Video Observations

We have just completed our second video observation feedback session based on Michael Absolum's Clarity in the Classroom text.  Our first one was a term ago and we received feedback based on a rubric then and have just had to redo this now.  This second rubric highlights the growth that I have made in regards to student and teacher understanding of what they are learning, how and why they are going to learn it and how they will know if they are successful.

Art and Creativity

As a school we have been lucky enough to have a local artist - Nicola Bennet - come to work with us during staff meetings and provide us with professional development around Art in the classroom.  As a PRT I have found her wealth of knowledge and experience extremely helpful and in my own way am playing around with some of the ideas that she suggested.

Attached below are the two powerpoint slides that she has shared with us in order to inspire us.  During each of these session we were able to experiment with and explore different aspects of her presentations.

Nicola Bennet - Art in the classroom

Anthropomorphic Images

At the moment in class we are doing an art portfolio unit where the children are being encouraged to explore a range of different types of art styles.  The pieces that we are working on include sketching with charcoal, watercolour sketching, collage, paint, dye and pastel.  The children are loving exploring their creativity through this unit and it is a wonderful opportunity to hidden talents emerging from a range of students.

One of the things that Nicola talked about was the way that Art is one of the things that people decide at a very young age that they either can, or cannot, do.  I find it quite special that in my classroom a culture has developed where students are so encouraging of each other and of themselves - one wee young boy came up to me today telling me "Miss M - isn't my art great.  I am so proud of it and I did my best - it doesn't look exactly like J's one - but I don't mind because it looks how I want it to look."
Another student came up to me whilst he was on independent writing today to discuss his work - he was thrilled with the creativity that he was involved in and shared with me how he was transferring his learning about gesture drawing in sketching into his writing.  It was an exciting moment for both of us.  My hope is that my students continue to feel this way about their creativity in art and across the curriculum for many years to come.

John Hattie - Success Criteria

As a school we have been focussed on ensuring that our learning intentions and success criteria are developed alongside our students in a way that enables the students to both develop ownership and achieve success.  We have been working through the book 'Clarity in the Classroom' by Michael Absolum.  I have really enjoyed seeing the link between university studies and working within the classroom as this is the first book that we have used at university that has linked directly into what we have been doing in the school setting.

Last term we were videoed and after that we worked alongside a mentor from the senior management team to develop ways in which we could be more successful in helping learning intentions and success criteria become more commonplace and effective within our everyday teaching.  For me, this is where all of my work with POGIL originated.

Last week in staff meeting we were shown this clip by John Hattie about learning intentions and success criteria and we discussed the importance of having these in very small breakable chunks for them to be most effective for students.  Below are the notes that I took during this staff meeting and presentation.  Some of this was just simply a reminder however aspects of it gave me something new to think about and consider.

• Learning Intentions are about what we are going to learn not what we are going to do.  Best way to show success criteria is to model what a successful one would look like.
• If you have a clear understanding of what success looks like you are able to get rid of what matters and teach just that.  If you don’t know what you want the kids to achieve in bite sized chunks, then it is impossible for the kids to know what they need to achieve.
• If we want to develop life long learning then we should not be the ones who are telling them they are successful – they need to be able to self regulate it against success criteria.
• Success criteria should not just be performance related – needs to be mastery focused also – and teachers need to show the students what mastery looks like.
• Need to have a deep understanding of where each child is to understand what success would look like for each kid – is it exactly the same for each child – and when it is not, how can we make it so that it is something that every child can achieve.  

I have attached the link below so that you are able to watch it - I personally found the first half of it most effective.