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Introduction
| Overview
| Becoming an LC
| CILT support
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CILT-SLC case study |
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Beaconsfield High School, Buckinghamshire |
Primary |
A new venture with feeder primary schools
Background
Beaconsfield High School is an all girls Specialist Technology College, with languages as a second specialism. Since September we have started a new venture with our primary feeder schools. We have over 40 feeder primary schools as we are a grammar school, but we are working with our main 5 feeder primaries.
Using an NQT to work with feeder schools
We appointed in July a newly qualified teacher (NQT) and wanted her to work with our primary programme, as apposed to sending an advanced skills teacher (AST). We believe this has helped to develop a friendly relationship between our department and our primary colleagues. There is a strange rapport between primary and secondary colleagues and we would be fools to ignore it. We have to respect the fact that many primary colleagues are extremely experienced and hugely able professionals who have to –yet again according to them- add something else to their curriculum; the use of emotional intelligence was crucial for the implementation of the project; they respected the fact that they could learn the language teaching /pedagogy from the NQT and in return she could learn so much from them in terms of classroom management, pace etc. This give and take made the whole process much more acceptable to them.
Objectives
We had our first cluster meeting on the 4th July 06 to discuss priorities and agree on a re-shuffling of our main feeder primary schools in order to fit in language teaching. The objective of that first meeting was to see where they were, where they would want to be by the end of 2006-07 and ideally where they would want to be in terms of language teaching by 2009. Differences were huge, from nothing at all to all of year 6 with 60 minutes of language learning per week.
Putting words into action
From September we started a tailor-made language course for each main feeder primary with the ultimate objective to offer support and help to colleagues in the teaching of languages. Some schools started with observations done by us in order to draw diagnostics of existing methodology, others were doing team teaching with our NQT –on the principle of reciprocal learning and sharing- others were observing and moved on gradually to team teaching.
Here is the term 1 layout to give you a better overview of what we did.
Resources were made available through a superb pack that they could opt for or they could also take the grant available to them and make their own capitation decision. Only one school went for this option and in fact reverted back to the pack as searches for resources are time consuming. It can also be a bit of a blind decision and the overall response from other colleagues was so overwhelmingly positive that they now use the pack.
I am doing the planning and organisation side as well as the delivery of some of the training; the training of primary colleagues was open to the whole faculty who saw it as an opportunity to further themselves.
Future plans
In term 2 we are moving on to train further our primary colleagues on 5 priorities that we have all agreed upon. Each primary school was asked to prioritise the five aspects of improvement:
- Sharing of resources and their use. Sharing of best practice especially songs and games: participants need to come with 6 copies of their 3 favourite language activities in order to share and explain to colleagues.
- Cultural awareness: to bring back to life your existent or even non existent French in order to feel confident in front of your class in terms of classroom instructions, classroom routine etc.
- Basic language training for primary colleagues: to give participants an insight into French culture in terms of education, children’s games and interests, holidaying for a French family etc. so that you install a dialogue with your pupils on their points of interests about France nowadays.
- Assessing pupils’ learning: how do we/ could we assess pupils’ learning in order to track and feedback on their progress
- Differentiation within primary teaching of languages: how to cope with different levels in the classroom. How to support your special needs pupils in such an alien environment.
- How to cope with the odd native speaker!!
Clearly this is part of a long-term, three year plan as it is part of the community aspect of our Language College bid. One of the crucial goals is to have an absolute understanding of what students learn in languages at KS2, so we can adapt our KS3 schemes of work in order to push them further and certainly to avoid the switching off/blasé approach due to lack of a challenge; and looking even further to shortening KS3 and fast tracking to KS4; even further than that we’d like to develop even more excited, able linguists to carry on languages at KS5 and FE!!
Patricia Calderbank, BeaconsfieldHigh School, January 2007
