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.