I tweeted yesterday that our department doesn’t do any book marking:

A lot of people asked what we do do, so I posted a snip from our Teaching and Learning policy. At our school, departments have the autonomy to shape their own approach to Teaching and Learning. Autonomy doesn’t mean anarchy – no ruler -, it means self law. The policy is the “law” we have constructed as a department, and one which we stick to, as a department. A large chunk of its power lies in the fact that we made it together in collaboration, and have agreed that this is what good science teaching in our department looks like. That means you can’t just copy it, stick it in your shared folder and expect job done, you really need to work at it.

It’s also dynamic. We review it each year, and carefully decide how to improve it for the next iteration. It’s also not an aspirational document – it doesn’t describe the way we wish our lessons were, it describes the way they actually are. So there’s plenty of stuff that we might like to do that isn’t in the document. We might trial something this year and then decide to put it in the document next year as we roll it out fully. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll delete it from the next year’s version.

science-handbook-2021-22-3Download

If you’re interested in reading more about our no-marking policy, check here.

A couple of people asked about our FOFs, so I’ve put some here as well:

y11-fof-1Download
y9-fof-1Download
y7-fof-1Download

The document also makes reference to our booklets. You can find all our KS3 ones here.

Finally, we also have a department “admin policy.” This is where we have put into writing all the things you need to function effectively as a team. We don’t really believe in unwritten rules because people forget things, or new members join the team or whatever. Just be explicit, it helps everybody.

science-department-admin-and-policy-guide-21-22Download

You can read a bit more about our approaches to minimising workload here.

Anyway, hope that helps and if this sounds like a pretty cool department or school to work at, my DMs are always open so either message me on Twitter or at adam.boxer@tta.org.uk.