Visible learning- two years on

It has been an interesting and extremely busy half term any Ysgol Merllyn .  There have been so many highlights, particularly presenting our work at the World Visible Learning conference.  What an amazing time.  Not just meeting up with the #vlnetworkuk colleagues, presenting our work and listening to amazing speakers, but being in the presence of some educational Giants- John Hattie, Shirley Clarke, Guy Claxton and particularly Andy Hargreaves.  We took so much of his thoughts and musings back to school.  I'm really looking forward to hearing him again at the Incerts conference in June.

 However, for me it's always been how much Visible Learning has impacted on our pupils and how different our school is now.  We had colleagues visit from a local school visit us last week.  It's hard to explain Visible Learning but I can only describe it as forgetting everything we thought we knew about education ( being focused on curriculum and teaching) or as a time a colleague described as 'before we knew anything'

On a daily basis I'm in awe of the impact on our pupils.  A yr 3 girl was stuck last week and asked her teacher if she should find someone to collaborate with, year 1 pupils being able to describe how much progress they had made, year 6 using their own feedforward to set their own success criteria the next day, reception children understanding they knew many things about bonfire night and they were now ready to relate....

We also had 15 schools visit on our Visible Learning open day.  I was so proud at how well the children did on the panel Q and A session with the visitors asking them some tricky questions (we like tricky questions, they are the best type!)

So like good learners we need to know our next steps.

For at least the rest of this term we're focusing on the following

Continue to plan and embed Solo Taxonomy

Begin an impact cycle on the learning process

Begin assessing the pupils against our assessment capable rubric

Use Google apps for education for collaborating 

And continue to develop our pupils so they know what to do when they don't know what to do

Finally, I'm putting my money where my mouth is.  

The teachers are really happy to get feedback from their learners on how to be better teachers.  I'm going to ask the teachers for feedback and feedforward on my leadership!! Should be interesting 🤔