Skip to main content

Curriculum Planning Day – Department Vision

P6210018

I have to admit, that I’m not a great fan of leadership jargon.  Having said this, I do agree that it is important to have a clear, shared and well communicated vision.  Part of our curriculum planning day was given over to this.  As with most activities, I had two aims in mind.  The first was to strengthen our existing department vision and ethos, and the second was to practice and explore some of the ICT skills I want to see employed with classes.

I’m a great believer in learning new things by doing them as opposed to listening to someone talk about them.

The aim was to create a short video, to be published on YouTube, that communicated our own personal view of what Geography is. Although we probably need to work on the soundtrack, this was put together in under two hours (including a lunch break). This makes the activity viable for use in class as Geography only has 1.5 hours of contact time per week.

Here is the result:

We are pleased with the result (better soundtrack needed but in our defence we didn’t have the time to explore the huge range of Creative Commons music) and belive that it communicates our shared vision of Geography.

We plan to roll this out at every opportunity.  How do you communicate your vision? Do you think that this is a good way?

Comments

  1. Apple should sponsor the vid...free and powerful advertising for them, as well as your own brand of geography. I love it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agreed on the soundtrack :)

    A great little video !

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

High Impact, Low effort

This month is the start of the #29daysofwriting challenge.  I enjoyed this last year and will be using my Staffrm account to post.  I'll also be reporting here, both to give a little more detail and to keep a log of what I have written. The challenge developed a great sense of community last year, which is why I'm choosing to write on Staffrm. What I would say to those who are new to writing or don't want to run out of ideas is: Write for yourself. Clarify an idea, write something out loud. The process of distilling thoughts into writing is immensely beneficial to your practice. If other read, comment and respond, that's a bonus. Ignore the muppets who know nothing of your context, style or students. Mix it up - I like to read about real stuff from real classrooms and schools and also about other stuff.  If we always write about school, how does that work for workload? If you've nothing nice to say, don't say it. So, the following has been 

What makes a learning experience profound? Personal reflections and possible implications for classroom practice.

I have recently begun a Leadership Pathways journey.  As part of the first core day, we were asked to reflect on a profound learning experience. This got me thinking about how many profound learning experiences I have both been involved in, and how many I have been able to give to others.  Our group came up with a huge long list, but these are my five. Emotional Connected Demanding Reflective Collaborative As always, these are personal thoughts and quite mixed up.  I put them here so that I can look back on them (plus they’d get lost inside my world-cup-free brain) 1. Emotional I can’t think of a time where deep learning hasn’t engaged my emotions.  From being awe inspired to that tingle feeling when a student gets a light bulb moment.  From this-is-the-happiest-day-ever, to I-think-I’m-about-to die.  How often do we engage the emotions of those we teach?  Here, I would argue that having a safe learning environment is not always conducive to profound

Banned Word Board

Today I want to share some simple ideas that I have found to be very effective in the classroom. I can't say that they are my own original ideas, although I have played around with them. The first is the Banned word Board. This is a simple display in the classroom that lists a number of words that are not allowed to be used by pupils in their written or oral answers. The effect has been an increase in the quality of written work, and I have almost made comments such as 'Sir it's simple, the stuff just affects the thing and causes people problems'. Pupils are now more able to use specific language, something that is vital especially at GCSE. I have had to make a few modifications, such as the introduction of 'Heavenly Words' This is an additional display placed on the ceiling. I found this necessary as pupils needed some stimulus in finding replacement words. After advice received after posting the idea on the SLN forum , I have also introduced semi-banned words