Our remarkable learning environment facilitates great teaching and learning that leads to excellent outcomes, and the very best life chances for all.
Teaching and learning policies at Beckfoot have been created with our staff, for our staff and students. Our approaches are based on ‘evidence-informed wisdom’ that has been tried and tested in our classrooms. We have a foundation of core structural features which appear in all lessons, but teachers use their teaching and learning toolkit to choose strategies most appropriate to the subject and specific curriculum content. As a school, we strive to always be a model of World Class teaching and learning – and outwardly-facing leader in develop practice across the Trust and local community. We are a team who gets excited about teaching and learning!
Teaching and learning at Beckfoot centres around three key areas:
- The Beckfoot Way – Our teaching and learning policy, providing the consistency and clarity our staff and students need to thrive.
- Developing greatness – Our CPD, providing the professional development to support and stretch our staff.
- Evaluation into action – Our QA, ensuring that our CPD and policy are based on a knowledge and understanding of what is happening in our classrooms.
The Beckfoot Way
Our T&L policy, The Beckfoot Way, has been built to provide the foundations for great teaching and learning and ensure ‘Limitless Possibilities for All’. The consistency it provides supports our students as they move from classroom to classroom, subject to subject, teacher to teacher. The freedom it allows enables our teachers to build upon these foundations in the way that works for them, in their subject, with their students. It includes:
- Systems: Knowledge Organisers and Retrieval Practice; Knowledgeable and Expert Learners Framework inc. Home Learning; Assessment, Marking and Feedback.
- Vulnerable learners focus: Know your students; Prioritise and Additionality; Literacy for all; Close Collaboration.
- Principles: Routines, Scaffolding, Modelling, Learning Checks, Questioning, and Practice.
- Practices: Starts & Ends of Excellence; The Big Picture; I do – We do – You do; Everyone Think – Discuss – Write; DNA.
CPD: Developing Greatness
Our CPD, developing greatness, is at the heart of teaching and learning at Beckfoot. If great teaching and learning is what has the biggest impact on student outcomes, then professional development needs to be protected and prioritised. Our CPD curriculum is:
- For all teachers
- Focussed on improving student outcomes
- Grounded in evidence-informed wisdom
- Long-term
- Bespoke and collaborative
- Linked to policy with opportunities for further exploration
Our core CPD curriculum centres around:
- Termly whole school CPD, where what we are sharing is relevant to all and linked to whole-school priorities
- Weekly collaborative planning time, focusing on great teaching and learning, curriculum and assessment in subject areas, linked to faculty priorities
- Instructional coaching, supporting staff in refining habits and developing personal practice
We also provide an ‘extra-curricular’ offer, alongside this core CPD, for staff to select from based on their areas of interest or where sessions are linked to pedagogy they are exploring and refining in their own practice.
We have therefore created a ‘Developing Greatness calendar’. These are issued half-termly and include opportunities such as:
- 15-minute forums led by our staff
- 1 hour webinars led by external experts, both live and pre-recorded
- Open Classrooms
Evaluation into action
Our Quality Assurance, Evaluation into Action, ensures that we triangulate all the sources of evidence to come to secure conclusions about what is happening in our classrooms – evaluation. From here, we determine how to feedback, develop and share teaching practice – action.
Our evaluation includes:
- SLT walkthroughs looking at the implementation and impact of school policy.
- Coaching walkthroughs utilising Instructional Coaching.
- Formal observations, e.g. for our early career teachers.
- Work Scrutiny with staff to diagnose how teaching and learning can continue to develop.
- And joint walkthroughs between senior and middle leaders, and staff and student voice, to look at the holistic quality of education.
We then ensure that we ‘close the loop’ – putting the right feedback and development in place and subsequently returning to ensure that this action has had impact. Examples include:
- Whole-school, Faculty or Individual CPD based on areas of policy that need further development.
- Collaborative Planning Time session.
- Working with a colleague to formulate a granular action step for Instructional Coaching, zooming in on feedback from evaluation activity.
- Observing a colleague who has successfully embedded a particular practice in order to see this pedagogy in action.
As Dylan Wiliam says, “Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.”