As schools focus on trying to make up for learning lost during lockdown, teaching professionals will be looking at ways of boosting their students’ performance. Here are a few tried and tested methods that some of the UK’s top secondary schools are putting into practice.
- Using assessment to keep track of students’ attainment. This will help you determine what you need to do to promote individual students’ progress. At Chelmsford County High School, assessment is vital: “As part of our teaching and learning practice, we track the attainment of all students using internal teacher assessment data, as well as using external data […]. This gives us insight into our students’ attainment and allows us to determine whether our students are on track to achieve their potential.”
- Offering pastoral care to help students who may have fallen behind with their learning during pandemic restrictions. Brighton College prides itself on this kind of support: “Our pastoral system, overseen by a dedicated deputy head, ensures that everyone feels supported in academic and personal matters.”
- Personalising your lessons by providing students with additional learning material, such as review videos and practice activities, or by partnering a pupil with a high-performing student. High-performing students could also benefit from extra challenging material. The Kendrick School is committed to: “Creating an environment which promotes personalised learning and lifelong skills by maintaining focus on the individual students’ needs, both academic and pastoral.”
- Building a high achieving culture – The Tiffin Girls’ School is doing just that: “The school encourages students to aspire to excellence in everything they do, whether that be: academic excellence, a passion, and enthusiasm for the creative and performing arts, sporting prowess, service to others or student leadership.”
- Keeping up with the latest developments – staying connected with up-to-date innovations in teaching means you can share your enthusiasm for your subject more effectively, so students have the best learning experience. Henrietta Barnett School has a strong focus on innovative teaching: “We encourage our teachers to use innovative teaching and learning methods to stimulate higher order thinking and to go beyond the requirements of the national curriculum in order to keep students focused and motivated. Lessons are interactive, and carefully planned, with a commitment to high standards of academic achievement.”
- Working in partnership with parents and pupils, which is what Latymer School does: “Latymer’s strong academic record has been maintained and improved over the years, we should like to emphasise that these results are only achieved through close working together of parents, pupils, and school.”
- Giving students inspiring revision options – most schools offer revision sessions in the run-up to exams. But it’s easier to motivate students if you offer interesting and memorable ways of revising topics. For example, Kendrick School students visited a Poetry Live event in Reading to support revision for English Literature GCSE; pupils also attended a revision seminar at Reading University on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, an A Level set text.
Now you’ve done all you can, it’s over to the students!