on post-its: what interests and loves do you have for your subject?
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creative innovations in a changing culture
Tim Whitehead – Alderbrook School and Claire Marshall, for Cre8us & changing cultures
By every measure thinkable boys at school were underachieving compared to the girls
Small team of us worked with a team of teachers(English, Science, Geography, History) and a group of 30 challenging boys from Years 7 and 10
We looked at what staff really wanted to see in their classrooms – what they loved about their subjects
We looked at the boys interests & why they were disengaged
We co-planned lessons using the boys interests, specific curriculum content and teachers hopes and ambitions for the learning in their classrooms
Year 1: co-planning
What are your students interests?
We took everything the boys offered seriously and worked with it – which soon disarmed them and engaged them
We planned lessons, the students and staff tried it with the whole classes and we looked at how went it well, refining ideas over a half-term
We then evaluated together with the boys and teachers sharing what had worked, what would have been even better if…
How we used this
Lucia had to look at the poetry anthology with Year 10’s and help move the boys up from D’s
She wanted to have excited discussions in the classroom with boys then able to pour into their writing
The boys were interested in Cheryl Cole! So it started of with looking at her songs, how
she interpreted them into videos, we used the skills Lucia would normally teach to approaching poetry as a way to approach the songs and then looked at the anthology as a comparison.
For Example
The boys were more engaged
Lucia had a new way to look at planning and continues to use this approach
She knows what works well – media resources and lots of short activities that keep the lesson moving all working to the same goal
Everyone in the class including the boys all improved in their writing assessments and were showing much greater progress in their learning
Outcomes
We told the Head this is what we needed to do
We came up with a principles of planning document that went into the school planners for all staff
We knew we needed to utilise the students as these new approaches meant the staff were spending time collecting new seemingly unrelated resources- the students needed to help not only plan but provide materials for the lessons
What we did next
‘Engage the Boys’
I was briefed- “Design and create a website that will store lessons ideas that will engage the students. Your working groups are 10 naughty boys from year 8 and 10 from year 9”
The site began to EVOLVE
Although the initial idea was to engage the students it quickly became clear that it would…make everybody’s life easier
Students more engaged
Greater levels of progress, students either on target or above (no longer below) and in KS4 improved GCSE results for boys
“The idea of this project was to find ways of making learning more interesting for boys, and we think it successfully did that. It was good to have a project just for the boys, as in lessons there are things we don’t find interesting but the girls do. It has improved our learning as it’s shown different ways for boys to learn, a good way, and it works.” Year 10 boys
Alderpedia Outcomes - Boys
They understand the strategies that make a difference and work
They built relationships with their students and saw this as crucial in a successful learning experience
“It has been a successful collaboration; I’m going to build in more time into lessons to get students to make resources that are more relevant to them. It has worked so well in that unit of work, it’s made me think about what more we can do.” Science Teacher
Alderpedia Outcomes - Teachers
In pairs/small groups each person thinks of a lesson coming up in the next week that you can set homework for to look for media clips
what curriculum content do you want them to think about?
how would you set it-up to be successful? how can you use what they find for you
usefully?
Task
Its that Easy All you need is a helpful ICT technician!...
And if you haven’t got a helpful ICT technician
ANY QUESTIO
NS?
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