More successful learning was taking place where:
- Challenge was provided in every task - no opportunities for challenge and bringing student attention to excellence were missed. For example, in one Science lesson, students were drawing out a diagram of an experiment, and an emphasis from the teacher on quality, precision and accuracy at every stage, alongside careful modelling of what was expected, meant that students were able to produce excellent work and make progress.
- In English, excellent use of simple but challenging success criteria was sued to guide students towards quality and excellence, referring to ‘increasing precision’ etc. This only required handwriting on the board, and was referred to as ‘remember to / aim for’, rather than clunky slides of dense text.
- In RS, Literacy Mats were being used very effectively to help challenge students to produce excellent writing, by using precise language and developing their ideas.
In MFL, the teacher was capitalising on a very clearly structured and substantial task, to enable her to spend time giving quality individual feedback to individuals.
Learning appeared less successful when:
- low-value, unchallenging tasks were given and completed in the same way by all students in the group, with little or no sense or modelling of how to achieve excellence in the task. It was notable that, where ‘this is how to do it really well’ was not explicitly addressed by the teacher, PP / SEND students were often unable to make good progress.
- Group work was set with little structure or sense of purpose, leading to students focusing excessively on presentation / drawing out titles, or for some students to complete the work whilst other group members sat back.
Key question:
- How are we bringing attention to quality and excellence for every task that we give the students to complete? How do we do this in a way which is slick and doesn't take too long to explain?
