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03/10/24

It was great to have Jamie McCreddie& join the BARE team last week . We had a special afternoon with students from & taking part in a massed instrumental workshop & performance. pic.twitter.com/nvVfs7vrX0

27/09/24

Rainy day, library is the place to be. Catching our students reading ☔️ 📖 ☺️ pic.twitter.com/0ZUakMLr8y

24/08/24

Hard work pays off, congratulations to our year 11 students, GCSE Results Day.😀😀#Class2024 pic.twitter.com/2hj7DxlxF5

15/08/24

A fantastic set of results for our wonderful sixth formers! We are so proud of you all ❤️.Another year of excellence for Harris Academy Greenwich Sixth Form 🙌#Class2024😀 pic.twitter.com/zZEa23WqaY

18/07/24

Today was our first ever Summer Fair. Students had an opportunity to engage in numerous of activities. ⚽️ 🧽 🪣 pic.twitter.com/bemweFf7Em

18/07/24

Today was the end of our Year 12s work experience placement at partnership has provided endless amount of opportunities for our students. pic.twitter.com/NDnhrJVkmf

18/07/24

Today we hosted our end of year KS3 Pizza Party, celebrating the bright spots and acknowledging these students hard work throughout the academic year. 👩‍🎓🏆😁 pic.twitter.com/eLOdSdO6O6

16/07/24

A lovely day out ☀️ 🚆 📖 pic.twitter.com/B2DurDbmZd

16/07/24

Who said the mind cannot be challenged outside the classroom 🙌🙌 pic.twitter.com/iMUcSjCXrC

16/07/24

Today was our Learning Beyond Curriculum Day. Our Year 7s was offsite today at the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory. Happy train journey 🙌😀 pic.twitter.com/XOKv27ZBN0

16/07/24

Well done to our athletes who took part in the Harris Athletic Sports Day Final.🏆🥇🚨 pic.twitter.com/hL862YzTjr

15/07/24

Future sporting champions 🏆🥇😀Always a pleasure hosting you. https://t.co/MWmemIW9hJ

15/07/24

Well done to our athletes who took part in the Harris Athletic Sports Day Final.🥇🥇🏆 pic.twitter.com/vd3ie5B9YC

15/07/24

Today’s Year 7 Achievement Assembly.Well done to you all, first year of secondary school almost completed.🏆 🥇🚨 pic.twitter.com/TaVYD7MRlS

13/07/24

What a lovely day, our students were engaged, educated and inspired 👮 🚨🚓. Thank you https://t.co/RVK0K4cpnW

13/07/24

Good music and excellent performances.What a vibrant evening 🎺🎷🎸🎹 https://t.co/AVkUQE5j3P

06/07/24

This year Bedrock Champions were rewarded for completing their literacy homework with an exciting trip to the British Library. The highlight was the "Treasures" exhibition, showcasing marvels from Shakespeare's originals to 2000-year-old homework placards. 📖 📕 pic.twitter.com/hniivDqYyh

06/07/24

Yesterday we commemorated 3 years since losing Tamim Habimana. We miss you and will always remember your vibrant and energetic character! pic.twitter.com/EQeh4Czgb1

05/07/24

Year 8 Assembly this morning focused on the general election. It’s important that we educate our students on the power of their future votes! 🗳️ pic.twitter.com/1hqAPAgK9H

01/07/24

Our students took part in the Harris regional heats' sports day at Sutcliffe park. The heats are held to determine if the athletes will compete at Crystal Palace stadium and ultimately represent the school against all other Harris secondaries. Great performances today🥇🏆😀 pic.twitter.com/QGJvLlrNHx

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How do students learn the curriculum at Harris Greenwich

How students learn the curriculum

Our implementation of curriculum is governed by our Teaching and Learning Blueprint. We care deeply about practising our teaching craft to ensure we are crystal clear in instructing powerful knowledge and we foster an academic climate for this teaching.

The six principles that govern our teaching craft are led by the mantra of ‘Knowledge is Power’ and  ‘Making it Stick’ to stop the forgetting happening.

Knowledge is Power

Because we know the above is true we know the teacher is the expert and therefore we carefully practise our direct instruction, dual coding and interleaving of sequenced knowledge. We know that our curriculum should be taught to be remembered not merely encountered. With this in mind, we follow the following principles in our planning, teaching and assessment to ensure pupil success.

Making It Stick

Every decision we make about learning and teaching is governed by two truths about learning.

  • If nothing has changed in long term memory, nothing has been learnt
  • Forgetting is inevitable

No matter how brilliant a year 8 Spanish lesson appeared, if the students cannot remember it two weeks later, it wasn’t learnt. Understanding sometimes gets confused with learning, but they are not the same thing. Therefore, everything we ask students to do, and everything we talk to teachers about, is designed to make more knowledge stick in long term memory.

The Teaching and Learning Blueprint

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All staff contribute to training around our six principles of Teaching and Learning which we refer to as our ‘Blueprint’. This Blueprint underpins all of our Teaching and Learning training session, training programmes and instructional coaching curriculum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lessons and lesson structure

We are not overly prescriptive on how lessons should look at Harris Greenwich, but there are some principles that all teachers adhere to.

All lessons start with a high challenge retrieval activity, followed by a period of fully guided instruction (‘I do’  ‘We do’  ‘You do’). This is surrounded by a warm/strict approach to behaviour management: ‘Because we care, what we ask students to do is not optional’.

Stopping the Forgetting – How lessons start

Every lesson at Harris Greenwich starts with 10-15 minutes of high challenge retrieval questions designed to stop the forgetting of the most vital knowledge, facts and skills. The questions pull from a broad knowledge base, including previous topics and sometimes previous years!

Such is the importance we place on ‘stopping the forgetting’, it is expected that all students attempt all the ‘Do Now’ questions, and those not attempting all of them are challenged. Teachers will refrain from providing too much help in the first 10 minutes, instead motivating students to think hard without looking back over previous work.

The teacher then spends time going through the answers, reteaching the most important points if necessary, and students make corrections. The graph below illustrates our belief, that the more knowledge is retrieved in Do Now quizzes, the more is remembered.

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Examples of Interleaved Do Now Quizzing in English, History and Maths.

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An example from Year 9 English.

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An example from Year 8 History.

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An example from Y10 Maths.

Fully guided instruction: ‘I do’  ‘We do’  ‘You do’

Following the ‘Do Now’, teachers pitch high in the ‘I do’ phase. This is where teachers introduce the new content clearly with great examples, models and explanations. We pitch it high, often above the most able students in the class, so everyone is challenged.

We follow this with a ‘We Do’ phase that provides support. Here you will see processes deconstructed, lots of questions being asked, students helping the teacher do some more examples, paired talk, and practice with writing frames.

Finally, students practise the new thing they’ve learned independently without support. The ‘arm bands are popped’ - there will be no / minimal support from the teacher. Rather than different levels of task, we strive for everyone doing the same, difficult thing. The support given in the ‘We Do’ phase ensures that all students can perform the ‘you do’ practise successfully, gaining confidence and embedding vital knowledge in long term memory as they do so.

How do we get better at teaching?

We know that practice is essential to making change and therefore all teachers having teaching partners where they meet regularly for instructional coaching where get granular about how to improve in service of students learning over time using StepLab to support development.

 

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