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Teaching and Learning
Teaching Fundamentals 2: Be precise about what you want to be learned.
This is the second instalment in a series on teaching fundamentals: aspects of teaching that are vital to get right, but are often areas for improvement. Something that I see quite often when observing lessons is that teachers throw a lot of ideas up into the air during their exposition or questioning without being … Continue reading
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
Teaching Fundamentals: Checking for Recall and Understanding.
I would say that this is often one of the weakest areas of practice in teaching in relation to how important it is: checking that students know and understand what we think we have taught them. If I tell you something or explain something to you I want to be sure that you’ve understood it … Continue reading
The Learning Rainforest.
I am delighted to announce that I have finished writing my book. The manuscript is with John Catt publishers and it should be ready to buy from October 13th. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Oliver Caviglioli who has produced various illustrations and chapter summaries. He also designed the front cover. The book is … 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
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
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