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.