teaching and learning

Overview of Teaching and Learning at Honywood 

At Honywood we are committed to the continued development of teaching and learning. Our classrooms are the beating hearts of the organisation, bringing our curriculum and core values to life.  As the world and society evolves, so to do the needs and expectations of our young people, and teachers must always be ready and willing to adjust to this.  At Honywood we are on a continual journey to develop our pedagogical practice in response to the changes and challenges of the 21st century.  No better can then be exemplified than over this last year.  So many changes occurred so quickly and we adjusted to this at Honywood by taking ‘Learning to thrive in uncharted times’ as our whole school staff learning focus.  We seek to embrace the context within which we are operating and focus on opportunity and solutions rather than self-imposed limitations. This is a mindset we encourage strongly within our school curriculum and in our classrooms.  

Teaching and Learning at Honywood is always developing and we base our practice around the most recent and relevant research and theory.  Each year we have a key anchor text around which we base our CPD; in 2020-21 this was Tom Sherrington’s book, ‘Rosenshines Principles in Action’.  This provides a springboard to develop thinking amongst our teaching staff which is something we strongly encourage in order to empower our staff to be confident making decisions about the pedagogical approaches which are best suited for their classes at any specific study point.  Our aims as a leadership team are not to direct teachers in a ‘top-down’ fashion or expect a ‘one size fits all’ model to teaching and learning, rather we want to motivate teachers and encourage deeper thinking by placing ownership and trust in them as educational professionals, so that the decisions they make around teaching and learning in their classrooms are the best and most appropriate for the youngsters they teach.