Thinking School

Intent on ensuring our pupils become experts in the range of academic and creative subjects they follow, at Woodlands we strive to equip our young people with the necessary metacognitive abilities to allow their continual development of knowledge and skills. Educational research suggests that effective long-term memory is the single most important factor in allowing pupils to master their learning and our ‘Thinking School’ approach adopts strategies to promote this.  

At the core of this is a broad, but carefully sequenced curriculum which is interleaved allowing our young people the opportunity to encounter new learning whilst regularly revisiting and thus consolidating prior understanding. This approach is not only a key feature of our lessons, all of which begin with a memory recall activity, but is complimented by our whole school homework programme. Pupils are expected to complete one online quiz per subject per week as a minimum for their home learning using our bespoke RAW (Retrieval at Woodlands) Knowledge programme.  Designed by Woodlands staff, in collaboration with Tassomai Learning, RAW Knowledge has several features to encourage the transfer of content to long-term memory. Not only does it quiz pupils on all content within each Key Stage, but for every individual it identifies the topics requiring most attention and as a result creates personalised and differentiated quizzes. Please click here for further details. 

This regular, low stakes quizzing, coupled with our interleaved curriculum, provides deliberate and distributed thinking practice. This equips our pupils with the necessary metacognitive skills to become independent learners, encouraging the self-evaluation and self-regulation necessary not only for success at Woodlands, but also in the wider world!