KLIC

The KLIC Programme in Year 7 has developed shared principles of connecting the learning across subjects and active learning.  Projects are planned to deliver personal learning and thinking skills (Plts) as well as the content and skills from a range of subjects.  The projects connect to the real world and give a context and meaning to the learning which aims to motivate and engage our Year 7 students.
The curriculum is underpinned by a desire to develop students as independent learners and expert communicators with high levels of self-motivation.  The students work independently as well as in groups, contributing to the planning of their own learning experiences and assessing their progress leading to high quality relationships with teachers and support staff. 

Literacy and fluency are a priority as student talk is embedded throughout the projects. Enterprise and leadership are developed through the range of team challenges. Progress in the Plts and the subjects skills are tracked against baseline data and targets are negotiated with students.

Progress is assessed as rigorously as student progress would be assessed in other subjects of the National Curriculum.  King’s Lynn Academy delivers various National Curriculum subjects through the competency based curriculum, such as History, Geography, Citizenship, ICT, Learning to Learn and Personal Social and Health Education.
With this optimistic view of learning for year 7, we have made serious attempts to create different methodologies to lessons that enable the students to investigate how they learn so that they can discover the pleasure of truly independent learning. This task is helped with prompts from the teacher with a focus on positive learning ethos.
Personalisation by Pieces (PbyP) is a new development introduced into the KLIC curriculum for 2011/12. PbyP has been in operation since April 2007 with 20,000 other children involved from across the world.  The programme aligns nicely to other work we’ve carried out in Klic regarding student goal-setting, standards-based education, and portfolio-based assessment

PbyP is hosted and was created by professionals from Cambridge Education, in the United Kingdom. 

Learners login to the service from school or at home and can see all of the Personal Learning and Thinking Skills (often referred to as “21st Century Skills” in the USA) they have to achieve. These are also broken down into the 5R’s of being reflective, resilient, responsible, reasoning and resourceful.  The students can set themselves targets, and they can upload their work demonstrating those targets into the website.

We have summarised what the PbyP website does in this diagram.  Every time a student goes round this cycle, his/her learning skills improve. Supporting the process online allows learners to use it more often, from more locations.

Your child will choose which pieces of their work (s)he will upload.  His/her evidence can be documents, videos, pictures, audio -- in fact anything that (s)he can put on a computer (as long as it meets King’s Lynn Academy’s acceptable use guidelines for the Internet.

The site is extremely secure and although learners can see each other’s work to get inspiration from each other, they have no direct contact.  No personally identifying information is shared.  Any work which may cause concern is filtered out by the system. Learners will also have a Key Mentor who is a teacher or teaching assistant at their school.
When students upload work to the site they will be assessed using the PLTS. Personal, learning and thinking skills (PLTS) providing a framework for describing the qualities and skills needed for success in learning and life. The framework has been developed and refined over a number of years in consultation with employers, parents, schools, students and the wider public.
PbyP is different because:

• It allows learners from different schools to assess each other’s work.  This addresses the need for peer assessment that is such an important part of contemporary curriculum standards.  The involvement of children from different schools helps to address the difficulties many learners have in being objective when assessing their peers.
• It allows you as a parent to see the work your child has been doing and mentor your child each week if you would like to.
• It allows learners to submit evidence from out of school clubs, activities they do with you and school all in one place.

You can find out much more about this by visiting the website at www.pbyp.co.uk.   Please let us know if you would like to discuss this program further, after viewing the website.  We are excited about this opportunity for the students!