Neil Goodfellow

It’s been a while since I’ve had an urge to post.  February felt like a bit of a slog, but things feel like there on the up.  Maybe its the weather or more likely the thought of my upcoming 2 weeks on the golf course thats cheering me up.

The blog has taken a back seat over the last couple of months.  I’ve just about had the time to keep up to date with my Google Reader feeds and have read some interesting and exciting things.  I know its been a debate on many blogs i’ve read about the merits or otherwise of ‘lurking’, but sometimes I wonder “why is it that I can’t think of any good ideas to post on this thread”, then as soon as someone else mentions something, you think “of course!!!”?!?!

Anyway this week I’ve had the “urge” to post.  I spent an excellent day at Law Primary on Wednesday.  Some of the teaching and learning I observed was very inspirational.  I was with the P7 in the morning and was very impressed with the use of formative assesment that I saw.  The school are really pushing AiFL and it seems to be producning some grat results.  The topic based work, much of which had a Geographical bent, was great.  The children had studied areas such as Volcanoes, Edinburgh transport and homelessness, some of which we study in S1 and 2.  It really made me thiink about what happens to the kids when the make the transistion from primary to secondary.  Undoubtably they have more opportunity in primary to explore topics in a wholistic way, something the secondary struggles to do becasuse of the departmental splits.  Taking these topics and incorporating them into areas like creative writing gave the kids some great material to really get stuck into.  Some of their similies and metaphors were fantastic.   

The way they were taking to formative assesment was also very interesting.  The whole class discussed and agreed the success criteria, usually 6 or 7 things, before they began a piece of work.  These were then stuck up on the wall for all to see.  When the work was marked it was assessed against these criteria and the teacher wrote comments accordingly using 2 stars and a wish.  It was great to see formative assesment in practise on such a scale.  When I employ these methods it’s usually on a much smaller scale.  One strategy with one class, something else with another.  It’s given a great impetus to my practise and I came back yesterday and really pushed a lot of things with my classes.  I had a really good lesson with S4 doing exam style questions, getting into what was being looked for in the question.  When I shared the marking instructions with them we had a long discussion about how limited they were, especially when they say things like “or any other relevant points” at the end of an answer.  Hopefully when their revising they won’t look up the answers before they do the question!!