Teaching & Learning

Teaching and Learning

All students have the right to quality first education in every lesson, across every subject. At St. Bernard’s we value the importance of good teaching and learning practice informed by research and validated by student outcomes. Our teaching and learning practice is defined by the PACE principles:

P – Progress: Designing and delivering a broad and balanced curriculum model with clear intent, ensuring progress in lessons and over time.
A – Assessment: Assessing the progress of students within lessons and over time.
C – Challenge and Adapt: Providing equity of access to a high-quality ambitious curriculum in each lesson to ensure each student’s progress.
E – Expectations: Enabling students to meet our high expectations of engagement, behaviour and progress.

Our Teaching and Learning practice is supported by established and newly developed research and we principally use Tom Sherrington’s ‘Walkthrus’ books to provide all teachers with excellent practical advice on all elements of classroom practice. All teachers are given a copy of this book and CPD will frequently make links to this book and others in the series.

Key Terms

Teachers and students are all familiar with the key terms in Teaching and Learning and this creates a culture of transparency in our school practice.

Key Term Definitions

Pace in Lessons

 

Marking and Feeback

Marking and feedback is the cornerstone of effective teaching and learning practice. It must be meaningful and enable the student to make progress.

Our process of marking follows a ‘loop’: students complete their assessment, the teacher (or student) marks the work based on the set criteria, provides WWW and EBI feedback and then the student is given an AOF task to complete (Acting on feedback). This ensures students are making progress and learning from the feedback. Once this is complete, the teacher will stamp the work to close the loop.

Our marking policy includes frequent marking of student work by the teacher (once per half term) and by the student or their peer (once per half term).

We mark both formative assessments (those assessments that are designed to provide constructive feedback to students) and summative (those assessments that are designed to test the student’s knowledge and skills at a set time in the curriculum.

Students are encouraged to take great pride in their books as they represent the learning journey over the course of each academic year.

Disciplinary Literacy

We recognise the importance of disciplinary literacy at St. Bernard’s as a way of promoting literacy skills within subjects, enabling students to more effectively read subject specific texts and develop a vocabulary specific to that subject.

St. Bernard’s recognises the importance of literacy in the lives of all young people. High standards of literacy are vital to the development of well-read and articulate individuals. We follow the disciplinary literacy model, where literacy is embedded in the subjects we teach.

·         SPAG

·         Reading like an expert

·         Vocabulary

·         Speaking like an expert

·         Writing like and expert

The 5 principles above cover the main elements of disciplinary literacy. Students are supported to maintain accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar in their work across subjects. Students are guided to read, write and speak like an expert in their subjects, thus providing them with the language to access higher grades in assessments.

Homework

Homework is an important part of learning and a vital way of developing independent study skills. We have a clear homework policy, which prioritises revision and retrieval, so students deepen their knowledge and strengthen their long term memory. Our work on homework is supported by the Inner Drive research group Inner Drive.

We are dedicated to protecting the wellbeing of students and our policy includes no homework during mock/exams and no additional homework over holidays, as students are expected to revise their learning.

Our homework policy can be found here

Adaptive Practice – creating an inclusive classroom

St. Bernard’s has an inclusive school ethos, and we provide opportunities for all our students to succeed in the classroom every day. As part of our inclusive ethos, teachers understand their students and provide support needed for them to succeed. We recognise each student is an individual and this support will vary, however, we aim to encourage independence in all learners. Below are some initial expectations for adaptive practice in the classroom.

  • Literacy mat: these must be available and visible to students in each lesson.
  • Seating plan: Seating plans will be considered to enable the best outcomes for students.
  • Visual needs: resources are provided for students with additional visual needs e.g. overlays.
  • Time: Students may require additional thinking or processing time, which should be included in lesson planning.
  • Literacy: Texts are checked to ensure accessibility.
  • MWB: These are helpful in enabling students to plan, edit and refine their ideas before committing them to paper.
  • Scaffolding: This can take the form of writing frames, sentence starters, formula help sheets, visual guides, essay plans, checklists, WAGOLLs etc. These are used with a clear plan for building towards independence.
  • One to one support from the teacher: this can provide clarity, depth, clear up confusions and misconceptions and provide verbal cues to prompt students to think for themselves.