Community engagement and building the learning community has been the focus of a lot of discussion, debate and development in the past couple of years - especially with the rise of EdTech. There are many reasons for this, but the changing face of engagement is strongly influenced by two things; Social media - we're used … Continue reading Community Engagement: Using Seesaw to help families get involved in learning
High Impact Teaching Strategies are a set of reliable practices which can be used to shape teaching and learning in your classroom. There are, of course, many more high impact strategies you can use too - but for today we’re focusing in on these 5. The thinking behind High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS) is to … Continue reading 5 High Impact Teaching Strategies to Support Student Growth
The process of goal setting is pretty well embedded in schools across the globe. We know that we make better progress when we have a clear outcome in mind and set reasonable goals to grow - and in an industry which can be slow to implement change, we've largely accepted this as a good practice … Continue reading Goal Setting: Starting with strengths not deficits
This weekend we shared our presentation on Building a Community of Researchers with the IB Global Conference. We shared our work to develop a continuum of research skills and the steps we're taking to use this to build a community of researchers. You can view the presentation here: Building-a-Community-of-ResearchersDownload Here are the steps we've identified: … Continue reading 5 Steps to Build a Community of Researchers
A few months ago we set about redesigning the way we give feedback. Whilst rubrics, standards and criteria are valuable tools to help students understand where they are at this moment in time, the link to growth isn’t always clear for every child (or teacher). Working with a few teachers we began devising, trying out … Continue reading Improving the Way we Reflect: Reflecting on ATL Skills
Looking for ways to support research skill development in the classroom that are easy to implement? Take a look a the 3 we've picked out below! Visible Thinking Routines are great ways to document and share the thinking that goes on during learning. By making the thinking visible we're better able to model, check for … Continue reading 3 Visible Thinking Routines to Support Research Skills in your Classroom
As mentioned in an earlier post Mark and I have been working on ways to build a community of researchers in school. We're excited to be presenting about this at the upcoming IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi. Before we could begin thinking about what this might look like in the classroom, we identified a … Continue reading Research Skills: Working towards the IB ATLs
Asking questions is one of the foundational skills of learning, its something a lot of children do instinctively and can open the doors for great inquiry led learning. However, its also something we can easily fall out of the habit of promoting in our classrooms. There can be any number of reasons for this; not … Continue reading 5 ways to Build Inquiry in Your Classroom: Asking Questions
A topic Mark and I have been focused on a lot the past few months is that of research. Specifically helping students to become researchers. Both coming from a humanities background has perhaps played a significant role in why we see this as important. The skills you need to succeed in those disciplines (formulating questions, … Continue reading Building a Community of Researchers: What does good research look like in schools?
I've written before about how proud I am of the changes we've made within our school to reporting and feedback this year. We're not claiming to be perfect, but we've made huge strides forward in our shared understanding of what we report on, how we do it, what it means and how we use that … Continue reading Reporting: Learning vs. Work
