Last official media literacy training in Bradford

Today was the last day of the media literacy training at the Design Exchange in Bradford. I spoke to the teachers about the importance of the research and also conducted some short questionnaires on what they thought about the scheme so far. Here is a bit of quantitative data for you:

2/3 through the school year...
... 10 out of 13 teachers had seen an impact from using the film literacy scheme
... 7 out of 13 felt that students felt differently about writing
... 10 out of 13 had seen changes to students’ attainment in writing

Teachers also had lots of other positive things to say about the scheme. They felt that it had made a couple of changes to their classes:

- Progress in reading
- Students are excited about literacy
- Better inference skills
- Range of sources to draw information from
- Allows all children to participate- no matter what level
- Students write at length
- Children pay attention in lessons
- Good progress
- More interaction and focus
- Greater variety of language used
- Emphasis is taken away from writing

The best thing about the morning was to hear from three teachers who had been on the scheme the previous year but are still implementing film literacy almost daily. They came up with some amazing examples of how to use films for whole units and across the whole of the curriculum.

It was very interesting to see the difference in how teachers approached the resources and how they thought differently about the scheme and its use. While some teachers said that they implemented the film literacy ideas into 80-90% of their lessons, others had 'only' used it for a handful of lessons over the course of the year. I will have to take these differences into consideration when it comes to analyse my data over the summer.

Last spring, I attended the Kaleidoscope Conference in Cambridge and submitted a journal paper after the conference. In January, I heard back and was asked to make some changes. The paper is now in its second review and I have my fingers crossed that I'll hear back in the next weeks. I am currently in the process of writing a second article about the Steiner Academy Leeds and its place in the Free School landscape.