Newsletters

GHS Connect #34 Monday 21 June

From the Head

As we enter another new week, I’m obviously hoping that things will turn for the better. There is not much news to report around the incident that happened just over a week ago, but myself and Lou have been tied up in lots of meetings with the police and various agencies; please rest assured that we will share anything that we need to with everybody.

Apologies from me that we have not got as far ahead with internal recruitment as I had hoped - obviously the events of the last week or so have put lots of things on hold. We will begin working through these this week however, with DHOY and English TLR interviews this week. Look out for adverts for other posts.

A huge thank you this week to Alan, Hardeep and Amandip, who have worked tirelessly on checking and inputting all of the TAGs. Now that this particularly challenging chapter is behind us, we can begin to hopefully look ahead to more normality for next year. We are currently planning for a standard start to next year, but still await Government guidance, and will, of course, let you know immediately, when we hear what the Autumn term should look like. 

I also want to say a big thank you Richard and Jeremy and the rest of the Post 16 team on managing exams and enrolment over the last couple of weeks. We are pre-enrolling many students into the Sixth Form, and already managing to recruit to lots of subjects.

As we rapidly move towards the end of term, we are starting to plan for the final day. We will be having the usual speeches - but would ask you to please video record them - and we will show them as one short film. More info to follow on this. We will also be ordering in some food so that we can meet together as a staff and celebrate the end of the year properly - it has been another very difficult year and I think it is important that we end with something nice!

Have a great week,

Mia

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

A round up of some of the great learning and teaching strategies we’ve noticed being used around school recently…
 
> Sammy Ebzao creating  a powerpoint on emotional resilience and control in Physical Education which he shared with the PE department.  With Harpal’s support, Sammy effectively linked his two specialist subjects: Psychology and PE.  
 
> The IT and Computing Department and various 6th form students creating a super-whizzy light up display on the ground floor of B-block:

Learning and Teaching: Giving Feedback (to Year 12)

Many of us will be offering feedback to Year 12 students  this week after they have sat their first round of formal mock exams for 18 months. As a year group they’ve endured much disruption at a crucial transition point in their education and as a result this is an important opportunity to give our students pertinent feedback that will really drive their progress forward before the summer.
 
Jo Cole shared a Chartered College article on feedback with me recently.  It’s a good, very concise read.  

Two lines stood out to me in particular: 
 
“To create a ‘feedback pull’ (Stone and Heen, 2014), students need to know that the next steps are within their reach.” 
 
“A granular, razor-sharp approach provides pupils with clear action steps that direct them on how to improve.”
 
It was a timely reminder that less is more. A series of clear steps for improvement which seem doable to the student will be more valuable than masses of wordy comments from me. I’ll certainly keep it in mind as I mark A Level Literature essays this week. You can read the full article here.

Kelly McCarthy

Inclusion & Pastoral

The first thing I would like to say this week is a huge thank you to everyone for being so supportive, understanding and reflective over the last week - I know it’s been tough for all of us, but, as always, I find myself immensely grateful to work in such a brilliant community that does so much for its students and staff.

There’s not much to report this week - I hope that RSE went well on Friday and that those of you who went along to the training session on Tuesday found it helpful. This week will be a tutor session so make sure you have posted your Virtual Tutor and use that if you need something to pivot the session around. This week is about Pride Month and there are lots of useful links on both the history and the importance of celebrating diversity. 

We also have Chelsea’s Choice visiting Year 9 this week - this is a drama production that looks at the risk of grooming from a CSE point of view. It’s hard-hitting and a tough watch, but an excellent and powerful workshop that gets students to think carefully about how to minimise risk and what consent actually means.  

Please continue to encourage your tutees, your classes and your colleagues to sign up to Show My Homework - the numbers are going up steadily and I am getting a trickle of queries about logging on issues. Keep them coming!

And, lastly, as always, remember the support that is available for staff in school, if you feel you need it - Tash and Jo, our school counsellors, are available on scp@greenford.ealing.sch.uk, Michelle, our school social worker, is available on mwilliams@greenford.ealing.sch.uk, and Scott, our Behaviour and Inclusion Consultant is in on Mondays and Tuesdays. 

Have a good week, everyone!

Lou Grimley

Behaviour for Learning

Each fortnight in Connect, Mark and Jo will be sharing behaviour for learning tips designed to help manage behaviour in the unusual circumstances of Covid-19.

Behaviour for Learning #13: Learning Behaviours

The EEF’s (Education Endowment Foundation) behaviour report, which draws on the best available evidence and high impact approaches, suggests that we should teach learning behaviours to support behaviour through a positive general climate for learning. Learning behaviours are those which support learning and promote engagement through self-regulation. What routines do you have in your classroom to support behaviour for learning?

When reflecting on learning behaviours, it is important to consider the following:

Relationship with self: talking to the pupil when they have given up and challenging them to persevere next time. 

Relationship with curriculum: ensuring the pupil has appropriate work which is not too hard, but still challenging and rewarding when they stick with it.

Relationship with others: setting a classroom culture where pupils are proud of sticking at things and not afraid to make mistakes.

This means that AfL, scaffolding, modelling, differentiation and language for learning are crucial for creating a classroom culture with excellent behaviour.

We can use verbal and non-verbal communication to keep students on track as we’re assessing and responding to students’ relationship with the self, curriculum and others.

Mark and Jo