teacherhead
teaching
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
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
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
Lessons that misfire. Good intentions + bad theory = poor results.
I am in the privileged position of having been able to observe a lot of lessons taught across a range of subjects in different contexts. I’ve also taught thousands of lessons myself – and I know how it feels for things to work well and not so well. Where lessons could be improved there are … Continue reading
Great Teaching. The Power of Diets
In so many discussions about the elements of effective practice in teaching, I feel it’s important to move away from thinking in absolute terms about whether certain approaches are more effective than others towards considering what the optimum combination of approaches with different qualities might be. I’ve made this case in various blogs before including … Continue reading
Common Maths Struggles – some examples.
This combines a couple of old posts that I recently revisited – because the challenges remain! Working with teachers from primary to FE, I’ve found it fascinating to consider the areas of maths that students find difficult and the processes we need to consider when teaching them to overcome these difficulties. It seems to me … Continue reading
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