teaching and learning - Balancing Act

In some ways I’m annoyed that my last ever blog post relates to performance management instead of something more positive in terms of teaching and learning BUT as I think about this – it’s positive and has made a difference to the learning experience for Year 11s at our school.

• Talk to her subject leaders (Head of Biology and Physics, Anna acts as Head of Chemistry) and create resources and lesson outlines for active revision for Year 10 and 11. I would organise cover so that the three of them could meet together as a team. This has now been done.
• Write letters home personalised (via mail merge) to every Year 11 parent explaining which modules were yet to be taken (either for the first time or as re-sits) and which websites were useful for revision; the letter would also outline what would be happening in lessons until the exams; this would also be copied to teachers who would then be expected to follow the content in the letter. I would read the drafts of the letters and organise office admin support for the mail merge and posting. I proof read the letters on Friday afternoon and so Anna’s perfecting them in the half-term ready to pass over to the office on Monday.

I'm just finishing my part in the first of a series of  'learning walks'.

The Local Authority inspectors are starting us off.

They're in today and tomorrow to observe lessons and work with Heads of Department and Senior Leaders to see 'how learning is progressing'.  I've done some observations of science and maths and am about to sample some Year 7 books to see how pupils have recorded their learning.

It doesn't sound too scary to me as a teacher. Even if  I know my lessons and books aren't perfect (as they're not) I always welcome the chance to reflect and discuss the teaching and learning going on in my classrooms.

So why did we have a science teacher who had to go home yesterday because the thought of the learning walk had stressed her out? 

Did she stop to consider that the thought of her not being in today stressed me out!?

I’m just getting ready to run whole school INSET – this will be my second whole school training, I regularly speak at whole school briefing and on the one hand I’m absolutely petrified but on the other I am looking forward to it. I always enjoy training days and as a former colleague once said to me “you can’t make it to Headteacher if you can’t talk to whole staff”; this just got me thinking about whether I really wanted to make it to the very top or not!

Back to basics

We are using the launch of the new curriculum as a way of getting back to basics – teaching and learning and what makes a good lesson. Whilst we cover the new terminology (or old terminology that we’ve just forgotten about) like range and content, key concepts and processes we also try to avoid death by PowerPoint and instead model the types of good practice that we’d like to see in the classroom.
 
So we’ve got an evaluation sheet focused around six-hats thinking (or at least we will have by the end of the week when I’ve created it). Plus we’ve a dvd of one of our teachers using the thinking skill of ‘Mysteries’; naturally we're not going to let staff watch a dvd without an accompanying cloze sheet, in the same way that we wouldn’t necessarily just let a class watch a dvd without giving them something to help focus their minds.
 
I’m just about to plan my opening talk about what we want a pupil to have learnt after 5 years at the school. Hidden curriculum anybody?