St MaryMagdaleneCatholicPrimary School

Teaching and Learning Policy

At St Mary Magdalene Catholic Primary School, we provide a broad and balanced curriculum, offering children the opportunity to succeed in many different areas.

Gospel values influences every aspect of school life so that together we can enable every child’s spiritual, moral, academic and social development to flourish.

Aims of this Policy

Our learning and teaching policy:

  • Is the means through which our vision statement and aims are achieved
  • Is shared and adhered to by all staff to create a consistent approach, high expectations and effective organisation
  • Provides all staff with a framework for the highest quality teaching and learning in order to inspire all children to learn and achieve to the best of their ability.
  • Is monitored informally and formally by everyone.

We aim for our children to:

  • Know God, to recognise His presence in every human being and all of creation.
  • Develop inquisitive minds, a spirit of curiosity and a passion for learning.
  • Reflect on their learning and have a sense of responsibility for their own learning and development
  • Understand the importance of perseverance, resilience and tolerance.
  • Have high expectations and self-belief to enable them to fulfil their potential.
  • Be equipped with the skills to fully participate in an ever changing world.
  • Be respectful and productive members of the community.
  • Have the courage and confidence to ask questions and take calculated risks.

In order to facilitate good teaching and learning staff will:

  • Provide a rich and purposeful learning environment.
  • Adopt a teaching style that fits the needs of the pupils and the curriculum.
  • Recognise that good relationships are the key to good learning and promote these.
  • Promote consistently high expectations of work and behaviour.
  • Ensurethere is a calm but busy working environment with well-established routines.
  • Ensure that all children receive appropriate and sufficient praise and encouragement

Roles and Responsibilities

It is the responsibility of all staff to facilitate the provision of the highest quality teaching and learning in order to enable all children to achieve the highest standards possible in basic skills and all other areas of the curriculum.

Teaching at St Mary Magdalenes

Although our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum, our children have the opportunity to develop their skills through termly ‘Learning Journeys’. These are cross-curricular and enable the children to learn through exploration of a theme. Every Learning Journey is supported by quality reading texts and the ‘Power of Reading’ strategies which engaged the children and provide the stimulus for writing and further exploration. Our ‘Learning Journeys’ are carefully planned, in order to ensure they cover the key skills of the National Curriculum.

Good teaching can be characterised by the following:

  • a clear focus to the lesson with explicit learning intention, shared with ALL pupils and support staff
  • agreed success criteria understood by pupils and revisited throughout and at the end of every lesson
  • challenging but achievable expectations
  • quality questioning with appropriate cognitive challenge
  • learning linked to pupils’ prior skills, knowledge and understanding
  • a secure subject knowledge
  • guided learning opportunities with clearly targeted work for groups of learners
  • employment of positive behaviour strategies to motivate and encourage pupils to respond appropriately and help create a climate for learning
  • assessment that is ongoing throughout the lesson and which informs progress and future planning
  • the provision of a purposeful and stimulating learning environment

Planning

Successful teaching and learning takes into account effective planning. At St Mary Magdalenes medium and short plans are clearly linked with objectives and outcomes are clearly stated. Plans will be modified in response to pupils’ learning and will ensure that activities are planned for that take into account the different needs and abilities in the class. Planning will also build in an appropriate amount of challenge for all pupils.

Quality Questioning

Questions are included in our planning and focus on ensuring sufficient and appropriate cognitive challenge. Differentiated questions are planned for – Basic Advancing and Deep- which are based around Blooms Taxonomy of cognitive challenge

Planning will be scrutinised by the Head Teacher, Assistant Head teacher and subject leaders as appropriate.

Speaking and Listening

Opportunities in all subjects for children to talk about their learning through dialogue with ‘Talk Partners’, in groups and with adults is key to developing conceptual understanding. High quality talk is crucial for effective learning and is built into the planning of teaching sequences in all subjects as a distinct, explicit part of the learning process.

Assessment for Learning

Assessment forms a crucial part of all teaching and is carried out both formatively and summatively by all staff.

Teachers and TAs maximize opportunities to encourage children to articulate their thinking and learning. Skilled use of formative assessment strategies like ‘Thinking time’, ‘Talk partners’, ‘Success Criteria’, teacher modelling, peer and self-evaluation, effective questioning, high quality marking and verbal feedback, all contribute to making learning processes explicit and support children’s developing thinking and learning skills.

Formative assessment takes place in all lessons and is ongoing. It is used by teachers and by support staff to inform future planning. Assessment will inform the next steps targets for improvement for different groups of pupils. It also provides an opportunity for pupils to reflect on their own learning linked to the learning intention in the lesson.

At St Mary Magdalenes, we use ‘Curriculum Essential’ and ‘Milestone Indicators’ to collect evidence of children’s learning and depth of understanding. We use pupil’s written work, talking to the pupils and observations of their learning to establish a clear picture of where they are in relation to the age-related expectations (this is further explained in the Assessment without Levels Policy). In terms 2, 4 and 6 teachers report to SLT on the progress of all the children in their class and targets are set for every child.

Monitoring and Evaluation

The quality of teaching and learning is monitored and evaluated regularly and systematically throughout the year in the following ways:

Subject Leaders

Curriculum areas are monitored by subject leaders. It involves lesson observations, learning walks, book scrutiny planning and assessment data scrutiny, pupil interviews, teacher assessment moderation and progress tracking through regular assessment.

Leadership Team

The Head Teacher and Assistant Head Teacher, monitor the quality of teaching and learning through lesson observation, scrutiny of planning, assessment data and children’s work, learning walks and pupil interviews. This evidence informs both teacher performance management and the school’s subject review schedule. Ofsted criteria are used to make a judgement about the quality of teaching and learning and teachers are given detailed written developmental feedback. An anonymised, generic report of the findings from each round of observations informs school self-evaluation. The Head Teacher reports to the governors on the qulity of teaching.

Governors

Governors have a statutory role to play in monitoring and evaluation of the school curriculum and the quality of teaching and learning. Each area of the curriculum has an assigned Governor.

Local Authority

The school’s LA School Improvement Partner through termly visits, works with the Head Teacher to monitor and evaluate the quality of teaching and learning through scrutiny of assessment data, joint lesson observations and pupil voice.

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Teaching and Learning Policy 2015