Keeping teaching and learning visible
Some of you will remember my blog in January of this year when I spoke about introducing the concept of a growth mind-set and how we are incorporating this focus into our teaching and learning practices. 10 months on it seems appropriate to re-visit this topic and reflect on how a growth mind-set is being imparted to students, how teachers themselves are benefitting from the experience and what related themes we are focusing on this academic year.
A growth mind-set ties up very effectively with one of our two Mary Ward characteristics upon which our school is concentrating this year – ‘Coping effectively with failure’. People don’t like talking about failure but it is a very important aspect of life to discuss with our students in terms of their own personal and social development. When we think about failure we tend to also think about other buzz words in education – like resilience. Some of you may have come across the American academic Carol Dwek, who frequently discusses the growth mind-set – her thinking is that by having a positive growth mind-set and feeling that, actually, if you find things difficult and fail, you can become resilient enough to pick things up, move on and learn from your mistakes. So we are trying to encourage our students to have positive growth mind-sets. Year 9 and Year 10 students had sessions on the concept during induction day and a group of Year 10 students delivered an assembly this week of their own volition on coping effectively with failure. However, it’s not just the girls who we are trying to impart a growth mind-set to – it is also our staff.
Our teaching and learning practices embrace the themes of six habits of learning and the 'Five Ps' of positive learning behaviour. At St Mary’s School, Cambridge we use the 'Five Ps' to ensure that everyone can do their best. These are: punctuality, preparedness, positivity and productivity, politeness, and being presentable. They stem from our school values of creating a community that is cooperative, confident, creative, conscientious and caring, which result in the 'Six Rs' for habits of learning, which are instilled in each student:
- Readiness to learn
- Reciprocity
- Resilience
- Resourcefulness
- Reflectiveness
- Responsiveness
These themes work to embed a growth mind-set across the school and are supported by activities such as open classrooms, learning walks, student learning councils and the school’s digital strategy. Professor John Hattie, a notable education researcher, developed a study called Visible Learning which ranks various influences in different meta-analyses related to learning and achievement according to their effect sizes. Hattie’s findings focus on a new understanding of the enhanced role of teachers – “teachers are most successful when they become evaluators of their own teaching”. We encourage our staff to have open classrooms whereby they invite their colleagues to come in and see what they are doing. Colleagues witness different teaching styles and can take part in best practice discussions following the class. Sometimes we all get caught up in a silo mentality and open classrooms are a profoundly good way to break this cycle and engage staff in reflective practice.
We also carry out learning walks where I and other members of the Senior Leadership Team go into lessons and see what is going on in terms of teaching and learning. I went on a learning walk at the end of the Summer Term to understand how teachers were giving feedback to their students, and how the students were coping with that feedback having had the internal summer exams. It really is an excellent way to understand how best teaching and learning practice takes place in the classroom and ultimately the progress students make. Throughout the Autumn Term learning walks will focus on student academic engagement, building examination skills and students’ academic and other achievements, reviewing their attitudes towards learning, including their ability to demonstrate initiative and independence, their willingness to work collaboratively and the extent to which they take leadership in their learning. This goes hand in hand with the new school inspection guidelines which I have had an introduction to recently. Instead of having multiple categories which schools are assessed against there are just two judgement grades based on student achievement and student personal development. If we, as teachers and senior leaders, are continuously involved with teaching and learning practices school-wide (as we should be!) then when an inspection comes around there will be no surprises when student achievement and development is assessed.
I couldn’t write about teaching and learning without pausing to reflect on what role technology has to play in the classroom. In a recent article titled ‘Tech is transforming teaching and learning’ the journalist proclaimed “while technology can do the work of several ordinary people, it cannot replace an extraordinary teacher and the best innovations seek to augment traditional excellence rather than replace it”. We couldn’t agree more. We believe that technology has a key role to play in teaching and learning and our digital strategy reflects this belief. Our digital learning platform, SMO (St Mary’s Online), provides teacher-curated educational content for students to use whether they are at school or doing school work at home or on the move. Students are able to access links to handouts, extension work, past examination papers and mark schemes, tests that can be taken and automatically marked online, and video or audio clips that can be digested in students’ own time, at their own pace.
Girls in Year 8 to Year 11, and all teaching staff, are provided with a personal iPad, enabling access to SMO, apps and the Internet quickly, reliably and wherever they may be. These devices, coupled with access to Microsoft Office365, provide our girls with opportunities to be curious, to discover, to collaborate and to present their learning in new and increasingly creative ways.
We continue to enhance our girls’ learning experiences by ensuring our educational approach caters to students’ preferred learning styles, enabling their intellectual curiosity to flourish. Technology assists teachers in bringing subjects to life too, for instance, by enhancing History or Politics lessons through shared YouTube footage of news bulletins from the time, or by allowing girls to role-play and take on the persona of a journalist working to a deadline and updating copy in real-time as updates arrive into the news room as part of English studies.
We use technology in an organic, understated way; our aim is for technology to be invisible, which on first hearing may not sound impressive, but that's exactly what we are aiming for. Technology in education should support teaching and learning, but not become the focus of students’ or teachers’ attention. In stark comparison, our aim to make our teaching and learning practices as visible as possible in and out of the classroom is what we strive for – engaging staff in reflective practice and students in active learning across the school will help us achieve that.