G&T Learning Walk Thursday 24th November

Last week Sylvia Hawken and David Gimson did a learning walk to help us learn more about our provision for gifted and talented students.  They visited seven lessons in History (2), Geography (2), Maths (1), Art (1) and MFL (1), in Years Seven and Ten.  The Classroom Quality Standards for G&T were used as a framework for observation.  David has posted their findings below.

Positive Feedback

In all classes observed behaviour and uniform were good or very good.  There were no barriers to learning because of bad behaviour by other students:  there was a positive learning ethos and the great majority of learners, including G&T learners, were fully engaged in the work and often inspired or challenged.  We recorded a very large number of positive student comments.  G&T students were reflective about their own learning and sometimes aware of what they could be doing to challenge themselves further beyond the classroom (e.g. by further reading).  G&T students were aware of how their learning linked to real world issues.  In most cases they seemed in charge of their own learning.  Quite detailed subject specific vocabulary, skills and knowledge were being developed.  We saw skilful teacher questioning (including some very well thought-through questions) and dynamic interactive teaching.  There was some detailed summative assessment, and staff who we questioned were clearly aware of where their students were at.  It was very inspiring to see teachers at work. 

Points for Reflection

Several of the classes we saw had large numbers in quite small rooms; a couple in particular also had very wide ranges of ability.  This is bound to have some impact on the student experience. 

Some students felt they wanted a bit more ongoing feedback about where they were at – not necessarily in the form of marking.  We saw slightly less evidence, overall, of formative than of summative assessment.   While most students felt they had clearly moved up a gear from primary school or Year Nine, a couple said that they were repeating things they had already done before and were asking for more challenge.  In one case a student had attended special classes at a previous school and now felt that he was treading water (while the other seven students questioned in the class all felt they were being appropriately challenged).  In Year Ten we identified three male students who are underperforming (for reasons unrelated to individual subjects) and we plan to follow up separately with actions to support/engage them. 

Thank you very much indeed to colleagues who welcomed us to their classes.  

Metacognition and all that stuff?

This week’s learning walks are going to focus on learning intentions, success criteria and metacognition.  So what do we mean by these?

Learning Intentions:  our teaching policy states that we want pupils to explicitly know what it is we are trying to learn.  This means that we need to share our learning intentions with students, in other words we need to explain what it is we are trying to learn in the lesson.  As part of our planning  we not only need to think about the subject specific content we are trying to teach, but also the generic skills that students will be developing as they learn our subject.  By explicitly discussing how we learn and what skills and techniques we use when learning we can hopefully, make our students more aware of the skills they use when learning and be able to makes links between different subjects as they see themselves employing similar skills in different subject areas.  Learning intentions should focus on what we want students to learn - not on what tasks we want them to complete!

Success Criteria:  if we want our students to become more skilled learners we need to communicate what successful learning looks like.  In our planning we should be thinking about what successful learning would look like in our lesson and flagging this up to our pupils.  This should be more sophisticated than stating that they should have completed tasks 1 to 12, but should reflect how their understanding has developed.  The English department has done some really interesting work on this.  They frame their success criteria through the concepts of a piece of work being skilled or excellent.  Each is clearly described and communicated to the students who are then encouraged to make judgements about their own and others work.

Metacognition: this is often described as ‘thinking about thinking’ or ‘learning to learn’.  So, if in our learning intentions we are discussing with students what we want to learn, how we intend to do this and why we use different approaches to different tasks.  And through our success criteria we discuss how we can make judgements about how well we are picking up knowledge, concepts, ideas and skills -then we are working in a metacognitive way.

In this week’s TLCs we will be discussing what makes good learning intentions and success criteria.  To make the most of this it would be well worth spending a little time thinking about our planning and how we fit learning objectives and success criteria into it.

For further information and ideas click on the links below:

Cheney School Learning and Teaching Policy

Metacognition

http://www.teachingthinking.net/thinking/web%20resources/robert_fisher_thinkingaboutthinking.htm

http://gse.buffalo.edu/fas/shuell/cep564/metacog.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoKUcRwLCWA&feature=related

Things to Read: try the Sutton Trust's Research

What is the Sutton Trust?

The Sutton Trust is an educational charity in the united Kingdom which aims to provide educational opportunities to young people from non-privileged backgrounds. The charity was set up by the millionaire philanthropist Sir Peter Lampl. Sir Peter Lampl worked extensively outside the UK and made his money through creating a private equity firm called the Sutton Company.  Lampl is not from a privileged background and his father was a Czech refugee who came to Britain in 1938.  He was state grammar school educated and went to Oxford University and the London Business School. Lampl believes that England’s present education system contributes less to social mobility than it did previously and he is passionate about increasing the educational opportunities for children from non-privileged backgrounds.  This is why he set up the Sutton Trust and its research makes interesting reading.  Lampl has been quoted as saying "a kid like me had little to no chance of making it to Oxbridge or another Russell Group university".

To read the Sutton Trust research on: Toolkit of Strategies to Improve Learning - Summary for Schools, Spending the Pupil Premium go to the following link http://www.suttontrust.com/research/

Learning Walks

The findings from last week's learning walk has been posted on Agility - Learning Walks.
Click on the link to the right of the page.

Improving Extended Writing

Guy Goodwin has been working on improving his students' ability to write thoughtful extended writing.  In this piece he comes up with an excellent strategy for developing deep thinking and writing for exam conditions.  It's genius and so simple you'll wonder why you didn't think of it!

Why do students struggle so much with improving essay writing?

One possibility is that too many of the practice ones are in ‘exam conditions’ i.e. against the clock and not knowing the question in advance. Thus students get lots of practice at being unprepared and stressed about time.

Instead it might be helpful to practice writing the best essay possible within your personal word limit and knowing the question before you start. I have been trying this with A2 Philosophy students increasingly over the last couple of years.

1. Find your personal word limit – spend 10 minutes writing fluently anything that you don’t have to think about (e.g. a song lyric or poem that you know by heart). Count how many words you have written. Then multiply up to the time limit you will face in the exam (for example A2 Philosophy questions can be 60 minutes, I allow 50 minutes writing time, so five times the 10 minute total). This is your personal word limit for that subject\exam.

2. Now choose a question that is typical of the exam, but focussed on work recently completed (it need not be an actual past exam question). Write the best essay you can that fits within your word limit, but don’t worry about how long it takes. Use the feedback\marking to make the next one even better.

Over the length of a course students build up a collection of good and improving essays that they can reproduce in exam conditions.

Lazy teacher benefit – you don’t have to deal with a whole class set of essays at once, and you don’t even have to give all students the same number of essay practices.

Guy Goodwin

Feedback from Learning Walks

We have published our findings from the first round of learning walks.  To read the findings click on the link to the right of the page.

Learning Walks have started!

We are nearly at the end of our first week of learning walks.  Thank you to everyone who has been visited, the process has been really informative.

We should be publishing our findings shortly.  Click on the link to the learning walks page on the right hand side.

Developing Learning Walks at Cheney School

We are looking to develop a system of learning walks at Cheney School. We want to do this for the following reasons.

• To help us deepen our understanding of what is happening in classrooms on a day to day basis
• To celebrate and share effective practice
• To help us identify any common areas for development across the school
• To help foster a school wide conversation about learning and teaching

Please read the document on learning walks and share oyur thoughts with Hugh, Phil or Alastair.


Thanks

Learning and Teaching Group

By the time they leave Cheney we would like our students to:

· be responsible

· take pride in their work

· see mistakes as learning opportunities

· be curious / have enquiring minds

· be open-minded

· be questioning / not blindly accepting what they are told

· be independent learners not needing to be spoon fed

· be thoughtful

· be focused on their learning not just on tests and levels

· have organizational skills

· be researchers

· be analytical

· take ownership of their learning

· be the 4 Rs: resilient, resourceful, reasoning, reflective

· have aspirations

· be adaptable

A2 History - OCR Personal Study

Pippa Whittaker on teaching dyslexic students

This video is a summary of the Dyslexia training provided by Pippa on 7th April. A note on the sound; it may be that this video (as with Frank's below) seems very quiet, especially when played straight through a laptop or PC. It's fine if you wear headphones, or watch on a PC which is connected to wall-mounted speakers, however. Tom

IT tips from Havemann!

Enjoy a quick and easy overview of some really neat and effective tips for getting the most out of Outlook, from IT magic-man Frank Havemann... might be a bit quiet, so use headphones or speakers.

Takeaway Teacher

The English department has launched a YouTube channel to help with revision and to store key bits of learning - here's a sample video: These videos have proved popular and effective with students, and have certainly helped them to focus. A quicker alternative is to use Jing (free downloadable software, discovered by TLa), which allows you to record what you are doing on your computer screen and adda voiceover. This is very quick and easy - it doesn't look as flash but may well be just as effective - here's a sample of a video made with Jing: If you'd like to have a go at this to support your own teaching or department, please contact TBo; for example if you have a presentation of a particular teaching point that you'd like to make available to year 11, this will be straightforward to organise and upload to the Takeaway Teacher site: http://www.youtube.com/user/CheneyTakeaway

Masters of the Universe - Teacher Research at Cheney School

Coaching—changing the way that students view their learning?

Chris Garside, as part of her AST work, has been trained in coaching techniques, as a driver for such aims as raising student engagement, responsibility and ownership of their own learning. The key difference between coaching and mentoring seems to be that a coach will not attempt to provide ‘the answer’, or even suggest how the coachee should proceed; instead, the skill lies in asking the right questions. In her Action Research document, Chris quotes John Whitmore summarising the strategy like so: ‘Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them’ .

Chris’s research has centred on taking a fresh look at the types of personalised interventions that we currently put in place, notably at the C/D borderline for GCSE, and exploring whether or not coaching provides an alternative model with a greater chance of success. During the project, she employed the GROW model (Goals, Reality, Opportunity and the Will to commit), and found success in helping C/D borderline maths students to improve their performance through becoming more reflective and more able to take responsibility for their own progress. Through coaching, students were made to feel that they were in charge of their developments, and avoided the sense of ’having learning done to you’. To conclude a very thought-provoking and convincing piece of research, Chris states: “Whilst I

had hoped that coaching would have some impact on the students' attitude and learning I was surprised by the scale of the effect which the evidence for these three students seems to indicate.”, suggesting that coaching is certainly worth further action and investigation. For further info, see Chris!

Personalisation through Deep Learning

As part of the Masters programme, Sylvia Hawken has been looking closely at learning, particularly through experimenting with AFL and examining David Hargreave’s ideas around Personalisation and ‘The Deeps’. Essentially, Hargreaves suggests a framework of four ‘gateways’, through which schooling can be transformed and improved. These gateways are: Deep Learning, Deep Experience, Deep Leadership and Deep Support—see Sylvia for the details of these ideas. In her research, Sylvia reflected on the extent to which aspects of the Deeps such as the development of a strong and relevant Student Voice related to learning is being achieved, as well as considering the extent to which the school is successfully developing and refreshing AFL practice through the Agile Teaching project.

Rob Bown on PLTS

The introduction of Personal Learning and Thinking Skills at Cheney is hoped to be a key feature of our development this year. But what’s it all about? We visited PLTS–tsar Rob Bown to find out…

What actually are PLTS?

Personal Learning and Thinking skills is the QCA’s account of the skills which underpin learning in the classroom… what is it that makes a good team-worker, creative thinker, independent enquirer, self-manager etc. These are skills which should help students to learn in any context, whether it’s in school or out of school.

How have used it in your own teaching, or how have you seen it used at other schools?

Well, in my own teaching, I’ve tried to follow a method that Guy Claxton in Building Learning Power has come up with. The idea is to have students engage with the skill at the beginning of the lesson before you even address any subject context. You get them enthused about the skill, understanding and seeing the relevance of the skill, inside the classroom, in other classrooms and outside of school. Then, when you’ve got them on-

board, and they are interested in the skill, have them use that skill in the classroom to take control of their own learning. Once they’ve understood the skill, they hopefully apply it and understand its relevance to their future lives.

And at other schools?

Yes, at Matthew Arnold they have introduced a year 7 programmein which each department is committed to delivering a series of lessons connected to a particular skill every half term.

What about here at Cheney? How do you think it might help us to improve our provision?

Well from 2010, there will be a weekly skills activity in tutor time. There’s a team that has put these activities together, and it’s hoped that through these activities, students will start to think about the skills and see the relevance of them across the curriculum and outside of school. That will be a key thing in 2010. We might also be looking at an Enrichment Day focsed on PLTS, and I’m hopeful that it will lead to students and staff gaining a better understanding of the skills that underpin learning.

Are PLTS expected to be explicit in classroom teaching? Is it a model of PLTS that skills objectives will be provided alongside subject objectives?

This is a key issue. I think that almost all staff would agree that these skills are important. Some staff would argue that the skills should be implicit to what happens in the classroom. My reasons for trying to make it explicit are that students in my opinion need to understand what the skills involve in order for the to then progress. If they can’t explain what a good explanation is, then how are they going to improve their ability to explain?

So, if there are colleagues who would like to find out more, what can they do in the meantime to find out?

There is a PLTS folder on the shared area with lots of links to documents such as the Guy Claxton books and useful websites. The group that has put together the tutor programme for 2010 is still meeting, so if you’d like to be involved in that and come to the meetings – lots of biscuits supplied – please do come to that, and otherwise, talking to any member of the team would be a good way forward.

THE BUZZ - Judy Sayers' practical classroom tips

The young swimmer struggles. She wants to swim the 100 metres more quickly...

The coach wants to help. She ties a rope around the swimmer and uses all her strength to tow her through the water. The coach is exhausted; the young swimmer is happy ...

For me this analogy, from Guy Claxton, captured how I felt about some of what I was doing in the classroom. If we wish to create independent learners, and surely we all do, we must hand over responsibility for leaning to young people. We all begin with an overpowering desire and ability to learn about everything in the world. What happens to the “Buzz?” I hope some of the ideas which follow might help in recapturing that Buzz. They have for me.

Mallet’s Mallet: Quick fire word-association game. One pupil says a word and the other then has to reply immediately with a word that is in some way inherently linked e.g: one may say ‘Islam’, the next may say ‘Mosque’, and so on. Only to be done in pairs.

Memorise: They look at a picture for 90 seconds. They then turn it over and they write a bullet point list of everything they saw in the picture.

Odd One Out : Give them four pictures and they have to say which is the odd one out (like ‘Have I got news for you?’)

Pass the Buck: Paired work drafting answer to situation with large paper and colours (5 minutes) – swap and carry on with another pairs work redrafting their answer – papers passed on and back to original authors. Open ended scenarios best.

Postcard summary: Summarise your learning to send by postcard to your friend – image on the front depicting the subject. Rwanda– ‘glad you are not here’ card. Abortion – ‘be glad I’m here’ card written by the foetus. Euthanasia – ‘wish I wasn’t here’ card. ‘Wish you were here’ for marriage.

Quotes Galore: Fill your classroom with all kinds of life quotes from the religious leaders, business gurus, celebrities etc. Place them on the ceiling, windows, all over the room. Particularly relevant ones for the GCSE course. Could a couple of decoy quotes that mean nothing. At certain points get class to search and find a relevant quote for the subject material.

Shout Out: Eg Topic on Buddhism. I read facts out – pupils shout out "Rubbish!" whenever they hear me mention anything that they think is untrue. The louder, the more foolish.

Spot the …: Can the pupils spot things in pictures. Alternatively – put numbers over pictures and ask the pupils what ‘number 3’ is etc.

Thumbometer: Arm out, fist clenched, thumb up for personal responses. Calling out Thumbs out’. To check instructions, test knowledge, gauge feelings, gather opinions. Could close their eyes if strong peer pressure.

Verbal Football: 2 teams and training (research) period. 3 correct answers (passes) and it’s a goal. Referee uses yellow and red cards.

Verbal Tennis: Students face each other in pairs and play word association with tennis scoring. Good lesson starter or informal test.

Back-to-Back: Students (A+B) sit back-to-back. A describes visual material and B draws it. Compare to original and swap roles.

Bingo: Pupils draw 9 square bingo grid. Choose from 12 topic keyterms. ‘Eyes down’ – call out definitions in random order. Pupils call out Bingo when they have one line, two lines and full house. Good for many technical terms. Variation – 16 Sq – 25 terms.

Chit-Chat: Can you talk for one minute on what you have learnt without stopping?

Co-operative Learning - TBo

Co-operative Learning is an approach to teaching which foregrounds students working in pairs and groups, high levels of engagement, participation and, erm, co-operation. It has been comprehensively branded by Dr Spencer Kagan, the US professor who first articulated the method, and who has presumably made stacks of cash from its global success; as a result, much of the literature and web-presence is a bit cheesy and commercial, which can be off-putting. However, its success cannot be denied, and those of us who have begun to experiment with Co-op have developed strong enthusiasm for the success, energy and fun it can bring to lessons.

Learning to use co-op will furnish your teaching with a range of student-centred structures and activities which are easy to use and which stick to a simple set of principles about learning. Kagan refers to these as the PIES principles, which state that activities which work well should promote:

· Positive interdependence (students need to work together to achieve a set goal or complete a task)

· Individual accountability (students have to play their role and are accountable to their group – without their input, the task can’t be completed)

· Equal participation (each student is expected to make an approximately equal contribution to the tasks)

· Simultaneous interaction (lots of students are active at any one time; lessons dominated by teacher-talk from the front are not encouraged!)

So in practice, what does it look like? To begin with a very simple structure, the teacher might replace traditional teacher-led Q and A with an activity such as Think, Pair, Share. In this structure, a question is posed, think time is given, then Student A is asked to explain their thoughts to Student B. Following this, Student B may be asked to explain A’s thinking to the rest of the class. That’s it – not rocket science, but very effective at creating an active buzz in the room, and avoiding the domination of the start of lessons by teacher-talk.

A slightly more complex structure could be Numbered Heads Together, where teams of 4 students are set an open ended, multiple answer question to investigate (could be anything: ‘why is this an effective piece of writing?’, ‘why are we here?’, ‘how can Science save the world’, ‘School uniform: good or bad?’, ‘which teacher has the worst dress sense?’. Students number up from 1 – 4, take think time, then stand up and huddle together – literally put their heads together – before each contributing their thoughts in turn. From here, they discuss their views until they agree on a team answer (a process which will involve some negotiation and compromise!). When they are agreed, they sit down, knowing that the teacher could call on any number to contribute, so they all need to be sure they understand their group’s view.

Of course, sometimes it works well, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all! Running co-op successfully certainly takes some practice, and a structure like Numbered Heads is likely to take a few goes before it runs smoothly. Learning to co-op has been compared to learning to drive; it’s a bit wobbly and anxiety-provoking at first, but you are soon whizzing along enjoying the ride. When it goes well, co-op lessons are brilliant – much more fun, much less tiring, much more productive and, when allied to the principles of Agile Teaching, there can be a real sense that the studentsare learning and making progress.

Hugh Nelson on Teacher Learning Communities

What are TLCs and how do they work?

TLC stands for teacher learning community. The idea behind TLCs is fairly simple; namely that the people best placed to develop learning and teaching in schools are teachers. Consultants come and go, suggest ideas of varying quality, they may even inspire us to try something new, but by and large they do not really fundamentally improve our practice because we don’t own the ideas being proposed. Therefore, as we return to our lessons after a nice training day we tend to return to our old habits because we are so busy that we just jump back on the treadmill. Hopefully TLCs can have a greater impact on improving the teaching of all colleagues because TLCs offer us the opportunity to personalise the development of our practice. For example; I am encouraged to identify any techniques, activities or actions that I want to develop. I can discuss these with my colleagues (people that inhabit the same teaching world that I do), try new ideas out and refine them. I could ask a colleague to observe part of, or a whole lesson. I decide what I would like feedback on; and the greatest consequence of something going wrong will be that I get a change to talk about what happened so I can decide what I need to do to make that activity better. I like the philosophy behind TLCs because it says; “we have excellent practitioners in this school, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience here and I have colleagues that are supportive and will help me to develop professionally”.

TLCs are a group of ten or 12 colleagues from different disciplines; within each TLC we are further divided into twos or threes. The idea is that each small group can support each other with our personal development. The larger group is there to help provide some accountability, to ensure that we do commit to trying something new by making us report back on what we have been trying to do. I suppose it is similar to a self help group; “Hi, my name’s Hugh and I have been trying to use lollipop sticks to help me with no-hands questioning with 9d4 for three weeks now.” Therefore if anyone else is trying out lollipop sticks we can share our trials and tribulations. It also gives others a chance to benefit from my experiences and find out what other departments are doing.

What prompted the decision to bring TLCs in at Cheney? How are they intended to benefit staff and students?

I attended a training course on Embedding Formative Assessment with Sylvia. We were both really impressed with not only the pedagogy but also the principles behind it. I also feel quite passionately that teaching is a profession and that as such we should be responsible for our own continuing professional development; both as individuals and as a teaching body. I get quite angry about the way the National Strategy tried to impose particular approaches on teachers such as the three part lesson or the literacy and numeracy hours. I don’t think there is any way that medicine would have allowed such high levels of government interference. I also think that TLCs give us an opportunity to talk about what we think we do well in our teaching and to celebrate this with colleagues. It gives us a chance to feel good about what we do and find out what others are doing. Teaching in many ways can be quite lonely, and we are not always aware of what is happening in the classroom next to us. This gives us a chance to demystify what happens in successful classrooms.

I hope that TLCs allow us to share best practice and to take a few risks in our teaching. I believe that we can all develop and try new things and that by having the confidence to try something new we can further improve the service we give to our students. I hope our students will benefit by getting the best learning and teaching that we can deliver.

What do colleagues have to do in order to get the benefit from the TLC programme?

Different people will get different things from the TLC programme. I think the more you put into it the more you will get out. TLCs are merely a platform that gives colleagues an opportunity to discuss what they currently do and what they might like to try in the future. Each individual sets their own areas for development and is responsible for their own development. Their colleagues are purely there to offer ideas and to respond to what is asked of them. Ideally, colleagues are asked to find the time to reflect on what they do and what they would like to do more of. If they can reflect honestly on what works well and what works less well and why that is, then I think they will benefit. If someone can go a little further and do some reading around their area of development or conduct a small research activity, then I think they will be even more informed and be better positioned to develop. We all know that it’s difficult to find time for reflection because we are all so busy; TLCs are in part an attempt to create a bit of time, a supportive environment and provide encouragement for reflection to take place.

What are the concerns about TLCs? What could go wrong and how can we avoid this?

I’m hopeful that TLCs will be well-received; with all new ideas it will take a bit of time before everyone feels entirely comfortable, but I hope that early anxieties, teething problems or worries about the process won’t translate into cynicism. It’s obvious from speaking to colleagues that we all want the best for their students and that teachers are keen to develop. As such I am confident that Cheney staff will be positive in their approach to TLCs. I suppose my real concern is that we all work so hard and give so much, (particularly as we often put the students’ needs before our own), that we don’t make time to plan for reflection and introducing new ideas.

The conundrum is; if we really want to put our students first, we have to put a little bit of time aside to put ourselves first.

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Using ICT to provide personalised feedback.m4v

Welcome to Agility - the Blog!

A big welcome to teachers, support staff, parents, students, and anyone else who might be interested in learning and teaching at Cheney School. This blog will be used to post articles, video, resources, news and ideas related to classroom practice at the school

Welcome to the first edition of Agility, the professional journal of Cheney School. The magazine and blog is intended to act as a vehicle for sharing best practice, swapping ideas, and to highlight examples of innovation, creativity and success from all parts of our school.

This journal is launched in the belief that the most successful organisations are characterised by a sharing culture, in which exchange and discussion of skills, ideas, knowledge and experiences is frequent and valued. There has been movement in this direction recently through, for example, the setting up of TLCs for next year, and it is hoped that this journal will make it easier for us all to learn from one another.

It is intended that the magazine contents will vary widely, but include reflections and reporting on practice and school life at Cheney, alongside research, news from other schools, personal reflections and more.

In terms of content, clearly the more staff who are able to contribute articles or experiences, the better, so please do get in touch if you have something to offer. The editorship is open to anyone, so if you’d like to have a go, just get in touch.

Recent additions include articles on PLTS and Co-operative learning, reports on innovative practice in History and Science, feedback from colleagues conducting research and more. We hope that it is of interest!

TBo