This week’s learning walk focussed on 6th Form. Once again I would like to thank those staff that had us visit their lessons. It has been a really informative experience and it was great to see so much good practice.
Good practice was witnessed in terms of exam preparation including the use of individualised tasks, for example:
§ students working silently on different tasks depending on their personal progress through preparatory assignments
§ students being encouraged to reflect on their preparation and self-rate their readiness
§ analysis of exam questions focusing on collaborative decision-making regarding what ideas to employ (rather than actually answering questions – enabling students to cover a large number of questions and ideas quickly)
§ clear evidence of detailed understanding of the requirements of exam questions in the questions posed by students.
§ In some lessons fast-paced teacher-led whole-class teaching was clearly engaging more able students, and eliciting plenty of evidence of their progress, but seemed to leave those with less confidence unsupported. This gives us some things to think about.
Therefore, the 6th Form learning walk does raise questions on how best we support students to become effective independent learners. In particular how we develop practice to ensure that students are being given the targeted feedback they need to move their learning forward in a way that they are able to digest and take action on.
There was variation in the visibility of feedback on students’ work in their folders. There were some very good examples of marking in some subject folders – linked to assessment objectives, clear targets for improvement and reference to overall trends in improvement of an individual student’s written work. Often marked work was not prominent in students folders though; perhaps during exam preparation the relevance and usefulness of work with teachers’ feedback could be emphasised, with students encouraged to keep marked work in one place in their folders for ease of reference when working on new practice questions. There was an excellent example of intervention in response to concerns over independent study in an AS subject where, a student who underperformed in a progress test was given a tracking sheet on which to log hours of work to be done out of lessons, with parents informed. The result is that students weren’t always able to clearly articulate what they needed to do in order to improve their work, or how feedback from their teachers helped them to do so; although this was generally a strength across the lessons observed.
We probably need to do some thinking about how effectively we use our lesson time. There were several examples of students working in silence on exam questions. In many ways this is a purposeful use of time, the student has to do the question under supervised conditions and the teacher can monitor how they seem to be using that time. For example, how much time do they spend planning, writing or day dreaming? However, this work does come at the cost of ‘lost’ teaching time. Also well motivated and organised students often create mock exam conditions to work on answers independently, but less organised students often need a structure to help them to this. Once suggestion has been to provide a supervised study room which could be booked by subject teachers for classes to do mock questions at set times. This might be a more effective use of time, but the subject teacher would lose the ability to make judgements by watching the students work. Please put any thoughts on the comments section.
Finally, thank you for everything that you are doing, everyone is working hard and wants the best for their students. This learning walk has thrown up some things for us to think about and by airing these ideas it will help us try to further develop and improve our provision.
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