At Lift Kingswood we believe that students have a right to be taught excellent lessons 100% of the time. We maintain high standards of Teaching and Learning through a mixture of monitoring, challenging and developing our teachers and students.
We have a key document entitled ‘The Kingswood Teaching and Learning Standard’ which outlines what we expect to see in lessons where students are making excellent progress. Teachers are able to use this as a basis for planning and leaders refer to it when monitoring the quality of teaching across the Academy.
Our Kingswood Teaching and Learning Standard is framed in the context of three areas:
Classroom Culture
Precise Planning
Assessment for Learning
These areas provide a purposeful framework for monitoring the quality of teaching and learning, giving feedback, planning good lessons, CPD and coaching discussions.
We monitor the quality of teaching and learning through regular informal drop-ins. We have an open door approach which allows leaders across the Academy to drop-in to lessons at any point during the day.
As one of our Key Drivers is ‘Value Feedback’ we recognise the importance of regular helpful feedback that looks for ways to improve and doesn’t dwell on mistakes.
All of our staff take part in regular CPD that is designed specifically to help them reflect on ways to improve their individual teaching. We have an academy-wide CPD programme that runs every Wednesday, with the majority of sessions focused on Teaching and Learning.
All of our Middle Leaders also have additional CPD meetings that have a heavy Teaching and Learning focus
Trainee teaching staff also have an additional CPD session each Thursday to fully support them through their training programmes.
All teachers actively use IRIS Connect software to record lessons and receive feedback from colleagues. We use the software to provide an opportunity for self-reflection and development in an informal way. This has proved to be really beneficial in giving teachers time to discuss their own teaching and get different viewpoints on how to develop. From this process we have also been able to create ‘clips of excellence’ folders. These clips are of our staff, with our students, in our context; these have been extremely powerful in ensuring all staff have access to examples of excellent practice in our setting. These are regularly shared in CPD sessions and available to staff at all times.
Staff are provided with carefully selected books which contain the most up to date research in modern pedagogy. Staff regularly read these books and they form part of our IRIS triads and CPD sessions.