Thank you to all parents and carers who attended our presentation of learning evening on the first 2 weeks of our staff induction. This acted as an opportunity to introduce ourselves to students and parents of both XP and XP East, and to showcase our professional learning over recent weeks.

The evening was also used to highlight the importance of such presentation events to both students and parents, as a central aspect of our curriculum includes the notion of ‘authentic audience’. This is where students celebrate and showcase their learning to real life audiences which may involve publicly reading extracts of their written work and exhibiting products of their learning. Parents and carers will be invited to several presentation evenings throughout the school year, as students will communicate their learning via the formality of exhibitions and other events.

We believe that an authentic wider audience encourages students to reflect upon the quality of their work, and to help our schools to forge strong links with the community. Moreover, presentation evenings also act as an opportunity for parents and carers to become involved and informed about their child’s development and progress.

In addition to our first week of induction (click here for the video) the new staff teams embarked on a 2 week expedition Slice which focused on the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. Throughout this period, Dr Anna Switzer acted as our ‘teacher’ and we were her students. Learning targets were given to us via a guiding question, and our ‘product’ was to present our findings to parents on the presentation evening via the creation of so called ‘Found Poems’.

Acting with our ‘student hats’ on allowed us to participate within the learning expedition process from the perspective of students, and this led to a much deeper understanding of the protocols involved.

We are really looking forward to our first Y7 presentation of learning in our first school year at XP East. You can find the slides from our presentation below:

Created using Google Slides. Learn how to embed here. Every student at XP East has access to them.