Teacher autonomy and The Story Project

As teachers ourselves, we understand how important it is to have autonomy over lessons. Using your own professional judgement to ensure your teaching suits the individual needs of your children is paramount to a successful lesson.

We also know that schemes can sometimes be a little inflexible, which creates more work for you, when it should be making life easier!

Adaptability built-in

At The Story Project, we have intentionally designed our approach so that you can tailor the learning for your class.

You can, of course, use our lesson plans exactly as we have created them (we think they’re really good!). They have all been written by teachers with decades of experience, are quality assured and based on evidence. So, when you pick up a Story Project lesson you can do so in confidence that it has everything you need. However, you also have the option to change parts of it if you wish. Happy days!

Let’s take a look at what this might look like:

Regulation strategies

Have a class who find colouring to be the antithesist of calming? Or a group of children who are nervous about closing their eyes during mindfulness moments? You can change it up! Adapt the activity to match what helps to calm your children’s emotions. If one activity doesn’t spark their interest, you can swap it for another.

Our programme contains over 200 emotional regulation strategies, so if one doesn’t work you can change it for another. All these strategies are designed to support children’s emotional regulation, so they can build up a bank of useful tools to help manage emotions.

Reading the story

We carefully choose our books so that children learn from diverse, engaging stories. We believe that your children will love the books because they are thought-provoking, fun and inclusive.

At the beginning of a unit, you will want to read the whole book to your class. Or, in the case of our longer chapter books, the whole extract.

However, depending on the age of your children and how they engage with the story, you can change how you interact with the book as the unit develops.

In subsequent lessons, you may wish to simply refer to a certain page or part of the book. This helps to keep engagement levels high and gives teachers the option to adapt the lessons.

Each lesson also comes with a set of suggested guided reading questions. As the experts of your class, you can adapt and add to these questions to move learning along at a pace that is right for your children.

Getting stuck in to activities

Our favourite part of the lesson is when children are given the opportunity to reflect the learning from the story on their own experiences and opinions.

You may have noticed that we give teachers the choice of two activities here.

This isn’t just because we like to give our team extra work to do! We do this intentionally so that teachers have autonomy over how their children’s learning is framed.

One activity might suit your class better than the other. For instance, if you have a class that love discussion.

Some of our activities involve slightly more planning, for example interviewing a family member, or getting out the craft supplies. These are all fantastic ways for children to engage with the learning in the book – however, we also know that sometimes the week gets away from you and an easy-to-set up role play is much more suited!

However you choose to adapt your Story Project lessons, we know you will be doing it with the best interests of your children mind. As expert professionals trust your judgement and enjoy teaching our lessons in a way that feels right for you and your class.

We are always here to support and answer questions. So, if you want to know how you can further adapt your TSP lessons, get in touch.