Pedex issue 8

This issue‌

Issue 8.

December 2015

Loyalty Cards The inaugural Sixth Form Teaching and Share ideas and great Learning Conference displays from our Encouraging a College & beyond!

Growth Mindset approach.

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Pedagogy exchange - steeped in practice

‘‘ Jacqui Fowkes

Sixth Form Teaching and Learning Conference

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n September Year 12 took part in the first student learning conference at All Hallows, designed to promote effective learner behaviours in our students. Once students had got over the novelty of free sweets and water (!), they took to the tasks with professionalism and the conference was a great success.

Students explored research surrounding a growth mindset (what it is, why it is important and how it can be developed) and some famous failures who had persisted despite multiple setbacks.

Students found it interesting to look at examples of people who we often see as having success come naturally to them – musicians and sports people – yet actually hours and hours of intense, tailored practice takes place behind the scenes to make this happen.

The first student learning conference at All Hallows designed to promote effective learner behaviours.

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Students explored research ‘‘surrounding a growth mindset

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ey messages that students took away from this was the importance of effort, embracing challenges and learning to grow from their mistakes.

Students then applied this to a series of scenarios they might face in sixth form, including organisation of their files, time management and effective use of free time and study periods.

At the end of the session students reflected on everything they had discussed over the afternoon and wrote a letter to their future self. In this letter they made promises about their learning, what they would do when they got into difficulty, how they would approach assessments and how they would strive to develop a growth mindset. Letters will be returned to students later in the year to allow them to reflect on their progress and see whether they have met the challenges they set for themselves.

Students took photographs of each other displaying what they thought was the key piece of advice/support they had gained from the session. These photographs will be displayed in the common room to remind students of the promises they have made regarding their learner behaviours. Hopefully this will help to develop even more successful learners in our sixth form students!

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Classroom Spy! Bite size TES

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Extract from September 2015

earning with Play-Doh How could you apply this?

‘When students arrive at their desks, they find some Play-Doh and the name of an animal on a piece of paper, with an instruction to keep their animal a secret.

Students must build their animals within a time limit.

They soon begin to realise that they all have the same animal – a Cat. Then I guide them through some probing questions to work out how they knew they had the same animal in spite of the ‘artistic’ differences. After compiling a list of features that make up a cat’s ‘cattiness’, I ask the students to mould a cat without these features.

Finally, I give the class an adapted extract or starting point and ask them to write a short paragraph explaining the link between the key features and the success of the task.

Interactive and exciting in our RE Classroom’s!

Ideas to promote thoughtful reflection and peaceful thinking time.

Twitter steals Assess prior learning and engage learners by challenging students to complete the formulae by finding the correct half of the egg.

Colourful and visual!

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Action Research Alex Cook

Book Review

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Talk-Less Teaching

he concept of talking less in our teaching is one which appeals to most of us and I was certainly no exception to this! The simple message of this book is that whilst we think we are imparting great skills and knowledge, how are we actually engaging students and checking their progress? Rather than students being passengers in lessons they can become responsible for their own learning.

I challenged myself to develop strategies from the book to try and to create a bank of resources to help me talk less and students learn more!

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ne of my favourite strategies was ‘Learning Detectives’. A great way to support students who needed help visualising what the next step in developing their work looked like as well as stretching more able students to identify ways to refine their work.

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learn new skills ‘‘ Students without you developing lecture-laryngitis ’’

iving students a camera to record successful outcomes and hard work allowed students to learn from each other, review and refine their work and create a buzz in the classroom.

Email: Staffalc for copies of resources.

Skitch A simple iPad app that allows you to visually feedback on students work

APPLY

Latest Tech

Engaging, visual, preserves students work PedEx Issue. 8 Pg.3

standards through ‘‘ Raising classroom assessment. ’’ Sophie Harrison

Loyalty Cards

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n my head I am constantly an activator and challenger for all of my students.

They enter my room desperate to learn especially if it’s a challenge. An unfortunate stumbling block to my ideal are the handful of students who do not want to be ‘motivated’ and ‘challenged’.

I was inspired to strive to change this when reading the book ‘Engaging Learners’. The book suggested building student competency through the use of loyalty cards.

Letting students know that they are doing things well and that they are on a journey to their desired destination helps them to remember that they are not starting from scratch. This motivates them to continue with a challenging task, or to reflect on and make improvements to work they thought they had completed .

Furthermore students can really make progress if they know where they are going wrong, building a ‘can do’ to help students to own and share their mistakes.

clear progression in student ‘‘ownership and self-management ’’

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fter the February Half Term I chose two classes where motivation was low, in other words students were doing the bare minimum or failing to complete work requiring me to ‘chase things up’ .

Before presenting the classes with the loyalty cards I created a questionnaire to be completed before and after the research in order to demonstrate whether the loyalty cards had an impact on their competency levels.

The KS3 class and KS4 class responded in different ways initially, with the KS4 class being particularly dismissive at first. However it took just one student to achieve a stamp for the rest of the class to take the cards more seriously.

There was clear progression in student ownership and self-management as a result of making the terms ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’ more explicit.

Furthermore it created a more optimistic atmosphere as students began to achieve more than expected.

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to make progress more ‘‘ waysvisible to students. ’’

Loyalty Cards

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was encouraged to look at other ways to make progress more visible to students – complementing the TEEP learning cycle and supporting my own growth mindset. There is plenty of additional evidence to show that loyalty cards have been used successfully elsewhere. These includes tweets from fellow practitioner @MissKMcD which shows her use of loyalty cards in Mathematics within her School. Sarah Mellor used loyalty cards in Dance to turn specific learning tasks into an explicit journey for the pupils to strive to complete. In May Sarah and I were given the opportunity to lead a workshop at All Hallows Learning Conference Day and following the positive feedback we received from both students and staff, the loyalty cards are to be trialed with Year 7 this academic year. A slight adaptation to postcards means that one of the rewards is parental gratification – a powerful tool!

Questionnaire Results Q. What makes you want to do well?

Before: “drawing”; “if it is something I am

good at”; “flight paths and assessment”

After: “completing all the stages on my

loyalty card”; “showing Miss what I can do”; “finding out I am good at something new”

Questionnaire Results Q. What gets you rewards?

Before: “good work”; “being quiet and

listening to the teacher”

After: “challenging myself/pushing myself”;

“putting more time into revision to get full marks in spelling test”; “doing more than what is expected of me”

Q. How do you know you’re making progress?

Before: “Asking the teacher”; “if it’s easy” After: “achieving something I thought I couldn’t”; “I can explain rather than describe”

– a powerful ‘‘ parental gratification tool! ’’

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ohn Hattie’s emphasis on the crucial importance of both feedback and challenge in outstanding teaching and learning seems appropriate. Competent learning requires planning and communication to make the idea of challenges explicit and visible from the outset. I believe that loyalty cards are a simple and valuable method of doing just that..

Let me know what you think!

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Top tweets from the world of Teaching & Learning

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