11 October 2020

WoW – empirical CPD Focus – Reading and Vocabulary

This Week:

Here's to another week of brilliant teaching and learning.

Trainees – in timetabled lessons within subject areas this week. Observations arranged for next week.
New staff induction and trainee CPD – arranged by PWA for Wednesday after school.
Reminders:
- Continue to add lesson resources into weekly folders for each class in Teams. This is really working well for those in isolation.
- Use Oak National Academy (or other online lesson bank) for cover lessons.
Reminder - Study Groups – information regarding the arrangements for Study Groups this year is saved in WLD Teachers here. HoDs will discuss with their teams before half-term. This will also be part of PM targets.
Year 7 teachers – please use the ‘golden rules’ emailed out last Friday morning with ALL year 7 classes.

RLO’s T&L update (circulated in JHA’s bulletin) here.

Reflect…

Link to this term’s CPD focus – Reading for Understanding

As a school, one of our priorities is reading for understanding. This is a section of our Brilliant T&L Toolkit and is something that has been explored through CPD such as Top Tips and Pastries and Progress. It is also an area that has been added into our Teaching and Learning Policy. This week, think about the role of questioning as part of promoting reading for understanding.

Questioning techniques can help struggling readers to engage with a text. They start to read with purpose and hopefully your questions will help them to comprehend what they are reading. ‘Teachers who model how to ask questions while reading help children to learn how to build interest with the text and become stronger readers.’

‘Even children who are strong readers don’t know instinctively that good readers ask questions as they read. Teaching questioning techniques can make strong readers even more advanced. ‘

The questioning CPD session offered last week was based on the work of Tom Sherrington. Resources are saved in the CPD Library here but the following grid is a useful prompt to help you to structure your questioning.

For further reading, click here and here.

The Remote Learning Policy remains unchanged from July. Please provide tweaks or amendments to RLO asap if needed.

The Teaching and Learning Policy has been updated and now contains a Section Two Pandemic section. Please read and use the one page summary to help you to refine your approach.