Teaching and Learning policy

Out Teaching and Learning policy aims to:

• Explain how we create an environment where pupils learn best and love to do so.
• Summarise expectations to ensure everyone is committed to a consistent approach and high standards in teaching, learning, assessment and environment across our school.
• Highlight the needs and aspirations of all individuals and show how we provide opportunities for all pupils to make the best possible progress and attain the highest personal achievements.
• Show how we enable children to learn in a way that best meets their needs – both individually and those we identified for our community (our key curriculum drivers).
• Involve pupils, parents and the wider school community in pupils’ learning and development

At Farsley Springbank we aim to provide a caring and nurturing environment, which fosters a love of learning in all our children and provides them with the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed to learn and discover and thrive in the world. We want all our children to become:

• Courageous Learners – who believe in themselves, are able to communicate their thoughts and opinions confidently, listen to others’ perspectives and are able to disagree respectfully
• Kind Citizens – who make a positive contribution to society and show respect to all others and an understanding of different cultures and communities
• Curious Individuals – who make links between information they learn, can ask interesting questions and are able to work collaboratively with a thirst for learning

We believe learning takes place in a variety of settings and we aim to provide our children with a variety of ways to learn and develop their knowledge, skills and understanding – these include play-based learning, active learning and outdoor learning. Our whole curriculum is guided by our three key principles above and is underpinned by our key drivers of developing children’s real-life skills of independence, resilience, oracy, collaboration, risk taking, respect and curiosity. Through responsive, reflective and adaptive teaching, underpinned by the pedagogy of the Rosenshine Principles, and a curriculum which is knowledge rich, engaging, challenging and fun, our children are able to develop these ‘life-skills’ alongside their academic knowledge. Learning is continually revisited through a variety of retrieval strategies to ensure key knowledge is transferred to long term memory and is available to make further links and connections with new information learned. We endeavor to do this with interest, enthusiasm and meaning and not with a ‘rote learning’ approach. In addition to promoting the British Values, we also continually promote respect, diversity and the importance of a sense of community, with a strong culture of ‘No Outsiders’ playing a key role in the teaching here. It is our overarching aim for everyone at Farsley Springbank to ‘Be the best you can be’.

Pupils learn best at our school when they:

• Have their basic physical needs met
• Feel secure, safe and valued
• Feel a sense of belonging to the group
• Are engaged and motivated
• Can see the relevance of what they are doing
• Know what outcome is intended and why it’s important for learning
• Can link what they are doing to other experiences
• Understand the task and how to be successful
• Have the physical space and the tools needed to succeed
• Have access to the necessary materials and support

• Are not disrupted or distracted by others
• Can work with others or on their own, depending on the task
• Are guided, taught or helped in appropriate ways at appropriate times

• Can practise what they are learning 
• Can apply the learning in both familiar and new contexts
• Can persevere when learning is hard
• Can manage their emotions if things are not going well and are supported with this
• Recognise that all learners make mistakes and mistakes can help us learn