Teaching & Learning

School Life

At Ellowes Hall, our Teaching and Learning principles are guided by research led pedagogical thinking.

Rooted in Teach Like A Champion methods, by Doug Lemov, our core principles form the Ellowes Eight: Make Compliance Visible, Engineering Efficiency, Targeted Questioning, Show Me, Show Call, At Bats, Name the Steps and Excavate/Plan for Error.

These fundamental techniques are key areas within teaching practice at Ellowes and ensure that our students are given the best opportunity to succeed within their lessons.

Lesson phase planning supports our curriculum intentions to be challenging, yet creative, and the cycle of phases are supported by the science of learning in relation to how our students learn most effectively.

Retrieval Phase -Through spiral opportunities and spaced retrieval Do Nows, we challenge our students to know more and remember more.
Knowledge Phase - Students are given opportunities to understand enriching explicit knowledge.
Guided Application - Scaffolding and modelling are crucial to students' success in their application of such knowledge to varied contexts.
Independent Application - Independent opportunities are given to students to showcase their understanding and skills.
Responding phase - Live marking and feedback are frequently used within the classroom to provide students with a clear understanding of what their strengths and areas for development are.
Mastery Phase - Due to the spiralled nature of our curriculum offer, students are given multiple opportunities to master the knowledge and skills within their subjects

We are also very proud of our CPD offer here at Ellowes combining whole school approaches with subject specific bespoke professional development. Alongside this, we also have termly CPD book clubs run by staff to discuss a variety of different areas including behaviour, the science of learning and reading amongst others. Action Research projects have also been launched by a variety of different staff in key areas of reading; this type of research led practice is something that we are very passionate about. We are also very lucky to work with expert colleagues across our Invictus Trust and have monthly opportunities to share good practice and discuss bespoke areas dependent on the needs of subject areas and individuals with the support of Subject Directors.