Dan spoke to us about Friday Fives as part of his INSET session. A totally simple, yet great way to build relationships with groups. Taking a moment on Friday (or any day) to contact home with praise can be a huge game changer. Try filling out five praise postcards on a Friday and getting these […]
Read more "Friday Fives"To was great to reflect on adaptive teaching as part the INSET day today. We considered how every individual student learns differently and this is affected by a range of factors, including prior knowledge, ability and motivation. Students are very diverse and all at different rates, requiring different levels of support from teachers to succeed. […]
Read more "Adaptive Teaching"Over the course of last year we began structuring our whole T&L drive towards Rosenshine’s Effective Principles of Instruction. We reworked our own teaching and learning policy in light of these principles. As part of our lesson visit programme we captured some truly brilliant practice over the course of the year, which exemplify the principles […]
Read more "Our Pedagogy Toolkit"In the past few months, it’s great to see more and more colleagues using visualiers in their day-to-day practice. The benefits of using a visualiser are huge, summed up nicely by @teachertoolkit who shares: ‘Using a visualiser can transform subject-knowledge into real, evident understanding, using examples from (students/work in) the classroom. Most importantly, a visualiser […]
Read more "Visualisers"On our lesson visits last week, it was great to see a good deal of teacher-led questioning. Sherrington (2019) defines questioning as the ‘frontline in formative assessment’. It really is the best way to gauge understanding, encourage review, probe deeper and extend thinking. The best kind of questioning is targeted. The very best, according to […]
Read more "Cold Calling & The No Opt Out Questioner"It’s been great to see more practice around interleaving during the last series of lesson visits. Interleaving refers to the sequencing learning tasks so that learning concepts are interspersed rather than being consecutive. This results in a more variable and challenging experience but is associated with benefits in terms of memory and transfer (Kang, 2016). A good way […]
Read more "The Importance of Interleaving"This past term we’ve begun looking closely at Rosenshine’s principles of instruction (download below). Rosenshine suggests effective classroom practice involves much of the following (Sherrington, 2019*): 1. Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning2. Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step3. Limit the amount of material students […]
Read more "Rosenshine’s Teaching & Learning Principles"When we think about professional learning, our first thoughts might go to all those twilights, courses and INSET days that we’ve attended over the years that didn’t quite work. We’ve all had to sit through hours of training that just hasn’t quite cut it for one reason or another. Ineffective CPL encompasses much of the following: […]
Read more "The Thinking behind our CPL"Our CPL year came to an end last week, culminating in a wonderfully collaborative Nano Meet. Summed up nicely in Alan’s plenary talk, the event was designed simply to give us space as colleagues to talk, reflect and critique. Alan reminded us of Wiliam’s notion that ‘everything works somewhere/nothing works everywhere’ and also Warren Little’s […]
Read more "Our CPL Year"Teachers ask around 400 questions every day, which adds up to a staggering 70,000 a year. Most of these are low cognitive questions and it’s important to consider how to make these questions more effective in developing pupils’ learning. One way is to add variety to you questioning strategies. For example, randomly select pupils – […]
Read more "Questioning Ideas"
KEVICC CPL 