Learning Walks Feedback 31st May 2012

Starters and Plenaries & Challenge and Pace

Strengths

‘Bell work’ continues to be used with much success in all Languages lessons with simple revision tasks to get the students immediately focused before the lesson gets started. This is not necessarily the ‘starter’ to the main content of the lesson so much as a ‘brain teaser’ to get them thinking. Activities tend to include cloze exercises, word searches etc. With more challenging classes, they are also extremely beneficial in getting the students immediately focussed on something constructive.

A new ‘spin’ on mini plenaries in the form of ‘Egg Heads’ is also proving extremely popular in Business Studies with students producing their own questions and answers to assess learning – they’ve even got some nifty ‘Egg Heads’ question cards made up!

As we’ve come to expect at Cooper, the ‘challenge’ and ‘pace’ of lessons is consistently strong. In one particular Food Technology lesson, the year 10 students achieved an incredible amount in one hour as the support and care given by class teacher lead to high levels of confidence and focus. Even the numerous BESD students worked diligently throughout the lesson: thoroughly engaged and motivated – largely due to the infectious enthusiasm from the class teacher. 

My thanks as always to everyone who has participated in the Learning Walks.

Have a relaxing break!

Jayne

Learning Walk 13 - Behaviour for learning

Areas of strength

Most feedback celebrated the high levels of engagement demonstrated by pupils as a direct result of the stimulating teaching. Comments such as ‘great learning atmosphere’; ‘students eager to participate’ and ‘very good interaction between students and staff’ featured in the feedback. Unsurprisingly engagement and the resulting excellent behaviour was most evident in lessons where students were clearly enjoying the learning and were able to work independently on research, planning, designing and creating, whether individually or in self selected or designated groups.

The focus for Learning Walks fortnight beginning 7^th May is Starters and Plenaries.

Jayne