Wednesday 23 October 2013

MIGs and TAG - CPD for all!


Mayfield Improvement Groups (M.I.Gs) are groups of staff who work as research partners to improve teaching and learning across the school. All staff at Mayfield belong to a M.I.G and link the work they complete to professional development targets and implement these techniques and ideas directly into the classroom.

The M.I.Gs are the main C.P.D push for 2013-14 at Mayfield. Each member of staff works within a group of 7-10. The groups are headed by a member of the Teaching and Guidance (T.A.G) Team who facilitate, guide and support the group. 

Each group has two main functions/objectives:
1)    To work on an area of Action Research by focusing on a key area of Teaching and Learning across the school and creating new ways to improve it and move forward. Staff were asked to opt into a group which will be focusing on an area of personal professional interest. The group are involved in a range of activities which include the creation of whole school resources, amendment of policies, working with student groups, researching current academic thought, filming of ideas and potentially taking part in learning walks in other schools. The group will impact whole school progression with Teaching and Learning and is linked to the S.I.P.

2)   To work together as a large group (or divide into smaller numbers) to support each other by;  providing opportunities for collaborative planning and thinking and learning; addressing current issues identified as part of our whole school development and providing opportunities to process new ideas, apply knowledge independently, discuss and reflect. This involves peer observations, mentoring and the sharing and recognition of good practice.


The focus over the Autumn term with be the first group objective – evaluating an area of Teaching and Learning and creating a way to develop it further. Each group will present their ideas during INSET in December. From Spring these ideas will be trialed and put into place across the school. The group will support this process and then begin to focus on the second objective. The summer term will allow for an evaluation of the action research projects as well as further work on the second objective.

This Blog allows all the work completed by the M.I.G.s to be shared across the school and Portsmouth area to encourage best practice. Please use the Tabs at the top of the page to read the latest work and share your comments.


Precise, descriptive language

Precise, descriptive language

I recently saw an excellent resource that was being shared by teachers on Twitter, to encourage the use of more precise language and to broaden the vocabulary of pupils. Geoff Barton has published his list of 100 words to sharpen your expression, this got me thinking as to how it could be used within Geography. 

I decided to work on some creative writing with Year 8 who are coming to the end of a topic on coasts and coral reefs. Pupils were introduced to 3 "Webber's Wonder Words" (thanks to Geoff's list). Pupils were given examples of poems available online and read them to unpick ways the author had made the poem appealing, including sentence length, rhyme and rythym. We then snowballed words that could make it into our poems including colours, sounds and feelings. Once pupils had a bank of words to choose from they were introduced to the words arcane, lurid and iridescent. One pupil was inspired to add translucent as he felt that would better describe the look of jelly fish (now they were really getting it about being precise with language)!

The results were a mixture of visually and linguistically interesting poems. Some pupils chose to echo the sea through their sentence length and layout of this work. 

Almost all of the pupils could confidently put these words into a sentence and they left being able to spell and define the selected words. Next time I plan to use a wider variety and encourage debate about the precise meanings of these words, maybe throw in a few red herrings and dictionary work to support their skills at questioning and defining words.





Lucy Webber - Head of Geography