Teaching & Learning

At Parkside Academy, our overall approach to Teaching and Learning is driven by three key elements: Engagement, Challenge and Depth. These elements remain at the heart of our Teaching and Learning approach so that we continue to offer a world class education to all learners. We remain committed to continual improvement and Educational Excellence; striving for innovative and exciting teaching and learning every hour of every day.

As part of our approach to ongoing improvement, we utilise 9 key teaching and learning principles. Based on Rosenshine’s principles of instruction we believe that these key principles are what make up transformative practice and our ongoing focus on these 9 areas are what ensures that teaching at Parkside Academy engages, challenges and deepens student understanding at every level so that all pupils make excellent progress.

Metacognition

To remain at the forefront of educational excellence it is imperative that the approaches we adopt are rooted in research. We take as our focus for 2020-21 the research carried out by the Education Endowment Foundation on Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning. Now more than ever it is crucial that we equip our students with the tools they need to understand their learning habits and their thinking processes and provide them with opportunities to evaluate and monitor progress towards their own goals. This approach is allowing us to form classroom strategies that encourage creative critical thinking and depth of understanding.

Magenta Principles

At Parkside Academy we are always eager to embrace new approaches to teaching and learning. In the academic year 2019/20 we embarked upon a training programme with Mike Hughes in order to provide a hugely beneficial CPD opportunity for all staff and as a result we have successfully embedded Mike Hughes’ Magenta Principles into our everyday teaching; with the principles having become a staple part of pedagogy within the Academy (see figure 2). For learning to be continual, deep and challenging then the lesson must be student centered. Mike Hughes’ Magenta Principles places the student at the heart of the approach and the simple, yet hugely thought provoking question that the principles are based upon, ‘What are we getting pupils to do with information?’ continues to be the driving force behind the engaging and stimulating learning experience we provide within the Academy and provides our pupils with the opportunity to become creative critical thinkers.