Our Approach
Schools often talk about ‘Quality First Teaching’, at Rodings we are on a journey to identify what that looks like in our context with our cohort. We will be working with experts from other schools and the sector to better understand and explain what makes great teaching.
What we do know is expertly explained by the Education Endowment Foundation’s Maximising Learning Guidance.
“It is important that schools consider how children learn, how they develop knowledge and skills, and how they can be supported to lay firm foundations for later learning. Teaching approaches that ensure long-term retention of knowledge, fluency in key skills, and confident use of metacognitive strategies are crucial. These are fundamental to learning and are the ‘bread and butter’ of effective teaching:
Teaching Approaches
The teaching approaches we use are guided by international educational research about what works best.
Depending on where students are in their learning, the approaches that are likely to work best will change. For example, when they are in the early stages of learning something new, approaches that are more teacher-directed will typically be most effective. As students develop expertise in learning, they will often benefit from leading their learning more.
We understand that teachers must feel that they have agency in the classroom and that they are the contextual experts in the room, trusted to make the choices that are right for the context of that moment. However, we also know that to ensure that we are providing a consistently high-quality educational experience for all children in all classes, we need to ensure that we have a shared understanding of precisely what we mean by ‘agency’. This centres on all staff having a shared understanding about the beliefs, ideas, principles, processes and strategies that underpin great teaching at Rodings Primary School.
Too often, schools look to find consistency with the use of specific teaching strategies. This results in teachers responding to the situational cue of asking a question by using cold calling. Of course, not every question is best answered through cold calling as the purpose of the question should determine the mechanism used for asking it. Ignoring this results in teachers having prescribed strategies that result in a tick list approach to teaching that ignores the teacher’s unique position as contextual expert. To avoid this, we start with ensuring that everyone has a shared foundational belief about what progression in learning looks like.
We then expect staff to understand about cognitive architecture and six teaching domains.
Our 6 Teaching Domains (Steplab)
At Rodings we have worked hard to codify what great teaching looks like in our context. Each week, both teaching staff and Learning Support Assistants meet in Professional Development Groups and undertake Professional Development training.
We use the Steplab Core Sequence as our starting point and adapt it, to move from the broad domains of teaching to specific classroom goals.
The sequence is built from six central strands. Each strand is built around a fundamental learning problem: a classroom problem that is universal for teachers – no matter their subject or age range - and intrinsic to the process of teaching.
The six strands are as follows:
- Select curriculum - has the teacher selected the right idea to teach?
- Secure attention - has the teacher got students’ attention?
- Optimise communication - is the teacher presenting ideas in a way that is manageable for students?
- Drive thought - is the teacher pushing students to think hard about ideas?
- Gather and give feedback - is the teacher assessing student learning and responding appropriately?
- Ensure consolidation - is the teacher supporting the students to consolidate their learning?
Teaching Strategies
Teachers at Rodings are skilled at using a range of teaching strategies in their lessons.
In our weekly Professional Development sessions, staff interrogate best practice and have opportunities to practice embedding new strategies in their lessons. These strategies are derived from evidence which could come from existing practice in school, high-quality research or models from other schools. Whilst there may be limited research into how effective each strategy could be, through our experience we are able to decide upon best bets.
At Rodings we do not prescribe how and when specific strategies should be used. Instead we provide staff with opportunities to learn about, practice and through experience and shared discourse embed various strategies in their classrooms.
A 'Typical' Lesson
There is no set recipe for a high-quality lesson. However, typically, high-quality lessons will tend to incorporate the following elements:
- Retrieval practice - a review of prior learning
- Learning objective - making clear the specific things students should be learning in this lesson
- Success criteria - making clear what success will look like
- Presentation of content
- Practice
- Review - a review of progress made in this lesson
There will also typically be:
- Appropriate support and challenge for everyone
- Activities that make everyone think hard and their thinking visible
- Opportunities for feedback, which may be whole-class or individual messages
Teachers at Rodings Primary School consider these elements as they plan lessons and reflect on them after they have been taught. Our school professional development programme prioritises their continuous improvement.
We also know that it is important to take account of the prior knowledge that children bring to lessons and to help them to build upon this understanding. Additionally, anticipating common misconceptions, and using diagnostic assessment to uncover them, is an important way to support pupils.
Assessment
We use continuous informal assessment to monitor and respond to evidence of learning. This includes:
- Daily Review
- Weekly Review
- Questioning
- Discussion
- Observing performance
We blend this with periodic formal assessment, which has both formative and summative functions. This includes:
- End-of-term Standardised Assessment weeks
- End-of-topic Review
- Mid-Year Review
Teaching & Learning Contact
The contact for Teaching & Learning is Darryl Crawley
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tel: 01279 876288