Last week, I lead one of our 'Wednesday morning masterclass' sessions - briefing sessions to staff on key areas highlighted as school priorities. They are 10 minute sessions which take place at 8.20am and range from really interactive sessions to 'talk sessions'.
We were asked to present on AfL strategies used in MFL and Music lessons. We set about hunting out ideas (and then it transpired that my colleague would not be in to help me out and I panicked as I was all alone!).
I have "pdf-ed" the presentation below and included everything except the photo of our children in Year 7 on the opening slide.
One of the things I was at pains to point out, was that a great many of our ideas have come from things we have learned from other tweachers. One of our current favourites is the Wheel of Marginal gains (thanks to @huntingenglish), which we have used to help students in the medium control phase of their written CA work.
I shared our department's changed approaches to marking, largely thanks to the posts from @headguruteacher and included some photos of our students' work. The children have responded really positively to our changed focus - less of us writing lengthy bits of feedback (which were often unread, and certainly not always as 'helpful' as we had thought), and more of them working out what went well and why we've suggested that certain things need tweaking.
I can't remember who first introduced me to padlet (or wallwisher as it was then), but staff seemed genuinely surprised about it - such a fab resource and can be used for a real variety of reasons.
We have created our own differentiated work cards for GCSE German (and French) - the German ones can be downloaded here - students start by working with the cards that they think are most appropriate (blue - easiest / green - average / red - hardest) and then, by assessing their own ability, they either choose to try the comparable challenge at an easier or harder level wherever appropriate. The children have enjoyed working with these cards, as they are 'trusted' to work at the level most appropriate for them - I think trust is mega important when it comes to AfL - we need to trust that the children can assess and judge their progress well.
We give our GCSE students a '50 word challenge' as they start a unit - the clue is in its title - there are 50 words, and they are a challenge. The idea is to find out the meaning of all 50 as quickly as possible. They record their times as well. We then work through the unit and, as the unit progresses, each week 20 words are prescribed for a test. We regularly then revisit a blank copy of the 50 word challenge (initially in the same order, later in the unit becoming mixed up as well), with the challenge of completing the challenge in a shorter time frame than last time. I was so relieved when I read this article which approves of lots of testing - we always knew it was true - how else does learning become embedded.
We know we could have talked about loads more ideas, but it was so difficult to decide which to include in the session - maybe we will be allowed to do another one day and share yet more ideas. Thanks to all who have helped us to discover new ideas over the past twelve months while we started out on twitter, getting to grips with sharing ideas across the nation and the globe.
