Tim Brighouse - collection of 'butterflies'

Monday 26th May 2014

Those headteachers who attended the conference in March will remember that the main speaker, Tim Brighouse, asked for suggestions or "butterflies" of good practice ideas that were going on in schools. As always, Essex heads responded generously and enthusiastically and came up with a list of great ideas. A couple of the suggestions included:

Hosting a staff meeting
Description
Staff meetings are rotated round the classrooms and whoever's classroom it is, acts as host. The first item on every staff agenda is the host explaining how s/he likes to arrange the room and the intention behind the display s/he has on the walls. S/he is required to say what s/he thinks is the next step in improving the display and how s/he intends to involve the pupils in carrying out some of the tasks towards improvement.

Comment on impact This is a widely used ‘butterfly' and in most cases leads to a much greater awareness of the potential of display as a subliminal educator as well as re-enforcing the practice of pupils having tasks to do as part of developing their sense of responsibility. Certainly the school involved in reports that it has ensured that the tone of the staff meeting was set in the sense that staff were talking about teaching and learning from the word go.

Improving transition from Year group to Year group
Description
Each autumn, in November, teachers spend a day with their former year group. For example the Year 2 teacher spends the day in the classroom of the Year 3 teacher who is teaching the children she taught the year before. The purpose is that the Year 2 teacher goes round and looks at the work and talks to the youngster she taught the year before in order to improve continuity of learning and to try to make sure that the new teacher is aware of say three children whose progress is pleasantly surprising her and three children whose progress might not be all she had hoped.

Comment on impact The school claims that this practice has various outcomes. First it causes teachers to talk more to each other about 'levels of progress' and spotting those children for whom the transition from one year to the next has coincided or caused a ‘pause' in learning. It has also led to teachers getting children to take work to ‘show' to their former teacher and to increase dialogue both about rates of progress and those children who may be most at risk of falling behind.

A variant on this might involve the released teacher simply observing two or three children in somebody else's class, making notes and discussing it with the class teacher at the end of the day.(‘Observing Learning')

The full list of butterflies can be accessed on the EPHA website.

Pam Langmead