expedition | XP East

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

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.