Dear colleagues,

Learning & Teaching Matters

The Pedagogy Festival on Friday was fantastic. Congratulations to everyone!  I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  It was great to see everyone contribute and shine.  Massive thanks to Michelle and our Pedagogy Leads for their part in guiding our learning.  Michelle will follow up shortly with an evaluation. Our plan is to run a Pedagogy festival on the May inservice day annually, so your feedback on what worked well and suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

Our learning & Teaching strategy is to clearly link our practice and improvement to the QI 2.3.  This will influence and support improvement while building our familiarity and confidence with the Quality Indicator. QI 2.3 is a feature of both inspection models - full and short.

Our strategy began with the development of our Balfron L&T Toolkit. All of our work should link to our Toolkit. The Balfron L&T Toolkit breaks down the QI, provides examples, techniques and routines as well as links to resources.  As this is PRD season, I would strongly encourage all staff to make use of the toolkit as a helpful reflection and planning document. 

This year Michelle and I have developed key documentation to support our L&T strategy:

• Balfron L&T Toolkit

• Balfron Self Evaluation Overview (used for discussion & planning at Open Doors)

• Balfron Observation Sheet (formal lesson observations)

• Team Observation Review and feedback/planning overview. PTs will feedback to Michelle and I so that we can plan our CLPL offer based on need.

There are two places that you can access our key documents - Balfron Staff Google Drive - Learning & Teaching and our new BHS L&T Website.  It is great to see the L&T Website take shape - thank you Michelle!  The fabulous Tom Sherrington Walkthru series can also be accessed through the L&T website. I would highly recommend these resources.

Here is the link to Danny's Inspirational Pedagogy Assistant.  To access the AI tool, scroll down passed the interactive guide.  

Behaviour Matters

Thanks to all of you who have stepped up at breaks and lunchtimes to supervise in the last week.  Pupil behaviour has been positively managed and the school has regained its calm.  I am delighted to share that 38 colleagues have volunteered to support supervision for the month of May - many to thanks to each of you.  

Here is a link to the supervision rota.  Where possible I have paired us up so that we have a chum!  If your circumstances change and you cannot make it, please let the person you are on duty with know.

Literacy Matters

This week, our word of the week is optimistic. We are continuing to encourage pupils to use the word in their speech and writing, rewarding pupils with merits when they do so. I hope everyone continues to get on board - it was great to see 'resilience' being used in form time last week by Sarah. Photos below.

Given the great work going on across our school, I am feeling incredibly optimistic about the future at Balfron High ;-)

Have a great week.

Elaine