Thank you Alesha M

By Jamie Portman28th September 2017

A special mention needs to go out to Alesha M in our HUMAN class. This morning I took a photo of her excellent work on explaining where aspects of community existed within the animal kingdom, and printed it out on an A3 sheet. Students then analysed her work, paying particular example to her choice of vocab, use of conjunctions, openers and sentence structure. This was used as a model to help students to progress withi their work.

Whilst students did this, Alesha and Arendeep explored ways in which would make the extract even better. Arandeep reported back to the class on how a range of sentence types, as well as the use of synonyms for different keywords would improve it even further.

Thank you Alesha!

7P Fieldwork to York National Railway Museum

25th September 2017Jamie Portman

7P recently visited York National Railway Museum as part of our fieldwork for our ‘Society, Steam and Speed’ expedition. When we arrived, the expedition’s guiding question was presented to students:

‘What does the community of Doncaster owe to the Railway?’

The event acted as a kick off to immerse students into the detail of our guiding question. Students explored the museum to find any pertinent links to Doncaster, and begin to consider the transformational impact of the railways during the Industrial Revolution.

Students behaviour was superb throughout.

Check out the brief video below:

Learning devices at XP East

By Jamie Portman16th September 2017

All students have now had input concerning the use of ICT from Mr ap Harri this week, and consequently the use of personal devices from home such as laptops and tablets are now permitted. These should be used for educational purposes only.

Such devices will enable students to use resources that can potentially transform the way that they engage with their learning, but with this comes great responsibility. Stay tuned for updates on how we will be using Google Apps and other ICT approaches.

This ‘Acceptable Use of ICT’ policy was signed during the meetings with either myself, Mr Said or Mr Sprakes during the induction meeting process before the Summer holidays.

Devices will be connected to XP School’s wifi system, and consequently all student internet usage is monitored via the Smoothwall filtering and firewall software.

We have a store of Google Chromebooks in school for students to use if they do not own a device. We understand that devices ordered by parents from Freedom Tech will be delivered soon.

We’re back!

By Jamie Portman29th August 2017

Today was the first day back from the Summer holidays, and it was great to see the team back together again. We visited Malham in North Yorkshire to reccy the area in preparation for our first official day as XP East.

XP and XP East Y7 Crews

Although this is instead of our original planned residential to Wales (this will still go ahead in Spring), we’re absolutely confident that the day will be a memorable one designed for students to begin to consider their first guiding question of ‘What is Crew?’ On Friday XP East students will also visit ‘Kingswood Inspiring Learning‘ adventure park, which will also help them to answer their guiding question. A special thank you needs to be given to Mr Said for organising the event at such short notice!

First impressions may create a false sense of security about what these 2 days represent. Make no mistake about it, students will be out of their familiar zones and will be confronted with challenges that will need the support of others in order to get through them. Yes, they will be enjoyable, but Crew is about establishing genuine and sincere relationships in order to achieve what had previously thought was not possible. Crew goes beyond ‘team work’ and instead creates a genuine culture of community which will underpin XP East, just as it does at XP School.

The 2 days will also be academically challenging from the perspective of gathering knowledge of the local geographical landscapes, and further exploring the character traits of the XP Trust (building on the Y6 induction day). Mark my words, this is important stuff for what lies ahead for the rest of the year.

Our own staff Crew at XP East is bringing together a variety of skill sets, experiences and personal qualities which will provide the foundations of what I know will be something very special. For me, our findings from the reccy at Malham today didn’t just reveal details about the visit, it also reinforced our own excitement for the beginnings of our new school, and amplified our Crew’s ambition for what something Margaret Mead once said:

Further links:

Y6 Induction Day 2017

‘What does running around in the woods have to do with growing a school?’

‘Fine Tuning’ Our Expedition Plans

By Jamie Portman27th July 2017

May I show our appreciation and gratitude to Miss Robinson, Mrs Smith and students from XP who took part in our third and final ‘fine tuning’ of our Y7 expedition today.

‘Fine tuning’ is an approach that is used by a group of people to critique the Expedition planning process. It has specific protocols which begins with a 10 minute presentation by the Lead facilitator – in this instance, Mrs Poncia (ably assisted by Mr Smith) from XP East.

Mr Campbell (new XP STEM teacher) introduced everyone and explained that ‘fine tuning’ was all about being ‘soft on the people, but hard on the content’ and then facilitated the session which initially explored ‘warm praise’ for what the XP teachers and students liked. The panel then asked enquiring questions, and made suggestions about how we could improve our plans.

Mrs Poncia with the ‘Fine Tuning’ panel

The process encourages the people who are presenting to have a burning question that they would like the panel to consider providing answers to. Ours was ‘When should we introduce the all important guiding question?’ Existing experienced XP staff were able to offer advice based upon what they had learned from previous expeditions. Students then followed and provided us with several superb examples of when its introduction had worked well, and not so well during their time at XP. They then went on to provide us with some further suggestions which gave us many options to consider when returning back to our plans

The fine tuning session helped our XP East team to reassess our overall Expedition calendar, leading to a much better placed introduction of when we will introduce our guiding question. It has also led to establishing a greater sense of clarity with regards to our next steps, and reaffirmed in our minds that we are definitely on the right track.

See below for a quick interview with students.

Thank you all involved!

Expedition Planning

By Jamie Portman20th July 2017

XP East’s Teachers and Learning Coaches have been really busy planning our first learning expedition. As you will be aware, we don’t have a traditional Secondary school curriculum of separate lessons. Instead, XP School and XP East have lessons incorporated into Humanities (RE, Geography, History, and English) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). Whilst we do have some distinctive lessons for Spanish and PE, other subjects like Art, Drama, Music and Computer Science appear within ‘XBlock’.

Whilst we don’t want to spoil some of the surprises that we have planned for our first expedition, I wanted to explain some of the processes involved.

Last week, the team visited the site of our first immersion which is in a city somewhere in the North of England. This stimulated lots of great ideas for Humanities and STEM. In fact our first expedition will be a blend of both disciplines with aspects adapted from 2 of XP’s existing expeditions, and with new ideas taken from the expertise of staff from XP East. The product from our first expedition will be a published book made from every Y7 student’s work around different aspects of their learning. In addition to this, all students will read extracts of their work in a presentation of learning evening on a date to be confirmed.

The expedition will also have an anchor text (a book which is studied throughout the expedition), and students’ learning will revolve around 3 different in depth case studies. Teachers and Learning Coaches have made contact with several experts who will wither visit us at XP, or we will visit them on mini immersion trips.

Other teachers from XP have been fine-tuning our expedition plans around strict protocols which have been designed to answer any burning questions that we may have, and offer advice and expertise. We have had 2 rounds of this, and a final fine tuning process will take place next week by a panel of Year 9 students from XP.

As you can see, all of this is very exciting and I’d like to thank the staff and students from XP school for their fantastic welcome and support so far.

Mr Portman

Y6 Induction Day

By Jamie Portman4th July 2017

We had a fantastic day during the recent Y6 induction event at XP school. I was personally very excited to meet everyone as our soon to be Year 7s will be the first ever students of XP East!

The students took part in several activities that revolved around our character traits of courage, respect, craftsmanship and quality, compassion and integrity, getting to know our temporary school at XP via a treasure hunt, and artwork. Products from throughout the day were exhibited in the main area of the school.

Check out some of the photos from the day below, and watch the video that I created for students to watch again when they’re in Y11 in 2022!

JP


Shot with iPhone 7. Edited using the iOS Quik app. Shot by Crew.

Staff Presentation Evening: Showcase of our staff induction

By Jamie Portman2nd July 2017

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.