Guest Blog Post: Wingate Children's Centre

May 01, 2020

Reflective Practice and Reciprocal Learning – My Journey into ‘The Wingate Way’

For the past two years it has been my privilege to work at Wingate Nursery School in County Durham. I came to this nursery because I felt that I understood this way of working, I knew (or so I thought) the meaning of ‘following children’s interests’ and I believed in trusting children to take reasonable risks. However, it was only through working in Wingate’s quite extraordinary (and yet very simple) way that I truly began to understand the meaning and power of these things.

Let me cast my mind back to my earliest days at Wingate and tell you about just a few of the many things that impressed, surprised and downright shocked me! –

We have only the loosest medium-term plans and no structured ‘teaching’ in phonics, numbers or anything else.
The children use real tools and equipment (from hammers to step ladders). They are taught how to use them safely and then trusted with them. It’s that simple.
A great deal of time and care is taken with selecting the very best equipment for the children’s work – e.g. silk and silk paints, graded colours of powdered paint for mixing, a huge range of wires, strings, cable ties etc – the idea is that every possibility is available so that children are never limited by the environment and their plans can be taken seriously and carried out properly. I remember this having a big impact on me in the early days.
Independence is at the heart of everything – children independently bake, pull bulky snowsuits on and off, prepare their own snack, serve their own food and much more.

Of all the things that I’ve learnt at Wingate though, the thing that has had the biggest impact on my own practice has been the power of being deeply reflective. As educators looking for inspiration, we are often given ‘examples’ of what others have done. This can certainly be really useful and it gives us all a ‘quick fix’ of refreshed ideas and set-ups. But what I’ve learned and loved at Wingate, is how much more effective it is to go back over our own practice and observations at the end of each day to reflect deeply on – “what did I see?”, “what do I think was happening here?”, “what was my role and how effective was that?”, “What (if anything) do I need to do next”. The last one, incidentally is crucial, I’ve learnt that having the courage to do ‘nothing’ is very often the right thing to do.

There is a particular day that sticks in my mind as being quite revolutionary for me in terms of the power of my own reflections. I was working with a group of children to construct a 20ft model of Big Ben (not necessarily something you do every day but this was Wingate after all!). I had absolutely no idea how to build something like this. We’d reached this point by following the children’s lead, purely and simply, in such a deep and focussed way as I’d never been brave enough to do before. So, surrounded by huge cardboard boxes (each one bigger than me!) I wondered how on earth I was going to guide these children to attach them together securely. One child in particular saw my worry and after reassuring me that he knew what to do, he climbed the ladders, helped me to cut holes in each box and then trotted off to our studio, bringing back thick garden wire. He threaded and twisted it just the right way to hold those two enormous boxes together. I watched him, I learnt from him, I worked with him. Reflecting later that day, I realised that this little boy had truly taught me about reciprocal and child-led learning. I had no idea how to join those two boxes, but in all honesty why should I have? Why was I naïve enough to assume I was going to ‘show’ these capable children, these designers and architects how to build and attach? They were experts in this. This is what they did every day. I was new to it and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d given serious thought to ‘attaching techniques’. So, I happily learnt from them about building and, through my reflections, I realised that they’d learnt from me too - about team work, communication and planning. Together, we created a piece of work that would have been unimaginable to me 6 months earlier. In terms of my own learning, the time I dedicated each day to deep thought and reflection had the biggest impact. I learnt practical strategies that I’ve used ever since.

When the artist Antony Gormley visited in 2000, he described Wingate Nursery School as “a laboratory of possibilities”. We took this to heart and kept it as one of our nursery values, striving each day to maintain this. Working in this unique environment each day and continually reflecting on what we’ve all learnt is most definitely ‘the Wingate way’.