Teachmeet @ Cheney School Wednesday 12 June 2013

 On Wednesday 12^th June 2013 Cheney School held its first Teachmeet event.  Thank you to Dr Rob Bown for organising this; I have no idea how he finds the time do these wonderful things.  I would also like to thank everyone that presented. It is not easy to come and present ideas to colleague, but it was a fantastic evening and a wonderful way to share best practice.  I left for home a little overawed by the range of ideas, but I was buoyed by the experience and reassured that I do the most wonderful job with the most wonderful people.  Teachers and teaching is so regularly bashed in the press – if only they would come and see what we do first hand; I am sure this would melt their cynicism.

Below are my notes.  They are far from perfect and a little more really than a list of presenters.  My apologies if anyone is misrepresented.  If this is the case; please let me know, advise me of what should be there and I will update the post.

Hannah Tyreman who presented also shares her experiences on her blog: 

http://hannahruthtyreman.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/tmoxford/

Welcome

Jolie Kirby Headteacher of Cheney School Opening

Rob Bown Languages AST Chair

Presentations

Sir Tim Brighouse

Features of excellent schools

·         Teachers talk about teaching

·         Teachers observe each other’s progress

·         Teachers teach each other

·         Teachers plan together- these are the success criteria for a high functioning department.

 

Helene Galdin-O'Shea

Walk through my last Ofsted Lesson – the magic happened in the lesson when the students got stuck into a silent debate .

Claire Hamnett  Science AST

Speed dating for learning

Sophie Burrows film

Film Club presentation

Tom Boulter

I can't take my eyes off YouTube; how using teacher videos accelerates learning because students can revisit explanations and work at their own pace.

 

Carina Byles

Using mobile technology be encouraging students to use texting so we can poll classes, www.polleverywhere.com

Amjad Ali

The power of Poundland Pedagogy - using raffle tickets, share and replace board, post-it note corrections for spellings, director of learning - make trailers for learning using iMovie. Think tax and knowledge bank.  Balloons and so much more…. check out his blog at bulmershetoolkit.blogspot.co.uk  and twitter - @ASTsupportaali

Macro Pontecorvi

The UFGWPA

Andy Wright

Literacy and thinking skills are intertwined.

Maximise marking by:

They check/ friend checks/ teacher checks- 3 way check with all work to reinforce the importance of editing and making corrections.

Rob Bown AST languages

Michel Thomas learning

Simon Davis

Thinking hats and self evaluation 

Hannah Tyreman 

Ict resources -  Padlet.  Today's meet.  Thoughtboxes.  info.gram.  S'more. Check Follow her on Twitter  @hannahtyreman

James Gurung

Celebrate making mistakes, because it is an essential part of learning.

Keven Bartle

@kevbartle Pedagogy leaders

Matt Gray

Mr Gray's Blog - http://cherwellenglish.typepad.com/  Thinking Squares an alternative to mind maps. Backward engineering. Works well with Bloom's taxonomy. 

Alexia Uhia

Using mobile phones in the class. Ipadio.com

Rebecca Bartlett

Killer questions - students questioning each other.  Ideal for homework - research a question that students think no-one else can answer; this has to be related to the topic being studied and students have to know the answer.  Use the killer question as a plenary, when using this for the first time lead as a group activity to get the concept of killer questions.  Ask the question, pick three people to answer, and get a reward if no one can.  Keep a tally to reward the people who collect the most unanswered questions.

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