Newsletters

GHS Connect #3 Monday 21 September

From the Head

Welcome back to another week. It has certainly not felt like the usual return to school and at the start of each week we don’t quite know what is ahead of us! What is becoming increasingly apparent is that there is going to be disruption in various forms and we are going to need to be constantly adaptable. Disruption to student attendance is already becoming clear, but we are also having to manage knock on disruption to learning. Our safety measures mean that lessons often need to be finished early (check Paul’s doc!) and we are having to manage events and staff training differently.

One such event which we are currently considering is the open evening and October inset day. We have a number of ideas about the best way to make use of the directed time in place for open evening, and will be putting this out to consultation shortly.

One thing I do need to ask is that colleagues are consistently setting remote learning to students who we have sent home to self isolate. This needs to be high quality work and should be set on google classroom. Ideally, this work will include lesson slides and will not simply be a list of tasks that students work through. Staff will also need to provide some feedback where students ask for it.

Without briefing and regular staff meet ups, our own communication is also in danger of suffering. This has not been helped by a problem with our VLE announcements not being emailed out. Please can staff continue to check announcements and the VLE regularly. We will hopefully get the email function working soon.

So, there are many, many challenges and at times everything can feel somewhat overwhelming for us all. Thank you then, for all you are doing in managing this increasingly complex situation. I am still seeing staff smiling, teaching great lessons and carrying on in the usual GHS professional way and I know that you will all continue to do so.

Let’s hope for a quiet 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…

> Rupinder Chana using images, key words and starter sentences to break down a tricky poem for year 8. 

> Cherish Bristow employing Think-Pair-Share to effectively engage her students.

> Isabella Madill developing excellent routines for using mini whiteboards with students, enabling effective AfL.

Learning and Teaching: Retrieval Practice

“I’ve taught it but they just don’t seem to remember it!”

Sound familiar? For the last few years we have been doing some work on understanding how memory works and how we might develop students’ ability to remember information through retrieval practice. 

For those staff new to GHS, by retrieval practice, we mean the act of calling information to mind that has been previously taught. Regular retrieval of information or content strengthens our memory for that information and we are less likely to forget it. This should be a strategy we build into the curriculum regularly, not one we save for revision.  

Our more flexible start to lessons in the current situation means the ‘Do-Now’ part of the lesson is a perfect place to practise information retrieval. 

One neat resource is a retrieval challenge grid-see the Geography example below:

The points system encourages students to recall not just what has most recently been taught,  but also information from longer ago, keeping the memory of those previous topics alive. 

If you would like to experiment with retrieval grids in your own subject area, try using these pre-prepared grid templates here and let us know how you get on!

Inclusion & Pastoral

This week sees our first PSHCE session of the year. Keely and I are very excited to now have a fortnightly slot, on a rolling programme, to continue to build on this essential part of our school curriculum. Thank you in advance for incorporating these sessions into your lessons and taking the time to work with the students on subjects that sometimes may fall outside of your comfort zone.

I know that this week’s topic of bereavement is a tough one. Ideally, staff would have had some time to prepare themselves for what they will be delivering and I apologise for the very short notice. After discussion with a few members of staff on Friday, I made some changes to the content. Plus, our VLE email alerts are still being blocked on occasion. Moving forward, I can assure you that you will have far more notice.

We will return to the topic of bereavement, as we need to start thinking about how we would like to honour our friend and colleague Douval as a school. I would welcome any suggestions from staff about how we might go about doing this, and will also be using both PSHCE and Virtual Tutor to ask the students about their ideas too. I know this is going to be difficult for many of us - you know where I am if you need to come and see me.

There were a few other bits and pieces I wanted to mention this week - firstly, thank you to those staff who have emailed the Pastoral Team about students struggling with IT access in the home. I am adding names to a centralised database and will be working with Zac this week to start getting some devices out to those who need them.

I have also started meeting with our external agents to ensure that when they return to our school, they are aware of what we have done to make sure we are COVID safe and that they maintain bubbles. If there are any students who you feel would benefit from some counselling, some mentoring, or a referral to the Learning Support Team, please contact the relevant Year Team, me, Gurvinder or Lucy.

Thank you to everyone for setting up their Tutor Group Google Classrooms - I am hoping that students have both signed in and are engaging, and that the Virtual Tutor presentations are useful. This week’s topic will follow on from PSHCE, so I will put an announcement out with the link once the PSHCE lesson has finished.

And, lastly, keep reading KCSIE! (You can find the CP presentation here). Chocolate prizes will be in pigeon holes later today...

Lou Grimley

Character strengths at GHS

You don’t have to look far to see Courage, Community and Responsibility already happening in our students. 

A prime example and worthy of celebration is Team Iscort. Over lockdown, five Greenford students showed the epitome of the Greenford Strengths when they worked together to create the Tomodachi app. Led by Supritha Rao, Lilia Khan, Sophie Leung, Basira Rishad, Eeman Shakeel and Kathryn Welhenage submitted their pitch for the Longitude Explorer Prize (part of Nesta Challenges). Then, in July, Team Iscort secured £25,000 for Greenford High School when they won the competition. The judges thought that the standard of research and detail put into the idea was extremely high, describing the work the team put into it as “outstanding”. The team described friendship, compassion and inclusivity to be at the heart of their project.

You can read more about their journey on the Nesta website here as well as watch their submission video here.

In addition, Tom Oseku-Afful is leading on Character Strengths with the JLT and Student Voice. Each week, students are going to nominate individuals/teams who have demonstrated our Character Strengths. Five stories will be celebrated each week by students. Tom and the students are working towards setting up a news-style channel to showcase these for our community to watch - the first episode will be available in the coming weeks.

Finally, you will have noticed you can now award APs for courage, community or responsibility. In discussion/feedback with staff over the past week, here are a few examples that were shared of how students have been given APs: students showing courage offered answers in class or argued their points successfully, students showing community demonstrated an act of kindness or helped to reinforce the need to follow procedures to help keep our community safe; students showing responsibility submitted good homework or took the initiative to do a little extra in order to take responsibility for their learning. Here are the prompts from the desktop posted last week:

Noble and Andrea