Internationalising Learning The story so far at Beaver Road Primary School… C

Today we will be discussing: Our reactions to the course and how we felt the content would fit into our school context. Our experience of Peer Coaching so far. Our future plans based around ideas that this course has given us. C

Our reaction to the course: Firstly, the course focused our minds on what was already in place at Beaver Road. We were very enthusiastic about the course and keen to try out some of the ideas and try and incorporate them into our teaching and school life as we knew they would work well with what was already in place at Beaver Road. C

Beaver Road: We currently have 662 on role. 3 form entry. Didsbury is an affluent area with a ‘café culture’ vibe. We have 10.9% of children on free school meals (national average is 19.2%) We have 41.8% of pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds (national average is 26.7%) We are an outstanding school. Huge pressure to maintain this. C

Feedback and Response of SLT On our return to school, we had a meeting where we fed back to SLT. Our Head teacher is very positive about anything that promotes the international aspect of learning and reflects the multi-cultural aspect of our school. As an SLT, they are also very open to new ideas and committed to maintaining our outstanding status. We were therefore given the permission to try out whatever we felt would work. H

Initial Steps We put the resources from the course on the staff server. We were given permission to trial P4C and time out of class to observe each other. We were given the display board to raise the profile of our international links in the school. We were asked to reflect on the potential of peer coaching with a particular focus on the Ofsted self evaluation pro-forma. H

Comenius/International display H

P4C We used the story ‘Something Else’ as a stimulus We realised how well P4C worked with Kagan structures (Claire’s school audit) It was very valuable observing each other as it gave us the opportunity to reflect on the lesson structure and our own teaching styles C

Feedback from the children about P4C ‘It was nice to see everyone’s face’ ‘It felt gentle’ ‘I enjoyed chatting in different groups’ ‘Maybe we could try it with lots of different stories?’ ‘I liked working with lots of different people and being listened to’ C

Our questions about P4C How can we involve ‘the logs’ without putting them under pressure? Should you give any input throughout the story or should it be led by the children’s reactions? When the children raise a silly or closed question, should we remodel or should the questions come from them? Any suggestion for how we can develop the whole class discussion (both of our classes found this difficult)? C

Associate learners Two Year 3 teachers observed and then trialled the P4C session. They commented on how nice it was to spend so much time discussing a story/stimulus and how calm and quiet the room became. They also talked about the potential of the P4C lesson structure in other lessons, particularly Literacy. We showed them the resources and we have planned to use the Oxfam ‘Mapping the World’ website in an IPC lesson. H

Peer coaching We have really enjoyed working together and loved having the opportunity to observe one another teaching. We have both ‘magpied’ lots of ideas from each other! Leadership course – difference between mentoring and coaching. We felt we were natural coaches as a lot of our feedback was done through questioning. H

Comenius/Link schools – How can we make these have more impact on the children and other members of staff in our school? Comenius project with a school in Marseille, Berlin and Oxford (Olympic theme and hopefully Paralympics theme next year). Also hoping to include schools in Poland, Greece and Spain. Pen pal link with Year 5 and a school in New Mexico Link with a school in South Africa and Head Teacher has various connections with some schools in China Possible link school in Thailand H

What does the future hold…? Staff meeting to share our experience of peer coaching Introduce more members of staff to the resources and websites International art week ‘World Came to My Place’ resource pack to be used throughout school Share/model P4C lesson structure World map on the playground C

Our Vision C