At Lift Kingswood, we believe every student has the right to an exceptional education 100% of the time. We achieve this by fostering a culture of high standards in the classroom with a dedication to the continuous development of our staff.
Our ‘Teaching & Learning Standard’ is the blueprint for excellence across the Academy. 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. It ensures that every lesson, regardless of the subject, is built upon three fundamental pillars:
Precise Planning: Lessons are meticulously crafted to ensure high-paced, purposeful learning.
Classroom Culture: We create environments where students feel safe, challenged, engaged and ready to excel.
Assessment for Learning: Teachers a baselining system within lessons to identify gaps or misconceptions and accelerate student progress.
These areas provide a purposeful framework for monitoring the quality of teaching and learning, giving feedback, planning good lessons, CPD and coaching discussions.
As one of our Key Drivers is ‘Value Feedback’, we recognise the importance of regular, high-quality and helpful feedback that looks for ways to improve and doesn’t dwell on mistakes. We have an open door approach which allows leaders across the Academy to drop-in to lessons at any point during the day. This open door culture also allows all staff to observe each others’ practice fostering a culture of collaboration, reflection and outstanding learning. Feedback is given from drop-ins, but also through the use of IRIS (a secure platform for staff to record and reflect on their own lessons).
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 are clips of our staff, with our students, in our context - an extremely powerful tool to ensure all staff have access to examples of excellent practice in our setting. These are regularly shared in CPD sessions and in our Teaching and Learning Bulletin alongside being permanently available to staff through the IRIS Connect website.
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. The focus for these sessions is determined using drop-in data to ensure content is purposeful to our classrooms and links directly to our ‘Teaching and Learning Standard.’
Beyond this, with a dedication to staff development, there are other CPD programmes that run within school for:
Middle Leaders where they participate in coaching CPD and regular sessions targeting Teaching and Learning within their specific departments;
ECTs where they attend an additional CPD session each Thursday that is differentiated for ECTs in Year 1 and Year 2 to ensure the most purposeful support for their development;
New Staff which begins in half-term five and focuses on the key components of our ‘Teaching and Learning Standard’ to ensure a confident start from September.
Staff are provided with carefully selected books which contain the most up to date research in modern pedagogy. Staff regularly read the most purposeful sections of these books as part of their own pedagogical development and they form part of our Teaching and Learning Standard and CPD sessions.
Through our regular drop-ins and use of IRIS, we are able to share best practice weekly across the school through our Teaching and Learning Bulletin. This includes:
Details of our top practitioners against our Teaching Standard
Video clips of good practice.
Regular updates and reminders for staff.
We also celebrate a ‘drop-in of the week’ to highlight and applaud the excellent teaching from our staff.