The 7-staged Learning Sequence at Powers Hall Academy

We understand the pedagogical importance of the learning sequence. At Powers Hall Academy, our curriculum is implemented by following 7 key stages of learning throughout each lesson/learning sequence to ensure our core curriculum enables pupils to ‘know more, do more and remember more’. Our teaching and learning model hinges on Rosenshine’s 10 Principles of Instruction and the ‘Five-a-day’ principle – recommended by the EEF’s guidance report ‘Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools’ – to support high quality teaching. Teachers will develop a repertoire of these strategies, which they can use daily and flexibly in response to individual needs, using them as the starting point to develop effective lessons and classroom teaching for all pupils, including those with SEND.

We teach ‘with the end in mind’ and our pupils understand their learning sequence from the very beginning. This enables learning to have a clear, step by step and visible pathway that can be followed easily. Feedback and progress checks allow for the regular management of understanding and tells both the teachers and the pupils whether there is a need to repeat, practice or deepen… This makes success in learning clearly visible. Sequences of lessons are carefully built to progress towards the outcome. Aspects of engagement, modelling, feedback and challenge are the 4 cornerstones to our teaching.

This framework defines the consistencies and key teaching strategies which will make everyone’s job easier, so that teachers can build up a repertoire of expertise, knowing that what they are doing in these key aspects is the same as what is going on in other classrooms across the school.

We believe that children learn best when learning contains the following:

• Teachers have high expectations of all children’s learning and provide appropriate scaffold to support all children to achieve.
• Lessons begin with a recap of prior learning. This may be through quizzing, a short ‘brain dump’ or a quick classroom discussion.
• New learning is then presented in an engaging and creative way, in small steps and through carefully planned explanations
• Pupil participation in learning is maximised through a range of strategies: no hands-up, mini whiteboards, effective questioning and lesson delivery that is concise and engaging
• Lessons are shaped according to the needs of the children: sped up or slowed down or levels of support adjusted following in-lesson assessment
• Opportunities to practise new learning are embedded so that new knowledge is internalised and new skills become fluent and automatic
• Pupils are given significant time to learn new skills and have time to practice those skills
• Practice is guided initially through explicit instruction, with levels of support being gradually withdrawn to foster pupil independence

In order to aid student memory and understanding we deploy the below in our teaching:

1. Retrieval – planning regular activities in lessons that require students to recall and use their prior learning in order to strengthen their understanding and commit it more readily to long term memory in a meaningful way. Retrieval also helps us to identify gaps in students' knowledge so we can plan our re-teaching in a bespoke way. 
2. Modelling – so that students know how to apply the knowledge and skills they are taught and have success clearly demonstrated to them. 
3. Questioning – we use a variety of questioning strategies in lessons to build rigour and challenge as well as to provide scaffolding for progress during the lesson. We also use questioning to ensure students are made to think hard with breadth, depth and accuracy. 
4. Deliberate Practice – giving students plenty of time and opportunities to practice new knowledge allowing an element of “over-learning” so that recall and application of new knowledge becomes second nature.
5. Feedback and Review – through verbal feedback along with regular chances for students to review their work we help students identify misconceptions and improve on their previous understanding. 
6. Challenge  - a ‘teach to the top’ approach for all pupils is adopted. This supports our more-able pupils by giving them opportunities for open-ended tasks, higher-order thinking challenges and extension activities. In class children work in a range of ways; ability groups, mixed ability, paired work and independent work. We use a variety of teaching styles and a range of higher-level questions to stimulate critical thinking.