Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 21st November 2011

Learning Walks

Week Beginning Monday 21^st November 2011

This was our final week of learning walks this term.  Thank you to everyone that has been visited.  I feel that we have learned a tremendous amount about the quality of learning and teaching at school.  I have tried to reflect what we have seen in a positive and open way, but at the same time raise the issues that we need to think about as we look to develop.  Hopefully this process and this blog have been informative and thought provoking to individual colleagues as they have been planning their lessons as well as for curriculum leaders.    We will return to our Learning Walks in the New Year. 

This week we have been visiting year 9 lessons to look at Learning Intentions, Success Criteria and Metacognition.  As with the last couple of weeks, this post will hopefully promote some discussion on how best we share our learning objectives and success criteria with students.  Suggestions and comments on how to develop best practice will be gratefully received.

Some really good quality practice has been witnessed this week.  Some learning intentions focussed really carefully on what was being learned rather than on what was expected to be done.  In the best cases, the language used to frame learning intentions explicitly focussed on learning as a skill and modelled the desired language that teachers were looking for pupils to use when discussing learning.  Successful learning intentions were able to unpack different layers of learning which helped sign post differentiation.  It was also good to see links to previous lessons and learning being explicitly shared with students.  Well constructed learning intentions helped frame what success looks like for pupils.  The role of classroom discussion was also well used by colleagues to regularly link tasks and thinking back to the lesson’s learning intentions; at its best this discussion focussed on learning as a process.  Good quality feedback was also witnessed in lessons and in exercise books, this feedback helped pupils make sense of how they were doing and what they needed to do to make progress.

However, although some excellent practice was witnessed we still have work to do to ensure that high quality learning intentions are a consistent feature of teaching across the school.  Some learning intentions still focus on the tasks we want pupils to complete rather than on what we want them to learn.  It is good to see that learning intentions are a regular feature to lessons, but we now need to think about how we develop and refine them.

Once again, thank you to everyone for helping in the learning walks process.  This week 14 lessons were visited.

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 14th November 2011

Learning Walks

Week Beginning Monday 14^th November 2011

This week we have been visiting year 8 lessons to look at Learning Intentions, Success Criteria and Metacognition.  As with last week, this week’s post will hopefully promote some discussion on how best we share our learning objectives and success criteria with students.  Suggestions and comments on how to develop best practice will be gratefully received.

The practice witnessed this week was really impressive.  There were lots of really good examples of learning intentions being shared with students.  On the whole it is fair to say that in this learning walk the majority of students knew what they were trying to learn and what they needed to do to be successful.  On occasions success criteria were framed in the context of work being “skilled” or “excellent”.   In addition to this there were really good examples of students being encouraged to think about why work achieved a particular grade or about the reasoning behind taking a particular approach to a task or problem.  However, as a school we still have work to do to ensure that there is consistency to our practice.

18 lessons were visited this week.

We have one more round of learning walks beginning on the 21^st November then over the next few weeks we are going to have a break. This is to try to help create a little space to give everyone time to arrange and organise their lesson observations.  We would like all members of staff to have had their first lesson observation by the time we break up for Christmas.  It is important that we do this as it provides you with important evidence in support of your performance management.  We will return to our learning walks after the holidays.

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 7th November 2011

Learning Walks

Week Beginning Monday 7^th November 2011

This week we have been visiting year 10 lessons to look at Learning Intentions, Success Criteria and Metacognition.  This week’s post will hopefully promote some discussion on how best we share our learning objectives and success criteria with students.  I am not sure that I will be providing many answers, so as with last week if you have suggestions on how to develop best practice; then please post a comment.

There were many examples of learning intentions and success criteria being shared with students. Most students were able to explain what they were doing and why they working on a particular task.  In addition they were able to talk about what they needed to do to complete this task successfully.  This was most common when activities were task or process driven.  Students were also able to talk about how tasks and skills related to their exam work or coursework.  The awareness students are showing regarding their course requirements is really good.

Students were less confident about explaining what skills they were developing and why these were important beyond the classroom experience, however, this was not the case in every lesson.   On occasions, teachers had clearly shared their learning intentions with their students, but the students had either forgotten or could not quite remember in detail what these were.  In lessons where students are developing a set body of knowledge, skills and understanding over a series of lessons, it becomes even more important to think through how the learning objectives and success criteria are revisited to keep these issues at the forefront of students’ learning.   How we solve this is a key challenge for us as it is not appropriate to have students copy learning objectives and success criteria down, nor is it possible to permanently have them displayed on a PowerPoint.  The goal is to enable students to know what it is they are trying to learn and to be able to evaluate how well they are doing this, without them having to rely on a prompt to be able to explain this. Students that can do this are developing their metacognative skills, and our challenge is to get all students to be able to improve their ability to become more independent learners.

17 lessons were visited this week.

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 31st October 2011

Learning Walks

Week Beginning Monday 31^st October 2011

Over the next few weeks we are going to be exploring the use of Learning Intentions, Success Criteria and how Metacognition fit into lessons.  Hopefully this feedback will help us develop and build on the work done in our TLCs.  Most of the lessons visited this week were year 7 classes.  Where year 10s were seen this information will be fed into next week’s learning walk.

There were some really good examples of learning intentions and success criteria being used in lessons.  These were often shared with students at the beginning of lessons.  However, there were few comments from colleagues conducting the learning walk about how learning intentions and success criteria were constructed; there was also little reference to what was more or least effective.  This is something we need to explore more deeply.

When a lesson was in progress and the teacher had moved on from sharing learning intentions; students were asked the following types of question to try to work out how well they understood the learning intentions and success criteria for the lesson.

·         What was it they were learning?

·         What skills were they developing?

·         Why were they doing a task?

·         How did they know how well they were doing?

Clearly these questions were not asked in a rigid manner and were part of a conversation about their lesson.

What seems to be coming through from this week’s learning walk is that the students were often very clear on what they were being asked to do.  They also tended to be able to explain what they had to do to complete a task and how they would know when the task was completed.  They were less clear about why they were being asked to complete a task and what skills they were developing as they were working. 

Some tentative thoughts from this are that we need to ensure that we share the bigger picture with our students.  It helps them to understand why they are learning something and how it fits into the course or into the skills they will need to be successful in life.  We should also be looking to try to share the reasoning process on why we might take a particular approach to solving a problem.  This might be achieved by allowing students to come up with different approaches to solving a problem, then exploring which approach was most effective and working out why this was.  Finally, sometimes students might not have been clear on what the learning intention was because it was displayed at the start and had then disappeared as other information was put on the board.  I am not sure how we solve this one.  It seems that students would benefit from being able to refer back to their learning intentions but equally I think imposing rigid system for sharing learning intentions or making students copy these out would be a backwards step.  If you have any ideas on how to solve this one, please do offer a comment.

12 lessons were visited this week.