WoW – maintenance CPD Focus – Reading and Vocabulary

Happy New Year! 

This Week:

• Trainees – New trainee in PE starting with us on 11^th January.  RSW will be mentoring her.   
• Trainee CPD starts on 20^th Jan (CBR – to be included as part of new staff induction)
• Remote Learning Policy – Please re-read. Changes are highlighted in green.
• T&L Update January 2021 – Please read and use it to reflect on your current practice.
• Student Newspaper – The Walton Times – if you haven’t already seen it, Eva-May B and Daisy L have produced this second edition of the school newspaper.  As this is all being done remotely, they deserve extra credit.  The editorial team is now growing and the issues will hopefully grow too.  

 

Reflect…

  Feedback - Plan - Teach

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

Please take time to reflect on the T&L Update PPT sent out with this TLD – hopefully the voiceover explains the salient points.

 

Key Priorities

• Delivering effective remote learning
• Promoting wider reading within your subjects and reading for pleasure

 

As we commence the New Year in challenging circumstances, the common thread of everything that we do should be ‘will my lesson materials ensure that students are able to access the learning?’  The following extracts may be useful prompts in allowing you to plan learning for January.

Evidence-informed Planning

Reminder: The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has found that the effectiveness of remote teaching is determined by many of the same factors as determine the effectiveness of live classroom teaching. For example:

• ensuring pupils receive clear explanations
• supporting growth in confidence with new material through scaffolded practice
• application of new knowledge or skills
• enabling pupils to receive feedback on how to progress

Remember that our teacher-created planning PowerPoint contains useful templates to enable you to plan all elements of effective learning.  Please make use of this by pasting in the relevant and appropriate slides to your own PowerPoints.  It is saved here.

 

DfE Expectations

The following extract is lifted directly from the DfE’s latest guidance on school’s reopening in January:

 

When teaching pupils remotely, we expect schools to:

• set assignments so that pupils have meaningful and ambitious work each day in a number of different subjects
• set work that is of equivalent length to the core teaching pupils would receive in school, and as a minimum:
  • secondary: 4 hours a day, with more for pupils working towards formal qualifications this year
• provide frequent, clear explanations of new content, delivered by a teacher or through high-quality curriculum resources or videos
• have systems for checking, at least weekly, whether pupils are engaging with their work, and inform parents immediately where engagement is a concern
• gauge how well pupils are progressing through the curriculum using questions and other suitable tasks and provide feedback, at least weekly, using digitally facilitated or whole-class feedback where appropriate
• enable teachers to adjust the pace or difficulty of what is being taught in response to questions or assessments, including, where necessary, revising material or simplifying explanations to ensure pupils’ understanding

 

 

Oak National Academy

With remote learning being implemented from January 4^th, the following information from Oak may be of use.  The video explanations may allow you to plan lessons more easily and may ease workload.

 

The following links from their website are useful and are signposted below:

• Their Teacher Hub provides access to nearly 10,000 lessons and they can be downloaded, edited and personalised lesson slides and worksheets for the vast majority of lessons.
• Their curriculum maps provide an overview of their lessons, units and approaches in each subject, so they can be quickly mapped against your existing plans and our own curriculum.
• Their Online Classroom provides pupils access to their nearly 10,000 lessons, either by subject, key stage or following their ready-made suggested timetable.

For those also coordinating intervention for term, these resources may also provide useful starting points for those delivering these sessions.

BESA LendED PLatform

The British Educational Suppliers Association’s LendED platform also provides a searchable list of resources for remote education.

Useful references:

Remote Learning Policy (updated for January 2021 – Please read)

Teaching and Learning Policy (containing blended learning approach)

WLD planning template (updated December 2020)

TOP TIPS

 

The Top Tip for this week comes from the Expressive Arts Department. The focus is on developing reading as a key skill within lessons.  Many thanks.

• Differentiated scripts often written from student suggestions.
• Scripts that students have to provide the ending for or the back story.
• Script learning techniques: chunking, learning small sections at a time.
• Shared reading with a partner (e.g. each person reads alternate lines regardless of character).

 

Please have a look back at the Top Tips offered by your colleagues.  They are stored here. 

CPD CASCADE

Feedback – MCS has provided this useful link demonstrating his approach to delivering feedback to students and it also showcases a real working example of linking curriculum and learning to Careers education.  Well worth a watch. Many thanks.

Homework reports on ClassCharts – many thanks to LEA for her video tutorial.  It is saved in our CPD Library, here.

 

Tidying up files in Teams – thanks to LCH for this tip

 

Bridging the Word Gap at Transition – Oxford University Press Report Building on their 2018 Oxford Language report, the Oxford University Press (OUP)

…continue to carry on their sterling work on vocabulary in their most recent published report: Bridging the Word Gap at Transition. This timely document focuses on the heightened word gap among many children as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown, whilst also drawing attention to the general increased demand in terms of academic vocabulary that occurs at transition. It is certainly worth a read for both English leaders and literacy leaders, as is the OUP's accompanying documentation that offers practical advice about how schools can act on the report’s findings and support students' vocabulary as they move from key stage 2 to key stage 3.

 

National College of Teaching and Leadership

Please take the time to look at an area in which you have an interest.

Useful CPD webinars (please email RLO if you need your password re-sending)

Webinar: Scaffolding Strategies

Webinar: High Quality Feedback

 

Microsoft Educator Community

 

Immersive Reader – lots of resources are available to promote inclusion to help students to become better readers.

Application window for becoming a Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert is open again. If you are interested, follow the instructions here to submit by 31st January. https://microsoftedu.eventcore.com/

Microsoft Educator Communities - Home - Home Overview. Open to any school who has begun the journey to whole school transformation to improve teaching and learning. Leaders, once you've joined the Microsoft Showcase Incubator, you will get supported with your transformation plans by Microsoft, its partners and other schools in the Showcase School program. microsoftedu.eventcore.com