Next Practice in Resourcing Personalisation - Cramlington Community High School

Digital toolbox

Cramlington has planned an enquiry based curriculum at Key Stage 3 through their Learn2Learn programme, trans-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary units of work. The purpose is to develop in students the skills and competencies needed for successful participation in a 21st Century world. To trial the concept they have planned an eight week module (scheme of work), built around an open-ended enquiry model of learning (fertile questions) and designed to involve students more thoroughly in the process of learning. This will help develop learner skills such as collaboration, research, critical thinking, and communication. There will be involvement from 400 Year 9 students and 14 teachers will deliver the initial module as a precursor to establishing, in the first instance, an enquiry based Humanities course in September 2007. This will mean that approximately 25% of staff will be involved in explicitly developing learner skills and attributes (through the Humanities context and in the discrete Learn2Learn course) for 25% of curriculum time in Year 9. This in turn will lead to the establishment of a new competency based curriculum at Key Stage 3 to be launched in September 2008 when the school will become an 11-19 school.

To bring the programme all together they intend to explore the physical learning environment in which such learning could take place. Part of this project requires an upgrade to existing (large) classrooms and the creation of a learning environment that would support a flexible and enquiry based approach to learning. The Digital Toolbox includes ICT hardware (Camera, MP3 player) as well as access to a Virtual Teaching and Learning Environment (VTLE), which can be personalised to meet the needs of individual students, and an e-portfolio in which students can build evidence of their progress. The VTLE will give students access to a wealth of online resources from articles to pod casts and discussion forums. The e-portfolio will allow tracking of progress and quality by the teacher but will also be an important device for both peer and self assessment.

See a map showing the locations of all the Next Practice in Resourcing Personalisation field trial sites. 

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