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Teaching and Learning
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
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
Teaching to the Top: Attitudes and strategies for delivering real challenge.
Teaching to top has been a long-standing principle of effective teaching from my perspective. One of my early blogs was ‘Gifted and Talented Provision: A Total Philosophy‘ and it remains one of the topics I am asked to talk about most often in CPD sessions. I no longer think that Gifted and Talented is a … Continue reading
You’re doing it all wrong: context and complexity in Ed-research and debate.
It’s continually frustrating to me that so much of the discourse in our debates and in the reading of education research reduces teaching and learning effects to crude averages and sweeping assumptions, ignoring complexity and context At the same time, it’s equally frustrating that some people’s response to this complexity is to reinforce a … Continue reading
Presentation: potentially a powerful proxy for progress. #shortblog
One of my frustrations with my last inspection experience was the high-speed book flick-throughs that were passed off as valid scrutinies of standards. Essentially, in the time given to each book, in some cases, it could only really have been presentation that was being evaluated. It was annoying when a teacher of a KS3 class was … Continue reading
Ten teaching techniques to practise – deliberately.
It’s a well-established idea that, to develop expertise in a particular skill or technique, you need to practise. The more you practise, the better you get. As outlined by the excellent people at Deans for Impact in their Practice with Purpose document, it helps to identify a specific element of your teaching to practise on and … Continue reading
Sweet Algebra. A model.
I’ve spent the last two years teaching maths – to Year 7 & and Year 10. Finding a good model to help students grapple with algebra has often been a sticking point, especially once we started performing operations on letters beyond collecting like terms; for some students this level of abstraction is incredibly difficult. … Continue reading
Too Much Teaching is Wasted
Let me give you some information: (Try to imagine that you’re going to learn it.) The Earth-Sun distance is used as unit of distance called the Astronomical Unit. 1 AU. The Earth-Moon distance is 0.0026 AU to 2 significant figures. The nearest Star is Proxima Centauri (part of the Alpha Centauri system. Pronounced ‘Sen-TOR-eye’). The … Continue reading
Teaching and assessment for top-end success in new GCSEs
I’ve been looking at the specimen papers for GCSEs in English, Maths and Science to get a feel for the expectations at the top-end. Although, in theory, schools should have been engaging with these materials for a while, with Year 11s ready to go this May and Year 10s already on the road with Science, … Continue reading
10 Must-Read Books for Better Teaching
This selection is my current top ten book recommendations for teachers. Continue reading
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