Building a Learning Community - Montrose Academy, Angus

This initiative really sprang from the fevered brain of a teacher on too many committees. It is the hectic rush from one discussion to another that can at times force one to see connections where there are none but maybe should be. Most schools concern themselves with the Primary Secondary transition and are consequently worried about the standardization of 5-14 levels in maths and English and the drop in performance in S1 for many bright and motivated pupils. There are concerns about pace and challenge in S1 and S2. There are initiatives to establish more cross curricular work to implement ‘A Curriculum for Excellence’ and many more. The tendency is to break these down establish groups to work on them and hope it all makes sense in the long run.

It is typical of the way in which secondary schools work that tends to produce change in a fractured uncoordinated way.  The Building a Learning Community initiative is Montrose‘s attempt the bring it all together.

On my visits to local Primary schools I found that the primary seven pupils operated in a very responsible way and managed to achieve all sorts of success in the classroom partly due to a clear sense , built up over their seven years at primary, of what was expected of them; how to please their primary teacher if you like.  It struck me very forcibly that when they came to secondary they changed. Gone was the confident, independent learner. Gone was the responsible member of the class engaged in the learning process. Instead here were what looked like, very young pupils uncertain, dependant and not engaged either in their new environment or the learning process of the secondary school.

In time they would learn to be confident. In time they would work out what constituted success in this new environment. Meantime they would either stay where they were educationally or they would regress in terms of their ability to achieve and learn.

There has been much said and written about the need to smooth out the transition between P7 and S1. It has been suggested secondary should be more like primary or that P7 should mimic the curriculum the pupil will experience in S1. All of these ideas are well intentioned but ignore one major factor; the pupils themselves are ready and desperate for change. They are excited about the differences and are motivated to achieve new and exciting things at their new school and the new environment.

We should see a leap in attainment and an appetite for greater pace and challenge but we don’t. The answer I believe is in the way in which we handle transition. To put it simply instead of waiting till they work out what is expected of them we should make it absolutely clear. We should share as openly and persuasively as we can with the new P7 intake the criteria for success in their new environment. We should also make sure that they have all the necessary skills and access to all the necessary tools to make a success of their first years.  This is where we started the idea of building a learning community. If you are going to make the criteria for success in the secondary school explicit to the new first year, you first of all have to establish what it is and look for consistency and agreement within the secondary school as to how it is delivered and maintained.

This is where the idea of ‘community’ comes in. To make this happen you need to work together and be interdependent across the sectors and the subject or faculty divides. If the teachers of a large institution like a secondary school cannot agree as to what success is then what hope do the pupils have.

The first step was to create a skills booklet where all the core skills needed for S1 could be collected and agreed by the whole school and issued to all S1. In this way we could have consistency of terminology and approach to subjects as diverse as writing a critical essay to drawing a graph. It is odd that this conversation does not happen on a regular basis in a secondary school but when it does it can be very enlightening.

A cross-curricular group put together the skills booklet which was then issued to all staff and all first year pupils encouraging a consistency of approach to learning and teaching across the subjects. We also tackled the literacy angle by working with the whole cluster Primary and Secondary to produce a common correction code. This we had professionally printed to A2 size and hung in every classroom in the cluster from P1 to S6, Science to Technical. All these activities engendered a sense of common purpose and highlighted the need for more and more cooperation and coordination between all subjects and across the sectors; in short a learning community.

The next step was to put the idea of preparing pupils for success into practice and a programme of two days of activities clearly focused on the idea of preparing the pupils for success in their new environment. We also worked on the idea of community and tried to build in a sense of belonging to the history and future of the school itself. So we ended up with a programme which tackled practical things like joining the library, getting logged onto the network, using pupil planners and study techniques and so on. This was balance by activities based around the skills required for success like working in a group, listening and synthesizing ideas. Much of this we lifted from the Critical Skills and Cooperative Learning courses that many of had been on. It led to a very packed programme.

I have for a long time thought that in an ideal world you would sit down as a school and say what do we want to do for these pupils? What would their day be like if we could deliver a perfect one where they were engaged and learning? In Primary there is a certain flexibility to react to the mood and rhythm of the day. In Secondary the timetable grinds on inexorably like a treadmill. On a hot day in May, a tired first year pupil can be sitting in Maths for an hour having just sat silently in History for the same amount of time. Wouldn’t it be good if you could say ‘ok let’s go play rounders in the sunshine for a bit then we’ll sit down with this problem?’ We can’t. We need a wizard timetabler who could organize a new timetable each day depending on the weather. During the induction days however we were able to put the notion of a balanced day into practice and build in games sessions into the day to break up the pace of activities.

We also were able to look at the balance of active and passive activities where group work and individual work were set against each other to vary the experience of the pupil. Through it all one thing predominated the approach and that was that each activity would be prefaced with the way in which the pupil could succeed either as a group or an individual. No matter what the subject or activity we emphasized for the pupils the criteria and behaviors involved in success.

We also involved the pupils in the process; engagement is definitely the secret to good behavior and it is the behavior of pupils that we were trying to influence. So we set the pupils a challenge to put together a set of rules for behavior in the school for the rest of the year, rules they would be held to again and again in their time at the school. We also challenged them to come up with rules for success in writing too, addressing the literacy agenda and pushing the idea of transference of skills and commonality of approach to literacy across the curriculum.

We are now involving subjects in Induction Day related activities to spread the sense of coordination and consistency and the ideas and precepts are reinforced with two further full days where classes revisit the ideas and values set out during the Induction.

This year we have started teacher team meetings where all the teachers of a class will meet to discuss the pupils and the dynamics of the group and share approaches and insights into the learning process. This, coupled with formal intervention teaching with the class teacher in the class, is forcibly setting out our desire for transparent criteria for pupil success and the generic nature of successful behaviors.

In the end it comes down to something very simple; pupils need to know where they are, where they are going and how to get there. It’s our aim to make that as clear as we can and hopefully achieve that together as a Learning Community.

You can find out more about this project at Montrose Academy from Andy Shanks.

Email – MNTShanksA@montroseacademy.angus.sch.uk

Telephone – 01674 672626