Today began once again with an alarm aggressively disturbing my beauty sleep - this time at 4.30am. yes... 4.30am people! We braved an Uber trip to school (arrived safely and can't recommend enough btw), and headed to whole-school staff meeting, to hear of some exciting developments!
Following discussions with my mentor, I have decided to base myself between both year 1 classes - for a number of reasons. Firstly because, despite there being no ability groupings in the school, the other year 1 class happen to inherently have the more able of the cohort - hence my research in week 1 will focus on how flipped learning of maths can impact upon lower ability learners of the year group (these are in one class) and in week 2, the focus will be on stretching the MAT, who are in the other class.
Secondly, the class teacher in the alternate class to my mentor's is super keen to embrace digital learning in as many forms as possible, but really wants some guidance on this. So I feel that his class would potentially benefit from my supporting him in this, far beyond my few weeks here at DC. It's all about the #biggerpicture guys!
The plan is:
Each week I will conduct focused observations of two 'traditionally' taught maths classes - with skills being from the same strand, e.g. Measure.
I will establish:
1) If and to what extent learners in the focused group (there will be 4-6 in each class) are extended in their in-class learning.
2) How confident the given learners are about completing the in-class tasks following the input - using thumbs up or traffic lights (TBC)
3) How engaged the children are during class time, using the Leuven Scale.
A mean of these results will then be taken and treated as a baseline assessment, against which I can compare the mean of the data collected in response to the same questions, during and following 2 'flipped' lessons. To ensure the best possible level of paroty, both the traditional and 'flipped' sessions each week will be from the same maths strand - even if the skill itself differs between lessons.
As of now, that's as far as I've got! But I am looking through the planning and, when I have a better idea of the style of input each teacher would like delivered, I will be able to get cracking on the creation of the digital lessons - which I will of course share with you lovely ones!!
Now, it is time to snooze, following a successful day of decision making, laundry, lazing on the sofas in front of the laptop and booking tickets to a karaoke dinner at the Pearl for next week đ I know... what the heck is a karaoke dinner anyway? We shall see... you are of course invited to read about the potentially #embarassing outcome! đ
Thanks for reading!
