heart of heartlands lessons

When we see our students every week (up to five times a week if you’re a Maths teacher!) it’s easy to assume we know how they best learn and what they do and don’t understand. However, in one class you might have students with graded reading ages ranging from 7 to 15, or in Maths from 1 to 6. Without this information, it is hard to know whether a student is finding the subject matter difficult, or whether they are struggling to read the question.

This is why at Heartlands, teachers create class landscapes for each of their classes to ensure data is central to their planning.

Class landscapes

By creating class landscapes, we can:

• understand students’ prior starting points and pathways;
• consider the vast range of teaching strategies and intervention we could deploy to help target vulnerable students; and,
• identify areas for development and help students make expected progress.

Class landscapes in practice

The essential function of the class landscape is to allow us to track student progress after each assessment point. Students below target are given a specific class action in order to accelerate progress. Research from the University of York* (2011) and Sutton Trust and Education Endowment Foundation (2015) gives some examples of promising strategies being used by schools to improve outcomes for students. Some of the in-class interventions we have adopted include:

1. Literacy intervention for students with a low reading age
2. Tailored in-class tests to assess progress
3. Speech and language support for students new to English
4. Changing the student’s location on your seating plan
5. Providing scaffolding resources and choices
6. Engaging parent and student aspirations
7. Training teachers to better monitor and use data
8. Extending the breadth of the curriculum
9. Improving feedback between teachers and students
10. Peer-to-peer tutoring schemes for students.

A class landscape includes all the following information:

1 = Name

2 =Gender

3 = Free School Meals

4 = Ethnicity

5 =SEN Status

6 =SEN Need

7= Pupil Premium Indicator

8 =EAL 9 = EAL Type

10 =Ability(HA = higher ability & MA = Middle ability)

11 =Most recent Reading Ages(15/2 = 15 years and 2 months

12 = End of Year Target

13 = AFA Result

14 = AFA Progress indicator

15 =A2L : Attitude to learning (E=excellent, G=Good, R=Requires Improvement S = Unsatisfactory effort)

16 = A2HL: Attitude to home learning

17 = Action: The class landscapes allows teachers to identify which student are not making enough progress. With this information, teachers can put in place specific class actions to accelerate student progress.

Applying the class landscape

The class landscape can influence how you plan your lesson or adapt your teaching style. For example, if you had a student with an emerging EAL status, you could incorporate methods for reading and unpacking word problems in your lesson model.

If you had students with low reading ages, you could differentiate the work and provide help sheets so these students could access the content.

If you had students with a specific SEN needs, you would incorporate the strategies in their SEN passport.

Accelerating progress

Closing the gap between pupil premium students and non-pupil premium students has become a high profile national issue. Class landscapes allow teachers to track the progress of this group of students and provide extra work or revision guides to help accelerate their progress.

Heartlands teachers also use the class landscape to organise their seating plans. Some teachers align all of the below-target students at the front of their class, so they can assess their understanding of the work set and monitor the quality of their work first.

A clear picture of the class

With diverse classes of mixed abilities, class landscapes give teachers a clear picture of the class. With this information, teachers can provide the individual support that students need to achieve their potential.