Following the introduction of the Sandringham Great Teaching and Learning framework in September, staff were invited to reflect upon their current practice by completing an audit in the four areas of Curriculum, Relationships, Opportunities and Long term learning. For myself, the area that was highlighted as needing most attention was ‘Opportunities’, causing me to reflect on how frequently and how assertively I promote the extra-curricular side of the subject I teach, Philosophy, Religion and Ethics.
While our lessons naturally revolve around social, moral, spiritual and cultural areas of interests, and these are signposted both in lessons and on notice boards, I am aware that there is more I could do to promote our Super Curriculum. So that got me thinking about how I could keep the Super-Curriculum ‘closer to hand’ and how to make it easier for myself to signpost activities of interest to students for further research and reflection. Here are some of the strategies I have decided to try in the coming weeks:
– Creating a folder called ‘Super-curriculum’ or ‘Further Research / Challenge’ in each Google Classroom. Following Katrina Clark’s excellent training last year about making full use of the Google Classroom I now organise my classroom resources much more effectively. To add a Super Curriculum folder will mean I am prompted to think about which of the Super Curriculum tasks I could be signposting for each topic. Posting in the folder will also keep the extension and challenge tasks in one place for students to retrieve easily.
– I’ve added some of the Super Curriculum hyperlinks to a Super Curriculum folder on my book bar. This can be further subdivided into Year group sub folders. This was a useful task as not only does it keep the links organised and easily accessible to me, but it also helps review which links have changed or been moved.
– To complete my trio of bookmarks, I have created an email folder for challenge tasks so I can email any interesting resources or website I see to myself, and store them for future reference.
– In PRE we are hoping to devote some Faculty time to keeping the Super Curriculum in mind, looking forward over the next topics to pick out tasks which are particularly relevant to set as further opportunities for learning.
– Other opportunities to extend learning may be found in two dynamic resource providers: Oxplore, first introduced by Alice Constable and Alice Wiggett, is an excellent debating and critical thinking website. In addition, The Economist ‘Topical Talk’ resources take an issue which is currently in the news and provide structured ‘talk’ opportunities to explore the issue from different perspectives. Again I hope to find some topics here which reflect or deepen understanding of issues we are studying in PRE.
I’m hoping that these strategies will keep the further opportunities for learning in mind and closer to hand, I will see if they have been successful when I complete my next Great Teaching and Learning audit!
