Tel: 015394 36354 Email: admin@hawkshead.cumbria.sch.uk
Hawkshead Primary School, Main St, Hawkshead, Cumbria LA22 0NT
Teaching and Learning Policy
At Hawkshead Primary School learning is defined as: The process of acquiring the essential knowledge, skills, understanding and behaviours required for deep understanding.
Provision is designed to advance understanding gradually throughout a key stage. Lessons are not an event in themselves. They are part of the process of learning and therefore we do not expect pupils to complete learning within a lesson. Many lessons will carry on over several days or even weeks until a pupil is showing the required degree of understanding. In lessons in may be relevant to be teaching a new learning objective – being introduced to new learning or sometimes learning may be revised, imbedded and deepened in a new context.
Progress is defined as “The widening and deepening of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and behaviour.” This means that pupils will experience the same content over and over again, each time in a richer and more challenging context, thus deepening their understanding. We do not rush to introduce new content as it is important that pupils have sophisticated problems that challenge them in a wide variety of different and diverse situations first.
Pupils will be given increasingly challenging activities at each stage of development which we call ‘cognitive domains’. The table below shows the cognitive domain, the type of teaching they will receive in each domain and the typical nature of each task.
| Cognitive domain | Predominant form of teaching | Type of thinking | Types of activities |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Modelling, explaining | Low level cognitive demand. Involves following instructions. | Name, describe, follow instructions or methods, complete tasks, recall information, ask basic questions, use, match, report, measure, list, illustrate, label, recognise, tell, repeat, arrange, define, memorise. |
| Advancing | Application, activities with review | Higher level of cognitive demand. Involves mental processing beyond recall. Requires some degree of decision making. | Apply skills to solve problems, explain, explain methods, classify, infer, categorise, identify patterns, organise, modify, predict, interpret, summarise, make observations, estimate, compare. |
| Deep | Coaching and mentoring | Cognitive demands are complex and abstract. Involves problems with multi-steps or more than one possible answer. Requires justification of answers. | Solve non-routine problems, appraise, explain concepts, hypothesise, investigate, cite evidence, design, create, prove. |
Pupils are assessed according to the curriculum standards for each milestone and whether they have a Basic, Advancing or Deep understanding of them. It is expected that by the end of each Milestone, the majority of pupils will have an advancing understanding and some will have a deep understanding.
View this page as a downloadable PDF here: Teaching and Learning Policy