Using Positive Rewards and Praise Workshop

Karyn Reilly and Sonia Ryan (English Department) delivered a workshop on Using Positive Rewards and Praise which aimed to share the wide range of systems and strategies that departments and faculties within St Margaret’s Academy use to celebrate success and reward pupils.  This workshop provided staff with an opportunity to collate ideas of ongoing practice in individual classrooms whilst allowing staff to reflect through discourse surrounding the idea of ‘praise’ and ‘reward’ and its impact on pupils.  The Powerpoint used in this workshop can be located here.

This workshop stemmed from Karyn and Sonia’s working group which aspires to further develop the positive reward system in the school.  Karyn describes their work as

“We are trying to come up with a whole school approach to reward all pupils.  We went round most departments to see what they were doing and what individual teachers were doing; we aim to use some of their good practice in the whole school system. We now need to collate all the thoughts and information we collected on Tuesday and use it to help us develop it.”

The image gallery below shows the responses that staff produced to set questions after a period of time discussing these questions.  Larger images can be obtained by clicking on each image.

Active Learning using Tarsia cards in Science

Mr Varty’s S2 Science class have recently been learning about plastics as part of the Chemistry Compounds unit that they have been completing.  One of the learning intentions from this lesson was that pupils should be able to identify the name of  a plastic when provided with the name of the monomer.  Pupils were formatively assessed using Tarsia cards that required pupils to work collaboratively with their peers to match the correct monomer to the polymer that it could form.  If successful each side of every triangle would have a correct match.  The following video shows two groups working on this activity.

Here is an example of one groups cards that were about to be formatively assessed.

Tarsia cards for any subject or activity can be made using the software from the following website that can be accessed by clicking here.