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I will post more as we move through the inquiry, but as we enter the fourth year of the Y6 Signature Work I can really see the benefits of running and refining an inquiry over a number of years. Key developments this year:
There have also been a couple of key changes to the structure. I was asked to move the spine of the inquiry to ICT rather than English because of pressure on the English curriculum time, but with some additional lessons in English at important points when English skills are the focus. When we were in the process of developing the project I taught all of the spine lessons (in part because I hadn’t yet developed it fully enough to confidently explain to someone else where it was going), but this year I have been able to hand control of certain parts of the spine over to one of the English teachers who is also the ICT teacher. We still team teach these lessons, but he takes the lead now.
It is such a priviledge to work with talented colleagues like this, and handing these lessons over has reminded me how important the subject specialist is in inquiry. As a Y6 English specialist, he has done a much better job that I did of teaching the skills of understanding and interrogating a non-fiction text at the right level for this age-group, and I think this year’s group understand the Science they have learnt from these texts better than last year’s (even though I am a Science specialist). Although we have continued to use all the materials I developed over the last few years, his understanding of their reading ability and what kind of scaffolding they need to access these kind of texts has really brought this part of the unit to life.
As the Science teachers are more used to the unit I have also felt able to let go a bit there (which has helped as one group’s Science lessons are timetabled at the same time as the other’s ICT lessons and I can’t be in both places at once!), although I did cover one of these lessons last week when the teacher couldn’t be there and I pop in when I can to lemd a hand.
The water bottle covers are evolving in Art (they are using some screen printing techiques this year), and I’m looking forward to dropping in to help out a bit with needle threading for some of the sewing lessons this week.
Although I do still co-ordinate the inquiry and play an important part in helping it to run smoothly, every year it is more of a community effort – which means the students benefit from a wide range of expertise, and as staff get more comfortable with it, inquiry ideas and practices are more likely to seep out into their other teaching. It also means that, although I am still an important part of the inquiry team, it does not absorb all my attention in quite the same way as it did in previous years, leaving me time to work with other teachers on other inquiries (e.g. Y8 Theology, Y4&5 Geography).
This intense focus on flagship inquiries (involving communities of colleagues) which, once set up and running, require decreasing amounts of attention from me every year, allowing me to turn my attention to new projects, possibly with different colleagues, feels like a sustainable model for inquiry growth within our school.