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!