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Learning

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Lessons
 
We aim for our lessons to:
 

• help our students acquire, develop, and embed new learning successfully
• support retention of learning
• engage our students             

 
To facilitate these goals, we plan lessons around 4 key phases. These phases make take a whole lesson to travel through or may repeat several times during a 100-minute lesson. We make sure students are aware of the phase of the learning they are in so that they know how the activities they are doing support or develop their learning.

Our lesson planning is informed by an understanding of the specific needs of our students and knowledge of the curriculum, which is carefully constructed by our teachers and refined and reviewed regularly.
 
 
 
Homework
We set regular homework at All Hallows, according to a homework timetable issued to students in September. This homework usually will support the ‘demonstration’ phase of a lesson; providing students with a further opportunity to practice and embed their learning. However, it may well prepare students for forthcoming learning, for instance research for a discussion in the next lesson.
 
Homework is recorded in the student journal by the student. We believe that this helps develop the core value of responsibility. Staff may also set further instructions on Microsoft Teams. However, for the aforementioned reasons, the journal remains the central record.
 
 
 
Feedback
We believe that feedback should be timely, useful and actionable. Because of this, most feedback should be given verbally during the lesson whilst the student is learning. How this looks may vary from stage to stage; during the activation stage this may well be ‘whole class’ feedback as learners develop their understanding and skill together, whereas during the demonstration phase this will more likely be on a 1:1 basis. The key is that feedback should happen (usually) before mistakes get embedded and there should be opportunities for students to act upon this feedback before it is forgotten, or the context of the task is lost.
 
We also believe that there is great value in students providing their peers with feedback; this is a skill which not only serves to improve interpersonal skills but also strengthens students’ own understanding of their learning as they seek to give useful advice to others.
 
Sitting down and reading the work of students properly is also an important part of the assessment and feedback cycle that teachers undertake. We ask staff to do this for every student they teach at least once per half term and provide useful written feedback for the students to read and reflect on. Once per half term from each teacher means that students receive, on average, one piece of written feedback each week across their subjects. The work they read may be something from their exercise book or it may be a more summative piece of work such as an ‘assessment’.
 
 
Assessment
At All Hallows we interpret ‘assessment’ to mean ‘checks on the success of learning’. These checks must be regular, and they must ascertain not just whether students can hit / achieve the learning outcomes but also the depth to / security with which they can.
 
We believe that assessment should take place in all four phases of the lesson, and we believe that assessment should be useful; it should give teachers information to better the learning of the children they teach. Students also engage in regular summative assessments, but like all other checks on learning, we use these to inform future teaching.