Bulletin - 22nd November

Hello Everyone!

Quite a lot going on at the moment, as you've probably noticed!

Please see minutes and action points from meeting on Tuesday

Year 11 Mocks and Mock Feedback
Mocks are happening this week and mark schemes / papers will be with you shortly. It's obviously important that our work here has a considerable impact in terms of helping students to understand their performance and what they have to do to improve; we need to make full formative use of summative testing in this instance. To this end, you will shortly receive a formative assessment lesson to deliver to students, in which they are asked to self and peer mark their performance in the mocks. It is therefore important that you do not write the marks you give on the actual exam paper, as this means that we can ask students to self-assess before we give them their scores.
As in previous years, you will receive a document for recording their marks per question in the exam paper. In return you will receive a question by question analysis of your class performance, and students will receive personalised feedback which highlights their weaker skill areas. If you feel unable to fill in the Excel document yourself, do pass your handwritten marks on to Toni. However this really is a straightforward process, and one which will be increasingly useful for teachers, so if you want to be shown how to do it I will run a session from 3.15 - 3.25 on Thursday after school in C5. Let me know if you want to turn up.

As I said, resources (mark scheme, blank Excel, formative assessment mark scheme for students) will be provided ASAP.

Progress Files
Thanks to Toni for sorting out everyone's allocation of Progress Files for each year group - if you haven't yet collected these, they are available in the office. Please see the emailed lesson for introducing the documents to your class, along with the reflection activity for your first lesson, and try to do this ASAP. It would seem sensible to keep them in your students' files and ideally give them out at the beginning of each lesson so that they can add targets, spellings and refer to the learning intentions and success criteria regularly. Please do try to integrate this into your teaching and get students used to using them, and we'll review the impact they are making in the summer.
There is a mistake in the year 7 one, in that the Content and Approaches for the Narrative unit actually contains the text for the Media unit - sorry about this! I could create a little replacement to stick in files if this might be useful? Thanks Corinna for pointing it out.

Learning WalkAW will be visiting lessons on Thurs am to have a look at Agile Teaching (TBo, JKy, EWa).

Agile Teaching / TLC focus
It would be helpful to know what we've all decided on as our area of focus deriving from the TLC initiative - mine is trying to get better at questioning, particularly when teaching Lit. If you could send me a quick email with yours that would be great and I will share them all with the dept if that's OK with everyone.

Website for year 11
I've knocked up a website for GCSE revision, using the unbelievably easy www.wix.com to host it! You can find it on http://www.wix.com/cheneyenglish/gcse - whilst I recognise that this has been nicely timed to miss helping students prepare for mocks, we can nevertheless point them in this direction from now on. It's a bit of a prototype and I've struggled to make it look nice or at least not horrible, but hopefully we can develop it from here - it's dead easy to edit and add resources to. We need to have some sort of online provision, and in the absence of the VLE, this does the job. There are some great resources on here though, particularly YouTube videos nicked from other schools - ideal for use in class! The guy from Cooper School in Bicester has done some amazing stuff - do have a look - the direct link to his YouTube page is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/bm124#g/u , also Westminster College School have some great videos available here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wcsenglish&aq=f

Have a great week everyone!
Tom

Bulletin - 8th November

Hi all,

This week:

• GCSE Paper 1: Mon
  
• GCSE Paper 2: Weds


• Tues: My understanding is that Tuesday's meeting is split between Leadership training for department and college leaders, and VLE training for everyone else. Therefore Csw, Pto, ACl, Pwa, JKy have got VLE training to look forward to, whilst EWa, TBo, JD, NTu, NBr, AW are at the Leadership thing. I don't know venues or times, so I suppose just wait for an email or SERCO message.


• Weds: 6th Form Open Evening (7 - 8.30)
  
• Friday: unbelievably, it appears to be our turn for Staff Tea again, so I will hastily arrange some sort of dubious reason for absence, will let you know when I think of something half-plausible.
  

Success Booklets

The booklets we discussed at the last meeting are now more or less ready, and I'll put them in to Trish for photocopying on Monday. I've made the adjustments that were suggested, alongside a little shuffling about of assesssment foci (nothing drastic) to ensure that we have a good balance of mid-term assessments over the three years. So, expect to get your lot fairly soon - perhaps we could all start by filling in the reflection sheets for the units that have just finished, so I'll try to sort out a ppt for this.

Thanks...

... to all those colleagues who have been sharing resources recently; please do have a look at Gary and Paul's spoken language stuff, Liz's success criteria and Corinna's poetry presentation (I know there's other stuff that's come around as well)... also thanks to Pat for her prolonged and time-consuming Erin Brockovich -style campaign for justice in chasing up the re-marks for our AS Lit exams!

Excellent Lunch
The lunch at the Media Studies moderation meeting that I attended on Friday was absolutely first class; thanks to all those colleagues who expressed concern on the matter. On a less positive note, I have done my back in, helping to move a friend's shed.

Have a great week!

Tom