teacherhead
Leadership Issues
Global profession. Global message.
It’s great to travel and see the world; but it’s great be back home. Time to unwind and reflect. I have just returned from delivering five days of training at schools in Lebanon, UAE and Oman. Each of the participating schools was very different, each with their own charismatic leadership teams and idiosyncratic teachers; each … Continue reading
Saffron Walden County High School: An exemplary school. The Learning Rainforest made real.
Last week I spent a day visiting Saffron Walden County High School in the North-West corner of Essex. This was the result of a conversation with Head and CEO, Caroline Derbyshire who suggested that I should consider writing a ‘Learning Rainforest in Action’ follow-up book. Having read the original book, Caroline felt that SWCHS embodied … Continue reading
The Ideal Assessment Tracking Regime?
In various blog posts and twitter exchanges I have critiqued several widely used approaches to assessment tracking and reporting. Reasons for my critique include the following: Forcing teachers across very different disciplines to morph their organic, authentic subject specific assessments – including wide-ranging quality and difficulty models – into a common grading system at an … Continue reading
Be A Better B!
Last weekend, after an excellent ResearchEd event in Philadelphia, where Dylan Wiliam had given a superb keynote, I wrote this tweet: Imagine teacher A is way more effective than teacher B. Tendency is to make B emulate what A does. I think this is wrong. We need to work with B to establish how B, … Continue reading
Secondary Curriculum Plans. A collection of links: Add your own.
Last year I was interested in curriculum models and, with the help of twitter, I collected 40 models at the level of subject time allocations: 40 Curriculum Models 2017: Now, I am interested in doing something similar but at a more detailed level. A couple of years ago I shared a blog post containing the … Continue reading
@teacherhead Update #1. October ’18.
Introducing…. This is the first of what I hope will be a half-termly update, highlighting trends and ideas that I pick up in my work across various schools and colleges and through my engagement with online discussions, blogs, conferences and publications. It will also highlight some of the content on this blog that has gained … Continue reading
Solutions and reality checks in the exclusion/inclusion debate. #pinballkids
The RSA Pinball Kids Initiative. There has been a lot of discussion in recent weeks about exclusions from schools with a string of newspaper articles exploring the theme: The news of rising fixed-term and permanent exclusions is covered by The Guardian here. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jul/19/sharp-rise-in-pupil-exclusions-from-english-state-schools This report describes some responses – the ‘Wild West system of exclusion … Continue reading
Know my name! A basic entitlement.
When I was in Jakarta at the British International School, the EAL department supported a group of Korean students to stage a protest. They made some placards and, during lesson time, they walked around one of the central areas chanting ‘Know My Name! Know My Name!’ It was a powerful moment for them -and for … Continue reading
10 essential discussions to have in any teacher team.
Towards the end of last academic year, I wrote a post outlining what might be in a typical school’s development plan: Here’s your school development plan – no, really, don’t thank me. All of those ideas are still relevant for next year. But what about at a departmental level or a year level in primary? Here … Continue reading
Get Into Teaching. The best job going.
One of the great joys of my current work as a travelling education consultant and teacher trainer is that I get to meet teachers everywhere; all over the UK; all over the world. Everywhere I go I encounter wonderful teams of people doing incredible work, full of energy, enthusiasm, a sense of mission; bursting with … Continue reading
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