Learning Blog

Welcome to Batchwood School's teaching and learning blog. We want to share with everyone the best of our teaching and learning, and to provide parents/carers, staff and any other interested parties with a greater insight into what happens in the classroom, and how you might help your son/daughter to ‘Make Every Day Count’.

Our core purpose at Batchwood School is Teaching and Learning, and so this Learning Blog section of the website explores the latest pedagogy within education, sharing new ideas with staff on a regular basis, so we can all keep our teaching as fresh and exciting for students as possible. But this is not just for staff. There are also lots of other interesting articles for example; Behaviour Management, working with ASC students, to name just a few, that all parents/carers and other stakeholders might find helpful and informative. So we encourage you to browse through the categories and the associated posts and enjoy learning with us here, at Batchwood School.

A4L

“A4L is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by students and their teachers, to decide where the students are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there” (Rowe 2007). Assessment is such an important part of the process of learning, and of making progress in learning.

Key Characteristics of Assessment for Learning

Outstanding

Understanding the features of what makes outstanding learning are imperative to ensuring student progress is outstanding.

The Perfect Ofsted Lesson
What Makes an Outstanding Lesson? - by Margaret Thomas
Getting to Outstanding - by Tony Thornley
Outstanding Lesson Features

Pace & Progression

Pace has always been an important component of a successful lesson, particularly with able or gifted groups of high-achieving students who are more than able to cope with 50 minutes of rigorous challenge, who thrive on the demands of a lesson that asks them to move quickly through exposition and review to get to new learning points and spend time developing and extending new learning. Pace is also a critical feature of a well-disciplined classroom; if pupils are busy enough there is no time for off-task behaviour

If your lesson is described as having ‘unrelenting pace’, sometimes we are not sure whether this was a compliment about a fast-moving, productive lesson in which students were asked to work hard with unbroken concentration, or a criticism of the lesson providing too few opportunities for the students to reflect and ponder on the skills they were being taught.

Injecting Pace into Lessons

Questioning

More effort has been spent in framing questions that are worth asking: that is, questions that explore issues that are critical to the development of children’s understanding (Black et al 2003).

Use open questions that encourage analysis, synthesis and evaluation at critical learning moments to elicit thinking and develop learning.

Snail questioning wheel
Higher order questioning mat
Blooms Taxonomy questions
Planning your questions using Bloom
Sample questions from Blooms
Questioning wheel
Higher order questioning stems

Learning Objectives

A learning objective should describe what students should know or be able to do at the end of the course that they couldn’t do before.

Learning Objectives