Celebrating success - What do the results say and WHY?

I have been very fortunate this year to work with an incredible teacher and amazing Year 7 & 8 students at Panmure Bridge School.

The opportunity to observe and work alongside these amazing individuals has renewed my passion for teaching and learning. 

Robyn Anderson and I have had many conversations about the needs of her students and the comprehensive ways she has of supporting her students who have very many diverse needs. I really appreciate the opportunity to share ideas, problem-solve, bounce ideas around, work with her students, carry out additional assessments and most importantly to have the opportunity to be Robyn's critical friend.
I totally agree with Robyn Critical friends are awesome!

Today I celebrate the progress her students have made under her guidance.

Robyn has adapted her programme throughout the year to meet the needs of her students.

She has listened to her student's opinions and consider their interests when recrafting her class programme.

I believe the progress made by these students is a direct result of the explicit acts of teaching  Robyn carries out every day.

Regular strategies I have seen in place daily in her classroom

• Recapping learning from previous days or lessons and makes clear links to other curriculum areas
• Checks in with her students regularly to check their understanding of vocabulary and content.
• Regularly involves the students in the decision making about their own learning 
• Constantly reminding students of their learning goals and how they can demonstrate their understanding.
• Reinforced the focus/goal including asking students to share their goals in multiple ways.
• Actively Models the learning.
• Guides and scaffolds the students towards their next step goal with appropriate strategies and support.
• Gets the students to share with a partner their ideas and new learning to reinforce concepts and vocabulary.

But: while these strategies are impressive and I believe they have had a significant impact on learning it is the other important things she does daily that I believe have had an even greater impact -

• Builds a positive relationship with her students - these students know she cares and wants the best opportunity for them.
• Has very clear boundaries around expectation and class rules and culture.
• Checks in with her students daily and is aware of significant events in their life that could have a detrimental impact on the students day eg social and environmental facts that we know can be very extreme in our community.

Explicit acts of teaching and positive relationships make the biggest difference.

This has been a wonderful learning journey for the Teachers and the students!

Student voice and evaluations

I have been fortunate to spend time at Panmure Bridge work with Robyn Anderson in her Year 7 & 8 class. She asked me to interview her students about their learning.
This was an amazing experience to hear these students describe their own learning, achievement and challenges. 
Some of the positive comments where :

• To hear students referring to specific strategies eg skimming, scanning, inferring etc
• Identifying specific skills they need to learn eg my times' table to help me solve problems faster.
• Recognise what they had just learnt or achieved eg adding decimals.

Please see Robyn's informative post here

Robyn gets her students to complete an evaluation and the end of every term, I have linked her blog post here.


At Sommerville, we have been working on our students understanding their learning goals and being able to recognise if they have achieved their goals

Our students need visual supports to help understand their learning goals.

What am I learning?

What do I need to do?

What do I think?

How well did I do?

Developing Vocabulary

I had the opportunity to hear a presentation by Jill Ritchie Literacy Consultant from Impact Learning Consulting.

Jill had some fabulous ideas about embedding vocabulary into our teaching programmes.

The teaching of vocabulary is a vital part of our Literacy programmes but must be all taught in all curriculum areas.

We need to review, reteach and checking in regularly that our Learners have the required vocabulary and the correct definition.

Explicit acts of teaching vocabulary is vital for our learners.
We need to reference this new vocabulary in multi contexts through out the week to ensure our learners understand this new vocabulary especially specialised specific vocabulary.

I saw a fabulous example of this when working with Robyn Anderson from Panmure Bridge when we discussed her maths lesson introducing new maths language to her learners.