Learning Walks Term 1: September to October 2012

Thank you to everyone that took part in last term's learning walks.  They are an essential part of our practice and really help in 

• enabling students to see teachers supporting each other
• sharing best practice 
• giving us all a feel for what is going on around our school.  

Just to reassure you we are not grading learning walks.

Last term has been an excellent start to the learning year.  There are a lot of excellent things going on and the quality of learning and teaching is continuing to improve.  Thank you for all of your hard work and your commitment to developing best practice.

Our evidence shows that behaviour around the school and particularly in lessons is very good and we have seen high levels of engagement among students.  Incidences of poor behaviour affecting lessons have been rare.  We have to continue to be consistent in our approaches to managing classroom behaviours and would encourage all staff to use the 'hands up' signal when gaining the attention of groups in years 7 and 8.  Please continue to be rigorous with ensuring that uniform is correct and insist on students wearing their jackets.  It is this attention to detail that helps reinforce our high expectations and aspirations for our students. All colleagues made a tremendous effort with this at the beginning of the year and I am sure this attention to detail contributed in better student attitudes.

The strongest lessons have been characterized by really effective planning.  In many lessons learning objectives have been clear and shared with students helping them know what they are trying to learn and clarifying how they are going to learn.   We have seen prompt starts to lesson and good use of 'do now activities' or DNAs.  These have helped settle classes and get lessons off to a purposeful start.  However, as with many things consistency is key to ensuring that students meet our expectations and we do need to continue to embed DNAs, learning objectives and success criteria in our practice.

During lessons students are often active and engaged and there have been lessons where learning has been personalized and independent with students being stretched and challenged.  Good use has been made of AfL techniques such as no hands questioning and using mini whiteboards and traffic light cards to check understanding.  Also tools such as the online stop watch has been used to good effect to ensure that tasks are time bound ensuring good pace within the lesson.

Departments are making strong inroads in addressing literacy and are supporting learning by focusing on key terminology and are supporting this with wall displays and desk mats.  However, as with all things we are on a journey with this initiative. We need to continue to develop our approach by looking beyond spelling and key words by developing strategies to extend writing and by challenging students to answer questions using formal language.

Finally, thank you for all your hard work and for all the support that you give to our students.

Student guide to learning at Cheney

We all work hard to do the best we can in the classroom.  And you know what - it is appreciated!

Here Cheney students tell us about their experience of learning.  And the sub-text is they greatly value what we do!

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 18th June 2012

This week the best lessons showed some really excellent practice; with students being stretched and challenged.  The following key ingredients were witnessed in all classes where students were learning most successfully:

• §  The teacher was very well organised and the lesson was thoughtfully planned.
• §  Classroom routines were well established with high expectations and students understood what was expected of them.
• §  There were positive relationships between the teacher and the class.
• §  Tasks and activities were well matched to the students’ learning.
• §  The students were being challenged to think and learn.
• §  The teacher had planned thoughtfully how to assess how well the students were doing.

What is clear is that where routines and high expectations are not well established students were less well focussed and the learning was hampered by some low level disruption.  This even happened where tasks were well thought through and were matched to students’ abilities.  It is important that:

• §  Colleagues ensure that bags are put on the floor, or stored in appropriate spaces.
• §  Colleagues insist on silence when they are presenting to their groups.
• §  Teachers review seating plans if behaviour is not where they want it to be.
• §  Teachers direct the TA’s in their lessons.

There are lots of tools and tricks we can use to constantly assess how students are doing.  However, as I have suggested above, it is best to use these regularly and build them into classroom routines and this can take time.  For example, if you are going to insist on no hands questioning, you will have to persevere with this until it becomes habit both for you and your students.  Initially they will continue to put their hands up and you will have to constantly reinforce your standards until it becomes second nature.  Some suggestions to help develop strategies for minute by minute assessment are:

• §  Use lollipop sticks to randomize who answers a question (this could be an electronic version).
• §  Use mini white boards to see pupils thinking.
• §  Use the traffic light cards in planners to see who gets it – totally, a bit or not at all.
• §  Ask students to nominate the next person to answer a question.
• §  Ask a student to repeat or build on what the previous person said.
• §  Chose a student to summarize the main learning from the lesson (just let them know they will be doing this at the start).

Finally, thank you for all your hard work.  I know it is close to the end of the year and we are still all working really hard.  But it is this relentless drive to be the best we can be that means our students do get a ‘good deal’ from us. 

We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. Aristotle

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 14th May 2012

This week twelve different lessons were seen.  The best learning was active, purposeful and challenging, giving opportunity for analysis and reflection.  This was good to see.  Some lessons could have been more effective with:

§  less teacher talk

§  more challenging activities for students

§  further planning for questioning activities to prevent students from being passive during discussion work

The effectiveness of learning varied between lessons, therefore we have to work hard to ensure that we have as much consistency as possible as we try to ensure that all students have first class learning opportunities. 

We have a really clear learning and teaching policy that we have branded Agile Teaching.  This can be found in our Agile Teaching Handbook.  This is a really useful document that not only sets out our policy but also gives guidance on PLTS and sets out teachers’ and students’ expectations for learning entitled Cheney Expects.  Further to this document we have updated our homework policy.  These documents are available on Agility the Blog! http://cheneyagility.blogspot.co.uk/   

In addition we have tried to supplement our own learning and teaching initiatives by distributing multiple copies of Jackie Beere’s The Perfect Ofsted Lesson and Jim Smith’s The Lazy Teacher.  I am raising this because I believe that Learning Walks are evidencing that learning happens best when we apply the principles of formative assessment sometimes referred to as assessment for learning.  This is the approach to teaching that we have adopted through Agile Teaching.  Thus it is important that we are all familiar with our policy and build its principles into our planning. 

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 7th May 2012

Thank you again to everyone for their hard work so far this year.  Everyone is working hard as we prepare for exams and as we try to finish off BTEC folders.  Fewer lessons were visited this week and the length of this post will reflect this.

The question of how best to motivate our students is a key issue we all face.  Preparing for an exam or finishing off a course often provides a little extra motivation which helps us keep students focussed and involved in their work.  But this is not always possible; particularly if you are teaching Key Stage 3 where you have no such external motivators.

What is clear is that our students are most engaged and learn best when they are encouraged to get down to tasks quickly, when they are set challenging activities and are encouraged to be independent.  Admittedly this is no easy task, but colleagues have had success by:

§  finding ways to make things fun such as introducing games to promote learning

§  introducing competition and teamwork

§  finding leadership opportunities for students to take control of tasks or give feedback on tasks

§  being relentlessly positive, aspirational and by giving lots of praise

Learning has been less effective when there has been a lack of pace or challenge to lessons or when activities have not been matched to the abilities of the students.  In such circumstances students have passed up the learning opportunities made available to them.

If you have any top tips, fail safe games that could be used or anything that will add a bit of fun into a lesson then please post your ideas the comments section below.

Learning Walks: Week Beginning Monday 30th April 2012

This week’s learning walk focussed on 6^th 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 6^th 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.

Week Beginning Monday 16th to Friday 27th April 2012

Learning walks are up and running again and thank you to all colleagues that were visited over the last two weeks.  This term the leadership team will try to encourage colleagues to come round with us so you may find that you have two of us in your room.  We are doing this because we are trying to create more opportunities for teachers to see what happens outside their subject areas.  It is also a good opportunity for us to discuss what Leadership are doing when we are on a learning walk.  This is an attempt to make the whole process more transparent and hopefully it will help stimulate discussion about good learning and teaching.

I have merged the feedback from the last two weeks as we only did a limited number.  I also apologise for being slow in publishing our observations; I will try to be quicker next time.

There has been a lot of really good practice seen.  Lots of active and purposeful work is being done by students.  We have seen some really good examples of Learning Objectives and Success criteria being used.  Literacy has also been at the forefront of colleagues work with teachers ensuring that students understand subject terminology and key words.  It is clear that some students are having an excellent experience.  The challenge for us is to try to ensure that all students are active and engaged in their learning.  In several lessons it was the same pupils answering questions during discussion.  Here we need to try to use strategies to encourage all students to take part; this could be achieved by using a random name generator, lollypop sticks, getting students to nominate the next person to answer a question or simply only allowing a pupil to answer one question. Be confident about planning in some wait time and using no hands questioning techniques when holding discussions.

Finally; well done I really appreciate how hard everyone is working and how much of your time you give to your students, particularly those who are preparing for exams.