- Use of the 5 B’s in Geography - when faced with a problem, Students are encouraged to consult their Book, Buddy, Brain, and Board BEFORE sticking their hands up and consulting the BOSS - develops student independence / resilience.
-Some very effective use of Mini-whiteboards was seen in Maths to get quick feedback from students, at which point the teacher was able to make decisions about whether to move on or to re-clarify teaching points. Some writing about AFL refers to this type of questioning as using ‘Hinge Questions’ - an account of what it’s like to try to build this area into your practice can be found in this teacher’s very readable blog here .
- Learning intentions in a Science lesson were deliberately not shared with students prior to the class taking part in a practical experiment - as a result, students had to work out and explain what they were learning themselves, and an exciting sense of enquiry was generated.
We could work on:
- Continue to work on embedding and experimenting with success criteria and modelling on a task-to-task basis in lessons - how can we give students a sense of what quality looks like, in a way which is manageable and effective?
- Literacy and SEN - developing strategies to make sure that texts used in lessons are accessible and appropriate for SEN students in particular, eg by breaking them up, providing texts at different levels of difficulty, explaining key vocabulary prior to reading. We will aim to provide some training / guidance on this in the near future.
