CPD Reflections: School-Based Studies From Our PGCE Students

Every year, WA welcomes a number of PGCE students to the school, completing one of their placements. Whilst here they observe, teach, and spend lots of time working with our teaching staff to hone their knowledge and skills in the classroom. Part of their work includes completing a school-based study, where they select one area of teaching and learning to focus on during their time with us, and carry out a project on this topic. Donna and Paul were delighted to hear our most recent PGCE cohort present their projects recently so we thought we'd ask a few of them to share their reflections on the blog for you all to enjoy...

Implementing the new RSHE curriculum- By Samuel Webster, Faye Griffiths & Harry Paine

We decided to look at how the implementation of the new RSHE curriculum provides student learning at WA. To gain our data we created two identical Google Forms to be used at the beginning and end of the second term. We asked the students during TTB to grade out of 10 how they felt their knowledge and confidence was, and how important they believed the respective RSHE topics to be. (See figure 1 for an example relating to different views on marriage).

We conducted this survey with three tutor groups; one in Year 9, one in Year 10 and one in Year 11. The data that this garnered could then be compared to measure where we might see differences across the three respective categories and the three form groups. Figure 1

In the second Google Form, we anticipated seeing an increase in both knowledge and confidence, which would correlate with increased learning. When looking at the results we saw a steady increase in both knowledge and confidence in the Year 9 group, however, Year 10 showed more variation. This was especially prevalent in their results in ‘how to have difficult conversations' and ‘county lines’. One was a subject they thought they knew about already and one was completely new to them. In the latter, their confidence and knowledge grew, but with difficult conversations, their confidence dipped as well as their knowledge as they had uncovered there was a lot they didn't know about this topic. This shows great maturity in the Year 10 group as they were able to understand and truthfully answer during the last questionnaire that they overestimated how much they knew.

Use of mini-whiteboards in lessons- By Nasir Uddin & Mahfoozur Rahman

As we first began our placement at Westminster Academy, we noticed a pattern across classrooms: the widescale use of mini-whiteboards (MWBs). At first this came as a surprise but, as we made more observations of their use and began trialing them ourselves, we noticed the array of benefits that MWBs can offer and decided to make this to focus of our school-based study. We initially set out to find how effective they are for student engagement and assessment for learning. First of all we created surveys which we sent out to teachers in the maths and geography departments to gain staff perspective on MWB usage and also spoke with many students across various year groups. The results showed that Year 8 and Year 9 lessons used MWB most frequently, and this decreased with older year groups. We supposed this pattern could be a result of student engagement being weaker in the lower years, meaning that MWBs help facilitates class engagement. The vast majority of teachers, most of which were mathematicians, suggested they used MWBs primarily as an AFL tool- being able to read answers at a glance means we as teachers can adapt our teaching accordingly. Although many maths teachers emphasised that they use MWB daily, this was not found to be the case in all subjects. One suggestion was that, in subjects that require more focus on extended writing skills, MWB are not always the most effective AFL tool to use. Our suggestion would be to focus on routines- when students are accustomed to using MWB they can be used efficiently and flexibly to check the learning within a lesson.