I had a great moment today that I’m banking through this blog post.

Basically, I’d never really considered how much could be gained from collaborating over a wall display.

Sounds random. But you know what it is like as a leader. You try to ensure effective channels of communication, you want to appear approachable, you want your team to collaborate. You do all that stuff like regular check-ins, regular emails, regular meetings, bad jokes in Google chat, team lunches (I call them munchfests just to make them appear more relaxed). Basically, you do anything you can to build trust and rapport, with each act being somewhere on the scale between:

weirdly formal (like when I did some in-department CPD on inclusion and the team we like ‘whoa where did discerning-look Pete come from?’)

…to

invite yourself into the room while team members are having a gossipy lunch (which is an awkward moment I never want to relive but, knowing me, I undoubtedly will).

So, putting all this into context, the moment today when me and a team member put up a display together in the corridor was an absolute sweet spot of communication and collaboration.

We’d just spent 5 weeks on a poetry scheme of work with Year 7, co-planning it (my colleague leading), with a challenging final task. Our ‘final product’ for the common assessment was for learners to create a visually appealing display of their own poetry/responses to real poems.

Just an FYI for EALers if you want accessible ideas/tasks for Year 7 poetry, we went for…

Personal responses

• Sonnet 18 (relate to modern day English, write a love letter instead in the style)
• Orange Juice – Michael Rosen (adapted British Council lesson, write from the perspective of the thief)
• Caged Bird -Maya Angelou (visual response based on vocab in the text – our focus was on imagery)
• A Brand New Year – Daya Nandan (writing resolutions)

Creating our own poetry

• Haikus (to review syllables and teach structure)
• The Homework Machine – Shel Silverstein (structure and rhyme)
• Acrostic (fun and accessible)
• Ode to an object (we gave them a model and they recorded their own poems, adding QR codes of the recording to their displays! We hit some standard poetic devices through this like similes, metaphors, personification, etc)
• Hearing – James Berry (I mentioned it here – our focus was on poems to describe senses)

Could have chosen a wider/more representative variety of poets – we will revisit this in our curriculum evaluation. Aaaaanyway….

Our learners completed a series of tasks, then created their own ‘visual response’ if you like. Our display looked like this:

So, the whole sequence and final task was lovely. My co-teacher Becky planned most of it and it was right up her street as a lang-lit type approach. The products from our learners were really good.

An awesome thing about this project were the chats me and Becky had around putting up the display together. Things like…

Me: Ah, look at this one. [Student name] did so well here. Visually, they really nailed it.

Becky: Yeah – so creative. I have to say that I hadn’t really seen that from them before.

Me: They didn’t do so well on the structure but…

Becky: You know, I disagree. If you look at this poem, I mean, they’ve got a really good the feel for…

We weren’t like that the whole time of course. But honestly, just the ‘put students work front-and-centre and open up the dialogue’ was great. Why?

• Well, it was ad-hoc moderation. We were realizing some of our biases, recognizing that maybe things weren’t so tight assessment-wise at times.
• Immense pride. Honestly. We’d set out to display these, but I wavered for a moment. I don’t know, I just thought maybe we keep it a classroom thing. Displaying our learners work did genuinely give me a bit of a lump in my throat – from nowhere! I was like – ‘they achieved something and we achieved something too. They are awesome learners and really showcased their talents. We are an emerging department. That felt like the sequence of learning where we all really found our feet’. I loved it. I know my colleague felt pride too – I could sense it.
• Sharing notes: those little chats like the example above. We have them a lot in passing. We rarely have them with the learners’ work in front of us. It draws out so much. The areas for development your colleague sees and you don’t. Vice-versa. The little anecdotes that give you that extra insight…
• The interest! An after-school class (mixed Years 7-9) finished in the classroom next to us. The students (some Year 7s) popped out and saw us putting up the display. Their own pride, their discussions in home languages, willingness to show each other their work. The Year 8s praising Year 7s on their work. It was 4.30pm. They’d been in school since 7.30am. Big smiles on their faces. It’s massive to see that. A reminder of the need for that recognition of their efforts sometimes. I don’t do that enough.
• I felt genuine connection with my team through this activity.

Overall, this was a real lesson as a (new) leader for me. Keeping the students, *the real focus*, at the heart of things does a lot of heavy lifting on the team-building front.

Categories: General, reflections

Tags: eal, leadership, poetry, project-based learning, team-building