teacherhead
teaching
7 Deadly Difficulties in Teaching.
Increasingly I feel that teacher development, performance review and the whole apparatus around lesson observation should place a strong, central emphasis on understanding the challenges that teachers face in securing the learning of all the students in a class. It can often be extremely difficult even for experienced expert teachers to nail every student’s learning … Continue reading
Small change; big impact. Six suggestions.
Sometimes switching to using different teaching strategies can feel like a fairly major upheaval for some people. That is especially true if they require new resources to be produced. However, very often, I think that a teacher could make a big impact in their practice by making quite small changes to the routine way they … Continue reading
Rosenshine’s Principles: 10 FAQs.
Having published the little red and black booklet, Rosenshine’s Principles in Action, I now get asked to talk about it a lot. I also get asked a lot of the same questions. Here’s a sample of 10 FAQs. 1. Do the principles all apply to every lesson? No. It’s really important not to think of … Continue reading
Are Rosenshine’s Principles “just common sense”? #rED19
In my work supporting teacher development, I always refer to Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction as a major go-to source of ideas, linking findings from cognitive science and other research to classroom practice. There are lots of reasons for these ten principles gaining a wide audience, one of which is that, to many teachers, they feel … Continue reading
Teachers can only improve themselves. But how?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of teacher improvement – naturally enough, given that this is my full-time job these days. Increasingly I think that we need to be very clear to understand the process as a very individual one and less of a general one. Essentially teachers are only going to improve … Continue reading
Ideas for better teaching. @teacherhead blog collection.
I’ve written a few of these round-up posts as a way of collecting ideas together. Hopefully this makes it easier to share. The #1 problem/weakness in teaching and how to address it. A popular post exploring the problem of enabling all students to learn all the material with some common weaknesses in teaching and how … Continue reading
A glossary of terms to help us discuss learning.
Increasingly I find that there’s a whole language that teachers would benefit from sharing so that, when we’re talking about learning, we are talking about the same things. The list could be very long – and I’m happy to add to this over time – but how about this for a start: (*Recency and … Continue reading
From “I’ve done it” to “I’ve learned it”. Terminate the tyranny of the task.
If you go into lessons as an observer, it’s pretty standard to sit alongside a student and to engage in a short discussion about their work. I might say ‘hello, tell me what you’re doing this lesson’. The normal response is ‘I’m doing this sheet’ – as the student points to the worksheet task in … Continue reading
Studying successfully: motivation + strategy + habit
At home we’re in the midst of another exam window. My son has an AS and several internal Y12 exams to prepare for. As I documented last year during his GCSEs, I feel that it’s generally a positive process for him. He works hard and learns a lot in the process. I think there are … Continue reading
Teaching and Learning Agenda 2019/20
The summer term is often a time when people gather their thoughts for the year ahead. The work I do with schools and colleges is largely driven by a medium term improvement agenda: combining some initial support – establishing areas to improve in current practice, setting some goals for the next 12-18 months – and … Continue reading
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