Thread by @judehunton

Making tutor time impactful: you are what you repeatedly do.
I wanted to share two of the straightforward school improvement projects we have initiated since Easter at Skegness | @DRETnews. They are ambitious in intent for young people’s education & fairly easy to implement.

They are #DRETreads and Prep. Both of these take place in form time; Prep in morning form, #DRETreads in afternoon form.
Firstly, #DRETreads is an idea from @educurious2015. It is about increasing students' reading time. Each day in @DRETnews secondaries our tutor groups are >>

>>read to for 20 minutes. We had a careful process to select texts & we are rotating them around schools in the trust to share our joy & ideas!
We snipped 5mins off lesson periods & were able to create P6 afternoon tutor. Teachers had advance copies of the book. >>

At Skegness it's been led by @LaurenceJay19 & @MrENoon. We were also very lucky as an entire staff to have some CPD on DEAL from one of my edu-heroes @DavidDidau.
We have further developments planned for reading at school. >>

We are next restocking, painting & recruiting for our school library. @MrENoon is planning a strategic overview of reading in lessons & around the school with the head of English @mrshoulstonlau. September will see reading at the heart of curriculum, pedagogy & school culture.

Secondly, Prep builds individual students’ study habits over time. We have refocused morning tutor time on culture, retrieval practice & the value of knowledge. Our form groups memorise from their KOs. This idea has been formed with the wonderful @MrMWilkinson >>

We have designed 100% Folders containing KOs (An idea taken after CPD from @DixonsAcademies) and an exercise book. Students look-cover-write each morning on chunks of facts from their curriculum. We call these “fingertip facts” that serve students “quest for knowledge”.

How did we do roll-out?
Here are the steps we took:
Organise with admin the resources: folders, KOs, plastic wallets, books.
Trail the idea at staff briefings and provide the “hook”.>>

Monitor every morning and act helpfully for tutors implementing this: run and get books if something is missing, help set the culture high through sharing authority with the tutor, stepping in to cover in case of absence.>>

No new initiatives: repeat the instructions & expectations at successive staff briefings with a limited agenda.
Here is the phased change for morning prep routines. We made sure to keep communicating this, trailed before & then repeated to colleagues.

This is during the Easter holiday (You can probably spot the box of #DRETreads here too!)

We supplied all tutor groups with a standardised slide to give the language at school consistency. As @MrMWilkinson always says “consistency is a superpower”!

We also tasked our sixth form student leaders to make us a video on how to “do Prep”. This video owed a lot to Midlands Academy MAT!

We are now at the end of week 3 and as you can see students are taking this very seriously!

Our whole staff briefing keeps to the same themes each week: this time though we incorporated some early morning rehearsal amongst tutor teams to build self-accountability about making the processes efficient.

Work from @MrMWilkinson on our “hook”: This we generated during some awesome awesome awesome training with
@Star_Inst, @DixonsAcademies & @UncommonSchools (but we still haven’t got to meet @paul_bambrick yet - one day!)

We want to keep going until all the classroom transitions are really sharp; the retrieval practice is consistent & standardised & the students themselves can see in their books their progress over time. Essentially turning these routines into well practised @SkegGrammar habits.

Thanks for reading this long thread! We are indebted to others in creating these initiatives and are happy to share with others - perhaps you might want to visit a @DRETnews school? (#GoDRETtersOnTour) if you want to know more please feel free to ask!