Charity is the winner

Harrow staff enjoyed an exhibition match against 梦舟明星足球队 a team of Chinese celebrities, including three ex-professional footballers who had represented their country. Both sides posed for a huge group picture before the match and the tempo of the game was high, even in the sunshine after the earlier Harrowthon races. The match certainly proved to be an end-to-end spectacle for all those who had stayed around to watch and support.

It was an action packed game with both teams creating a wealth of chances. Some excellent skill was on show, especially the moment midway through the second half, when Gao Feng nutmegged Harrow defensive supremo Mr Colbourne and rifled the ball past Mr Wade, adding another goal to his team.

The celebrities proved to be the superior team on the day but the staff showed true valour and sportsmanship throughout the game.

哈罗北京的老师足球队十分享受和梦舟明星足球队的表演赛。这支明星队包括三名中国前国家队足球运动员。在比赛之前，大家聚在一起合影，在Harrowthon比赛后的阳光下，气氛一直很热烈。比赛非常精彩，一直有观众在周围观看和支持。

这是一个充满活力的比赛，两队都创造了丰富的得分机会。比赛中他们展现了自己优越的球技，尤其是下半场的中间时间，前锋高锋带球绕过哈罗防守Colbourne先生，在Wade先生的防守下大力射门，为梦舟队又添一粒进球。

梦舟明星足球队表现抢眼，但是哈罗的老师们在比赛中展现了很好的体育精神和决心

Action Research 2015-2016

Overarching theme: Assessment for Learning

My personal question: How does student talk, as a means of improving literacy, impact on assessment?

Why I chose this topic: I decided to choose this topic for a few main reasons: From my professional and personal point of view-

1) I am often found frustrated by (mainly KS2 and KS3) ‘quiet’ and ‘muted’ students within my classroom, even after exploring other T&L techniques designed to assist them to express their views and opinions. 2) Some students are good at copying, replicating, memorising and regurgitating things that others have said… with a ‘teacher hunch’ that they do not always fully understand what they are saying. 3) I wanted to build on the TESMC work that I did last year. But did not want to do something purely literacy based.

From a subject and student point of view-

1) We have lots of students in D&T this year that are either new to the school (and a western-style of education) and also a lot of students that are new to the subject, exiting the sheltered curriculum last year. 2) In D&T we do a lot of talk around a product, outcome or process, which isn’t always recorded. 3) More importantly, talk as process and using the subject specific language is the first step in moving towards speaking and writing as performance. Essentially, allowing students to access and process the vocabulary, terminology and sentence structures required for summative / end of module / end of year assessment.

I did some background reading on the subject, as well as linking this AR question to the TESMC course that I studied in the last academic year. Additionally, from my previous role in other schools, I know that most good written work can only occur after students have thought, talked about and shared their ideas.

Resources required: I feel as though I already have some suitable resources, which just needed to be tweaked for individual lessons / series of lessons.

Possible problems

• Students getting used to new structures and routines.

• How to measure the success, as most of it will be observational in the first instance, with perhaps no actual evidence of long term / summative progress being made for some time.

Success Criteria

• Increase purposeful student interactions

• To encourage quieter students into contributing more to class conversations

• Improved BFLs (Year 6- focus is vocabulary acquisition, Year 7 focus is Peer-to-peer learning, Year 8 focus is Speaking and listening)

• Improve questions and the responses from questions

What I did I used a resource previously used in my previous school in the U.K. however, initially this proved a little overwhelming and too generic. Therefore, I decided to go down more of a verbal route with students through a range of questioning.Students were asked to evaluate the food products which they had made- Week 1- breaking the product down into different components Week 2-5 breaking the product down into different colours, smells, textures, tastes

Data I compared how PTG & BFL levels changed over the trial period time (Jan 2015 through to March 2016.

Findings

At the start of this process, when students were asked to describe their food product responses from one class were: “Sweet, It’s so sweet, sour, very good, sour, has seeds, yummy, sweet, too good to describe, sweet”

These descriptions are a low-mid level 3 (PTG C/C-), which is more or less the level we would usually expect from Year 6 students

As students progressed through the trial I started getting responses such as: “The colour is bright, it tastes sweet and sour, it’s green, has different shapes, the pieces are chunky, it looks summery, and i like the colours”

By the end of the trial some students were able to state: I would describe the look of the bread as flat and brown, the cheese and golden and yellow, I would describe the look of the cheese as a white colour. it smells strong. It tastes fresh and peppery. It tastes sweet and sour because of the tomatoes, spicy peppers and herbs. I would describe the texture of the bread as hard and crunchy.

Throughout the course of the trial, I genuinely thought that there were more positive and purposeful reflections made by students on their work. In terms of their general progress, we can see that-

Impact Assessment:

Attainment before the trial: C/C+ Attainment after the trial: B/B+ Study Skills before the trial: 2/1 Study Skills after the trial: 1/2 Organisation before the trial: 2/1 Organisation after the trial:2/1 Participation before the trial: 1/Base Participation after the trial: 1

Did it work?

Quite clearly we can see that attainment and participation has improved, which was one of the main focuses of the trial. It is a little short-sighted to state that this was the impact of the trial, as there are lots of other factors, such as other trials by other teachers and the natural progress of students etc, which may have also contributed to these results.

However, these results show that student talk (for year 6), as a means of improving literacy, impacts positively on assessment. It allows them to move from the more safe, everyday words into more complicated analysis of their products, thus resulting in an improvement in their participation levels and attainment levels within class.

In terms of my other success criteria-

• Increase purposeful student interactions- Yes, the trial definitely allowed for this, as students were able to build on, expand or even object to comments made by their peers. • To encourage quieter students into contributing more to class conversations- I felt that I was able to target more ‘quiet’ students more effectively, once they heard their peers share ideas in a more articulate manner than what they may have seen previously. • Improved BFLs (Year 6- focus is vocabulary acquisition, Year 7 focus is Peer-to-peer learning, Year 8 focus is Speaking and listening)- Quite clearly, see ‘findings’ • Improve questions and the responses from questions- I didn’t really focus on this criteria in the end, as it proved too much to fit in. This said, once again, looking at the ‘findings’- the responses from questions have improved immensely.

Unanticipated problems:

Time- Trying to fit it all into a lesson, as well as the other learning, which had to take place. Time- we lost one lesson at the very end due to book week

Ways forward: To develop this further by considering how it could be adapted for other projects and aspects of the design cycle. To focus on one individual, or a smaller group, rather than a whole class. These results are very generalised.

Further questions: Would this work with older students?

Beijing's Best Bookends

At the start of the school year, Mr Wade’s Year 7 students were set the task of creating a pair of bookends that show a scene or tell a story.

Students shared ideas, producing several design proposals, before coming up with a rendered and annotated final design.

Students produced the ‘L-shaped’ wooden bookends completely by hand. This aspect of the task was designed to improve manual dexterity and the ‘hands-on’ skills of the students, whilst doing so they learned about where wood comes from, the differences between hardwoods and softwoods and different types of wooden joints.

Next, Year 7 then set about designing the ‘scene’. This part of the project introduced students to CAD (Computer Aided Design) and CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing). The scene was designed using design software (Techsoft 2D Design) and then the silouhettes were cut out with a laser cutting machine.

A cleverly designed ‘peg’ on the silouhettes enabled them to sit in a small notch on the actual bookend.