Another way to audit your departments teaching and learning provision Having spent some time looking at the

Sutton Trusts learning strategies report and identifying some of the low cost/high impact ideas available, I thought it would be worthwhile looking at ways in which these could be audited. RAG rating is a useful way to do this, but sometimes does not provide a clear overall picture. I am a fan of the radar graph as it shows strengths and weaknesses clearly. I am going to explore a way of using this format to audit learning strategies in a department as a whole, but this could easily be an audit of aggregated teachers, showing strategies used by individuals. This could then inform professional development needs. First you need a spreadsheet and a simple couple of columns to describe the strategies and the score: Score Meta-cognition Homework Peer Learning Effective Feedback Next you need to consider how you attribute scores and against what criteria. You may want to consider the following: no strategies in place (1); strategies in place but not used (2); strategies in place but used inconsistently or ineffectively (3); strategies in place and used with some impact on learning (4); strategies in place with a significant impact on learning (5).

Obviously you may want to adjust these, but you need to be clear that these are not Ofsted style judgments. You are auditing for the greater purpose of developing skills and practice within the department. At this point you will need to run your audit. The broader spectrum of evidence that you use to make your judgments the better. You may want to look at: o schemes of learning; o lesson plans; o department handbook; o learning walks; o book scrutiny; o marking scrutiny; o pupil interviews; o LTA interviews; o parent/guardian interviews; o summative assessment outcomes.

Remember that these are qualitative judgments and to anonymise any individuals involved. This is about understanding the strengths of your department and to develop improvements in the way strategies are implements. Place a score against each strategy and select a radar graph based on this information. It may look like this:
Meta-cognition 5 4 3 2 1

Effective Feedback

Homework

Peer Learning

If you want more detail, you may create a radar graph for each element of evidence within each strategy. However, you now have a guide to the success of the learning strategies used in your department. What are important now are the questions you ask about each strategy. In this example Effective Feedback is clearly successful and you may want to identify why. It would also be useful to understand where it is effective, especially as homework is less successful and you may be able to strengthen homework by improving/developing feedback in this area. Meta-cognition is clearly not doing well. It may be that there are strategies in place in the schemes of learning, but the question would be why they are not being translated into practice. Is this a skills issue? Do you need to put in place further CPD for your team. Actions: what are you going to do, for whom, when, with what support, with what measurable impact?