Douglas Academy – Monitoring and tracking progress in literacy
HEADTEACHER: Well our strategic plan for Literacy I think like all good plans is brought together first of all by our whole school improvement plan. We have a three year cycle for our plan and that plan has three overarching themes: learning and teaching, vision values and ethos, and self-evaluation, improvement and reflection.
PRINCIPAL TEACHER ENGLISH: We’ve been really interested in the English department in how pupils can track their progress in English and literacy, and we’ve taken the question really seriously and have been asked, you know, in the broad general education how is it they actually do know that they’re making progress. And the answer to that really is the pupils themselves know that they’re making progress. So we decided that we’d put together a ‘book of journeys’ in reading, writing, talking and listening so that we could gather together what the pupils themselves were saying about their own learning.
PRINCIPAL TEACHER ENGLISH: The process with putting together the ‘book of journeys’ starts out with the mechanisms that we use in the English department anyway, which is self-evaluation forms. And we look at every class in the school and ask them lots of different questions about how they’re learning, not just in English but also their literacy skills across the curriculum, and also outside of classroom as well and what they might be doing outside of school to promote literacy.
PRINCIPAL TEACHER ENGLISH: And then from that, we look at all the evaluation forms that they give us back and choose certain pupils who’ve got some interesting things to say about their own learning and then sit down and interview them one to one. And from that we get a really rich picture across the whole year group and across… in fact it ended up being S1 to 6, of how pupils were progressing in their literacy.
PRINCIPAL TEACHER ENGLISH: One of the key strengths about doing this form of self-evaluation is that the pupils themselves have been able to really think about the transferrable skills that they have and be able to take things forward. HEADTEACHER We’ve rejigged our working groups within the school to align them much more with the needs and requirements of Curriculum for Excellence. So we created for example a Literacy and Numeracy working group, we’ve created for example an achievement working group. And these working groups are led not by senior members of staff but by members of staff who wish to have opportunities for distributive leadership and to up-skill themselves. PRINCIPAL TEACHER GUIDANCE: I was involved in developing a new initiative called ‘learning logs’, and what that did was it was a way for teachers to make it explicit where they were promoting the Literacy, Numeracy, Health and Wellbeing outcomes. And it was a method for young people to record where they were doing that. So we asked teachers to make it explicit during lessons where appropriate, where they were overtaking a number of literacy, health and wellbeing and numeracy outcomes.
PRINCIPAL TEACHER GUIDANCE: So they were to write down in a lesson when a teacher said, “Well today we’re doing this work,” they would write down, ‘In Maths I overtook this literacy outcome,’ and then once a week in PSE, the PSE teacher would check what they had written and stamp that. And that really allowed young people to buy into that. They had some ownership of where they were recording their learning. They were reflecting on their learning. What that also allowed was we collated all the results using a spreadsheet, and what that allowed us to see is where each young person was overtaking each experience and outcome.
PRINCIPAL TEACHER GUIDANCE: And that allows planning for second year and third year to think about different experiences and outcomes so we’re not simply repeating what they’ve done in first year but to build in continuity. And it also allowed departments a snapshot to see where do they overtake literacy and numeracy ‘cause we could record where in Art, Literacy outcome one had been overtaken, and Literacy outcome two had been overtaken. And that was a really useful tool in evaluating our first to third year curriculum.