Last Thursday was a treat. Leaving school at 3.30pm. Even though I was missing a Joseph rehearsal (and another opportunity to be dropped on stage by my less-than-focused sons!), I was looking forward to escaping to the coast for the early evening.
Super @MissMcLachlan had organised a TeachMeet - #TMWave. Now I thought it was called #TMWave because we were by the sea. Or because we had to wave a lot throughout. Both were fine by me. (Absent #MFLTwitterati friends, I am now *waving" at you all!)
Turns out it was named after a building. But I think we could all make up metaphoric reasons for the name!
Anyway, it really was a cracking evening arranged and hosted by Wildern School, especially Sadie. And imagine my delight when @thwartedmum appeared. Perfect! On top of that, the best crisps I have ever had at a CPD session!
I opted out of presenting a slot, mainly due to the current fraughtness of my MFL world at the moment. But the presenters of the night (ooh that sounds good!) were fab. Lots of great CPD ideas. Here are just a few.
·
Green
Pen Marking – a really good slant on our current Think Pink Go Green
approach, which is that the children use green pens to assess their own work,
reflect on what they have written, and actively mark their work, before the
teacher marks their work. You can then mark their work, their improvements, and
their SA. Means that you aren’t marking everything. Potential for the students
to do a WWW / EBI before handing it in.
·
Socrative
– feedback tool, including exit ticket. Can be used on computers, handheld
devices, ipads etc.
·
Flip
Learning – introduced by Sadie @missmclachlan – flipping the approach
to teaching. Learning is done for homework (example given = YouTube clip with
relevant Google Docs for students to access at home – listening task means that
students can replay, rewind to their heart’s content, which they can’t do in
the classroom.). Results of the h/w collated and used to group the students
together the following lesson. Major differentiation.
·
What’s
The Question In The Room? A student goes outside the room, and in the
room, a key word/phrase/theory etc is decided as the “Question in the room”.
The student is let back in, and start asking normal questions, and the students
have to respond in cryptic ways, using clues to the “question in the room”. The
example given was the topic of “Height”. Questions asked might be “What is your
favourite football team”, and the response could be “Stoke City, because Peter
Crouch is so enormous”, or “Arsenal because they are top”, and the student has
to try to spot the theme with the answers he or she gets.
·
PEEL
Paper Chains – 4 different coloured pieces of paper ready for a paper
chain. Each colour represents a different part of an essay. (MFL can be used
for the different skills being learnt – negative/positive opinions, reasons,
tenses etc). Students work in groups of 4. Each student works on 1 colour, then
they are linked together for a good quality answer.
·
Kahoot.it
– Excellent plenary tool – free – can be used on mobiles J
·
Doughnut
Thinking Cards – Circle of paper cut into 5 pieces. Each card for
separate thoughts, then joined together to see similarities, connections etc
There are lots of things that I will choose to trial. One thing that I really grabbed hold of in one of the sessions was the idea of using colours. I am trying to train up my students to underline different types of words to help with reading/accessing longer texts. So I may get colours for them to use, and have set colours for set word/phrase types, from Year 7 all the way up to KS5.
And so to a wave-related choon. Somewhere Beyond The Sea. Then it was difficult to choose the version. No more tricky decisions please!
