Friday, February 20, 2009
Personalisation by cluster.
Schools are increasingly choosing to develop their personalisation practice in conjunction with other schools in their area.
The Teacher Learning Academy is encouraging teachers to network together to conduct action research using their own practice and share results. In order to support this, a number of local authorities and excellence clusters are leading the way and using PbyP as the tool for teachers to evaluate the impact of their work.
Personalisation by Pieces was devised as an approach and framework for schools to use to stucture their own delivery of personalised learning and peer assessment. Integral to the peer assessement of PbyP is the making of connections with other schools. Evidence of using a skill is submitted by a learner and then sent by the system to a learner in another school to peer assess. Increasingly staff inclusters of primary and secondary schools using PbyP are collaborating almost as much as the learners and for the first time this last month we were invited to provide training for a cluster spanning from Early Years to KS4 recognising that all phases can learn a great deal from each other when it comes to developing competencies.
The practice of teachers from different schools meeting together and planning improvements for learners, then carrying out these improvements and meeting back together to evaluate the impact is proving a hugely successful way of implementing PbyP. All of the schools share the same pool of expert assessors on the web and all have experience of the same framework making the sharing of ideas and evaluations much more powerful.
For schools concerned with the changes happening nationally perhaps this is an ideal way to work together