The Power of Crew – EL Conference, Atlanta, USA 2024
Last week, Gwyn and I had the privilege of attending the 2024 EL Conference in Atlanta, USA with five colleagues from across our Trust. The highlight of the conference was a keynote speech by our great friend, mentor and inspiration Ron Berger (pictured below with XP staff).
Colleagues visited schools as well as attending sessions on Crew, Expeditions and Leadership. In addition, they captured their learning and reflections in an article that will be published in our first edition of XP Unpacked in January this year!!
It was an exhausting but exhilarating visit, packed with working hard, getting smart and being kind. Take a look at the pictures below to get a flavour of our experiences.
Sharing our Stories: 13/12/2024
Beautiful Work This Week
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust over the last week! To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
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Get your groove on for a great cause! @ XP East
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To Infinity and Beyond!
This Expedition had Carcroft pupils exploring how movement shapes the world around us, starting with understanding the Earth, Moon, and Sun, and how day and night occur. Through hands-on experiments, they learned about forces—like gravity, friction, air, and water resistance—and discovered how simple machines (such as pulleys and gears) can make work easier. By creating their own mechanical systems and prototypes, the children tested their ideas, refined their designs, and connected their science knowledge to real-life situations.
To show what they’d learned, pupils shared their insights in a variety of ways—writing imaginative sci-fi narratives, crafting fact-packed scientific reports, and even presenting biographies of key figures like Isaac Newton. Their presentation of Learning was an Expo at the School, where they proudly showcased their models, experiments, and discoveries to parents and the local community. Through this journey, they not only built up their skills and confidence as young scientists and designers but also sparked greater interest and involvement from the people around them.
Plover’s Christmas Activism!
Year 6 pupils joined Charles Court care home to spread Christmas cheer and create Christmas flower arrangements with the residents for the residents to keep. The floristry workshop was ran by a local business, Charlotte’s who coached the children to be able to support the residents when creating and designing the flower arrangements.
The children also sang Christmas songs and gifted their care home boxes of biscuits. We are so proud of our children for showing activism and serving our community and cannot wait to continue this relationship with the care home in the future.
‘How do we show we care?’ – EYFS @ Norton
In the Autumn of 2024 the EYFS children at Norton Infant School began a Learning Expedition
called ‘Be Kind’, which looked to answer the guiding question ‘How do we show we care?’ – you can watch their story here!
Sharing our Stories: 06/12/2024
Beautiful Work This Week
Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust over the last two weeks! To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.
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Beautiful Work on Staff Days
At XP Trust we collaborate together to create our learning expeditions. On every other Staff Day, we all work out of one of our sites so that we can share collective ideas and collaborate to create and powerful learning expeditions that deepen learning through making authentic and meaningful connections between subject disciplines.
One of the key parts of the expedition planning process is when staff collaboratively plan and create a staff model product. We call this Jeff’s Law, after the world renowned educator, Jeff Robin whose mantra is that adults must ‘do the project first’ if they are to truly understand variables, connectivity and relevance for students. Products should be driven by teacher passion and engagement if they are to have a meaningful and long lasting impact on learners. By giving staff time and space to do this, unsurprisingly they create beautiful work – just like our kids!!
One of our teachers shared their thoughts on the impact of of our Staff Days by stating the following:
‘It felt amazing to sit in consultation and collaboration with, in my opinion, some of the best teachers in the country. Everyone had a voice. Everyone’s ideas were respected and it felt like we were all working towards something really special with a common goal. Subject integrity was upheld whilst links and connections were built…[the Staff Day] has revitalised my spirit and made me so excited for the next term. I wanted to write this down as a lasting reminder to myself of why it is so special and such a privilege to work at our schools.’
Check out the pictures below for powerful draft ideas and beautiful work!!
XP Live (Forever)
In July 2024 we launched ‘XP Live’ by hosting our first Festival of Arts and Culture. Last night, we followed this up with our first in a series of events entitled Thursday Night Live. The gig gave the opportunity for all our indie bands in school to perform live!!
It was a fantastic evening! Students showing real talent and courage to rock out!! It was professionally and confidently hosted by Dylan Green who introduced a range of bands from across our secondary year groups who performed songs by Nirvana, Wet Leg, The Beatles, The Gorillaz and Weezer to name just a few!!
Special shout out to August who played in almost all the bands and premiered her own song which was beautiful. Check out our rock stars below.
Can’t wait for the next one on February 13, 2025!!!
Andy Sprakes
Sharing our Stories 11/10/2024
Beautiful Work This Week
Beautiful Curation at Green Top!
Have you seen these beautiful newly curated areas at Green Top – awesome spaces for students to learn and play in!
A great sporting week at XP Doncaster!
On Monday, students met a few of the Doncaster Rovers first team players and were able to have photos and get autographs from the players. Students asked questions about the life of a professional athlete and the journey that the players have been on playing for different clubs. It was great to hear the players speak about our character traits and how these character traits link to sport.
Then on Tuesday students visited Hill House school to listen to Olympic gold medal GB hockey player Sam Queck. Her experience as an athlete and the ups and downs she has faced really helped our students to understand that if you want something in life you have to work hard for it! Students were able to have a photo and ask questions to Sam at the end – they even held her gold medal.
We’re looking for an Art Teacher at XP Doncaster!
Find out more and apply now to #JoinOurCrew
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Crew Rashford getting smart-er @ XP East