Achieving Excellence Together Rhagori Gyda'n Gilydd

PiXL

Being a member of the PiXL group gives schools access to a range of highly effective strategies and resources for use in Teaching and Learning across the school, all of which have been specially designed to help raise standards.

At the heart of the PiXL approach lie the three Cs: Currency, Character and Culture. 

Currency

The school’s currency lies in its results. 

Our continued commitment to finding the best strategies to help our pupils achieve their potential at every stage in their academic career drives everything we do.  That means setting challenging targets; identifying “key marginal” groups of learners in need of additional support; providing all learners, regardless of ability, with the tools they need to access those areas of the curriculum they find most challenging.  Teachers are constantly working on these areas, of course, but the ideas, strategies and resources provided by PiXL can give us the edge!

Here are just a few examples of PiXL approaches:

Walking Talking Mocks

The PiXL Walking Talking Mock (WTM) addresses the two key issues of motivation and confidence.

The WTM is a PiXL strategy to impact ALL students in any subject area. Students are guided through a full examination paper by a member of staff who provides verbal and visual support to enable students to successfully answer all questions under exam conditions. For many students, this experience of fully completing an examination is a first and the benefits this has to their gains in knowledge and ambition are significant.

Personalised Learning Checklists

A Personalised Learning Checklist (PLC) helps to ensure that staff and students have a laser-sharp understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of individual students.

The PLC is best in its simplest form - a small group of key students referenced to a list of the key areas of knowledge and understanding needed for a student to be successful in an examination at a particular level or grade. This forms the foundation of the PiXL principle of DTT (diagnosis, therapy, testing).

Diagnosis, Therapy, Testing

DTT therefore focusses on diagnosing what a student cannot do in very specific terms and trying to address those issues through therapy which is the action of teaching and guiding students through a particular area. The therapy is always followed with testing to ensure that the therapy has had the required impact. DTT works alongside the Personalised Learning Checklists (PLC). The principle is drawn from a medical analogy - doctors diagnose the specific issue before prescribing the right therapy for a patient. The best doctors then re-test to ensure the therapy has had the desired effect.

Smith Proformas

The Smith Proforma is a strategy to motivate and engage staff and students. The process leads to a simple document and forms a crucial part of the DTT (Diagnosis Therapy Testing) cycle.

Following a key diagnostic assessment (e.g. PPE) a simple document shows students their secure and insecure topics, what action is planned by staff to secure the knowledge and when a re-test will take place to ensure the new knowledge is secure.

Character & Culture

As well as ensuring that all pupils receive the support they need to achieve academically, it is crucial to help them develop as young people in other ways:

to make sure that they are confident communicators, good leaders, and are able to organise themselves.  Furthermore, we need to help them build their sense of self-esteem and offer them the tools to enhance their own wellbeing, as well as that of others.

PiXL offers a range of structures approaches to help develop these important attributes.  There’s more information about this programme on our dedicated Edge pages, but here’s a brief overview:

The Edge

The PiXL Edge is a framework for schools to develop in students those personal attributes essential for employability and life.

The scheme will focus on five key attributes:

  1. Leadership
  2. Organisation
  3. Initiative
  4. Resilience
  5. Communication

Each of these is embedded through a scheme, delivered during tutor time, which breaks the qualities down into its attributes and explicitly teaches how they can be recognised and developed.

Wellbeing

With news that young people’s self-confidence is at its lowest ebb in the last eight years (Princes Trust, January 2017), the wellbeing resources help build resilience and promote the importance of making the right health, mental wellbeing and positive lifestyle choices.

Of course, promoting these also has the potential to improve educational outcomes.