Newsletters

GHS Connect #21 Monday 20 February

Mia's notes

Welcome back everybody.

I hope everyone has had a lovely half term and feels rested. We are now officially past the half way point of the year and while that might feel great, it’s now that all of the hard work starts as we move towards the exams.

We have managed to move on a number of high profile students before half term who have been moved to other provision either permanently or for a trial. This should help free up some resources, so I would ask that if you are struggling with students who are challenging, but have not met the ‘really high profile threshold’, that you take the opportunity to ask our pastoral teams for some support and ideas to help you with any persistent, low level behaviour concerns. The most effective thing we can do to improve behaviour in the classroom is to share strategies that might work, so please do reach out for advice and guidance from colleagues.

The other thing I am hoping to have a push on this half term is minimising cover lessons because this is another thing that can really affect behaviour. Before half term, we had some students who had cover lessons for a whole day on a few occasions.  We have had a lot of nasty flu bugs going around over winter, but now that these are hopefully over with, I would ask that everyone makes a real effort to be in every day, unless they are absolutely too ill to be here. The greater consistency we can have in terms of students having their regular teachers, the better this will minimise disruptions to everyone.

Have a great first week back,

Mia

The week ahead

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
Meeting: No meetings due to Year 9 Parents' Evening on Thursday.

Wednesday 
Briefing 8.15am.
No meetings after school.

Thursday
Year 9 Parents' Evening 4pm - 7pm. In person with appointments on School Cloud - login here to check your appointments.

Friday
Normal day.

Notes
Year 11 mock exams - all week.

Learning and teaching: Spotted!

A round up of some of the great learning and teaching strategies we’ve noticed being used around school recently...  

Learning and Teaching: Putting CPD into our classroom practice

Thank you to those colleagues who have fed back that they appreciated the CPD sessions just before half term. The real measure of the success of these is how much we adapt our practice and experiment with new ways of teaching to meet the needs of our cohorts. 

In this training, the Business Department worked with Georgina and Ramya (and Social Studies, History, Geography and Media) looking at how to tackle barriers to reading.

Just before half term Fay Hudson was spotted putting the CPD into practice, supporting her Year 10 Business Studies students to access a reading source in a number of ways:

1. She recapped key words first.
2. She then split the reading source into 4 separate sections and added line numbers to break up the text and help her support students.
3. She modelled annotating the reading source on the visualiser.
4. After each extract, she used mini whiteboards to consolidate what they had read.

A masterclass in scaffolding and supporting students to ACCESS what they have read!

Please think about what you could continue to develop in your practice based on the CPD session you attended and share with us anything that works particularly well!

Kelly

Inclusion Heroes

This week’s Inclusion Hero goes to Ellie Navarro for the brilliant work she has been doing with a small, but lovely group of 16 Year 9 students through the Inspire Programme – this involves meeting the students once a week and putting on masterclasses in all sorts of areas to stretch and challenge them and get them thinking about the kind of skills and questions they might need or ask for top universities! Thank you, Ellie, for inspiring this group.

Lou