Building Blocks
Many schools are now part of the Building Blocks family of schools – our flagship approach to a one-stop planning, monitoring, assessment and reporting package. By joining all the dots, Building Blocks supports busy teachers and school leaders by reducing workload without compromising the quality needed to ensure exciting and dynamic learning.
Invite us to your school or cluster meeting for a complimentary Building Blocks ‘Show and Tell’ session.
What is Building Blocks?
Building Blocks is a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning that allows schools to plan, monitor, assess and report on their curriculum offering in line with Welsh Government’s Curriculum for Wales. Building Blocks enables teachers to focus on ‘What Matters’ saving time and money as all planning, monitoring and assessment systems are in one place. Traceable data from all components of the Learning and Teaching cycle is available to school leaders, local authorities and Estyn.
What is 21st Century Learning?
Globally, there is a shift in what are deemed to be the important elements of learning,
- Deeper conceptual understanding
- Connected and coherent knowledge
- Authentic knowledge in context
- Creativity and problem solving
- Learning in collaboration and to collaborate
- Ethics and values and Personal agency.
The Building Blocks Authentic Contexts for Learning
Building Blocks learning experiences are written to provide children with opportunities to use and apply cross curricular skills in real life meaningful contexts. The challenges are relevant to the needs of today, easily understood by all, encompassing an entitlement to high quality education for every child.
Building Blocks Allows Teachers to:
- Plan teaching and learning experiences that promote the Four Purposes
- Integrate Assessment for Learning strategies for pupils’ understanding
- Ensure breadth and depth to learning by monitoring, mapping and gapping
- Incorporate Authentic Contexts for Learning into their curriculum offering, allowing pupils to apply skills in engaging and authentic experiences that reflect the twelve pedagogical principles
- Plan personalised learning for individuals and groups of children ensuring that pupil voice is recognised and acted upon
- Formatively assess pupils learning through on-going evaluation and reflection at the point of learning
- See profiles of learning of where children are in their learning and their progress
- Reduce workload in line with Government recommendations
Building Blocks Allows Teachers and Senior Leaders to:
- Monitor curriculum coverage by class, year group and key stage
- Evaluate the curriculum offering and quality of learning and teaching
- Analyse children’s progress using traceable data for individual and groups of children linking planning to the Formative Loop
- Analyse pupils progress using Point In Time Assessment (PITA).
- Identify areas for further improvement
- Produce reports from teacher’s planning (Monitoring of curriculum coverage, formative assessment and summative reporting to parents)
- Reduce bureaucracy
- Allows schools to deliver their curriculum offering in line with their philosophy and pedagogy yet being accountable to LEA’s and government
Why are more and more schools turning to Building Blocks?
- There is an alignment between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment
- There is a strong emphasis on active and experiential learning
- Teaching and Learning Experiences focus on critical thinking and problem solving; planning and organising; creativity and innovation; personal effectiveness
- Formative assessment is given prime status where teacher reflection supports and enhances pedagogy
- Assessment focusses on teaching and learning and next steps for pupils rather than to levels and outcomes to generate data
- Teacher professional judgement is key, there is no need to upload ‘evidence’ to be accountable
- Lets teachers focus on what helps them raise standards