing with the success of every child’s understanding.

This half-term, all teachers are on a self-development programme where we are observing the learning in each other’s classrooms and measuring the success of these approaches with our pupils. We are looking forward to analysing the results and continually improving our teaching practice.

Miss Jo F