Teaching and Learning Policy 2014
St Mary’s Bryanston Square School
Teaching and Learning Policy
Revised: Emily Norman March 2014
Aims
- To ensure that every child at St Mary’s school is able to achieve to his/her fullest potential, and is given the best possible teaching in order to achieve this
- To equip children with the tools necessary to become confident and successful learners
- To encourage all children develop a life-long passion for learning
Agreed Procedures
As a school staff, we have agreed the following expectations for Teaching and Learning at St Mary’s (January 2014):
Learning Environments should be: / Children’s Attitudes to Learning should be:- Calm, purposeful, happy, safe
- Displaying all children’s work
- Interactive
- Tidy and organised
- Displaying key vocabulary
- Clearly labelled
- Displaying Working Walls (displays which are updated and added to regularly to show current strategies/ topics)
- Labelled with multi-lingual signs
- Celebrating children’s achievements
- Promoting positive behaviour, with rules and charts displayed
- Fully engaged in learning at all times
- Keen to learn (thirst for learning)
- Focused
- Clear about what to do
- Asking questions
- Confident to ask for clarification or support
- Independent, but accepting of support when needed
- Problem solving
The Role of the Teacher should be to: / The Role of Support Staff should be:
- Question: open-ended questions (planned for), targeted questioning (differentiated)
- Know each child and be able to ensure each child makes progress in the lesson
- Scaffold learning
- Listen to the children
- Demonstrate strong subject knowledge to know where the children need to get to and what they need to learn
- Have a vision for the class
- Adapt lessons to ensure maximum progress
- Maintain high expectations & standards
- Make lessons enjoyable!
- Liaise with parents
- Communicate with support staff
- Set homework
- Child-focused (what do they need?)
- Both intervening and ignoring as appropriate
- Encouraging independence
- Multi-tasking
- Communicating with everyone involved with the child
- Feeding back to the teacher on what they observe and assess to feed into planning and assessments
- Supporting and clarifying the teaching
- Engaging in discussions; modelling
- Challenging children
- Working with parents
Planning should be: / Teaching Strategies should involve:
- Accessible for all staff working with the class & clear to understand
- Discussed with all staff involved with class
- Differentiated according to levels within the class
- Targeting support for groups/ individuals as needed
- Denoting prior and future learning (learning journey)
- Including L.O.s, Success Criteria, Assessment opportunities
- Providing opportunities for creative and collaborative learning
- Flexible, adapted and evaluated through the week (in red)
- Well-resourced
- Not too much teacher talk!
- Techniques such as lollipop sticks being utilised so every child has the chance to speak
- Questionning as a key feature of all lessons – different levels of question; targeted at different pupils
- A variety of approaches – visuals (visual prompts, timetables etc), Speaking and Listening, drama, ICT, investigations and problems solving tasks
- A mixture of class/ group/ individual activities
- Emphasising thinking skills
- Going beyond the classroom (trips, outdoor learning, making full use of the school’s facilities)
Differentiation should be: / Assessment for Learning should involve:
- Ongoing and flexible
- Providing work pitched appropriately to NC levels
- In the form of tasks, support and questioning
- Providing every group with direct teacher input during the week (in Literacy and Numeracy lessons)
- Providing tasks directly related to main teaching
- Making good use of time so all groups make maximum progress
- Using differentiated Success Criteria to provide an appropriate level of challenge for each group
- Opportunities for children to talk, discuss and self-evaluate in lessons
- Mini-plenaries to recap, regroup and move learning forward
- Adapting of lessons to accelerate learning based on ongoing assessments within the lesson
- Higher order questioning to promote high quality learning
- Self, peer and adult evaluations of work
- Use of Success Criteria embedded into each lesson so children know what to aim for and stay focused throughout
- Up-levelling of work to be a regular feature of lessons
Children’s Verbal Responses should be: / Key Skills should be taught by:
- In regular opportunities for open discussion
- An opportunity to rehearse answers before sharing (eg through talk partners)
- Given using full sentences & standard English where possible
- A chance for allthe children to speak
- Given time to respond (thinking time)
- Cross-curricular links being made where possible
- Transferable skillsbeing practised across the curriculum
- Targets for Maths and English beingused throughout the curriculum & children (and all staff working in class) knowing what they are
- Speaking & listening opportunities throughout the day
- Explicit Reading, Writing, Communication, Mathematical skills planned for in a range of lessons
Children’s Written Work should: / Feedback and Marking should be:
- Be dated and with L.O. clearly written
- Be completed according to Success Criteria (differentiated)
- Include a variety of work and range of styles
- Include evidence of peers working collaboratively and peer-assessing
- Have opportunities to rehearse/ practise work (jottings, working out)
- Include use of other media (including ICT)
- Recordachievements, with efforts celebrated
- Be well presented, with correct use of underlining for titles
- Regular and consistent
- According to school’s Marking Policy
- Done during tasks or as soon as possible after tasks
- Sometimes in the form of verbal feedback recorded in children’s work (V)
- Done using positive language and praise – usually in the form of ‘what went well’
- Next steps for each task (something to practise, improve or extend further) in the form of an ‘even better if’ comment (Y1-6)
- Related to children’s individual targets for English and Maths
- Giving opportunities for children to respond (and time planned in for this to happen)
- Constructive feedback which enables the child to move on
- Balanced in length (some times more detailed than others)
- An opportunity for communicating with parents and carers
Is this working? (How do we monitor and develop teaching and learning?)
Monitoring of teaching and learning is through formal and informal classroom observations, learning walks, by talking with children and staff, by scrutinising children’s work and by reviewing evaluated planning. Each person who is monitored receives feedback, with key areas for school development and individual training needs built into the school improvement process.
Curriculum coordinators carry out monitoring of curriculum areas at least once every year. These are scheduled according to our monitoring schedule. Monitoring has a focus taken from the relevant curriculum action plan. Observations and issues that may arise are reported to the school management team.
Further school improvement monitoring, with an agreed focus that is based upon teaching and learning, will be carried out each half term by the school management team.
Children’s learning is monitored by regular pupil progress meetings, where each child’s progress in Reading, Writing and Maths is analysed. Teachers are expected to prepare for these meetings by presenting current progress data, and having up-to-date information about the provision each child receives.
Teachers’ practice is developed through lesson observation feedback (both formal and informal), key stage meetings, observation of other teachers’ practice and in-school and out of school CPD. It is also expected that teachers will take responsibility for updating their own practice by researching current education theory, and asking for support from colleagues as needed.
Emily Norman
Headteacher
March 2014
To be reviewed: 2016
St Mary’s Bryanston Square School