CPD Reflections: Collaboration with School 21

By Sophia Evans

Part of WA’s strategic focus is to develop the curriculum collaboratively, with a whole-school perspective. This term, the maths department was fortunate enough to engage in this process through collaboration with another school! Working with people from another school is something that most neglect once we qualify as teachers. We complete contrasting school placements as part of teacher training but rarely get the opportunity to go and visit other schools after this point. Working with others in different schools not only gives us the chance to think about new approaches to teaching and pedagogy, but also allows us to be validated in what we are currently doing.

Last week Michael and myself hosted 4 teachers from School 21, an all-through school in Stratford (East London). As part of their staff development, School 21 sends all teaching staff to visit other schools on their INSET days. Thanks to Ruhina (and our alumni Tom Holmes - their head of department) we were able to host their KS3 Maths Lead and three of their colleagues. During their time with us, they visited our lessons and fed back to our department our strengths and areas for improvement. 

It was useful to hear feedback and ideas on how we can add more stretch to our KS3 curriculum, something which is incredibly useful based on our feedback from previous departmental reviews. They shared suggestions of “mastery style” activities we can add as depth tasks during lessons, such as “how many representations of a fraction can you give?”. They told us that the behaviour in our lessons was great for learning (thanks to our school’s behaviour policy!) and that our use of language in lessons (e.g. emphasising the difference between a variable and constant in algebra) was something they were going to feed back to their department and wanted to implement in their lessons.

I particularly enjoyed talking about maths curriculum with their KS3 Maths Lead as both of us shared similar philosophies of teaching. We discussed approaches to teaching algebra with manipulatives, how retrieval can be embedded into lessons and assessment without being tokenistic, and how project-based assessments can allow students to explore a topic through a student-led approach. 

This process of working collaboratively with teachers from a different school with a similar context to ours was incredibly insightful for not only myself but other colleagues in our department. Hearing strengths and weaknesses from an outside source, as well as new suggestions on how to improve, left us engaged and focused on how we can improve both departments. I would love the opportunity to return the favour and go visit their maths department with some of our colleagues to help strengthen this relationship between our two departments and give us the opportunity to work together and share our passion for mathematics.