Beckfoot Nessfield Pedagogy

We are in the second year of building our research-based pedagogy (the method and practice of how we teach) to ensure we have consistency of teaching across school. This will enable all children to progress seamlessly across year groups and allows a greater focus on the teaching of powerful knowledge which links across the different subjects we teach. 

The Beckfoot Nessfield pedagogy is underpinned by Barak Rosenshine's principles of instruction with four clear strands that run through each of the 10 principles: reviewing material, questioning, explaining and modelling, practice. We are currently in the process of embedding three key principles:

Review

Review is an integral part of teaching and learning. We forget things, but regularly revisiting what we have learnt can reduce the amount we forget.   Reviewing helps us develop our understanding of what we have learnt, consolidate knowledge into our long-term memory and reduce cognitive load for new learning. We are aiming for all children to have automatic recall of prior learning: effortless, fluent and automatic. Each lesson at Beckfoot Nessfield starts with a review of prior learning following our principles below:

Beckfoot Nessfield Principles for Review

Vocabulary

To develop a wide-ranging vocabulary, we plan and teach children new vocabulary across the curriculum. Vocabulary learning is not a one off, word of the day activity. We fully consider which words we need to teach and teach vocabulary over time: daily, weekly, monthly and annually. We know from research that the size of a child's vocabulary is the best predictor of success for year 6 SATs and future learning. Vocabulary is taught following the ‘review’ at the start of the lesson. This is expected to last 2—3 minutes and follows our principles for effective vocabulary teaching below:

Beckfoot Nessfield Principles for Vocabulary

New Teaching

For new teaching to be effective, teachers need to ensure children efficiently acquire, rehearse and connect prior knowledge by providing sufficient instructional support. Research shows the most effective support is given through breaking down new material into manageable chunks, modelling, guiding children’s practice, helping children when they make errors and providing for sufficient practice and review. New learning is taught following our principles for effective new learning below:

Beckfoot Nessfield Principles for New Teaching