Our Meetings

Friday 13th September

Our first meeting of the new academic year! Great to see everyone back and welcome new DART members too. Everyone was issued with a new handbook for the year, we started to think about our research projects for the year ahead and how we want to share our work with colleagues and pupils.

Friday 25th September

Following Chris Moyse’s excellent coaching training, this meeting was a coaching takeover. Coaches and DART members (many of us are both!) joined forces to try out the coaching skills taught by Chris before we begin to work with colleagues across the school.

Friday 11th October

Members of DART presenting at Researched Northampton October 2019

LAZ shared plans for lecture lunches and several DART members signed up to deliver future lectures. Those of us who presented as Researched Northampton at the weekend shared how it went-the presentation is available in the ‘Presentations’ section of the blog. We discussed ideas for our first assembly-sharing the work we do with students and we collated our project titles for the year ahead. Working titles are below:

• Building a reading culture
• Building cultural capital
• Interleaving and spaced practice
• Improving teacher confidence: becoming more ‘risky; and the impact on students.
• The use of academic reading to narrow the culture capital gap, enabling enjoyment and its impact on outcomes.
• Formalising the informal-looking at knowledge recall questions to the greatest impact-times scales/interleaving/schema
• Improving the outcomes of underachieving boys in Year 9
• How we get students to effortfully think?
• Developing explanations
• Curriculum design and attainment
• Developing habits of discussion (year 10 focus)
• Developing cultural capital

Friday 25th October

We ended the term with a discussion around the article ‘Why It’s Hard To Think Like a Scientist. ‘ It was really interesting to consider just how swayed we all are by anecdotes, graphs and charts. The good thing is that knowing this is an important first step to adopting a more detached viewpoint.

Friday 24th January

DART Badges have arrived! Much excitement is around the room as we get to represent DART all the time now. The main focus of today is two of our members who are presenting about their project looking at retrieval and focusing key questions on important knowledge. They’ve been linking this to metacognition in science of which there is a lack of approaches. ‘In the classroom: Metacogntion explained‘ by Matt Bromley is a focus for the project and wondering if it can be applied to their project and develop the learning of lower ability students in particular.