teacherhead
Teaching and Learning
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
Teaching for Recall, Fluency and Understanding: Blog round-up for easy access.
Recent blogs on teacherhead.com have had a certain theme around teaching for recall, fluency and understanding. Here is a round-up so people can access them easily all in one place: Two influential papers: Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction: A blog exploring this key paper using four simple themes, now with a new graphic by Oliver Caviglioli. … 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
Major Teaching Myth: “Always ask before you tell”
Short post: Having seen this going on a lot, I tweeted this yesterday and it seemed to resonate with people: A widespread ingrained teaching myth: "Always ask before you tell". This frequent exchange can be absurd and painful. Anyone know..(the secret thing I know).? Anyone…..?No….? No, not quite… No, that's not it…. Good guess…Actually it's…… … Continue reading
Three powerful steps to deeper understanding and better recall. Specify; check; apply.
This post is based on my observations of teachers over the last few months and the common areas for development that emerge in feedback discussions. It is also informed by the ideas of Rosenshine and Shimamura around effective teaching for understanding and recall. My aim is to try to describe highly actionable strategies for putting … 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
How not to misfire.. exploring the learning process with Henry VIII
Having written about lessons that mis-fire, I was asked to suggest what people should do instead. That’s a mighty big task because, what you might do depends on what exactly you want students to know and, in any specific example, there are countless possibilities. However, given that a lot of my mis-fire examples are about gathering … 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
Rosenshine Re-ordered. A Poster by @olicav
This blog post is simply a way to direct people to this lovely new poster by the mighty Oliver Caviglioli about the brilliant Rosenshine Principles of Instruction. I first encountered Principles through Oliver’s original poster. It’s so widely circulated, I see it in staffrooms and classrooms all over the country. Sometimes I have to remind people … Continue reading
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