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Marking mocks: strategies for success?

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A strategy for success Every year I devise a mock marking strategy to keep me sane and organised. I have noticed over the years that my strategy has become less focused on the number of papers I mark per day and instead, more focused on the quality of the feedback I give students to help them improve. This isn’t to say I have it sussed as there is always room for improvement in this job, however, I can confidently say that this strategy allows for greater consistency, accuracy, efficiency and leads to more meaningful feedback for students whilst also acting as a chance for students to practise retrieving knowledge and improve their procedural skills. Prepping the students We are fortunate to have 10% of students’ curriculum time for RE lessons as we are a Catholic school. We take two lessons to prepare students. 4 weeks before the exam, in Lesson 1, we explicitly teach revision strategies specific to RE and get them started practising these on the content of the units featured in the e...
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How we embedded CST in our school

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The new CSI Framework was going to be a challenge! I’m sure every Catholic school in England and Wales was a bit overwhelmed when the new Catholic Schools Inspectorate framework was published in 2023 (link here ). The descriptors for ‘outstanding’, were visionary but extremely challenging and, in some cases we feared, even unrealistic. In our school we soon got over the shock and started to embrace the challenge; after all, we wanted to be the best school we could be if it would mean helping the next generation of Catholics take the Gospel values into the world. In terms of fulfilling the demands related to Catholic Social Teaching, which appears in all three sections of the framework - Catholic Life and Mission, Religious Education and Collective Worship - we knew from the framework that we would have to up our game. CLM 1.4 says, ‘pupils take a leading role in responding to the demands of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and are pro-active in finding ways of responding, locally, nation...
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How to find brilliant CPD in one handy place

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The online CPD pinboard - how did it come about?   I'm a Head of Department who is very keen to help my team engage with CPD so that we can always be better teachers for our students. We have a fabulous whole school CPD programme but I wanted to enhance this with some RE specific resources. Especially considering the 'RE World' is such an exciting place with so many advances being made in the teaching of the subject.  Initially I decided to share links to various short online CPD which they could dip in and out of informally, hoping this would start conversations about our practice. This meant adding a link to a blog/podcast/article into my weekly bulletin to the team. The topic of which was either something related to our current focus area eg subject knowledge relating to topics we would be teaching soon or assessment ideas when we were working on improving our model for assessment & feedback.  Issues with accessing CPD links   After a year of doing this I real...
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