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Teaching & Learning

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At SCC, high-quality teaching and learning is at the heart of everything we do.  We think carefully about every aspect of our practice, and our teaching and learning approach brings together key insights from educational research and cognitive science to support teachers in their planning and delivery of highly effective sequences of learning.  We have identified four core principles that underpin all aspects of teaching and learning, and which help us to plan with clarity and purpose, deliver lessons that stick, and support every student to make real progress.

We build CONFIDENCE

It is important that we address issues of confidence and low aspirations before trying to teach content.  Evidence shows that poor motivation is a response to repeated failure and so it is crucial that we support all students to experience success in order to build confidence and, consequently, increase motivation for learning.

We focus ATTENTION

‘Thinking’ takes place in working memory and occurs when we combine information in new ways.  This combining of information is essential for learning and, as such, it is crucial that we support all students to focus their attention on what we need them to be thinking hard about during lessons.  We recognise the limitations of working memory and must be mindful of not overwhelming this by introducing too much information at once or increasing the complexity of a task too quickly.

We make CONNECTIONS

For students to learn something, they must be able to connect new ideas (things they don’t know) with old ideas (things they do know).  This allows them to make meaning and consequently build strong, interconnected units of knowledge (schema).

We check UNDERSTANDING

The meaning that students make from what we say is a combination of what we say (or at least the parts they attend to) and the relevant knowledge they already have.  Each student will use at least slightly different knowledge to understand what we say, and this means the resultant meaning made by each student will be at least slightly different.  Consequently, it is imperative that we regularly check for understanding.  This allows us to take students from where they are, not from where we imagine or would like them to be.