More, Issue 2, Spring 2023

Contributors

What is a community?

(SEND) SEND Matters

Magical Realism: Artificial Intelligence versus Education

Assistant Headteacher

(Head of Year 13)

The 21st Century Sixth Form

Hew Dalrymple

Department of English

How to make the most of DEAR

James Neophytou Head of Economics

Simone Ruggiero

Lloyd Opara Head of Behaviour

Cheryl Rosen Assistant Headteacher

Nisar Ahmed

ICT Lead Trust Facilitator

Using Teams Effectively

If a theme is running through this issue, it is culture and ethos. That may be surprising given this is a teaching and learning journal. However, learning does not take place in a vacuum and the line between academic and pastoral is a porous one. Our trade is and will always be a relationship business. The quality of those relationships, how safe our students feel, and the attitudes, values and behaviours we instil in our pupils goes a long way to determine their academic success. ‘It takes a village’, and that is no less true in the school ecosystem.

Lloyd opens our second issue with an article on community and school culture, that ever effusive term, but can be thought of as the set of beliefs and expectations which everyone in the school community has agreed to. We all contribute to the school’s culture, an inclusive, calm and ambitious learning environment, with kind students who exemplify our school virtues, captured in the catchy acronym CREST. At the heart of our school, our Catholic ethos, Christian agape love and an emphasis on service to others, in the many initiatives that we run, CAFOD Young

Leaders, Peer Mentoring, Guided Reading and collections for our charities.

An inclusive culture means one responsive to the needs of students with SEND. Cheryl’s CPD last term, summarised here, considers how we can continue to adapt our inclusive curriculum for all of our students to continue to achieve strong outcomes for our students with SEND, so that no child is left behind, and emphasises the importance of high expectations and accountability.

Turning to literacy, Hew discusses how we can continue to build that culture of reading within the school, and offers five ways we can maximise the impact of DEAR time.

With the launch of ChatGPT, James explores the implications of artificial intelligence for both teachers and students. Does artificial intelligence present a threat or an opportunity, and looks to the future and purpose of education. At the end are some suggestions on how it can be used by teachers.

Sticking to the theme of technology, Covid forced us all to become experts in Microsoft Teams, but is this resource being underutilised today? Nisar reminds us of the utility of Teams, and points out some of its best features.

Culture and ethos are also becoming popular topics in edu-literature, and our book reviews this issue focus on two recent case studies.

book reviews and online resources which are signposted prove to be useful, and enjoyable.

I am again enormously grateful to our contributors but also to you, our readers. We know that our job is relentless and we are time poor. I therefore hope that the summaries of research,

What is a community?

The season of Lent, what does it mean to you. Etymology of the word “Lent” may take you back to the old English word “Lenten” meaning “spring season”. The beginning of something new, respectfully transcending what lay before.

The Old Testament will tell us the story of the prophet Moses going into the mountains for forty days and forty nights to be closer to God in search for enlightenment, before receiving the ten commandments; it is these ten commandments on which the moral foundation of our Catholic community is built.

At this point pause for a moment…. And let us extract key words from the text already read. “The beginning of something new”, “Transcendence”, “Moral”, “Community”.

These words I believe to have significant meaning. However, each may have different value dependant on the understanding and experiences lived by the recipient. Think about what these words mean to you personally and how they have shaped you into the person are today and further shape you into the person you wish to be tomorrow. What sort of impact will this person have on the community?

Each community is defined by its purpose and consequently obeys specific rules; but "the human person . . . is and ought to be the principle, the subject and the end of all social institutions.

I give credence to the belief that community is the organisation of an organic whole, with each stakeholder contributing to provide the sustainable and developmental functioning and prosperity of the whole. Thus, creating a harmonious unity and something new each day bettering the one before through increased understanding of one another; tolerance of differences; acceptance of change and open to forgiveness. More often than not the shutters of greed, arrogance, ignorance and pride prevent us from us peering through the window of human kindness, which then lends itself to the uprising of our defensive mechanisms and self-constructed concentric castles.

Modern society and taught metrics of success has shown us how to take as much as we can and protect it with all that we have. However, as romantic as it may seem, I still believe that as humans we have an inability not to care. It is human of us to care for others as well as ourselves.

You are a part of this community, and as a stakeholder you have a responsibility to and develop, grow, learn from others, accept people for who they are without moral judgment and together build something new, transcending the old whilst interweaving the perennial values taught to us by the ten commandments.

SEND Matters

Every teacher is responsible for, and should have high aspirations and expectations, for every pupil, including those with SEND.

Following a graduated approach, teachers should:

Assess; identify a child as needing SEND support and work with the SENCO to carry out a clear analysis of the pupils' needs.

Plan; teachers and support staff should be aware of the pupil's needs, the outcomes sought, the support provided and any teaching strategies required.

Do; The teacher should remain responsible for working with the child on a daily basis, even if the child is working one-to-one away from the main class.

Review; the impact and quality of support and interventions should be evaluated, including listening to the voice of the child and their parents.

Accountability and high expectations are key when approaching SEND

High Quality Teaching

1. Explicit instruction

• Supplement verbal instructions with visuals

• Ask the pupil to repeat back an instruction

• Encourage pupils to ask for clarification or repetition if they have not understood

• Leave instructions on the board

• Give instructions in the order in which they should be followed

• ‘Chunk’ them and simplify the syntax

2. Cognitive and meta cognitive strategies

• Use recall tasks that support long-term memory

• Teach pupils how to plan, monitor, evaluate their own learning

• Verbalise your metacognitive thinking e.g. ’How did I go about this last time?’

• Use knowledge organisers

3. Scaffolding

3. Scaffolding

Visual -what equipment they need, the steps they need to take or what their work should look like.

task planner steps to take modelled example partially completed example vocabulary support dual-coding

Verbal - may involve reteaching a tricky concept to a group of pupils, or using questioning to identify and address any misconception

“Let’s look at this together...”

“What have you done before, that will help you with this task?”

“Don’t forget, your work needs to include...”

Questions to identify and address misconceptions

4. Flexible Grouping

• Groupings are temporary, flexible and fluid

Written - support with an independent written task.

- notes made on the whiteboard during class discussion

- child’s own previous work used to support their recall

- writing frame, word bank

• Buddy Support - utilise strengths and support individual needs based on level of understanding, needs, interests

• Short term intervention - explicit instruction

- pre/post learning

• Vary depending on task e.g. amount of reading required, scaffolding or stretch and

• challenge

Whole School Reading Strategies

Scaffolded reading:

Scaffolded reading is an approach in which temporary support is provided to the pupil which can be removed as the student gains confidence.

Reciprocal reading:

Reciprocal reading is a structured approach to teaching strategies that involves questioning, clarifying, summarising and predicting to improve reading comprehension.

Disciplinary reading:

Disciplinary reading is an approach that enables pupils to read like experts in a particular subject.

Final Reminders

• Ensure you are making best use of a seating plan with strategies recorded on them

• Implement those strategies within lessons

• Use high quality teaching strategies

• Use your TAs effectively and give them guidance

• Be aware of the school's provision

Finally, be ambitious for all students, adapting the curriculum for our pupils with SEND through high quality teaching strategies, but aiming for the same end points.

The destination is the same for all, but the pace and method of transport may be different.

References

Bedrock Learning. Available online: https://bedrocklearning.org/literacy-blogs/disciplinary-literacy/ Education Endowment Foundation. Available online: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/reciprocal-readin g

Nasen- free resources and webinars https://www.wholeschoolsend.org.uk/resources? title=webinar

Teaching Reading Strategies. Available online: https://teachreadingstrategies.weebly.com/scaffolding.html

SEND code of practice: 0 to 25 years - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)

Magical Realism

Artificial Intelligence versus Education – the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning?

‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ – Arthur C. Clarke

Artificial Intelligence is real, it’s here, and it’s on your phone. What does this mean for Teaching & Learning?

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is upon us.

The AI application ChatGPT recently set a record for the fastest app to reach 100 million users. It achieved this in just 2 months. This surpassed Google+, which took one year and two months to reach that milestone.

Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. It is now used by 120m people. A sizeable proportion of that is students.

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Its stellar success has placed an eye-watering valuation of $29 billion its author company OpenAI.

It’s simple. You type in a question, and it answers it. It will write out a clear, structured and correct answer in seconds. It does not just do a simple word search. It will think and rank its answers before it starts typing.

These systems are variously described as algorithms, or Machine Learning (ML), or Natural Language Processing (NRP), or Conversational AI. They are developing at such a fast rate that we struggle to distinguish the real from the imagined. The implications for learning, education and teaching are immense. But we are still in the stone age.

Here are a few questions that I typed into ChatGPT.

1. Write a weather report in the style of a Dr Martin Luther King speech.

2. Does Hamlet suffer from a mental disorder?

3. What lessons can we draw from the fall of the Soviet Union?

4. Write a song about school exams in the style of Stormzy.

5. If a plus b is 8, and the difference between a and b is 3, what is the product a x b?

6. Write a lovers’ quarrel in the style of Dr Seuss.

7. Discuss the importance of floating exchange rates to an economic system.

8. Write a football match report in the style of George Orwell.

The answers – written in front of your eyes in seconds – will astonish you.

I will share just two of them. The answers to 1. and 5.

Here is ChatGPT’s very elegant answer to my Question 1: Write a weather report in the style of a Dr Martin Luther King speech.

"My fellow Americans, let us look to the heavens and observe the weather that surrounds us. For as we stand here today, the clouds are gathering and the winds are blowing. The temperature, though cool, is a reminder of the resilience and strength that lies within us.

As we move forward, let us not forget that just like the changing seasons, the weather too shall pass. The sun will shine again and the rains will come to nourish the earth.

Let us use this moment to reflect on the power of nature and the majesty of the elements. Let

us also remember to be thankful for the shelter that protects us from the elements and to extend a helping hand to those who are less fortunate.

So, my friends, let us embrace this weather, not with fear or trepidation, but with hope and determination. For as we stand together, weathering the storm, we will emerge stronger and more united than ever before.

Thank you, and may God bless the United States of America.“

I can absolutely hear his voice in that answer.

And here is its correct answer to Question 5: If a plus b is 8, and the difference between a and b is 3, what is the product a x b?

“Let a and b be two numbers. Then, we have two equations based on the information given:

a + b = 8

a - b = 3

Adding the two equations, we get: 2a = 11

Dividing both sides by 2, we get: a = 5.5

To find b, we can substitute the value of a, and use the first equation: b = 8 - a = 8 - 5.5 = 2.5

Finally, to find the product ab, we multiply a and b:

ab = a x b = 5.5 x 2.5 = 13.75

So, the product of a and b is 13.75.”

How does it work?

AI systems learn and adapt. They are not programmed. They rely on a body of knowledge known as a corpus. This is content that is verified and curated through the virtual teaching by thousands of experts, and by regular user feedback loops.

An AI system can read millions of pages a second. It then uses pattern recognition, anomaly detection and predictive analytics to generate an acceptable answer.

In milliseconds (1,000th of second), an AI system goes through 4 steps: -

1. Question analysis (400 milliseconds).

The AI will parse the question and understand it as human language. It is not just a key word search, like Google or Alexa.

2. Hypothesis generation (500 milliseconds)

This entails analysing hundreds of millions of documents, sites, journals, structured data (text, numbers) and unstructured data (pdf, video, images).

3. Evidence scoring (700 milliseconds).

Now the AI system will generate some possible answers and score them based on its confidence. At this point, quantity trumps quality.

4. Answer generation: final merging and ranking (1,100 milliseconds)

The final step. The AI will weigh the useful evidence, decide its answer and it will document its level of certainty. If its confidence level is less than 50%, it won’t answer. This is a significant step in the evolution of computing. The AI knows what it knows, and knows what it doesn’t know.

So within 3 seconds, you’ll have an answer.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales tried ChatGPT on one of its professional exams and it got a very respectable 42%. While below the 55 percent pass mark, this was considered a reasonable attempt.

This deep analysis and natural language processing has huge implications for healthcare, medical diagnosis, finance, retail and education – virtually any industry where people are using data to make better decisions.

This deep analysis and natural language processing has huge implications for healthcare, medical diagnosis, finance, retail and education – virtually any industry where people are using data to make better decisions.

Is this end of Teaching and Learning?

Faced with this powerful technology and its ease of use among students, do we need teachers anymore?

The outlook is far more complicated than merely replacing teachers with a computer program. If we look at our foundational principles of learning (Figure 1), we find that teachers will become even more critical over the next ten or twenty years.

The encouraging news for teachers is that AI can only really address number 7. We are trained to be fully in control of 1 to 6.

I remember a university lecturer once saying to us that ‘at university, we are not interested in facts. We know where to find them. You can find them. What we are interested in, is ideas.’ It seems that this will become the new, higher bar in secondary schools and sixth-forms.

AI forces us to take a closer look at Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Figure 2).

If AI can find the lower order descriptions, definitions and knowledge, then, firstly, we need to make those stick. Secondly, this allows us the time and freedom to pursue the challenging endeavours of scaling the higher order skills of diagnosis, evaluation, and illustration as students begin to create, reflect, integrate and coordinate.

We should focus then on retrieval practice, consistent retention, application and development. It won’t be long before AI is competent at the higher order skills as well. It is already creating original and creative content.

Figure 1: The Principles of Learning

Figure 2: Bloom’s Taxonomy

Prime Minster Rishi Sunak recently described his policy vision for the compulsory study of mathematics up to the age of 18 as ‘the closest thing we have to a silver bullet.’ The same thing can be said for many of these AI tools — whether it’s ChatGPT from OpenAI, Bard from Google, Watson from IBM, or any others that will undoubtedly appear.

I have always been relaxed about students using Wikipedia for their homework. I think it’s a constructive and valuable use of online time. At least they’re looking in the right places on the web. Wikipedia beats Andrew Tate every time.

Let’s not be in denial.

The economist Milton Friedman was once on a foreign speaking tour. Stuck in traffic due to some roadworks, he asked his hosts why the workers were using shovels, instead of machinery. The answer can back that it was a deliberate policy, in order maintain employment levels.

Friedman retorted, ‘Then why don’t you give them spoons instead of shovels, and create even more jobs?’

In January, 2023, the New York City Department of Education restricted access to ChatGPT from its public school internet and devices. I believe this to be a misguided, Orwellian, knee-jerk reaction.

In a blinded test, ChatGPT was judged to have passed graduate-level exams at the University of Minnesota at the level of a C+ student, and at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a B grade.

We cannot bury our heads in the sand, and should not resist this lightning-speed development. We should cultivate, curate, encourage and savour the leaps that it can give us and our students.

We’ve been here before.

‘There is nothing new under the sun.’

Ecclesiastes

In the film Hidden Figures (2016), the African-American women mathematicians working at NASA, were confronted with the oncoming era of computing. An IBM computer is brought in to make computations in seconds – of rocket trajectories, speeds, landing arcs – that previously took humans hours and days to perform.

What happens? The women begin learning the new programming languages, such as COBOL, at night school, and they become the first computer scientists. They were able to improve the computer programs that took the space race into the digital era. The women mathematicians were not replaced — they just moved to a higher order of thinking, and invented a new industry.

Sixty years on, we need to mimic those remarkable and talented women — Kathryn Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, and many others — and carve out a path that combines inspiring magic with gritty realism. Thus, we can make the next generation thrive, and scale the heights of traditional learning, creative ideas and better decisions.

References

ChatGPT is available to try at: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/ ‘The Science Behind an Answer — How Watson Works’, IBM video, YouTube. Krathwohl, D., Bloom, B., Masia, B., (1964). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Microsoft Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, content, and apps together in one place. It’s built on Office 365, which means we can benefit from integration with familiar Office apps and services. It can be and customised to fit the needs of our school.

Bring everyone together in one digital classroom.

Teams is a central place for live class sessions, text and voice chat, calendars, assignments, quizzes, Live Events, and more.

Personalize learning based on insights about student needs.

Using Insights in Teams, educators can track student and class progress, identify at-risk students, and take action to improve outcomes.

Include all students with built-in accessibility tools.

Microsoft offers a range of accessibility features, including Immersive Reader, dictation, live captions, translation, and more.

Simplify collaboration and class management for educators.

Educators can prepare rubrics, post assignments, and stream lectures. Teams also enables internal meetings and sharing of course materials or lesson plans.

Empower educators to customize teaching and learning. You can build tailored experiences through custom apps and tools right within in Teams, no coding experience required.

The 21st Century Sixth Form

What defines a 21st century Sixth Form? To consider this question requires us to consider what the defining challenges of this century are facing our young people.

The Mental Health Challenge

The last two decades has seen a growing awareness of the complexities of emotional wellbeing and mental health, and a range of statistics point to a mental health crisis, exacerbated by Covid, and there is a growing responsibility on schools to meet this challenge through equipping young people with tools to decode their experience and create a culture of belonging.

Mental Health Crisis

Emotional wellbeing as a concept is truly a development of the twenty first century. The statistics highlight an alarming mental health crisis. In 2017, one in eight 5-19 year olds were reported to have a mental disorder. A 2018 NHS report highlights that nearly half, 46.8%, of 1719 year olds with a diagnosable mental health disorder had self-harmed or attempted suicide at some point, rising to 52.7% for young women. (NHS Digital 2018) Suicide remains the leading cause of deaths for males and females aged between 5-34 in 2019. The number of A&E attendance by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition has tripled between 2010 – 2018-19 (NHS Digital / The Independent Jan. 2020). Access to NHS care continues to be a challenge. Just over a third of children and young people with a diagnosable mental health condition get access to NHS care. However, there have also been some positive trends, the stigma around mental health is increasingly falling and there is a growing awareness and recognition that mental health matters as much as physical health. Among young people there have been reductions in drug and alcohol use and teen pregnancies are at their lowest levels.

The rates of mental health problems increase as children get older. “Among those aged 17 to 22 years; 27.2% of young women and 13.3% of young men were identified as having a probable mental disorder” (NHS, 2020). New relationships to navigate, social media, financial pressures and high-pressure exams may all contribute mental health issues for our young people. Reports indicate that adolescents report greater extremes of emotions, feeling more self-conscious and lonely than adults (NHS 2020).

Covid and the financial pressures many families face after a decade of austerity and successive financial crises has contributed to this crisis. 83% of young people surveyed had agreed that Covid had made their mental health worse as many struggled with isolation and homeschooling. (Young Minds 2020)

What does a sixth form that puts wellbeing at the core look like?

 Leaders audit the wellbeing provision

 Curriculum includes emotional resilience and mindful techniques

 Share risks of interacting with technology and link between phone use and sleep deprivation

 Peer support

 Equip young people with tools to decode their experience and create a culture of belonging.

Auditing the wellbeing provision

Both the Anna Freud Centre, and the Association of Colleges, have put together useful auditing tools. The Anna Freud Centre ‘5 Step’ Action Planning Tool allow schools to audit their wellbeing and mental health provision under five categories: 1) leadership 2) curriculum 3) staff

development 4) student intervention and 5) stakeholder engagement. The audit should form the basis for a detailed action plan. Schools should have a mental health and wellbeing policy in place, provide high quality health and wellbeing lessons – with mental health now featuring prominently in new compulsory RSHE reforms – and have strategies to support young people at risk.

Understanding Wellbeing

Underlying the strategy, leaders need a good understanding of what 'good wellbeing' actually looks like. Noorish et al's Positive Education model ('Live It, Teach It, Embed It'), highlighted in Power's brilliant Head of Year handbook, outlines the characteristics pupils must cultivate in order to experience wellbeing (Power 2020). Students need to develop positive relationships, health, emotions, engagement, accomplishments and purpose, and pastoral leaders need to ask themselves what opportunities they are giving to students to develop these characteristics. Publicly rewarding accomplishments, high quality careers education, advice and guidance to help pupils find purpose, and a supportive form-time programme are all important features (Power 2019).

The Economic Challenge

Another challenge facing our young people is an economic one. Our young people enter an increasingly more competitive and volatile labour market (Mann & Huddleston, 2017). Despite being better qualified than previous generations, they are increasingly struggling to compete for economic opportunities. Globalisation, liberalisation of labour regulation, and technological change have all contributed to this competitive environment. Increasingly employers are looking at personal effectiveness and adaptability as key in the new service economy.

Employers have greater expectations from employees to be job ready, and there is greater competition for work from older workers.

What does a sixth form that puts career readiness at the core look like?

 CEIAG is enriched with employer engagements

 Resilience and recruitment preparation

 Learning is applied in the workplace.

VESPA and Resilience

Our VESPA programme seeks to build students’ resilience and independence. They are not just essential qualities needed for Level 3 study, but are life-long qualities of character and mindset needed to enter the workforce. There has been an enormous amount written about character based education and Carol Dweck and Angela Lee Duckworth have become something of minor celebrities with their work on the growth mindset and grit respectively, though too often this work has been over-simplified into platitudes. Oakes and Griffin’s VESPA model builds on their work into what successful habits and characteristics look like in a Sixth Form student, and in doing so, helps to shape them into adults (Oakes and Griffin 2018):

VISION - students need to turn dreams into goals and work towards them.

EFFORT - students need a clear idea of what high effort looks like and it should be normalised and turned into a habit.

SYSTEMS - students need to develop simple prioritisation tools and break down projects into manageable 'chunks'.

PRACTICE - students need to learn the content, develop skills and seek feedback from experts.

ATTITUDE - students need to want to succeed more than they fear failure.

For each characteristic, they present a series of short activities that can be implemented in a one-to-one session or as part of a pastoral programme that may follow up a workshop/or assembly on these themes.

Sixth Form is the launchpad into the wider world, shaping young people into happy and healthy adults who are prepared to face a more diverse and inter-connected world and equipped with the skills and qualifications to enter an increasingly competitive labour market. A 21st century Sixth Form is therefore one in which wellbeing, diversity and skills are at the core and one we all have a responsibility to build.

References

Anna Freud Centre, ‘5 Steps Action Planning Tools’. Available at: https://www.annafreud.org/schools-and-coll eges/5-steps-to-mental-health-and-wellbein g/

Mann, A. & Huddleston, P. (2017) Schools and the twenty-first century labour market: perspectives on structural change, British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 45:2, 208-218.

NHS Digital (2020) ‘Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2017’. Available at: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/p ublications/statistical/mental-health-of-childr en-and-young-people-in-england/2017/2017

NHS Digital / The Independent (January 2020) ‘Number of children admitted to A&E with mental health problems jumps 330 per cent over past decade’. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/ children-mental-health-hospital-suicide-nhsae-a9255626.html

Noorish, J. et al, (2013) ‘An Applied Framework for Positive Education. Available at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/25 7931706_An_applied_framework_for_Positi ve_Education

Oakes, S. and Griggin, M. (2016) The Alevel Mindset. (Crown House Publishing: Carmarthen, UK).

Power, M. (2019) Developing a whole school well-being model https://michaelpower.org.uk/2019/05/30/dev eloping-a-whole-school-well-being-model/

Power, M. (2020) The Head of Year’s Handbook. (Critical Publishing: St Albans, UK).

YoungMinds (summer 2020) Coronavirus: Impact on young people with mental health needs (survey two). Available at: https://www.youngminds.org.uk/media/355g yqcd/coronavirus-report-summer-2020-final. pdf

How to make the most of DEAR

Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and make sense of the world. Lacking vital literacy skills holds a person back at every stage of their life. As a child they won't be able to succeed at school, as a young adult they will be locked out of the job market, and as a parent they won't be able to support their own child's learning. This intergenerational cycle makes social mobility and access to opportunities more difficult. If that hasn’t convinced you that literacy matters, then perhaps this succinct quotation will:

“Literacy provides access to written knowledge – and knowledge is power. In a nutshell, literacy empowers.” (Y Kassam, 1994.)

I believe that promoting literacy should be the single highest priority of every school. As Kassam concludes, ‘literacy empowers’ and in doing so it opens the doors of equality. Therefore, as educators – particularly in a disadvantaged borough – we have a duty to ensure that literacy is prioritised.

As a school it is fantastic that we have adopted many important literacy based initiatives, including: DEAR, Word of the Day, author visits, World Book Day celebrations, poetry and creative writing competitions and more.

For the purpose of this piece, I would like to focus on one aspect of literacy which every teacher in every department can adopt: fostering and promoting an environment which values reading.

What can we all do to promote reading for pleasure?

This piece will focus on providing a few suggestions to improve DEAR sessions in your classroom. I know that these sessions can arise at frustrating moment, interrupting perhaps a carefully sequenced run of lessons or lesson; alternatively, you may rejoice when they come around because they provide you with the chance to do a burst of planning or marking. However, next DEAR time please remember that this 30 minutes of your week is a wonderful opportunity for you to promote reading in the classroom and develop the literacy skills of our pupils. Here are five suggestions for you to try out:

1. Talk about your reading: In form time or at the start of DEAR take a few minutes to talk to the class about what you are currently reading, or a book you enjoyed when you were younger and why you liked it. We cannot underestimate the “importance of teachers acting as reading models, valuing reading and sharing the love of reading to enhance their students’ reading motivation” (Gambrell, 1996).

2. Engage the class in discussion: Ask them about the books they have read and enjoyed in the past. One of the obstacles to reading for pleasure is that pupils do not know what to read. Class discussion will provide ideas for reading, and importantly, from peers with like-minded interests. It is important to make “reading a whole-class experience as well as individual” (Taylor, Pearson, Clark, and Walpole (2010).

3. Read to your class: Why not mix up DEAR every so often and use it to read to your class? Being read to is one of life’s great joys and too many of our pupils may not have had the opportunity at home for myriad reasons. Read them the first

chapter of your favourite book and hear their thoughts afterwards. Or read the blurb from a selection of three and let them vote on which one you will read. Another option is reading a short story. And if you were worried about what Ofsted would say if they finally decided to barge through the door, then relax, in 2019 they stated that ‘if we want to give all children opportunity, a good place to start is through reading to them frequently [which] introduces new vocabulary and meaning within contexts that stimulate their thinking.’

4. Check that pupils are reading an appropriate book: The previous two points will help provide pupils with reading suggestions. We all know that too many pupils are reading the Diary of a Wimpy Kid that they read in Primary school. Form tutors, please encourage pupils to go to the library and provide reading suggestions to them.

5. Classroom display: This one is less about DEAR directly, but it helps to develop an environment which values reading. Dedicate an area of your classroom or corridor display to what you, your form or department are reading. Put up photos of department members and their favourite books. This will be particularly powerful coming from departments beyond the English department as it will serve to highlight a universal appreciation for reading.

Finally, I hope you excuse my ending this article with a little self-promotion. I am running the London Marathon this year in support of the National Literacy Trust. The NLT is an independent charity which works with schools and communities to give disadvantaged children the literacy skills to succeed in life. If you would like to support, please go to my Just Giving page at:

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/hew-dalry mple1

Book Reviews

James Handscombe’s A School Built on Ethos (2021)

Published a year ago, A School Built on Ethos, is both a collection of ambitious assembly speeches, and the story of the birth of a new sixth form school, going from assembling an SLT to developing a school identity, the challenges faced and overcome.

I recall in my first months as a Head of Year that my assemblies were functional, notices were given, they were an opportunity to pray and reference were made to current affairs. This book prompted a change. The book shone a light on an alternative world. Here, assemblies were an opportunity to build an ethos, to spark curiosity and model the love of learning for learning's sake that we want pupils to emulate. The Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, my great great grandmother Alba Cinzia Scalcini, and Desmond Tutu soon all started appearing like characters in a Fellinesque circus.

A genuinely inspirational book for current and aspiring pastoral leaders, and all those interested in school culture.

Book Reviews

Chris Dyson’s Parklands: A School Built on Love (2022)

Another case study, here Chris Dyson shares his journey in turning around Parklands Primary school in Leeds and establishing a positive school culture, with, at its centre, love.

He lays out the challenges overcome, raising £500,000 in 2021 through a targeted campaign aimed at CEOs of large companies. A teaching philosophy defined by a focus on deliberate practice, a no excuses culture to ensure every single student is given the same opportunity to master basic skills and a high value to celebrating achieving and fun.

While talking in a primary context, it is full of transferable lessons.

A heartwarming and easy read.

Resources on the Web

A number of free teacher guides are popping up on the internet on using ChatGPT. While one must be careful when using it, the resources it produces can contain errors and it cannot replace the expertise of the teacher and emulate best practice or know our schemes of work, it can nevertheless be a useful resource in generating activity ideas and resources.

Sample Prompts

Can you create a lesson plan on the topic of X as part of Y Course

Can you create a six week scheme of work for a Year X unit on Y for Z

Can you suggest a homework for the topic of X as part of Y

Can you design a retrieval quiz for the topic of X as part of Y.