Okay a whole year has passed and I know I haven't been very good at keeping up to date, but I have been busy - honest.
A quick update - We have now launched our PBL curriculum in Year 7. Their whole curriculum is PBL apart from discrete PE and Languages. The students work on two projects; a literacy one and a numeracy one. Each project lasts roughly 3 - 4 weeks. I appointed two excellent Assistant Heads who are responsible for literacy and numeracy. Their job is to lead the development of projects with the aim of creating maths and English projects in which the students don't realise they are doing maths and English. The emphasis is on developing good habits of learning and excellent literacy & numeracy skills. It seems to be working, but we have a long way to go to really see it becoming effective.
The following link is a presentation which summarises the rationale and philosophy underpinning what we are aiming to do in the Academy. It is important to note that we apply the same philosophy to our curriculum as we do to our ethos/behaviour management as we do to our staff development. Download Schools of tomorrow for the students of today
For my own organisation rather than your reading pleasure: below is a list of topics I intend to cover over the coming week:
- A new way to organise the whole curriculum "Phase Learning"
- How PBL is timetabled
- A review of PBL at the Academy to date - some of the issues we have encountered
- Staff development
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Use of technology
Now if I manage to do all of these topics, will someone please explain to my wife why I'm spending all this extra time shut away in a room on the computer. She's beginning to get suspicious.
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