Starting From Scratch

I had thought long and hard about how I would reflect on my year taking control of computing. Then when on a Facebook group I realised, I should blog it! I noticed many people had commented the same thing I did when I got asked to 'sort' computing... Where do I start? If I had stumbled across a blog post like this then I would probably have saved myself some time.

The very first thing I did was create an action plan.

I had to first take a long hard look at what was going on already. Now at this point I want to mention that I was an RQT, so I had literally just passed my NQT year. I kept thinking no-one will listen. No-one will engage etc. After all most experienced teachers have heard and seen it all before because I firmly believe there is no such thing as a new idea.

However, most people were quite open to any new approach as they had either not been doing it through lack of direction or our due to lack of confidence/knowledge.

For me the most obvious place to start was a staff survey using SurveyMonkey. It was eye opening, some year groups did a little coding, some did nothing and others hadn't an idea where to start anyway. I honestly felt like I was looking at a mountain, questioning whether I would be able to do anything by the end of the year.

It was pretty clear that I was really starting from the beginning. The first thing I did was join CAS, STEM and Barefoot Computing. I really, really can't stress this enough.

They were invaluable. Before this, I had spoken with a friend who was in a similar position a few years ago and he suggested buying a scheme. There were a few things that put me off. The first was that dependent on the scheme it could cost over £200 which at the time was around 4 BBC Micro:Bits. I just couldn't justify it. Secondly, I felt buying a scheme meant it wouldn't fit with our school, we would have to fit around it.

Now I want to take this opportunity to say, I am in no way against schemes of work, dependent on the school and the need, they can be fantastic. However, that being said I do disagree with schools paying money (public money) for something they could easily achieve with a few days of release time.

After the survey and a little research, I took stock of our apps and our resources. We had a good number of Beebots and the apps we had were fantastic. Yet, so many people hadn't used them or thought they couldn't because they were for another year group (below are the apps that we used).

There was a little bit of friction, as we had previously paid for discovery coding which was great. However, so many of the children had logged on at home and worked through all the stages. It was also being used more as an hour for children to mindlessly work through levels. This is when I got thinking about how staff will be teaching programming.

I was adamant after looking through Barefoot resources and their explanation pages on their 'Computational Thinking' approaches that each unit of programming needed to introduce each concept unplugged. I kept coming back to the maths mastery approach of Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract.

The unplugged teaching was to help children understand the concepts and basics of algorithms and how a program works. Simple instructions and how they are sequenced.

Concrete was printing the blocks for say Scratch Jr and using these to build the program that you would have been acting out unplugged then, lead into building the program your about to design, etc.

Then the abstract would be the digital coding using the software. After all programming digitally is a pretty abstract concept to children.

I asked a teacher in each year group if they would trial some teaching strategies and apps. This was fantastic, and some of the outcomes were brilliant. The feedback I got from the teachers was invaluable.

I had planned to offer Code for Life's, Rapid Router as an alternative to Espresso Coding as it was completely free and aligned to the UK curriculum. However, she pointed out that for Y1 there was quite a lot of reading involved and some children would struggle with this.

This did lead me to narrow the focus of Y1's progression to completely understanding Algorithms and the concept of instructions.

After some trials and collecting feedback and evidence I designed the progression documents. They were based on our old documents, merged with a couple of ideas that others had shared on CAS. I wanted to ensure that Computational thinking was just as important as the programming and coding. I based this on Barefoot's resources. My thinking was to have each year group focus on a particular skill, which by Y6 would build to complete the computational thinker.

I haven't incorporated the approaches in terms of assessment. However, I was careful to use the vocabulary and after each lesson I wanted the children to use this to reflect on their learning.

All this came together forming our schools progression document, which you can see below.

Now I want to be absolutely clear. I am in no way an expert. This has been an 'interesting' journey so far. I say so far, because there is quite a bit of work still to do. However, I have enjoyed every minute of it.

I couldn't have done it without the support of SLT and the hard work and patience of staff at school. I think it is incredibly important you have this from the outset. I know full well that if SLT and staff weren't with me, this would have been incredibly hard.

As for wider help, the many, many helpful teachers on Facebook groups, the CAS Community and Barefoot computing.

I hope this proves useful for others. It is a brief reflection which has helped me clear my thoughts heading into this academic year. I hope to keep blogging in particular about the journey ahead, reflection on last year and resources and advice (if anyone actually wants any).

My next step is to focus on teaching and consistency which is another mountain in itself. Thank you for reading.

MrM.

Below are the original documents - I only ask that these are used to develop your schools progression rather than straight up copy - as this will then not work for your school.