Learning menu's staff training

After an INSET looking at ways of improving the learning in school and encouraging the pupils to take more responsibility for their own education, we have within our department been working on putting lots of these learning menues into our new specification. In the last department meeting, I discussed ways of improving the literacy in Science to improve our results. I showed the team lots of strategies and gave examples of work that I had done with my classes. The staff training on learning menues lends itself perfectly to the application of literacy tasks. I believe that this will help our students to be more confident when they are explaining more complex theories in both the classroom and in the exams.

Leading Teaching and Learning

Objectives today were to gain an understanding of effective leadership strategies and learn how to recognise outstanding teaching and learning. Leadership Styles Goleman identifies 4 styles which encourage team harmony and inclusion, and 2 other styles which can potentially create dissonance and discord. The 4 styles encouraging team harmony are called visionary, coaching, affiliative and democratic, and they are described as follows: Visionary - moves people towards shared dreams, creates a sense of direction, encourages change Coaching - helps individuals improve their performance and align employee goals with those of the organisation Affiliative - builds relationships and teams, and helps to deal with problem situations between teams Democratic - helps to create buy-in or consensus by involving people and valuing their input The other two leadership styles, pacesetting and commanding, are more directional, and focus more on the setting down of expectations, and they are described as follows: Pacesetting - sets challenges that high performers can achieve and this can leave less competent people falling behind and obviously potentially uncomfortable and dissatisfied Commanding - gives direction when problems arise or calms things down in a crisis Thoughts. Which is best? or should effective leadership be a combination of all six? Adapting to change? People are different and will respond as an individual to different leadership styles. A good leader will lead by example. Leadership Style assessment. Before completing the assessment, I put myself as Affiliative Leader. My Scores Visionary -4 Affiliative - 17 Coaching - 14 Pacesetter - 9 Democratic - 13 Coercive - 3 Clearly to be more rounded I need to focus on fitting into the visionary and coercive style more often. Visionary leaders generate self confidence and empathy and have a strong positive impact. Do I not show empathy? I hope not! This is one of the most effective leadership styles. From the questionnaire, I need to do the following: Tell people what they need to do and expect them to do it. Give clear direction based on my experience. Discuss my vision with my team. Make my expectations clear and also where I would like the team to be heading. On a good note, my score for coercive was the lowest. This leadership style can have a negative impact if overused. It is the style that can be seen as bullying and causes low morale. Its more important to be balanced in all areas, however we can adapt to different styles of leadership when the time arises. In School Variation Biggest variation = Quality of teaching What to do to eliminate variation - Consistency for expected standards. Good presentation of students work. Awareness of your students - PP, SEN, G&T, learning styles. Accountability of staff. Closing the gap with staff to be a better team. Marking consistency. Development of staff. Sharing good practice.

Raising Achievement in Science by improving Literacy Skills.

Literacy is not often associated with Science, especially Chemistry but students are examined on their depth of understanding through long answer questions. These questions are often not attempted at GCSE and also A Level as students are put off by a blank page. My project has been to implement the use of literacy boards and key words when attempting these 6 mark questions. I have trialled it with the top set Chemistry group. It has worked very well and they are now more confident in attempting literacy tasks. Any literacy task has been marked and then the students have been given the opportunity to improve their work. I have looked at the following areas. 1. Rates of reaction. I demonstrated the thermal decomposition of hydrogen peroxide without a catalyst. Students recorded any observations. The experiment was then repeated using a catalyst. Through observations and verbal rehersal, students were asked to identify the two roles that a catalyst plays in a chemical reaction. This write up was completed as a homework. Some students missed out one the key points but they then improved their work. 2. Le Chateliers Principle. At A Level, one of the most difficult questions to explain is the application of Le Chateliers principle to a range of chemical reactions. This has also been trialled with the top set Chemistry group as a stretch and challenge activity. These questions have been practiced by setting out the explanation as bullet points to allow students to order their answers. 3. GCSE Addition Polymerisation. This question often confuses students. The use of a Literacy board helps to identify key words that need to be used to gain extra marks. I have now made a number of Literacy Boards. These will be laminated and used by the rest of the department. I have also written the use of literacy in both the new GCSE and A Level specification.

Developing Leaders - I have seen the light!

Traditional science lessons have often begun with teachers presenting students with science vocabulary words and asking them to write the words, find the definitions in a dictionary or the glossary of the textbook, match the words to definitions, or use the words in a sentence. In this model of instruction, words are often presented in isolation and students are tested on the words alone, without application to concepts. In order to enable pupils to learn specific words, definitions and be able to talk confidently about science is a skill that needs to be developed over time and used often in lessons to help pupils to become self regulators in their own learning. One of the big problems that I see in lessons is that student can't talk about science or use high level literacy skills such as evaluate and analyse. They also struggle to make their own notes or write a detailed method to an investigation. This is going to be increasingly important as we see the removal of coursework and the practical skills are examined during the written test. So my focus for the course will be looking at closing the largest gap which is pupil premium students. I aim to achieve this by looking at improving literacy in science. I know from my A level students that they love to talk about chemistry and they find it a useful revision skill. So if I can implement the use of literacy in science, hopefully I will see an improvement in pupil premium students.

This academic year I am responsible for leading a six month STEM project with a group of gifted and talented sixth form students. It will involve the students taking on a real life problem set by an engineering company in Staffordshire. One of the areas that I would like to develop in the school is the % of A* /A grades at both GCSE and A Level Sciences. By raising the profile of Science within the school and involving students in Science based projects I hope this will inspire students and help them to gain a much deeper level of subject knowledge leading to higher attainment in the examinations.