It cannot be stressed too strongly that learning needs to be an active process. It requires the learner to engage with ideas and in activities that stimulate thinking and develop understanding. Your role as a teacher is to provide situations that will encourage deeper learning.

One important way of creating a more active learning environment for students is to look beyond the classroom. The physical world around your school is a rich environment that can be used in many ways to support teaching in all areas of the curriculum. It can provide the stimulus for many topics. For example, if you were doing classification exercises in Science, you might start by looking at pictures of local animals or plants that would be familiar.

The local environment can provide both the context and content for your topic. If you are teaching about “place and space” to students, a mapping exercise around the school would help them realise how to represent buildings and roads on the map. If you wanted to look at environmental problems in the local community, such as litter or rubbish, you could use the students’ knowledge of the local area to discover where such problems exist. On the human side, families can provide a highly interesting source of stories and histories.

Local people can be brought into your school to give talks or explain their jobs; these might be doctors or health workers, plumbers or computer experts. You will have to carefully manage introducing outsiders into the school, but this is a good way of establishing school and community links. Such experiences always fascinate students, particularly if the person is also a parent or relation of someone in the class.

Using the local environment is not something that you will do all the time, but something that you should consider frequently when doing your lesson planning.