A booklet is really just a personal textbook that contains the material pupils will need alongside the tasks they need to complete. This, in effect, is ‘everything in one place’, which results in less time being wasted on transitions between different resources and activities.
The vision is that in each subject, each booklet is drawn from a planned and sequenced curriculum that covers the entirety of the five years pupils are at St George’s. Each pupil in each year gets the booklet at the same time, which means that assessments can be genuinely standardised.
Booklets have been a massive game changer for many schools across the country. From visiting these schools and researching how they are used, it is clear that (when complete) they vastly reduce workload, improve the quality of pupils output, help us think more deeply about our subject and improve our pedagogical content knowledge.
However booklets aren’t a magical device. They are a tool; an incredibly powerful one, but a tool just the same. They form part of what’s helped make really great schools develop effective teaching over the last few years.
Additionally, using a booklet doesn’t turn a teacher into some kind of thoughtless deliverer of dry content to empty-vessel-pupils. The booklet frees us up to do more in the classroom; it enables you to really zoom in our focus on explanation, clarity and feedback; it frees us up to be responsive to the learning of all, for example challenging misconceptions, modelling the learning process, extending critical thinking whilst also supporting our most vulnerable learners. Booklets aren’t professionally constraining: they are pedagogically liberating.
So, the main advantages are:
- Workload reduction when complete
- We don’t forget anything
- Outsourced a lot of thinking before the lesson, leaving you capacity/cognitive ability to respond to the pupils
- The format is standardised - all pupils are exposed to the same high quality resources that help shape their learning journey through a well planned curriculum.
- Excellent support for pupil practice
- Perfect for cover lessons
- Very helpful for pupils if they miss a lesson
- Very helpful for pupils to use as revision practice
- No more scrabbling around copying sheets for individual lessons.
- No more worrying about photocopying budgets (we may fund this centrally)
- A guaranteed quality of work for pupils in internal exclusion and those off long term sick/Covid isolation
- For pupils who miss a lesson due to absence or illness, we can just ask them to read and complete pages 5-8 at home from the online version of the booklet. Longer term our inclusion team or HLTA’s could deliver over a virtual lesson to pupils at home ill
- Staff planning time is freed up to improve subject knowledge, explanation, or classroom strategies