teacherhead
Leadership Issues
Primary Education is Extraordinary. What I learned in a day.
I recently spent a day visiting Tudor Court Primary School in Chafford Hundred, Essex, as part of a visit for a group of Chinese teachers. It’s a school I worked with last year – led by the wonderful Phil Kyriacou. It’s a four form entry school which allows visitors to get a sense of the … Continue reading
Tackle Workload. This bandwagon actually matters.
Everyone is talking about workload and rightly so. It’s even becoming a line of enquiry for inspections. The folk up at Wizard of O HQ are banging on about it – because they are the new Good Guys – and Headteachers now have an extra incentive to make sure they are doing something. This time, … Continue reading
Standards?! What’s going on with GCSE grades?
Are standards going up? Here’s my annual twitter joke for GCSE results day: DfE media guidance. Response to GCSE outcomes: If results have gone up: This is evidence of policy raising standards. If results have gone down: This is evidence of policy raising standards. It’s a clever trick – but it’s not actually wrong. A … Continue reading
Teaching for Distinction @OldhamCollege. FE CPD in action.
Following on from the first post outlining our Teaching for Distinction Programme, here is an update including more of the materials. We’ve just completed the introductory day on Modules 4-6 alongside a recap of Modules 1-3. Oliver Caviglioli produced these lovely infographics to summarise some of the key elements of each module – although it’s … Continue reading
GCSE Results Post-Mortem
I hope your results have been kind to you and your students; I hope you are still standing after the annual tightrope walk. However well things went, whether you are a senior leader, Head of department or teacher you’re going to want to try to extract as much information as possible from the results so that you can celebrate all … Continue reading
Compliance
Compliance. It’s another of those ideas in education that drives people into their camps. For some, compliance or systems that generate compliant children are an outrage; children suppressed, their natural creativity crushed, their rights and freedoms denied, victims of authoritarian power structures that have no place in the modern world. For others, compliance is a … Continue reading
Lessons for Ed-Research from Quantum Gravity via @carlorovelli
I recently read this fabulous book by Carlo Rovelli. The book works on many levels. It is an attempt to explain the emerging theory of quantum gravity. This has numerous mind-blowing conceptual elements – such as the idea that spacetime is quantized, that time isn’t really a fundamental thing that ticks forward – it’s just … Continue reading
Towards an Assessment Paradigm Shift
Despite my reservations about some of the big data measures that are used to judge schools, I am hopeful that our discourse is shifting the debate on assessment in a very positive direction. If this continues it will represent an important paradigm shift with positive consequences for students’ learning and their overall school experience. The … Continue reading
Maximising P8: Macro-Micro Thinking – and Ethics.
In my view it’s a sad state of affairs that we are a long way down the road towards absolute Data Delusion; where teachers, school leaders and commentators are engaged in discussions about the quality of education provided by a school via a single two digit number that purports to capture a measure of the … Continue reading
Teaching for Distinction @OldhamCollege
The most exciting job I’ve had since starting out with Teacherhead Consulting has been working with Oldham College. Principal Alun Francis approached me to explore whether there was scope in applying current thinking around teaching and learning, curriculum planning and my experience of the delivery of CPD in schools to the FE setting. He … Continue reading
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