planning

I had a really interesting day today. In amongst the usual, first day back after school holiday, excitement and heidie type things, I spent the day with the head of another primary in our learning community. She visited so we could begin doing some work on ACfE.

Our plan was to look at how we could do something with our current maths scheme, to reduce the reliance on workbooks, have more active learning, and give back the responsiblility for organising learning and teaching to the teachers (rather than following a scheme)….So as with these discussions and planning days what we came up with was radically different to what we thought we would. And that’s how it should be I suspect.

 First we decided that matching new numeracy outcomes in to our current scheme, deciding pages to miss out and then listing active learning ideas down was going to make the same mistake we had made previously with programmes of study. Basically we would be swapping one prescriptive scheme and way of teaching for another.

Then we agreed what we wanted was

• to reduce the amount of planning we have overall – highlighting sheets, ticky boxes, assessment records which we mostly don’t need etc.
• Give back trust to our teaching staff by believing that they are capable of organising learning and teaching in different ways
• Monitor and observe learning and teaching in a more coherent and effective way

Here’s what we plan to discuss with staff

• Remove planning blocks and the handing in of Forward Plans for “marking” by HT and DHT
• Refocus on daily responsive planning with built in ways for peer assessment and plenaries which change what might happen the next day
• Remove timetables! PE etc will remain timed but staff will have leeway to complete work in various curricular areas.
• Leave programmes of study as “background planning” which staff will use as a resource rather than driving force. Outcomes then become the driver.
• Refocus how we as HTs and DHTs monitor learning and teaching – take out the Forward Plan feedback discussions and feedback sheets from us, take out classroom formal visits.
• Timetable weekly “drop in” discussion times after school which staff can opt into with HT or DHT
• Timetable a day a week for DHT and HT to work in class with one teacher. This will work on a rotation. Coaching session to follow these days.
• Timetable a monthly meeting at CCC time with each teacher and HT and DHT to have learning and teaching conversations. Target setting for national assessments will be part of this for individual children.

We were both quite excited at where this conversation with staff might take us…. I’ll keep you posted!