heart of heartlands lessons

The Heartlands Teaching and Learning blog launched in January and the first post set out our vision about how we wanted to make Heartlands the school ‘Where everyone wants to teach’. Turning this vision into the day to day of working in school takes practical steps and we’ve done a lot to take us there.

In July we finished the year with our Teaching Shapes (our version of Lesson Study) showcase event where all Heartlands teachers wrote up their in-class research, anchored in research and presented it to two other groups. This research was published in a booklet. Teachers spent hours talking about teaching and reflecting on their own practice.

This year, based on that research as well as what research suggests has the most impact we are focusing our efforts around the following three strands. These can be summed up with not Eat, Pray, Love but instead Feed, Speak, Remember.

FEED

Feedback remains a top priority. The Education Endowment Fund has Feedback at the top of their list for the strategy which demonstrates most impact with ‘8 months of progress’ based on ‘moderate evidence’. Feedback in the classroom - assessment for learning strategies have been found to have half a GCSE grade impact. However these claims come with the caveat that done badly feedback can have negative impact and be a de-motivator for students. Feedback will be a focus from using in-class formative assessment strategies to developing how our students respond to our marking in FIT (Focused Improvement Time) as well as whole class feedback from moderated exam type assessments.

SPEAK

Oracy and academic language is priority number two - before you learn to write you learn to read, before you learn to read you learn to talk. Oracy is the basis for language development and hearing and using accurate and subject specific language is key to written success. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds come to school with a narrower vocabulary and academic language has to be heard and used if this gap is ever going to be closed. (Quigley, 2018) There is also research that says that if children have the opportunity to talk through their thinking (metacognition) this can also support their understanding. We’re excited about the impact on using oracy strategies in class - even just simply the habit of full sentences- and using these consistently. All GCSEs now have higher demands on language. (EEF says Oracy strategies have + 5 months impact / Metacognition + 7 months impact)

REMEMBER

Finally knowledge retention has become even more important in the new GCSE exams. Students have to remember so much more that they used to. There is also a lot more recent research in the area with Daniel Willingham’s psychology research informing the how we use our long and short term memory. We've introduced exam practice sessions for Year 11, inter-leaving revision programmes and low stakes testing in different subjects to help us do this.

We’re not talking Eat, Pray, Love but instead Feed, Speak, Remember.