How can I enable the gifts and talents of my students to be in the driving seat of their learning?

My most vivid childhood memories of learning at school were not what the teachers taught me but what I found out for myself. I remember at junior school completing a project on childhood games and feeling important when I discovered there was a museum devoted to the topic. In Year 9 in geography a project on industry led me to interview a manager from a local company. In all these projects I remember the emotional engagement with the work because it was unique to me, but what I did not appreciate was the research and thinking processes that underpinned my endeavours. Working individually and independently I lacked the constructive criticism of peers. It is these omissions that have led me to me value not only the TASC framework (Wallace, 2008) and the work of Bognar and Zovko (2008), but also the idea of a research community, as shown by Whitehead and Huxtable (2008) in their University of Bath seminars. Through employment of these strategies in answering the question ‘How can I enable the gifts and talents of my students to be in the driving seat of their learning?’, I have discovered new opportunities for these students. Concurrently I have also been given the confidence through working in a non-judgemental seminar environment to start to recognise that I too have gifts and talents as a teacher. Into this narrative I pull together strands that have been woven together, to form an exciting tapestry for both the student and teacher to develop their gifts and talents. For the student there is a new qualification from the English Examination Board (AQA) called the Extended Project Qualification (AQA, 2007), which appears to meet a need to develop the skills of independent and interdependent learning. For the teacher there is the opportunity afforded by the concept of an educational living theory (Whitehead, 2008).