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