PiXL at Aylestone School

Aylestone School has been part of a national network of schools called PiXL (Partners in Excellence) since September 2023. PiXL (Partners in Excellence) is a growing partnership of over 3000 schools and education providers. It emerged from the London Challenge in 2007 and has grown from 50 schools at its inception to present numbers. PIXL provides our community with a collaboration of school leaders; access to vibrant, purposeful conferences and networks of people complemented by online resources, training opportunities and development programmes to support the promotion of excellence for students in the campus. The PiXL Network supports our determination to do all we can to help improve life chances for young people through improved educational achievement and enhanced self-esteem in order to connect them to worthy progression routes in the next stage of their education.

Schools join PiXL voluntarily. They have recognised that at its heart there is a compelling moral imperative to support the promotion of excellence for students, to better their life chances through improved educational achievement and to always do its utmost for students, whatever their ability to bring them a better future and a brighter hope. PiXL is concerned with offering opportunities for all students to make progress in life on the basis of achieving good results and, through the Edge, by developing key life attributes.

PiXL has 3Cs that underpin their strategies – Currency, Character and Culture.

• Currency – to support students to make the best progress they can in the subjects they are studying.
• Character – is to equip students with the skills, knowledge and competencies, distinct from their academic work that will help them succeed in the future.
• Culture – is about helping young people understand the importance of demonstrating kindness, showing respect and living without harm not just to those people who are like them but to people who are not like them: How we relate to people who don’t think the same way as us, or believe the same things, is a crucial skill that needs to be taught.

Below are some of the strategies we have launched so far.

 

PiXL Diagnosis Therapy & Testing (DTT)

We are ensuring that teaching practice at Aylestone in 2024-25 looks closely at Diagnosis, Therapy and Testing (DTT). DTT originally came from the Covey notion of a Compelling Scoreboard. The first step is to diagnose what a student does or does not know, or what the issue is, then therapy is used to close the gap. Therapy can take the form of whole class feedback and teaching, intervention where appropriate, or asking students to work on specific weaknesses. The testing part of the DTT cycle is often forgotten: ‘testing’ does not mean an exam (although it could). Testing can be done through questioning, low stakes quizzing or through other forms of assessment over time.

The key thing is that the gap that was diagnosed by the teachers is now closing, and that this gap is checked over time to ensure it hasn’t opened again. PiXL have created several resources that are designed for therapy (see PLCs, PiXL Classrooms and Therapy resources).

PiXL Personalised Learning Checklists (PLCs)

Personalised Learning Checklists came from the Covey Compelling Scoreboard and are a proven way of diagnosing and analysing almost anything. At Aylestone, PLCs are becoming central to that part of the teaching procees which supports student understanding of what their strgneths are areas for development are. PLCs at Aylestone which can be found in the back of students books in KS4 contain the key knowledge or skills that the students have to be able to know/do. Each student is colour-coded one of 3 colours:

Red - means that there is no knowledge or the knowledge is not understood.

Amber - there is some understanding but it is not secure.

Green - knowledge is secure

This judgement is not often made on just one piece of evidence: teachers are looking to see that students are secure across different pieces of work and across a number of weeks or months, and will sometimes complete these themselves or work with students to guide them to complete them. Sometimes, information needs to be learned and PiXL resources try to help with this.

PiXL Knowledge

In Janmuary 2024 we introduced PiXL Knowledger into our school and have not looked back.

PiXL Knowledge resources are widely avaialve for almost all subjects at Aylestone and the expert resources are made up of three learning mats: Knowit / Graspit / Thinkit

Each of the mats help students learn and interact with knowledge in a different way. The mats get progressively more challenging. On the reverse of the mats are pictures to act as an aide memoire for the knowledge on the mat. These are prooving to be successful resources which syupoport teachers in developing differtent levels of recal and inforamtion retreval within their lessons

PiXL Thinking Hard

The Thinking Hard strategy is divided into a number of different areas;

Thinking Hard Classic

Originally devised by Simon Hardwick and Martin Jones from Dartford Grammar School, this strategy helps every child to be able to think harder. Using research and evidence-based approaches, this package gives our school an approach to help students to think, and provides lots of supporting resource and ideas. Thinking hard introduced the 12 Devices for encouraging learners to develop hard thinking skills in our classrooms. These 12 areas help our teachers to create activities which challenge learners. They encourage active thinking which helps students to memorise key information. These devices also require no new resources so they are low preparation, but have a high impact upon thinking and learning. At Aylestone School we use Thinking Hard to add challenge in the classroom for all pupils and to ensure that students are genuinely having to engage and “think hard” using the material they are studying.

Thinking Talk

This part of the strategy centres upon talk within the classroom which can extend the thinking and learning of all pupils. The strategy seeks to empower teachers and learners and encourage our students to THINK actively. It focuses on powerful ‘Talk’ and ‘Questioning’, supporting students so that they are challenged to explore, distil and verbalise their own ideas and views. This strategy is being developed through staff training in 2024.

Thinking Hard – Memory and Revisit

Memory and Revisit is the third phase of the Thinking Hard Strategy. The devices have been used to create a strategy and a variety of resources which encourages pupils to engage in an active way with their subjects while they are revisiting. This strategy also highlights some of the theory and research surrounding memory and how this theory can help us help our pupils achieve their full potential.

PiXL Feed Forward

The purpose of Feed Forward is to 'feed forward' the intelligence from examiner reports in the summer so that students and staff are supported fully in preparing for the next exam season. Each year, the PiXL subject team create the subject-specific Feed Forward Update documents, sharing the key issues, approaches to address these as well as key questions to discuss with our school leaders.

PiXL Up for Debate

Our successful and well established debating club use the PiXL ‘Up for Debate’ resources and debating stimulus sheets subjects that span KS3-4.