The Bramley Way

Our Teaching and Learning Model

The aspiration of our school is that a focus on high quality teaching – defined as ‘making every lesson count for every child’  can deliver a better learning experience for our children.

 

Our teaching and learning approach is defined through the three main components within The Bramley Way:

• Nurturing the Bramley Citizen
• Growing the Bramley Learner
• Delivering Bramley Teaching

 

 

Nurturing the Bramley Citizen 

At Bramley, we aim for children to value being a member of a community, within the school and wider world. There are regular opportunities for children to play, learn and grow as people developing friendships and a sense of belonging. We aim to ensure children develop self-awareness: taking responsibility for their own learning, embracing a growth mindset and having high expectations of what they can achieve.

Through a nurturing and supportive whole-school ethos, with opportunities to contribute to all aspects of school life, we strive for all children to develop a sense of confidence which they will take forward with them in life in order to make a positive contribution to the future.

 

Growing the Bramley Learner 

We actively encourage children to be reflective about their learning, behaviour, beliefs and values, and to develop a sense of personal responsibility alongside the motivation and aspiration to learn and improve.

Through a combination of research and collaboration with stakeholders, we have identified 5 prominent learning behaviours which will effectively support our aims for our children. These can be grown through every subject across each year group and will provide a foundation for pupils to learn effectively and thrive throughout their schooling and into the workplace of the future.

 

Delivering Bramley Teaching 

At Bramley, we recognise the vast number of different teaching strategies and pedagogies which are used in the classroom to facilitate effective learning. As a teaching team, we have spent time discussing and shaping what we want teaching to look and feel like in our school. As a result, we have identified key teaching strategies that provide a consistent foundation to the quality of teaching across the school.

Information Processing Model (Atkinson and Shiffrin)

 

 

Our approach to teaching is characterised by:

High Expectations and Pupil Engagement – Creating a positive and productive classroom environment rooted in high expectations will contribute to gaining high levels of pupil engagement. When pupils are actively involved and motivated to participate, they are more likely to retain information, develop critical thinking skills, and succeed with their learning. High expectations are important in the classroom because they can lead to a number of positive outcomes for children, including: Academic achievement, Self-esteem, Motivation, Engagement, Behaviour, Attendance.

Carefully Sequenced Learning Journeys – Our working memory capacity is finite and can only handle a few bits of information at once. Too much information swamps our working memory and leads to cognitive overload resulting in confusion and children unable to process it. By only presenting small amounts of new material at any time, then assisting the children as they practice this material leads to successful learning and retention. Only after the children have mastered the first step do teachers proceed to the next step therefore progressing through the longer term learning journey.

Explicit Instruction and Modelling – Pupils need cognitive support to help them learn to solve problems and learn new material. The teacher modelling and thinking aloud while demonstrating how to solve a problem or how to structure a sentence gives the pupils clarity about what is expected of them as well as understanding how to think through the task. Worked examples and ‘WAGOLLs’ (what a good one looks like) are other forms of modelling that show pupils the final outcome of a similar task. These types of models reduce the cognitive load on pupils’ working memory.

Checking for Understanding, Responsive Teaching and Use of Scaffolds – Effective learning requires work and thinking to be frequently checked to see if all the pupils are learning the new material. Checking for understanding (assessing) enables the teacher to identify if the pupils are on the right track and being successful or if they require additional teacher intervention in order to be successful. Once a high success rate has be achieved by the pupil, the teacher will move the child onto the next step of their learning journey. This can be done individually or by grouping and regrouping children who are achieving to the same level of understanding. Scaffolds, or instructional supports, can be used to help them learn difficult tasks. These are gradually removed as the pupil becomes more competent.

Periods of Deliberate Practice – Following the ‘teach’ phase of the lesson which has included modelling and guided practice, pupils begin practicing the new material independently. This period of repetition is vital in overlearning and embedding a new skills and/or knowledge in order to achieve fluency and mastery. The new material will go through the process of encoding and transfer from working memory to long term memory. Once learning has been embedded, it can be built on or used to complete similar tasks reducing cognitive load.

Daily, Weekly, Monthly Review – is about securing knowledge into long-term memory and being able to recall it easily. Review can help us strengthen the connections among the material we have learned. It’s a powerful technique for building fluency and confidence and it’s especially important if we’re about to introduce new learning. Transfer of knowledge into long term memory requires effective schema construction and spaced retrieval practice. Weekly and monthly review is about longer-term retrieval practice – to continue the process of building long-term memory to support future learning.

 

Much of our Teaching and Learning Philosophy is based on the work of Barak Rosenshine who wrote this Paper “Principles of Instruction”.   https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Rosenshine.pdf