Good Practice - Case Study - Francis Bacon Maths ... · Web viewA range of learning and teaching strategies are being combined at Francis Bacon Maths and Computing College to enable

Francis Bacon Maths & Computing College

School No 403

Hertfordshire Development Centre Page 1 of 9/Good Practice - Case Studywww.thegrid.org.uk/goodpractice/casestudies/ Francis Bacon Maths & Computing College

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Personalised Learning & Assessment for Learning within ICT


A range of learning and teaching strategies are being combined at Francis Bacon Maths and Computing College to enable students to work independently within ICT yet at the same time receive very structured guidance on their current attainment and how to progress.

Introduction

Personalised learning is something of a pedagogical challenge. We are all encouraged to work towards it, yet nobody has all of the answers as to how we should do it. Attempting to go down the path of personalised learning within your own classroom is often a dangerous / brave route to take as it often leaves the classroom teacher more open to criticism when boxes need to be ticked during observations – if you have twenty five students all working on totally different things what on Earth do you write up on your board as the learning aim? How do you do a starter and a plenary that is relevant to all?

Three years ago the author of this article won the National BECTA Award for ICT in Practice for ‘innovative work’ that was enabling success through personalised learning at a Hertfordshire secondary school. Three years on these ideas and technologies have matured and developed a great deal. Does the ICT department at Francis Bacon Maths and Computing College feel it has totally cracked personalised learning? Certainly not. However, the hope is that this snapshot of how Key Stage 4 ICT is managed within the school may just give you a few ideas that you might take away and try for yourself.

Background

In September 2006 the school began to follow the new OCR Nationals in ICT (Level 2). Although this qualification had only just been given the go-ahead and limited resources were available for it, the school had struggled to deliver AIDA to the previous cohort and knew that a change was necessary. Having had success with GNVQ, the similarities between GNVQ and the OCR Nationals led to a belief that success could be achieved.

Teaching of the course was somewhat complicated by the fact that ICT appeared as both a core subject and an option subject. Furthermore, some classes not doing double Science were given more ICT time. As such, in a single class there might be students with just one hour per week in the same lesson as a student with five hours per week. Also, a student might be taught by more than one teacher at different points in the week. The challenge was therefore to provide a ‘learning and teaching experience’ that would enable all students to use the time available to them to work towards their potential within the subject.


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dyDate: October 2007

Subject Coverage:

ICT/Assessment/Personalised Learning

Key Stages: KS3 & KS4

Contact Details:

John Rutherford

Related Documents & Links:

www.francisbacon.herts.sch.uk

http://www.francisbacon.herts.sch.uk/


Enabling Facilitated & Independent Learning

Before going in to detail on the strategies and resources used to enable facilitated and independent learning within lessons, it is important to stress that all sessions are run by competent teachers with strong ICT skills. Starters, plenaries and class discussions are needed to focus students and to develop their understanding of the success criteria in their work. Even with quality resources guiding them through the course requirements students will always come across technical hurdles to overcome and this is where a qualified teacher is necessary. The resources should be seen as a means of reducing the ‘how do I…?’ and ‘what do I do know?’ questions, freeing up time for the teacher to invest in more detailed, quality support to the class.

Despite all the advances in VLEs and other online course structures the ICT Department at Francis Bacon Maths and Computing College have found that students are much more comfortable with paper-based instructions forming the cornerstone of their guidance. A series of workbooks have been created that provide the students with guidance on what they need to do at each step of the coursework. These instructions are image-rich and contain many screenshots to assist students with low literacy levels.

The following ‘progress spreadsheet’ was created as a tool to keep work rate high in the lessons. With students all working on different activities it is easy for the class teacher to lose track on how long a student has been working on a given activity – this resource quickly and easily highlights to the class teacher exactly which activity each student is on and how long they have been working on it.


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Class selector buttons.

Progress rate

indicators.

Progress through assignments indicated here.

Lesson objective buttons.


The fact that a single student might be taught by more than one teacher meant that records had to be centralised to avoid duplication of effort and to ensure that at the start of a lesson the teacher has the most up to date records. The progress spreadsheet was therefore set up as a ‘shared workbook’ – this simple to apply option means that multiple users can use the same spreadsheet at the same time and save the changes and amendments they have made without losing the changes other users have made.

Each student appears just once in the spreadsheet. The class selector buttons at the top run macros that filter the students on display so that only those in the teachers’ current class are shown.

During a lesson students hand in completed work electronically to ‘hand-in’ folders on the network. When they do so they inform the class teacher who takes a quick look at the work and, if it is OK a tick is placed in the relevant cell on the progress spreadsheet and the ‘date of last hand-in’ column in updated. This date directly controls the automated rate of progress indicators on the right-hand side of the spreadsheet – the longer it is since the student has handed in work, the longer the red bar will be. This rate of growth is automatically differentiated to take into account the number of lessons each student has (more lessons per week results in a faster growing red bar).

The ‘red bar situation’ forms an ongoing focus and discussion point for lessons. It helps the teacher to focus time and attention on students who are not maintaining an appropriate work rate and helps to highlight problems that might otherwise go unseen.

A criticism the ICT Department had to overcome in delivering KS4 lessons in the way they wanted to focused on the setting of lesson objectives. It is a school rule that lesson objectives should be set and clear each lesson. This is obviously very difficult when within any one class the students could all be working on very different things. To get around this challenge the ‘lesson objective’ buttons were added to the progress spreadsheet as shown below. Students click on the button relevant to the task they are currently working on and a user form (as shown below) appears.

As the image shows, each user form clearly explains to the student the learning aims for the task they are working on, and also details the elements we are looking for in a successful piece of work.

Using this guidance students are then able to complete the box at the bottom of the user form where they state what they are aiming to learn and achieve by the end of the lesson. Pressing on ‘Submit’ takes this information through to a central database which stores the details of all learning objectives that have been set. In this way, the teacher can call up the objectives the class have set

for themselves at the end of the lesson to use as part of a plenary discussion. It also provides an additional method of monitoring student progress as it will show the dates the student has been working on a certain activity.

Enabling students to set their own learning aims and objectives, albeit with detailed support and guidance, has been found to be an excellent means of focusing student


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attention at the start of a lesson and for raising their expectations for what they can achieve in the session.

A range of additional resources have been created to support students in completing the necessary reports to the highest possible standards. A good example of such resources is the high-tech writing frames used to ensure students cover all necessary elements when they need to produce longer written pieces of work. The writing frames present students with a number of boxes to fill in, along with guidance on the kind of things that should be written about in each. Once completed, all of the information the student has provided the user form is placed into an appropriately structured Word document where they can spell check and proof-read it to ensure it is of the highest possible quality. This has been found to be an excellent means of ensuring all students cover all required elements in such pieces of work.

In some parts of the course students need to build up some quite challenging skills within certain software applications before they begin their actual assessed coursework pieces. It would obviously not be possible for each student to have these skills personally demonstrated by the class teacher at the time that would most suit them. To get around this problem short video demonstrations of the skills being used have been created and put on the network. Students can watch these as many times as they need to and ‘pause’ them where necessary. By repeating the skills demonstrated students are soon able to get to the required level of competence with little direct input required from the teacher. There is a range of screen capture utilities available for creating such resources, Camstudio being a full-featured and free to download example.


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Assessment for Learning

Before a marking grid could be created, indeed even before a scheme of work was created, it was necessary to develop a thorough comprehension of the assessment objectives. In particular, identifying the threads that run through the objectives was key. For instance, in the image below (taken from OCR’s guidance for the first unit) a thread has been highlighted that is essentially the same element divided into three standards. Identifying these threads is necessary for the accurate marking of work but also in providing the students with guidance on how to improve their work.

In some instances these threads do not cover all three levels - some cover only pass and merit criteria whereas others cover only merit and distinction criteria. Each thread identified was given a summary name. For example, the thread shown above was classed as ‘multiple recipients’.

The marking grid is built within an Excel spreadsheet and indicates clearly to each student their current attainment against each of the assessment threads. All students have access to the most up to date version through the shared area on the school network. As with the progress spreadsheet detailed above, this is a shared workbook enabling all staff to add to and edit one central record. It also enables individual groups or classes to be quickly displayed. A number of the other key features have been highlighted below.

In areas where specific guidance needs to be given, the class teacher adds comments…


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Median and upper-quartile grades displayed for comparison against

actual attainment.

Assessment threads.

Overall grade for the assessment objective – equates to the lowest grade in the preceding columns.

Guidance buttons.

Conditional formatting of cells automatically colour-codes

attainment to make the information clearer.

‘Tell your teacher’ button.


Students are all aware that they are not able to have any single element classed as ‘ungraded’. Most are also keen to drive on their attainment towards A- and B-grades. The guidance buttons provide most students with all of the help they need to identify any gaps or problems with their work and informs them of what they need to do to move up to the next attainment level.

As the image shows, for each assessment thread the student is told in ‘pupil-speak’ what is expected at each level. For weaker students or those who are yet to attain any grade there is information on what they should target – often this may be just a few steps in one of the guidance booklets.

The guidance pages are created using Visual Basic user forms – something relatively quick and simple to do, although it may seem a challenge at first!

With students keen to use the guidance provided by the marking system to make many small changes to their work there was a risk of coursework marking becoming unwieldy. Staff certainly did not want to be going through whole coursework pieces time and time again looking for minor alterations made by students. To solve this problem a communication tool was integrated into the system. When a student has made a change or addition to a piece of work that they have already handed in and had marked once they press the ‘tell the teacher’ button on the marking spreadsheet. The pop-up box shown below appears.

The student is then able to fill in a short form (shown to the left) explaining which report they have added to or improved and what it is they have done.

Upon pressing submit, the completed form along with the student’s username is sent through to the central marking database.

The marking database, shown to the left, once populated with student requests for work to be checked, provides the class teacher with the means to use marking time as effectively as possible as they are able to go directly to the coursework elements that need to be looked at. It also integrates with a staff monitoring tool to ensure that all members of the teaching time are sharing the joint marking load.


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This system really does demonstrate assessment for learning. Students require no prompting to access the records of their current attainment, independently find out what they need to do to reach the next level, and then inform the teacher when they think they have achieved it. Although many of the integrated elements are complex, the use of conditional formatting and comments is very easy and something that could enhance many teachers’ recording of assessment. Keeping the most up to date records in an area on the school network where students have read-only access (i.e. they can see it but can’t change it) is also simple but effective in getting the students more involved in their own ongoing assessment and progress.

Maintaining Motivation & Enhancing Learning

With strong resources providing guidance through the coursework requirements and students who arrive to the lesson knowing what they need to do and how to go about doing it, there is a temptation as a teacher to take a back seat and let them get on with it. This is something that would be very damaging in terms of student motivation, understanding, rate and quality of progress. As such, ICT staff at Francis Bacon Maths and Computing College work hard to avoid the trap.

Despite the fact that in a single lesson each student may be working on totally different activities, all students are brought together two or three times in the lesson to discuss common problems in the work, evaluate exemplar work completed by classmates, etc. These teacher-led elements are essential not only for developing and assessing student comprehension but also provide an opportunity to celebrate success and to break up the focus of independent work on coursework which could become monotonous.

Online learning and assessment tools are are used to break up lessons and to raise motivation and understanding. These tools also provides an additional strand to assessment and monitoring within the course as all student attainment is automatically recorded and logged for the class teacher. The tools provide a very wide range of interactive activity types designed to develop subject knowledge through a number of different approaches. The activities range from game-style to formal interactive assessments.

Content within these activities has been shaped to the requirements of each element of the coursework students need to undertake. Students are encouraged to complete these activities before attempting the related reports. Doing so has been found to improve the quality of their written work as they are more familiar with the theory elements they are required to know. Also, their enhanced literacy levels increase the likelihood they will incorporate the most appropriate subject-specific vocabulary into their work.


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Evaluation

In a recent visit to Francis Bacon Maths and Computing College, Herts ICT consultant Jonathan Dobres needed to observe an NQT teaching in the department. I stood with him and as we looked around the room we saw…

a student learning to do a mail merge letter; a student learning how to create simple drawing objects in Macromedia Flash; a student developing her ability to do step-by-step animations in Flash; a student using a writing frame to do a detailed evaluation of an animated GIF; a student analysing his current levels of attainment and investigating what he

needed to improve in order to raise his grades.

There was a really good ‘buzz’ in the room and all students at least appeared to be on task and actively taking part in the lesson.

The system described in this article involves processes that we believe are in line with government guidance on ‘personalised learning’.

This is because from the students’ perspective, the learning and teaching practices in the department are enabling them to work at their own rate. This is enabling the Gifted and Talented to fly yet the less able students are able to come in to the lesson knowing exactly where they are up to and confident in their ability to continue to meet the course requirements.

Systems are in place to ensure that all students make progress and those students who would chose to make little or no progress are soon identified and appropriate action taken.

From the teachers’ perspective, day to day planning and marking time has actually been reduced. Although there is obviously a lot of work that needs to be done at the start of a course to plan and create resources and to gain a full grasp of the assessment objectives, once these are actually in place life becomes really quite easy!

From the Head of Department’s perspective, such teaching practices enable greater monitoring of student progress throughout the subject area. Thus students making less progress than expected can be identified early and appropriate action taken.


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