A Learning Walk At Wildern School
-Charlotte Humm
A few weeks I had a day visit to another school to go on a
learning walk. As part of the NQT+1 programme I am trying to embed ideas that I
have picked up from other colleagues and implement them into my teaching.
My first focus for the learning walk was looking at ways to
support A+T students in the classroom.
One way that this school supported these students was to have a focus on
the display boards during the lesson. On the boards in each classroom there
were several pieces of work at different grades. During the lessons the
students were encouraged to go the display board and read the work suitable to
their target grade. They could then reflect on why this work is the grade it is
and also what needs to be done to improve this piece of work. They can then
reflect upon their own work and see what needs improving. By having the work up
on display the students were able to use it as a resource when they needed to.
I also wanted to focus on how to encourage students to be
more independent in lessons. One way that I observed was to use a Zone of
Relevance. This was where the students had a question related to the topic of
work where they had several statements in which they had to write down if they were
relevant to answering the question or not. This activity seemed very useful for
revision or as a starter activity.
A second activity that encouraged independence was a paper
chain. The students had to link key words and facts together in a paper chain.
The students then had to link the key words and facts to a case study. They
were then able to answer a question on the topic using the information on the
paper chain or they could write their own question.
Overall I found the learning walk very interesting and I
have learnt many ways of supporting A+T students and encouraging students to be
more independent in their learning.
