So, 30% of teachers quit within five years. This news has been emblazoned across the BBC website and has been recycled across the news cycle this week. Sadly, alas, this ‘story’ is nothing new and it is a bleak tale that has beset the teaching profession for decades now. Place this poor retention rate alongside […]
The Problem with Teacher Retention Read More »
Sometimes we are offered a simple solution to help us succeed in life. Amy Cuddy, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School offered us just that: the power pose. Her joint research showed that adopting a power pose for a short time could increase testosterone and improve performance at job interviews. As a result, her confidence
The ‘Power Pose’ Exposed Read More »
We can all imagine our own personal hell of terminal exams, stacked on top of one another, with acres of knowledge to remember. It is the stuff of sleepless nights, for teachers and for our students. And yet, if we teach with memory in mind all the time, we can mitigate our students’ stresses (and our
Memory for Learning: 10 Top Tips Read More »
Some aspects of education are devilishly complex: take many school tracking systems, our army of acronyms, or behaviour management on a windy Wednesday. And yet, some thing are very simple. As I sat and read this short article on the TES – entitled ‘Cut Teaching Hours to Ease the Recruitment Crisis, PISA Chief Advises’ – I considered the simple truth about how we
Is Teaching an ‘Intellectually Attractive’ Profession? Read More »
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 »
(Image sourced from Flickr and courtesy of City of York Council) “It [Confidence] is the single most important attribute any child can have. I truly wish there were classes to focus on it…With confidence comes personality. With personality comes a form of charm, wit and wisdom. These can camouflage any shortcomings in the academic
Should we teach ‘confidence classes’? Read More »
(Image sourced via Pixabay.com) In writing a book for teachers with purpose of developing their self-confidence, I was always very wary of being misinterpreted as representing confidence as some gift that is granted to us with a moment of inspirational self-talk. Confidence isn’t some elixir that grants us success; in fact, an unthinking pursuit of confidence
Confident…but not quite sure Read More »
