Back in September 2016 the teaching staff, TLAs and pupils all contributed their thoughts and ideas as to what makes good teaching and learning. This formed the basis for our policy reviews on 'Curriculum' and 'Teaching and Learning'. Here you can find information about how we went about sharing best practice and agreeing on a school wide policy.

Here you will find:

  • resources from the staff meeting on reviewing our T&L policy
  • information obtained during the staff meeting
  • the padlet for recording your ideas for Q5
  • links to educational research on T&L
  • information from the pupil council on teaching and learning from the point of view of the children.
  • The new policies are available on the previous page and in the 'Good Practice' area of the staff server.


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Photos of the end session: Staff opinions on what 3 things (out of 9 choices) have the biggest impact on learning. The list is not exhaustive!


TotalPrimary OnlySecondary + Specialists
Lessons that pupils enjoy361620
Creating good relationships311516
Giving precise feedback27189
Differentiation25916
Shared high expectations211211
Asking good questions19136
Providing opportunities for children to lead learning1367
Allowing time to think before responding1019
Pace523

Overall ranking of choices. An interesting prompt for some good debates....

Above find the answers from the Teaching and Learning Assistants in the school. 


Question 1 - How do children learn best in lessons?

Word cloud created from all 10 groups' top 3 choices.

Below is a table giving more detail about the answers to Q1. In the right hand column is the beginning of how what we think about how children learn best might translate into our T&L Policy. Please use the 'comments' section at the bottom if you want to add or challenge anything.

Outcome from DiscussionRelevance to our T&L Policy
Nearly every group ranked the importance of engagement and understanding of why they are learning as one of the top 3 most important things.
Teachers need to ensure that the purpose of learning is clear and that what students are taught has a relevance to them.
Most groups answered with some reference to treating children as individuals and catering for the needs of different learning styles.Teachers recognise that children are different and learn in different ways. Therefore teachers vary the delivery of learning across time taking into account different abilities, needs, learning styles and preferences. These can include:
  • Group, paired, whole class and individual work
  • Problem solving and investigative work
  • research
  • questioning
  • use of IT
  • fieldwork and visits
  • creative activities
  • debate, presentation and role play
  • participation in physical activities
  • designing and making things
  • listening and responding to audio visual stimulus
  • reflecting on what has been learning
  • engaging classrooms allowing for independent learning
Many groups selected a comment related to students feeling safe in their environment and that it was OK to take risks and fail.Teachers:

-create a safe space where failure is seen as a positive and necessary part of learning
-facilitate students to work supportively with their peers 

-actively seek to build students' resilience 

Some groups spoke specifically about students' being challenged and having high expectations of them and themselves.Teachers have:

-high expectations of all learners

-help students to know where they are and what there next steps should be in order to improve.

Q2 - How do we engage and excite pupils in their learning?

This was the 'snowballing' activity. There was a lot of detailed ideas to support this but the main themes were that teachers:

  • are enthusiastic about their lessons - (their voice, their classrooms, their energy!)
  • use technology to support variation of activities
  • vary how they deliver their lessons (games, dress-up, hooks, ICT, competitions, experiments, drama, demos, visitors, trips, cross-curricular)
  • allow all children to succeed and celebrate them when they do
  • make memorable lessons that children enjoy (linking learning to what the pupils enjoy and making it relevant)


Q3 - How do we make sure each pupil makes progress?

  1. This is a word cloud created from Q2.

  2. The post-it notes from our 'top 3'. It is obvious that there is a huge consensus about the importance of AFL.

Q3 -Relevance to our T&L Policy:

  • students receive detailed feedback on their progress and attainment from both teachers and peers
  • target setting is used to ensure students are aware of their progress
  • learning is personalised so students are working at an optimum level of difficulty to drive progress (not too hard and not too easy).


Q4 How do we support pupils to be Ambitious?


Staff meeting resources:

Activities:

snowball - set a question, ask the group to record their points, at a set time, screw it up and throw (or roll) to another group. They can then read and challenge or add to. Good for developing descriptive writing.

market place - set a question, ask for a consensus - set one person for each group to be the 'sales person'/'market stall holder'. Rotate the groups and ask the sales person to sell their ideas. Rotating groups can be encouraged to challenge the sales person. This could be scaffolded by giving the challenge questions. Good for demonstrating problem solving methods in Maths, debate work or can be adapted to demonstrate subject knowledge of an area.

cups and counters - can  be used to visually show data of any kind. Give multiple choices of answers but only allow a set number of choices - can be used to show preferences. Previously use in development planning to see where people thought strengths and weaknesses were. (plastic bowls are outside my office - help yourself - hp chips in PE office)

What the pupils think.

During a pupil council session, a group of children were asked the two questions - What helps you to learn? and What makes learning fun?. Interestingly their first response was overwhelmingly - "a good teacher". They were then asked to try and break this down as to what they meant by this. This is what they said:

Comments from the pupil council on how they learn best.


Answers discussed with the Pupil Council


The Research behind Teaching and Learning

There is a lot of research on learning. It is important for teachers to be aware of this and that evidence from research feeds into how we approach teaching and learning. 
To find out more about the latest research there are many useful resources on the web - including NAU.

  1. Click here to view http://www.workingoutwhatworks.com/en-GB
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  2. Click here to view http://www.suttontrust.com/researcharchive/great-teaching/
    As a precaution, Firefly only embeds content that has a certificate to prove it's sent over the web securely.