Improving learning outcomes

Team's meeting room in Adobe Connect is behind this link:

https://raisio.adobeconnect.com/team2/

The next team meeting using Adobe Connect is on the 29th April at 10:00 am London time.

Developing teaching and encouraging learning

Improving learning outcomes

Group members

William (Bill) Griffiths (Leicestershire) headt2@eastfield.leics.sch.uk

Matti Autio (Vaasa) matti.autio@edu.vaasa.fi team leader

Olli Autio (Vaasa) olli.autio@edu.vaasa.fi

Leena Virkki (Vaasa) leena.virkki@edu.vaasa.fi

Jari Miettinen (Raisio) jari.miettinen@raisio.fi team leader

Ana Mengíbar (Rota) administracion.rota@salesianos.edu

Rocío Izquierdo (Rota) rocio.izquierdo@salesianos.edu

Kirstie Randall (Leicestershire) kirstie@stepteachingschool.co.uk

Next presentation is Team 2 planned acts for spring 2019 after Vaasa project week

Next table is Team 2 targets and planned acts before and until Vaasa project week 2019

Vaasa project week participants: Jari Miettinen, William Griffiths, Ollie Mayhew, Rocio Izguierdo (these 4 travelled), Leena Virkki

Rota project week participantss: Matti Autio, Jari Miettinen, William Griffiths, Ollie Mayhew (these 4 travelled), Ana Mengibar, Rocio Izguierdo

Starting the team work

1. Every member of the team lists 3 – 5 challenges at their school or work, linking the teams objective.

2. What are the planned acts, acts taken in practice and acts that have worked?

3. How do you measure the results of the made acts, if you measure?

Members save their answers on this platform under his/her team link and 'city box'.

4. Team leaders collect the answers together.

The chart for this collective work is here.

5. The team goes through the summary during an online meeting.

We use Adobe Connect as our online program

- Every member of every team gets personal guidance for about half an hour.

- Team leader sends the team meeting invitation through Seppo.

- Everybody needs USB – headphones with microphone!

- You should use the same computer every time you use Adobe Connect.

- Team leader must inform team members about online meeting dates as early as possible (time in GMT).

online meeting should not last more than hour

6. Every good idea and innovation must be saved on this platform.

Getting prepared for the project week in Rota

a) Seppo sends the starting query to Rota in early October at the latest.

b) Salesian save their answers on this platform and under Starting Query before the middle of November (Seppo reminds Antonio if needed)

c) Every teams every member reads the answers before the Rota week

The query is opened and discussed together in the beginning of the project week

Discussions are saved (in writing) on GS

Leicester

28.9. Bill Griffiths

3 – 5 challenges at their school or work:

• Improving reading is our toughest and most important challenge. Many children start school with poor speaking and listening. They have poor vocabulary and books are not really part of the family home.
• We have a high number of Special Needs Children ( very low starting points and attainment), All Special needs are 21% but about 6% very challenging.
• The number of mental health and behavioural problems is increasing. Children find concentration difficult and some have attention disorder so lessons can be disrupted
• There are many parents who are not very supportive of education and have difficult home lives. They are not sleeping well, have not got good diet and so are not ready to learn
• We have reducing finances and difficulty in recruitment so good quality teaching and support for struggling children is harder to provide
• Access to specialist support for struggling children is hard to find and expensive for the school to provide
• We also have very high pressure on accountability and so teacher workload is intense and great teachers face burning out

The planned acts, acts taken in practice and acts that have worked:

• We have provided special intervention programmes to help readers and used some Finnish ideas such as reteach using Teacher assistants
• We use individual data tracking to check progress
• We have regular discussions about the slow progress children
• The strong experienced teachers pair up with less experienced teachers to provide guidance
• The most effective actions have been to provide intensive short catch up sessions/reteach in small groups

We measure the results of the actions by:

• Entering assessment data into our tracking software
• We have team meetings looking at the work in books
• We have monitoring walks to all classrooms
• We look at test results and compare national data

Raisio

Jari Miettinen 12.10.2018

Challenges:

• Increasing number of pupils with special needs. Sometimes it is challenging to tell, whether this is due to developing diagnostics, or de-facto a progressive number of difficulties.
• Need for special need assistants versus the financial resources.
• Outdated school buildings and unhealthy premises.
• Accessibility of modern ICT and problems with networks.
• Need for further education for teachers.

Planned acts and ongoing acts:

• Increased resources in special education personnel, enhanced co-operation between professionals (teachers, psychologists, social workers, etc.), attention in communication between teachers and parents.
• Aspiration to get more (educated) assistants with steady employment.
• Efforts to rationally re-organize school buildings and to keep up renovating projects.
• Efforts to get more and renew ICT equipment, as well as network technology; educating teachers to use new systems.
• Peer-to-peer training amongst the teachers.

Measuring:

• The number of pupils attaining intensified support.
• The number of special need assistants per pupils.
• The number of appropriate school premises compared with the number of groups of pupils.
• The number of ICT equipments compared with the number of pupils. The reliability of data networks.
• Teachers’ reflection about their professional capability. Pupils’ overall success in large scale (extremely difficult to measure reliably).

Rota

October 8th Ana Mengíbar administracion.rota@salesianos.edu, Rocío Izquierdo rocio.izquierdo@salesianos.edu

3. How do you measure the results of the made acts, if you measure?

We will focus on the evaluation of our proposals in a direct and daily observation in class, where the students work and act freely and show us their degree of satisfaction with the proposed activities.

In addition, each semester, we will distribute some open and anonymous questions about the methodology carried out, so that students can answer them with their proposals for improvement.

2. What are the planned acts, acts taken in practice and acts that have worked?

Group dynamics to work on self-esteem.

Brainstorm on topics that may interest them (music, sport, fashion, movies)

Activities based on real situations and achievable goals.

Interventions in real situations linked to their goals.

3 – 5 challenges at their school or work, linking the teams objective.

1. Effectively manage the classroom, fostering positive relationships among students, transmitting confidence in their possibilities to achieve achievements and providing a high level of support.

2. Setting medium-term objectives.

3. Facing students in real situations or contexts, "learning by doing".

4.Proposing realistic goals.

5. Enriching prosocial bonds.

Vaasa

When you edit: add the date and your name. The newest edit on the top!

11.10.2018 Matti Autio

1. a) Each student must have the feeling that he is unique and valuable just as he is. We want each student to feel, that one is an important person and a part of our community. We have to make stop for dropouts already during daycare and early school years. If we succeed in these things, we hope our students have good basis for life-long learning.

b) Individual support for a student: we have to find more effective ways to give individual support by using multidisciplinary cooperation.

c) Improving Childrens’ Concentration

Concentration problems are very common and they often are a reason for a poor results of learning and motivation.

2. a) We have an active student association, which takes responsibility of doing things at school. Students' opinion is asked in decision making. We are planning to start a new project in co-operation with Bothnian Crisis Center ''Valo'' ( Light in english). The project is called '' Good to Be At School''. It will by started in January 2018. We have first meeting on Monday 29. Oct, so it we are in the very beginning at the moment.

b) We have three-step support in use for those who have special needs in learning.

c) We are going to start with chess pedagogy and some other methods, where games are used in learning and even learning concentration as well.

3. We have not measured these things yet.

Basic questions and challenges concerning our objective?

1. Organizing support for those, who have special needs

2. Increasing understanding of different special needs.

3. Helping students to keep and build up their motivation.

4. Inventing and changing ideas of new methods how to increase motivation.

5. Finding ways to form flexible studying groups.

6. Recognizing different styles in learning.

7. Finding ways to involve families and children to life-long learning.

8. Helping students to be active learners.

9. Improving school atmosphere, classrooms, relations between adults and students.