Mount Kelly School, Devon, has recently received accreditation from the University of Exeter as a Thinking School. The award is centred around whether a school can evidence that it is taking a genuinely whole-school approach to the development of metacognitive, self-regulating learners. Assistant Head, Teaching and Learning at Mount Kelly, Alan Johnson, shares the school journey to accreditation.
As Sir Ken Robinson once so rightly observed, we are all seeking to raise standards in education; I’ve yet to encounter anyone deliberately trying to lower them. At Mount Kelly, a through-school boarding establishment nestled on the edges of Dartmoor National Park, our approach to the development of our teaching and learning provision has favoured incremental improvement over outright revolution.
Turning to platforms such as the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), as well as the research of such authorities as John Hattie, we have been able to hone in on what might constitute best practice for us, in our context, as well as having an eye on local, national and international trends and developments within the world of education. Our focus has increasingly turned to enhancing a greater sense of Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE), which can be thought of as developing commonly held beliefs within your staff body that what they do matters, and this is, according to the work of Hattie, a potentially very powerful contributor to positive pupil outcomes…