Newsletters

GHS Connect #33 Monday 20 June

From the Head

Hi everyone,

I’m waiting to hear about how the GHS staff rounders team did on Friday, and I’m hoping to be able to celebrate a victory! However, there are plenty of celebrations and thank yous to share whilst we wait.

Firstly, a massive thank you to Sally Ramsdale, who has actually been visiting Year 13 students’ homes to invigilate (yes, you read that right), as there have been a few cases of chicken pox in our Post 16 students. So many of our staff go above and beyond in all sorts of ways and this is a prime example of that. Sally has willingly gone along to do this, following exam board agreement, and as a result of this she is giving these students the very best chance of getting their best A Level grades possible. Those of you who know Sally’s commitment, will not be surprised by this, of course!

I also want to thank Angela Thomas who has had a tough week helping to support one of our Looked After Children who has had a sudden change of placement. The amount of work and emotional exhaustion that goes into this is huge. Again, Angela always goes above and beyond to support her cohort of students.

Some more thank yous and congratulations….

Thank you to Sarah Williams who took some Year 9s and 10s along to Lady Margaret Road to teach French. Sarah did a fantastic job of inspiring the Years 9 and 10s to teach the Year 2s French and help with lesson preparation. Apparently they were quite surprised by how much work was needed in preparing a lesson….

Thank you to Maya for her continued efforts on International Day. Watch this space…

Finally, congratulations to all of our ECTs for achieving QTS, and congratulations to Ben Gunn who has been appointed as Head of Drama from September.

Mia

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
Meeting: Department time 3.15pm - 4.30pm.

Wednesday 
Meeting: Teaching/Pastoral Staff CPD 3.15pm - 4.15pm
Mentor meetings to submit the first year ECT reports (MAT/LEA)

Thursday
PSHCE P1.

Friday
Normal day.

Notes
Y12 exams continuing.

Learning and Teaching

Spotted!

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

• Jamie Rosser set up an inclusive classroom where students supported each other brilliantly for their assessed speeches. His success criteria reminded students of the expectations throughout each speech (below left). 
• David Clare exploited the relationships he’s built with his class to calmly manage their behaviour on a very hot Friday afternoon. His light humour diffused an incident and ensured a disruptive ball disappeared (below right). As a result the student stayed in the classroom, learning with his peers. 

• Oumayma Geagea making great use of mini whiteboards to check the understanding of her class. She supported this with hints and challenges on her slides. The whole class snapshot let Oumayma quickly pick out a brilliant example by Ekam to share with other students. 

• Sarah El-Sockary using her ipevo with a mini whiteboard to model how to rearrange equations (below left). Sarah explained every step, modelling her thinking as well the equation. She used this to bridge the gap between teaching and students completing a scaffolded worksheet independently.
• Joe Wilcox consolidated a hot and difficult lesson on abusive relationships with a simple and creative summary task (below right). He gave students the space to think through challenging ideas carefully so that everyone could leave the classroom with a positive attitude.

• Christine Gada was spotted energetically questioning her students on human geography on a Friday afternoon. Her class routine of no-opt-out was impressive with students keen to give answers. Students were happy to put themselves forward and make mistakes, knowing that they would make progress either way!

Learning and teaching: lesson drop-ins

Over the next couple of weeks, HODs will be arranging to complete ‘lesson drop-ins’ with teachers in their teams. These are short, 20 minute lesson visits which are an opportunity for teachers to demonstrate to observers that they have been working on targets suggested in the first round of observations.  Observers will arrange this with you in advance rather than just doing an unannounced learning walk!  Although this does form part of our appraisal and observation process, colleagues should not be concerned as the emphasis will be very much on celebrating great and developing practice. 

A reminder!

If you haven’t yet given us feedback on how we have organised CPD and meetings this year, please remember to do so using this link.

Kelly

Inclusion and Pastoral

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend and managed to grab a little bit of sunshine!

Firstly a reminder that this Thursday is PSHCE - remember to check what you are supposed to be delivering to your tutor group and ask me and Keely if there are any queries. Keely will be sending out a survey on PSHCE later this week so that you can share your thoughts on how it has gone as we prepare for next year.

The other thing I thought it might be useful to do this week is remind everyone of who the Year Teams are, given the new Deputy Heads of Year who have joined and the attached PSWs. So, here goes:

Year 7 - Tara Quigley, Amit Pall, Gulaid Gulaid and Hibo Ahmed
Year 8 - Rav Dhindsa, Ben Gunn, Abbie Allen and Barbara Latawiec
Year 9 - Allison John, Hassnain Mahay, Jamie Rosser and Tevin Deola
Year 10 - Sarah El-Sockary, Shem Parry, Adam Hamida and Hemal Odedra
Year 11 - Dan Siskin and Jesse Mantey
Post-16 - Rich Lewis, Christabel Haines, Annji Bashforth, Sal Ramsdale and Fuad Mohamed

What we will be doing, however, to make it a bit easier, is create bespoke email addresses for each year group from 7 - 11 so that you don’t have to remember everyone’s names. You also need to remember that these teams will change again in September, but, don’t worry, the team addresses will be updated accordingly…

That’s it for this week - thank you to everyone for your ongoing work in all things inclusion and pastoral, especially as everyone’s energy reserves begin to dwindle towards the end of the year.

Lou 

Inclusion Heroes!

This week’s Inclusion Heroes are all the staff who have been working so hard on all the different elements of our Transition work - Dan Siskin, Adam Hamida, Finola Doyle, Pam Lewis, Ange Thomas, Amandeep Phull, Gulaid Gulaid, Fuad Mohamed, Monika Siek, Faye Hudson, Gurvinder Nayyar, Mark Harvey, Amandip Johal and Paul Manby are all either delivering sessions or visiting schools and have been fantastic. Thank you! 

Behaviour for Learning: Positive Greetings at the Door (50/50)

This week, we thought it would be useful to look at the findings of a research paper based on a study of positive greetings at the door (PGD), a proactive classroom management strategy designed to improve student behaviour. The researchers investigated whether using PGD as a proactive classroom management strategy would improve middle-school (ages 11–13) students’ behaviour.

The study attempted to answer three research questions: 

1. Do students exposed to positive greetings at the door (PGD) exhibit gains in academic engaged time when compared with students in attention control classrooms? 
2. Do students exposed to PGD exhibit reductions in disruptive behaviour (DB) when compared with students in attention control classrooms? 
3. Do teachers find the PGD strategy to be acceptable, appropriate and feasible? 

What were the key findings?  

• Academic engagement among the students exposed to PGD increased from an average of 58.75 per cent before the trial to 79.70 per cent after. This was different to the control group whose academic engagement remained roughly the same at around 54 per cent. 
• Disruptive behaviour decreased.
• The researchers also note that there was a significant correlation between student academic engaged time with a change in disruptive behaviour. 

Impact on practice: What ideas might you adopt for your own classroom from the research?  

The findings from this paper suggest that PGD is an effective and easily implementable proactive behaviour management strategy which can potentially increase academic engagement time and reduce students’ disruptive behaviour. 

What does this mean at GHS?

50/50 works! Please ensure you start your lessons with positive greetings at the door and remember to "end and send" your lessons too.

Original research by: 
Cook CR, Fiat A, Larson M et al. (2018) Positive Greetings at the Door: Evaluation of a low-cost, high-yield proactive classroom management strategy. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions 20(3): 149–159. 

We hope you have a great (cooler!) week.

Mark and Jo