Focus for Learning Walks: Student Engagement
Reflections from Learning Walks between 9th – 27th January 2012 – 32 lessons visited, with 9 colleagues taking part on walks. Many thanks to all those involved in piloting this process.
Areas of strength:
- fantastic relationships between students and teachers was apparent in the vast majority of walks – students were engaged by the warmth, patience and humour displayed by teachers.
- Learning objectives which were engaging, clear, and well-understood by students. This was backed up with passionate, expert delivery of subject knowledge – in many lessons students were engaged through the expertise and enthusiasm of the teachers.
- There was some very effective use of mini-whiteboards to gather student responses – this allowed students to work in pairs to reach an answer, and allowed the teacher to see very clearly which pairs had grasped the concepts and which hadn’t.
Area to develop:
Questioning for engagement
One are in which we could develop our provision is questioning for engagement, looking for enhancement to teacher-led Q and A / whole group discussion. A key area seems to be the structuring of questioning to engineer high levels of participation, engagement and accountability from the students - how can we make sure that they are all required to answer and engage with the questions they are asked in class?
One strategy might be the use of whiteboards as detailed above. Other approaches might be through using Co-operative Learning structures. I'll link some training to the end of this post, and distribute powerpoint resources and structures which are adaptable to questioning in any subject.
Further training and guidance is available on www.cherwelllearning.blogspot.com by clicking here. If there are other strategies that you've used and you know work, please let me know and I will share, or leave a comment on this post.
Thanks,
Tom
Co-operative Learning Training available here
Questioning / Moving the Middle Presentation here
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