The 4Ts - Topic, Task, Targets, Text

The learning expedition is summarised under the 4Ts:

Topic - the compelling topic that brings the content to life

Task - the culminating assignment (product or performance)

Targets - the learning targets derived from literacy and content standards which all students are expected to meet

Text - the complex text (books/articles) that students will read closely, and additional texts that ensue students experience a 'volume of reading' at their independent reading level

Targeted Learning Time TLT and making it work

TLT happens for all students in Middle School every other day. It has grown from the 'study hall' idea and students are given a block of time for independent study to target specific learning targets which need extra time and practice. TLT period is supervised by the crew advisor and students are able to seek assistance from their staff if required.

But how does this not result in chaos on corridors, wasted learning time in classrooms with students who lack focus? How can this level of independence work for students equivalent to our yr7-9?

1) students complete an entrance ticket at the start of each TLT session which states which target they are going to work on and the work they are planning to do to address this target

Since the small team of 4 core teachers plan together and are the crew advisors for the house, they understand the curriculum which the students are covering so can really keep a grip on work students set them selves.

2) at the end of the session an exit ticket is completed

Again allowing the advisor to keep updated with what each individual has done in the session and entrance/exit tickets are kept together in a record.

3) the whole teaching team of 4 is available at the same time and running TLT so that all are available for any questions, support required by students.

This is only possible since the whole teaching team are in the same house and are housed in the same area of school.

4) the only thing that cuts into TLT time is band/orchestra this is because some students travel a way to get to school, some have commitments after school as carers, etc. and the school want as many students as possible involved in extra-curricular whole school music.

Engaging parents

A jumble of points picked up from Casco Bay High and King Middle Schools:

Parents come into school for two student led conferences each year. If parents want to discuss any concerns etc at any other times meetings are organised during team planning times so every teacher who teaches the student can be present.

Parents also attend culminations (public demonstration or exhibition that occurs at the end of an expedition).

  

Before joining the school the 6th grade advisors meet the families of every student joining their new crews. Informal meetings take place at the students home or a local community space (coffee shop, etc) to enable the new teacher to get to know the student and their family better and make a start on good, secure working relationships.

Rather than keep parents 'at arms length' EL schools actively engage with parents - 'we don't just enroll students, we enroll parents' by putting out lots of volunteer opportunities:

Help or lead a school project

Classroom/Library/Tutoring help

Fieldwork - help with fieldwork days

Professional services/expertise 

'We own time' - scheduling at King Middle school

At King Middle there are 7 schedules or timetables. One schedule which the whole school follows (above) and then each house has their own schedule which has been organised by the teaching team for the house (the blanks above). The school runs a 6day rotating schedule.

The overall whole school wide schedule has the following

Home room - first 10 mins of everyday

Lunch - 20 min + 5 min refresh/movement time

Foreign Language/reading - 40 min every day

PE/Health lesson - 3 days per cycle

2 x 50 min Crew meetings every cycle

Crew day 2 - check in/community building initiatives

Academic Crew day 5 - focused on learning targets with crew advisor supporting

Targeted Learning Time - 3 days per cycle

So once these parts are in across a school wide timetable, then it's over to the team of teachers in that house to decide how they use the rest of the time. 

The house team is a group of 4 who work with 80 students. They teach the students and are the advisors for this house too. Teams stay together in 6&7 and loop,  two different 8th grade teams exist.

 The group of core teachers are 

Maths

Science

Lang/Arts

Humanities

These teachers design the expeditions together, organise time, house committee meetings, etc. They meet for planning time 40 mins every other day whilst students are involved in FL/reading. 

Thoughts

A team really knowing students well 

Collaborative staff planning means that the student learning experience is richer. There are 2-3 expeditions of 10-12 weeks and staff are encouraged to recycle expeditions to perfect them, this also helps since the expeditions must be planned and tight. There was a 'sell by date' of 3 years on expeditions though

the team have to be talking all of the time and understand learning targets from each area for academic crew and TLT to work

Each house lives in an area of school which means movement around the school at various times has little effect on other students

The lack of 'recreational outdoor breaktimes' has little effect since every opportunity is taken by teachers to get the students outside to learn. There was discussion about how beneficial longer lunches and breaks are...

Mainely ponderings.

This is written without regard for logistics nor a sense of scale. Its only standpoint is one of our student experience.

The philosophy of “It is not enough to get yourself to the top of the mountain, we must strive to get everyone in the crew there” should be a tenet central to any education institution. Communities of practice should be established for teachers, to have the opportunity to

1. Use time to meet the needs of student learning.

2. Plan specific activities for specific groups of students

3. Utilize subject expertise in different subject areas.

4. Have a shared understanding of the individual students strengths, weaknesses and next steps.

5. Own the learning taking place, exerting some choice over the how and the what is learned.

The schools role is to establish the operational conditions to allow this.

Communities of practices should be established for students to have the opportunity to

1. Support one another.

2. Build aspiration.

3. Learning from each other.

4. Develop a sense of identity, community, and be part of something.

5. Share a direction or purpose.

6. Develop student literacy by placing the word rich and the word poor together.

These communities should be both academic and character building.

The teachers role is to establish the operational conditions to allow this to happen.

There should be opportunities to develop and maintain each community as well as develop the character and the skills of the individuals within. Time spent working on the community pays dividends in the long run, as this can normalise academic success, provides a supportive network of people all working towards the same goal.

To share goals effectively the use of rubrics and standards should be aligned with every activity and every task. Students must have multiple opportunities to be able to demonstrate learning. Assessment should be focussed on the most important aspects of a subject whether this is

1. A concept that will lead to further learning.

2. A concept that we know to be difficult.

3. A concept that is inherently interesting.

4. Separate Academic and Character Assessment, while be able to be used to show how Character affects the academic.

(A concept could be a fact, an understanding, or a subject/discipline  specific skill)

Students should be in the habit of collecting work as evidence of current understanding, so that they know where they are in concrete and manageable ways. Supporting materials and time should be available linked to all learning targets, in order that students can decide what they need to do next in a scaffolded and logical way. This should help develop independence in the individuals before any school remedial work is required.

Making key statements of learning intentions public will change the dialogue between teachers,parents and students to a much more concrete one. Traditional examinations could also provide long term assessment of learning (over performance) and also help develop individual exam technique. Progress within topics could be shown using  simple pre and post tests. This data could be used by students and teachers to reflect and determine next steps

To prevent this approach from reducing the curriculum to the assessed points. Learning should be presented connected to bigger questions or problems. This should sometimes be within subjects and sometimes go beyond it. Long term goals and short term goals should be used to show how knowledge and ideas fit together. Time spent placing knowledge into context also  helps with this and furthermore it may provide motivation, in the form of a reason, to learn.

The content of the curriculum should serve future public examinations, the development of  an understanding of how our world works and allow students to work out who they are and what they would like to do with their future selves, and ways of getting there.

The curriculum should sometimes aim to be broad and sometimes be allowed to go deeper into key topics. The deeper parts of the curriculum could allow students to make public their work and understanding to a wider and more expert audience.  This should happen at least twice in an academic year. This should be a celebration of student learning and success. This culminating event should demonstrate for all the competence achieved in all content areas, in the skills developed, the process of completing such important work and the implications that this work has beyond the classroom. These should be timed between year groups so that other students get to see the work of others,and consistently share the philosophy of the institution.

A biannual opportunity to reflect on both positives and negatives should also be undertaken, and be focused on next steps and upon the evidence at hand. The evidence and the process should help make the student well to teachers and what the students need to do for students and their families.

Teachers need to have professional development that ensures that the conversations we have with students and with peers are positive, solution focused and develops student independence and thinking. Teachers need to work in ways that allows us to become role models of learning and being a community member for our students. Team of teachers should design and develop lessons, projects and activities that allow the students to develop successful work habits and perform handsomely academically. By getting better at sharing the how and the why  we increase the likelihood that students will follow  us on these journeys.

Importance of names

In EL schools students work on expeditions, in  CLV students work on projects - does the name make a difference?

Expeditions infer a journey and a richer experience
Does the term project communicate a message that it's all about a final product rather than the journey and the process?

Structures to ensure high quality student work

The following slides give an insight to the amount of support structures in place to make sure work does get to the professional standard. The teacher thought and planning is stunning and in my opinion only possible when a teacher is not stretched, teaching across all key stages with many classes. I did not photograph all sheets but the 11 slides here give a taste of the level of planning in place to get real quality learning.

Preparing students to interview other

Crew

The crew programme is based around three guiding questions

1. Who am I ?
2. How am I doing?
3. Where am I going?

There appears to be systematic team and skill building activities and challenges.

The who am i question resonates with Larry Rosenstocks assertion that "What is adolescence but when you try on new roles and trying on new identities?" Therefore providing student many different opportunities to interact and work like and with adults is central.

The crew session I observed was a great model of this practice at Casco Bay. 
1. the student arrived and without prompt gathered in a circle. 
2. They asked many more questions than the teacher.
3.They discussed an upcoming shared experience. ( community of practice) as they planned their performance for an upcoming talent contest.Everys student was required to be involved. 
4. Teacher asked the students to reserve judgement and then modelled this behaviour.
5. Student ownership was central, decisions left to them, Do you want to table this now? 

The portfolio, exhibition and student led conferences clearly dealt with the next two. The Crew time, therefore dedicated time for these tasks too. 

At King Middle students had around 2.5hrs of Crew per 6 day cycle. 

Numbers

Students undertake two expeditions (cross curricular) per year. Although they may take some classes that are a little more stand alone, these are known as intensives and help increase student choice. I think this is useful in deciding how many "projects" to do per year.

Students have two student led conferences per year. These take place during the school day. When not in their conference they help class mates practice their presentations.

Teachers appear to teach a total of 90- 115 students per year.

Crew size is around 15 students.

Grade reports are issued three times per year as a measure of where you are now.

Expeditions last between 10 and 12 weeks. Each subject has there own part of the project. They try to support one another through howls and literacy (genre) strategies.

Looking together at student work?

Might this book be useful too

This seems common practice.

Portfolios
Exhibition
Teachers from different subjects helping task design in other subjects. Eg English teacher helped Science teacher develop student lab reports. (Scientific writing)

High tech high have some ideas on staff review of projects.

We used a simple protocol to do this in preparation for the upcoming Project Fortnight.

http://www.amazon.com/Looking-Together-Student-Second-School/dp/0807748358

Community of practice

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

I have seen lots of this on this trip between the staff, between the students and between the staff and the students in both institutions.

" a community needs a common goal" was an opening gambit from Mike McCarthy, head of King Middle. There mission is clear and mantra like." We get everyone to the top of the hill, it is not enough to get yourself there"

It appears that EL have deliberately set up such a community of practice

Where a community of practice could be seen	Example	Expeditionary Learning model exampel
Problem solving	“Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck.”	Guiding Questions.
Requests for information	“Where can I find the code to connect to the server?”	The primacy of Self Discovery
Seeking experience	“Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation?”	Work with Experts
Reusing assets	“I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client.”	Use of Models, prior student work
Coordination and synergy	“Can we combine our purchases of solvent to achieve bulk discounts?”	Crew, small teams
Discussing developments	“What do you think of the new CAD system? Does it really help?”	Student led conferences
Documentation projects	“We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all.”	Drafting culture
Visits	“Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city.”	Expeditions and experts. Public Exhibition
Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps	“Who knows what, and what are we missing? What other groups should we connect with?”	Concepts are mapped

An interesting part of this all is the notion of legitimate peripheral participation, where by newbies begin on the periphery. They make no attempt to tackle the hard problems, but watch and help out with simpilar tasks. Their contributions are welcomed as they learn to become more sophisticated in their craft. 

A few  of simple examples spring to mind. 

1. Mixed ability ( what ever ability means) groupings.

2. The pair of the students that showed me around. One was a very articulate, very assertive student clearly academically gifted student, the other had started learning English after arriving as a refugee in 2011, who smiled widely but sometime struggled to explain his thoughts. So, while the first student explained eloquently the complexities of her  6 day schedule/ timetable and used phrases like " the HOWL's help us to develop our skills", he would say "Please come this way" and "I like this school" 

3. The grouping for the crew session that was ran by 2 students and groups of 11 adults, had a similar combination of the word rich and the word poor. 

4. Every group of students follow the same expedition
5. Student practicing and rehearsing a class presentation. Class focus on volume. SOme were confident and enunciated others, read quietly and looked down. But their was models of how it should be done. A classroom assistant even modelled the posture needed to present well, as each student took their turn.

Although the formal teaching of language is considered deeply at King Middle the informal day to day practice helps a great deal.

EL design principles in student speak

This is part of a mini 2-3 expedition which 6th grade students are involved in at the start of Middle School. Student written explanation is in the top text box along with an illustration. The EL explanation is in the bottom text box.

'Me to We' is the name of an initial expedition

Ponderings...
Can we run a short project for y7 joining CLV which enculturates them?
We need to make the 5Rs less abstract for our students.

Classroom displays which support all learning

Might be worth watching this again

Standards Based Grading Planning Structures

Student Led Conferences and Portfolios

Student led conferences take place twice per year. Students get dedicated "Crew" time to prepare and compile these. They may also be given time to add specific evidence during subject time. They are not continually added to as this would add and administrative burden to students while they learn and take part in expeditions.

Clear labels upon each rubric, evidence sheet makes it easier for everyone to collect the evidence and organise it. The student I spoke to clear had a good grasp of topics not studied for a while. Habits of Work evidence is mixed in with the content being learned. This is intended to help students see the HOWL leads to the SUCCESS.

The Student said " Portfolio are better than the single piece of paper with numbers on we used to talk about, i can show what I can do"

Take Backs/ next steps/ ideas????

Initial thoughts.....

1. Standards Based Grading- with strong guiding questions These can not be separated.
2. Relationships built in small teams
3. Teacher autonomy- Schoorl provides operational condition.
4. Role of tutors aligned to Crews- PHSE to Teambuilding, relationships,  HOWLS
5. Celebration of Learning. Students talk about and show their learning.
6. Student led assemblies/ notices
7. 5R's aligned with HOWL's - how make them practical.
8. Questions about cross curricular- role of collapsed times? "expeditions or courses"
9. Define us.
10. How do we get to own time?
11. What goes into a portfolio?
12. When is best for student led conferences? Why continual collection may not be best?
13. Exhibition of process, product and content.
14. Literacy at the heart of project work.
15. Flexibility- some courses stand alone, some integrated.
16. Have courses, not topics?
17. Pupil awards based on 5R's/ HOWLs/ Learning behaviours.
18.Set up  Interest groups- Standards Based Grading/ Disciplines or Cross Curricular/ Crew/ Celebration of  learning/ Reporting, portfolios and Student led conferences
19. How do we make best use of visitors for our students?

Literacy is integrated

Senior learning expeditions at Casco Bay High

Some of the stunning examples of expeditions undertaken - work that will definitely leave a legacy.

These strong statements of vision made by each student alongside their picture are displayed along a main corridoor in the building.

What should School Experiences be like?

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. CS Lewis.

A study of formative experiences in medical school is a revealing insight to what makes a good educational experience, after all it is good enough to prepare those in whom we trust our lives. As part of the curriculum students should be taught and have a wide range of rich formative experiences. So what might they need to be like?

The conclusions drawn from this study resonated with me and have been summarised as 

" Specific formative experiences have especially strong impacts on medical students. Whereas the intrinsic value of such experiences should continue to drive educational design, increased awareness of the diversity and range of formative experiences will prepare educators to more effectively guide positive emotional development, enhancing personal and professional growth during medical school." and that " emotional development is an important part of nascent professional competence."

I have paraphrased the outcomes of the most important experiences and added my own annotations to make a link to why this is relevant to schooling.  These are the top ten scoring “experiences” from the research, they are more or less in order, although I have grouped similar ideas together.

Experience	What might this mean for schooling?
Meeting a truly exceptional role model.	Where in your teaching do you get to show your subject based knowledge? Remember that  your teaching is a demonstration of your pedagogical content knowledge and not necessarily a showing of your “expert” knowledge as a Scientist or an Historian or a Writer. The opportunities will be when you are doing something. Demonstrating a technique, being metacognitive and sharing the how’s and the why’s. Alternatively consider when if you let students meet the professionals that use the information in their job that the students are currently studying? So University and industrial visits, trips  and speakers may do this on one occasion, but this does not allow them to become role models as such. So how do you have “experts” working with students over a period of   time? Project Based Learning can do this.
Discovering an area of   medicine that is perfect for you.	This appears to be a dream, nay fantasy scenario for teachers? How could we have lesson that students love so much that they want to spend 70 hours per week working at in their adult lives? And work in a prescribed curriculum? Answers may lie in how we balance breadth of study and depth of study. We are unlikely to become obsessed and passionate about something if we just have a surface understanding or a recall of a fact. Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High in San Diego “What is adolescence but when you try on new roles and trying on new identities?". So by providing experience of what potential the knowledge being studied has when it is applied should be part of the student experience. The relevance revealed by doing that can only motivate when studying the basic building blocks.  Project Based Learning can do this.
Being inspired by a special patient –care experience. And Seeing a patient life be saved by a medical intervention.	Both of these are inspiring and aspiring experiences, they are look “what we can achieve” moments. We can do this by modelling good work. Clearly not a “that’s a well underlined title” or “great, you got t o number 20” kind of way, but, with work that has an impact beyond the classroom. How do you design “work” for children that has a positive impact on other people? Project Based Learning can do this.
Working well with a team.	Remember this study is not about the skills of team working. It’s about the formative experiences that have the biggest impact on their emotional development and professional competence as young professionals. The study categorises this as an inspiration. So how do we design activities that allow students to be inspired by being part of team. It may be excessive to define a team, but I feel worthwhile. A group of people working towards a shared goal or purpose So, how do we design “work” that is purposeful?    Project Based Learning can do this.
Seeing a patient die, And Seeing a patient in much pain, And Seeing a medical procedure go wrong.	I don’t want to sound glib about this, but failure despite your best efforts is sometimes going to happen. I think it is significant that this   happens during training. Not all experiences have to be positive. The difference here is that the medics are robust enough to take these experiences and use them in a positive way? How can we help students build their resilience to take the failures and then perform when it really matters. All of these are classified as mortality related experience which clearly has no schooling equivalent. They do however have commonalities. They all have impact on other people they are therefore important. They all require much reflection and may involve some problem solving before they next encounter a similar situation. How do we give students safe, yet meaningful experiences that will allow them to reflect on how they acted or how to overcome the problems faced? How do we help them consider next time? Project Based Learning can do this.
Realising that you are not as idealistic as you once were.	Again this is a difficult one for education, do student really have “ideals” about the subjects that study? I doubt it, and will probably never know as it is such a personal experience. However, I’m sure we have all come across an indigent teenager before?  They do have ideals and they do have an opinion about themselves and the world, and it matters. These “opinions” may not be based on facts that they have not accrued and they may not be right. The obligation for education is to allow children to work out their ideals, with all the information available (let’s call this knowledge). Ideals, however, do not exist without the context. How do provide context for student learning and experiences? How do we help students work out what ideals they have? Project Based Learning can do this.
Receiving genuinely inappropriate feedback.	How can school work ever provide genuinely inappropriate feedback?   Please correct your spellings; add an adjective to describe how you think George felt when Curly shouted at him; add the units to your speed calculations. It can easily if the person who is giving the feedback does not have a   good relationship with you. This may be the teacher, but, it may be someone in your team or class. Nuthall’s research on the three worlds within a classroom suggests that this is a powerful influence on classroom dynamics and who will take criticism from who. You are more likely to be defensive of feedback if you have put a lot of effort into a task. You are going to care if the feedback you get is rubbish, you may even perceive it has inappropriate. I would hope that this would not be an issue for an already well qualified and maturing medical student, but for younger students the relationships and the perception matter. However, both groups need understood and shared success criteria before feedback is given.  How do we do this so that it is clear to students? How do we make them care enough about the feedback? Well, working on something that they see as worthwhile or that they see has an impact beyond the classroom. Choice of task and choice of assessment may also provide added motivation. The feedback provided also needs to be good. How do we make sure that all feedback is good within a classroom?  Remember that a large amount of the feedback does not come from a teacher, but from other students. The work of Berger on Critique and Critiquing culture provide many solutions to this. Although Berger acknowledges that Project Based Learning alone is no magic bullet but they do provide a core that can provide experience that help these thing happen.

ReVOLT project

Project display with the product, the content knowledge and process. The Project also included a pecha kucha style presentation. The students were remarkably fluent in delievring these.

Standards Based Grading

I’ve been heading in this direction for a little while now, so it has been good to see this first hand at King Middle School and Casco Bay High School in Portland.

I'm reminded of this passage from Graham Nuthall. "Significant knowledge and ability are not like this."

As a teacher I know I can only attend to the items of learning that we want our students to learn. I really can’t do a great deal about turning a C grade into B grade, these are averages of performance and therefore an abstraction.  I can do something about a student not understanding how a star develops or a how to balance a chemical reaction.  I can explain these in different ways, design tasks to break these ideas down, to make them memorable or to practice them. In these terms separating the grading system and the knowledge is a rather bizarre practice.

Staff at King Middle have found students are better at articulating there understanding of the content and of what they have learned and still need to practice.  This is the big advantage of Standards Based Grading. These items or learning targets are communicated with parents and provide for concrete conversations about learning and next steps.

It appears that the students have multiple opportunities to demonstrate competence in each of the learning outcomes for a module. I think this four chances, and have been told categorically that the school will not report on an learning outcome if the student has only had one assessment on that target.  A wide variety of tasks are used for assessment.

Some students in year 8 have found the transition difficult after being used to a percentage style grading. A few students (and parents)  have been a little confused by this, and some have found it more difficult to get the highest grades.

My big concern over SBG is how it could be used in a very reductionist way, valuing only small items of knowledge rather than the beautiful complexity that learning brings. The context of Expeditionary ( and Project) Learning seems to be the counter balance to this. I will need to ask some questions around some of the more “stand alone” courses.

Both staff and students seem happier with the HOWLS grades being separated from the academic grades, and have found these easier to be acclimatised to than the academic ones. The HOWLS grades are not too dissimilar to Cramlingtons 5 R scores.

A few of the do not’s and do’s  in grading have been pointed out.

1.       Do not include behaviour in academic grades.

2.       Do not consider attendance in academic gradings.

3.       Have clear rubrics

4.       Do not use mean scores ( and I am assuming “best fit” too)

5.       Only summative assessment counts.

6.       Involve students in the process.

7.       No zero gradings.

8.       Look at recent or current scores.

9.       DO not lump grades into one

--  Do not use group work for individual assessment.

Following the identification of the benefits of SBG was made three staff working groups were established to develop the school practice and to begin to share the vision of this.

1.       Academic standards

2.       HOWLS

3.       Remediation

A simple but thorough approach. These categories all feed into the student led conferences and have already improved the focus in these sessions.

The book A repair kit for Grading by Ken O’Connor has been recommended and on first glance looks a worthy purchase. This book was the start point for their work.

Evidence of "Fostering Character"

A couple of simple teacher quotes I picked up today that for me exemplified the teacher behaviours that are need to do this. I think they encourage ownership of the learning/ problem/ task by the student.

"maybe we could work with you on that one"
"Do we need to table this now?"
"Have we decided?"
"What do we need?"
"I'll do the ones in bold, can you source the rest?"
" A community needs common goals"
Following a frankly frivolous suggestion about a talent contest performance, teacher demonstrated reserving judgement by adding it to the list. He also reminded students that they were trying to generate ideas so that they could then make a good choice.

and from students

"During an expedition you really just want to concentrate on that"
"What are we doing after our presentations?"
"Can I work on my script during this session- i really need to make some amendments."

Preparation for presentations

We arrived a day before the final 9th grade presentation of learning for their second expedition of the year 'Sustain Me'. You could feel the pressure rising (in a good way) and staff and students were working hard to put the final touches together. Crew time for grade 9 was all about finalising presentations and this was based on great quality feedback from peers in crew and feedback from Mondays dress rehearsal. The dress rehearsal gives all students a chance to practise their presentations on an audience (likened to the prep rally before a big game). Students literally come dressed up in their presentation clothes. The days that follow provide opportunities for all the extra time needed to move work from good to great. This key structure of dress rehearsal is now a standard practice before all final presentations. 

This rubric gives an insight into the carefully structured planning in place and detailed feedback given to enable students to truly produce work better than they ever thought possible 

In the words of the Principal Derek Pierce when explaining the purpose of dress rehearsal 'Everyone has the opportunity to do something excellent'

Rituals that celebrate

1. March to the post office- students write a postcard home about a success they then walk them to the postbox to send them to someone. Home?
2. Student led assembly - a rich fair- Show case for student work shown, advertised. The whole school is present.
3. Moving on up- Seniors in assembly climb a ladder and stick a pendent on the wall with the name of the college that they have been accepted into.
4. HOW awards- each "tutor" group nominates a person who is most improved. Certificates issued during assembly.
5. Student nominated and decided award to promote desirable behaviours. Todays was the healthy living award.
6. Academic successes shared - courses passed etc
7. External awards - maths competition and car engine rebuilding contest highlighted.
8. Clap Out.   Following the completion of an expedition, the students who have completed it are clapped out from the school through a "guard of honour" by the rest of the school. This shows that students understand the investment their peers needed in order to succeed

Quote " we like using protocols, but it's more about the culture that makes us successful"

Examples of Committed practice

The second class visited was a support english lesson for ESL students. The teacher described what the students were doing as committed practice, I interpreted this as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice could  crudely defined as requiring

1. -          bigger problem that can be broken down to smaller ones.
2. -          An understanding of the task at hand so that it allows investment into a conscious and focused effort.
3. -          An element of choice or control over what is practiced.
4. -          A chance to deconstruct and restructure learning

The students were using a shared reading protocol. Protocols were ubiquitous and the Principle ( Derek Pierce) as the schools fourth R- Ritual



The support lessons were integrated into the project/ expedition that the students were working on. So that the reading was relevant to the work. The students were developing the key vocabulary that would allow them to talk/ write in the subject genre.

Other examples of committed practice include

• The dress rehearsal of public speaking before a exhibition- a presentation to an expert panel.
• Multiple assessment of each content standard.  
• more to follow

Long Term and Short Term goals

Long Term and Short Term goals or learning intentions are displayed in every lesson.

This was consistent in every classroom visited. Rather like this idea as it fits nicely with Nuthalls and Perkins assertions that learning best takes place when it is connected to bigger “problems/ questions” and then broken down into smaller components. Simple structure complex results.  

This is also reflected in the multiple assessment of each Standardised outcome. The school stated that they will not report back on student learning if they have only been assessed on an outcome once. This was one of several references to learning taking over time. 

Crew and crew advisors

Every students is a member of a crew. Crews are small and perfectly formed - 15 to 20 students max. Crew meets 4 times per week. The advisory time has a different focus each day but the three guiding questions are always the same

1. Who am I? (As an individual, a learner, contributor to crew, school and wider community)

2. How am I doing? (Academic standards, HOWs, goals and targets)

3. What are my plans for the future? (What college, what career do I want to explore, what steps am I going to take)

Crew is all about being known well by at least one adult in school, being an active part of a small supportive community and being cared for by a group of people in school.

All crew work is focused on progress in all areas of school - academic achievement, character traits, crew community, supporting others, etc. 

There are lots of crew which chime with us - home group, learning guide, learning reviews BUT do the structures we have in place really allow for this to happen?

How can we get smaller home groups?

Can we meet on a more regular basis and really have a clear focus on progress/growth of the individual?

Can we take away distractions which get in the way of 'crew type advisory' eg. PSHE was not delivered in crew but in the wellness programme. At the moment are we putting too much content in and this is stopping the work we really want to do in knowing students and knowing them well, learning guide as advocate, holistic achievement, etc?

Quote of the Day?

I had a fantastic conversation with a long term exchange student about how she was finding the school. She said she loved it, and was excelling beyond what she had previously. She already was a high achiever, but was excelling being educated in her second language.

She went onto to reason why. “Back home we were pressured to learn in a particular way, here we are supported and encouraged and challenged, and learn in many different ways”

She described the one way was teacher led, rote input. 

A neat quote to show the value of student centred learning. 

Habits of work HOWs

These are the quality habits of work essential to success - students receive a separate HOW grade each course  and data shows clear correlation between quality HOW, academic achievement and learning. HOW is the key to success!

For students with  a HOW Grade of 3 or more 'great things will happen'. The door will never close for these students and if they have not met academic standards they will be granted all the additional time and support required to meet them. Summer school will be free to them and not carry the usual cost.

Those students not getting a 3 still get additional support but not the open availability that's offered to those achieving a 3 or more. They are not playing their part in learning - consistently (about 80%) completing homework, meeting deadlines and participating effectively in class (includes regular, on time attendance). 

Using HOWs made students accountable to what's expected, what their part of the deal is. 

How do we really hold our students accountable? How do we make sure that our 5Rs make more sense to students and are less abstract?

Regular celebrations in weekly school meetings around HOW - an honour roll, HOWs awards and nominations. All a very big deal for students and staff.