School starts again on Monday for me and so it is an appropriate time to procrastinate…sorry, I mean plan for the year ahead. Now, I know that the best laid plans of mice and men are quickly waylaid when September gets into full swing, but I want to commit to making some changes to my […]
10 New School Year Resolutions Read More »
We all get our students to do tests. We do long answers, short answers, multiple choice, long essays, or performances in Music, Drama, PE and Art. In short, there is lots of testing and, as we know, lots of feedback. We all know that this tried and tested (sorry!) method is a route to success,
Confidence Tests and Exam Wrappers Read More »
(Image based on the Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit findings) All the evidence tells us that great feedback works. Simple. Let’s do more of that and all of our students will gain…easy! And yet, what do we mean by feedback? What does great feedback look like in the classroom? Too often the notion of feedback is
Whole School Feedback Policy Read More »
As part of our whole staff training at Huntington School we have been sharing ideas and collating ‘Top Ten Strategies’. This list is the fruits of our labour: 1. Differentiated questioning. Given the time we take doing it daily, effective questioning may well be the highest impact strategy we can employ. There is no ‘one size
Questioning and Feedback: Top Ten Strategies Read More »
This practical post on a couple of teaching and learning strategies is wholly indebted to an excellent trio of posts from Doug Lemov, of ‘Practice Perfect‘ and ‘Teach Like A Champion‘ fame. His series is based on the concept of ‘disciplined discussion‘. I love this simple phrase as it neatly summarises an essential component of
‘Disciplined Discussion’ – As Easy as ABC Read More »
No, this post isn’t a dissection of David Dimbleby’s negotiation of a bent table full of politicking talking heads. I’m sorry if you came looking for political debates! My post is an exploration of one of the simplest, but most fundamental, aspects of how students learn and how students display their learning in lessons: higher
‘Question Time’ and Asking ‘Why’ Read More »
This week I gave a seminar at TeachMeet Clevedon. I am going to post more fully on my topic of teachers getting better by undertaking ‘deliberate practice‘ sometime soon. One smaller aspect of my presentation was how teachers can improve written feedback, both to improve learning and to marginally reduce the time taken to give
Improving Written Feedback Read More »
