The Fifty-Sixth Republic - Who is up for a game of TAG?

[StaffRepFeistyClub]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

Do not give the staffroom password to non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation. Do not sit on the chairs and do wear a mask

@MrsHamlet

Question... your internal assessments. How are you marking them? I mean the red pen bit... what are you actually physically doing?

Shockingly, a decision hasn’t been made in my school 🙄 I’m intending to annotate when marking as it helps with final score 😂

Chief Regulator of Ofqual was on R4 earlier. Making it all sound like a walk in the park, IMHO.....

No mrsH , unless of course exam boards ask for stuff!

@JanFebAnyMonth

Chief Regulator of Ofqual was on R4 earlier. Making it all sound like a walk in the park, IMHO.....

It probably is a walk in the park for him.

Interesting. If they do, we've got 48 hours to get it out...

Yup. Same with NEAs more or less normally.

I did see Jonathan Mountstevens on Twitter advocating for SLT to give affected teachers time off timetable to do this.

I listened carefully to the Chief Regulator & wasn't much wiser, frankly . Although I did wonder why he kept mentioning Grade As instead of the 2017+ numerical system.

I did see Jonathan Mountstevens on Twitter advocating for SLT to give affected teachers time off timetable to do this.
This was raised tonight. We're sticking to our calendar so we've got year y10/11/13 to do now and everyone else immediately after half term.
SLT are very busy though and we should all thank them.

For all my SLT bashing on here they have had an ultra shit time too. They're fortunate to not have multiple exam classes on top of a heavy ks3 timetable now though. They're also completely forgetting how relentless it is. We have all year group exams, 2 parents evenings and 2 year groups of reports before May half term on top of y11/13.
Yet again the distribution of work is disproportionately affecting some but not others at my place. I now have a third qualification (only 12 students) but it has to go through the same process as the other 2. It's a lot of work.

I agree that SLT have it tough... some of ours are drowning.
It's hard to listen to them praising each other when some of us have massive marking mountains and full timetables though (not me... I have a colleague I'm very worried about though)

Yes @StationView the non numerical grades thing was a tad worrying wasn’t it

Tired and grumpy tonight. I am so fed up with SLT moving the goalposts, endlessly criticising and never finding anything positive to say. I love teaching children, but the relentless, largely pointless admin and constant scrutiny is really getting me down.

This week we have multiple learning walks, book looks and classroom spot checks. Formal observations commence next week, but we still don't know details. Oh, and they want reports early this year. Fml.

We’ve gone big on planning in my dept last few years. We had big influx of NQTs over a few years and our cohort can be tricky so having the lessons planned right makes a big difference to behaviour (and progress obvs). I planned some lessons for one year group we all used and then discussed and then we’ve started collaboratively planning - so we had 9 of us meet once a week for an hour and although each lesson you do takes ages, you get input into 8 other lessons and they are pretty good.

It’s allowed us to discuss lessons after without it feeling like you’re criticising a teacher because the lesson was jointly agreed. We’ve focused on different things at different time based on needs identified through HoDs learning walks.

We’ve now got some great lessons and list of questions to ask about a lesson to check it’s got everything covered. I made a fancy planning booklet with examples of checking misconceptions etc... things experienced teachers often do naturally. We don’t use it so much now as we’re all more consistent but it’s our favourite hour of the week and comes out of our own time.

It’s improved general planning for all teachers in our subject for all year groups and I would say we all teach and talk maths pretty consistently. When ofsted came they went into a number of Y8 lessons and they were doing the same lesson so essentially they saw the whole lesson split through four classes which they loved.

That sounds amazing, @MrsHerculePoirot - I'm so envious of such a collaborative approach. We're two form entry so in theory planning could be shared but the reality is that my year partner couldn't be less interested so it all falls to me.

I'd love to implement something like that whee I am. Mrs HP. Sadly is wouldn't be valued by enough of the dept to make it work. It's a real shame because collaboration is key to success imo.

@HercwasanEnemyofEducation

I'd love to implement something like that whee I am. Mrs HP. Sadly is wouldn't be valued by enough of the dept to make it work. It's a real shame because collaboration is key to success imo.

Me too. Same problem though.

Am so tired. Have been sitting on the sofa since I got in from work two hours ago. Taking a long time to decompress!

All 4 of us have PPA together, and I share out planning responsibility - I do it two terms in advance, so no excuses for not knowing what you're doing, and actually doing it. Loads of time to prep and make purchases or plan resources if necessary - also lots of time for chatting about ideas. We also then discuss scaffolding or SEND approaches. I do it so we all plan each subject at some point during the year, so no de-skilling goes on. I shaft myself quite a lot with planning load, which I should stop doing.

We're at the end of a second year of a 2 year curriculum cycle though, so hopefully next year will just be about tweaking existing plans (apart from Easter - May half term last year when we went off piste just to get something into remote learning).

My department would be incredibly resistant to that. They do NOT share (perfectly happy to nick my resources though). Do you have mixed ability groups? Or if in sets how do you do the same lesson with all the different sets? I can't even use the same lesson with set 3 (aiming for grades 4/5) and set 5 (aiming for grades 1/2) in year 10, as they have such different needs. Even lower down the school the ability range is huge. I'd love to do something like that, but I'm struggling to picture a lesson that works for both ends of the ability scale.

I agree Herc. We used to sit down for an hour a week and plan the next week between the three of us. I think there’s lots of advantage with that in primary especially if you have a mix of people who are confident in different subjects.

I think it worked because once they’d taught lessons planned well they could see the benefit of spending that time. We ended up getting 8 other really good lessons for the one we planned so time wise it was a bonus.
We teach mixed ability for first 8-10 weeks of Y7 then loosely set so we have top groups and really bottom groups and mixed the rest so no fine setting in between.

Bottom groups use same lessons but over longer time period and we have slides in where you can drag the counters or whatever to make up as many more examples as you want and they will focus more on the repetitive practice and not get to the later problem solving slides usually.

Mixed groups and top usually mostly the same - with challenge/extension/whatever you call it for the higher ones (open middle type ones often) and they also have some extra lessons/slides to push it at the end.

That way the basic is the same, everyone knows where it is going to. Faster classes can move on quicker (and have some extra content throughout the year). Middles knows where it is going and can push as far as they can etc.

We write lesson notes for each lesson making clear the purpose of that lesson - how to scaffold if needed and how to stretch if needed but keeping within that focus.

It’s not perfect by any means but we’ve had no staff leave (except one relocating the other side of the country) for two years in a tricky school with fairly high turnover in general and when we survey each year it comes up as main thing they like about our department....

We teach mixed ability so our planning includes differentiated tasks eg a slide will tell you what’s expected for each flight path and how to extend towards the next. It’s built into lessons.

It’s all shared. I’m rewriting a unit which will mean PowerPoints for each lesson, the resources and the end of unit assessment (all differentiated).

Is it not normal to share like this?

We also teach mixed ability (mostly)
We rewrote our schemes last year - everyone was given one thread to work through from 7-9 - but we did them independently of each other.
No schemes in 10-13 which is a bit of a pain.

That is a pain. Everything is there for us, albeit of varied quality. It at least means there’s a skeleton for every lesson even if we want to flesh it out in our own way.

In recent years all departments have had to produce learning journeys, rationales, overviews of their subject including values, skills, themes etc. Even cultural capital gets a mention lol.

When the ofsted alarm goes off we’ll all need to actually read them closely to make sure we’re singing from the same hymn sheet