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Tom Sherrington
Five Ways to: Scaffold Classroom Dialogue
Five Ways. A series of short posts summarising some everyday classroom practices. The essence of scaffolding is that students are elevated to a level of performance and thinking that they couldn’t achieve unaided. It opens up new possibilities. By practising in a supported way they extend their knowledge and form new habits. Then, with the … Continue reading
Fieldnotes and FAQs: Coaching Conversations.
A large proportion of my work is now with schools and colleges that are using our Walkthrus toolkit in various ways, where I return on multiple occasions to support their ongoing development with CPD and instructional coaching. This is my favourite type of work by far because we get into the details of implementing ideas … Continue reading
Masterclasses Nov-Jan. Curriculum Teaching: Research
Here’s an update on the Masterclasses currently live for bookings. The format for each event gives you the option to watch live or to receive recordings to view later. These can be shared within a school as a support for CPD events. A choice of book is included with each ticket and you will only … Continue reading
Weaving it all together: 9 key threads for maximising learning.
This is a selection of things that I find myself discussing with teachers regularly. We all crave simplicity, but actually, when teaching is great, there’s a lot going on. It’s unavoidable- but we can still try to break it down. As with any generic post it might appear to ignore subject-specific curriculum matters but importantly, … Continue reading
Check for Understanding… why it matters and how to do it. #rEDSurrey21
This post gives the key points from my ResearchEd Surrey talk at Farnham Heath End School. Firstly, I explored the challenge for teachers in teaching a group of people all at once, with reference to Willingham’s ideas about memory and understanding. When children don’t understand – there are numerous possible reasons: lack of prior knowledge, … Continue reading
Well-being is an outcome. We need actions, not words.
Recently I tweeted this about well-being and it seemed to resonate. I was making the point that promoting well-being insofar as it relates to a school’s responsibilities and its employees’ professional lives, should be regarded as an outcome of doing tangible specific things that support them in their work. It’s not about adding extra feel-good … Continue reading
Building Understanding: supporting students to assemble their own schema.
Recently, as I’ve engaged with numerous curriculum webinars (eg EduGiveUK) and continued working with schools and colleges, observing and discussing teachers’ practice, I’ve been thinking that much greater weight needs to be placed on exploring what our students have actually understood during a teaching sequence: the depth of their understanding relative to the teacher intentions; … Continue reading
An Inspector writes….
This was submitted to me this week from a serving Inspector – who wants to share their perspective whilst remaining anonymous. I’m happy to share it. From their point of view, though the direction of travel might be the right one in principle, in practice it’s not compatible with the process itself …. “Ofsted can … Continue reading
‘Inside the Black Box’. Classic Education Gold from Wiliam and Black.
Having started teaching in 1986, it’s hard to overstate the impact that Inside the Black Box by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam had on us, when it landed in 1998, summarising the case for formative assessment. It was the first time many of us realised that people undertook research into classroom practice at all – … Continue reading
EduGiveUK Curriculum Conference supporting @FareShareUK in partnership with @SchoolsWeek
In case you haven’t picked this up from my twitter feed, my daughter and I have set up an organisation EduGiveUK to run fund-raising events and our first endeavour is a Curriculum Conference on October 1-2 supporting FareShareUK. The event is being run in partnership with SchoolsWeek with additional sponsorship from Hodder Education, Century Learning … Continue reading
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