Wednesday 17 January 2018

Raising Motivation and Engagement in the Classroom


Over the past 12 months, we've looked to add something we've called ‘Sparkle’ into our junior school curriculum. ‘Sparkle’ is exactly that - something different, innovative, bright, interactive, technological, risky, cool and so on…
As part of this, we came up with the term ACE ( Audience, Context &Enrichment). The whole purpose being; to give children an audience for their work, a reason/purpose for their work and to do so in a fun and engaging environment. Should children just complete work for the sake of it, to learn and because they're told to? Well, that's one option. But, how about helping them to enjoy learning, finding out about audiences, complete tasks within a set context and with enrichment…

Like all schools, we have those who will work whatever the task, teacher, day of the week, weather and so on (even they need Sparkle). But, this is so important for the ‘Why?’, ‘Do I have to?’, ‘Boring!’ pupils.

What have we done?
Year Three: DT - Designed sandwiches and then visited Subway to make and eat sandwiches.
Year Four: Cave Painting - Enclosed room, lights off and the walls covered withpaper. The pupils had a go at creating cave art in the style to Stoneagedwellers.

Year Five: Non-Chronological reports about Pokemon and then used these tocreate a Pokemon Go style activity.

Year Six: Before making fairground rides in DT, the pupils visited Legoland(for, lots of fun) to generate ideas.

Year Six: Wrote about countries of the world and then displayed these outside with a large world map for all parents to see when collecting their children.
Year Five: Produced writing for iTunes publication.

Year Five: Had questions asked tosomeone in Sierra Leone as part of 100wc.net.

Year Four: Tweeted authors.

Year Three: Invited parents in during the day to help the children make toothpaste and share their learning.
Year Four - Learned how to and made Roman Oil Lamps as part of history/art. Then, in English, wrote and filmed instructions for how to make the oil lamps. Then, after school, parents came in to make an oil lamp with their child being the teacher.

 
Impact? Those who are usually engaged in learning were not turned off by any of the ACE additions. They continued to work with the same gusto. Whether interested in Pokemon or Lego or not, they engaged with the task. 

The main impact has been with those who are often not engaged with learning - those that are easily turned off. We saw boys (and it was mostly boys) really engaged by the Pokemon task: trying new words, working at home and asking, "When's English?" The Year Six pupils saw the buzz at home time where people were looking at their work. Year Five experienced seeing one of their peer’s work being used in an interview on Facebook. The Year Four pupils felt special and appreciated by having their Tweets replied to by an ACTUAL author.

We're working in an environment of testing, assessment and accountability. When do the children work best? When they don’t realise they're learning! When Lee Parkinson visited our school, he spoke about 'Camouflaged Learning'. He said that in his experience, if you ask a child in Year Three to write instructions for how to make a cup of tea, they will tell you to "Go away" (Lee didn't say 'Go away'). However, can they write instructions for Minecraft, using a Raspberry Pi, plaiting hair, or anything they're interested in? It takes a bit of extra work, it involves getting inside of the minds of the learners, but it makes a huge difference! 

Make it enjoyable. Make it memorable. Make it interesting. 
They’ll learn and might not even realise! 

 Let us know what you're up to too...

Friday 12 January 2018

Bar Reports for Attainment Data

In a recent discussion with James Pembroke, he suggested various different ways to manipulate and display our junior school data in order to analyse it. One of these was to create 'Bar Reports' for each cohort as they pass through the school.
When thinking about how to do this, Excel, Numbers, G Sheets and other applications were an option, but I went with PowerPoint so that I could have more control over how the finish product looked.
In PowerPoint, I created arrays of 100 squares and then coloured these according to the percentages we'd assessed children at. A slightly time-consuming process, but well worth it and something that has shown us aspects of our assessment, attainment and progress that we had not previously seen.
The three pictures here are completely fictional and in no way represent any school, children or their data.