Brighton Hill Community School is a coeducational secondary school located in Basingstoke, Hampshire. We spoke to Deputy Head David Watkins about how they use CENTURY’s AI-powered platform alongside PiXL’s “Diagnosis, Therapy, Testing” (“DTT”) strategy to support progress in science.
How do you use PiXL’s “DTT” approach?
At Brighton Hill Community School, we have worked with PiXL for a number of years. One of the key strategies that we use to support progress is PiXL’s DTT approach. So we give summative assessments to students that are subsequently marked and we identify - or diagnose - key areas of misconception, lack of knowledge or lack of skill.
We use a PiXL tool called the Personal Currency Plan (PCP) that then automatically feeds back these outcomes to individual students based on their responses. They are judged to be “very insecure”, “insecure” or “secure” on the topic that was tested.
As a whole group cohort, we then run a dedicated improvement and reflection time session that identifies and addresses whole group misconceptions, knowledge or skill shortages. We use CENTURY to support that exercise. Students are encouraged on their PCP to identify how they personally are going to improve their understanding of topic areas that they are identified as being very insecure in.
We instruct our students to identify nuggets on CENTURY that align to the “very insecure” topic areas that have been identified and are unique to them. This would be above and beyond the concepts that we would address during lesson time. We encourage students to be independent. It is really important to develop that independence, and we tell them that being an independent learner is going to set them aside from their peers.
We do not employ any tracking mechanism for that, although of course if we wanted to check, we could use CENTURY to review increased student usage beyond the home learning that we set on the platform. The main accountability for students is when we arrive at a parents' evening. We explain to parents how we encourage students to work independently, and then encourage that conversation between the parent and the students about how proactive the student has been in completing independent nuggets that relate to their PCP.
