What does this lovely old lady reveal positive messages about student success? Why is her story potentially so powerful? Nola Ochs is a special lady. So special she appears in the Guinness Book of Records. Back in 2007, Nola Ochs became the world’s oldest college graduate when she graduated from Fort Hays State University at the […]
Successful Learning by Stealth 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 »
After over a decade of teaching English I am still finding new approaches and understanding more about how students learn to write. In the last year or so, my thinking has developed to focus upon the primacy of vocabulary knowledge and also the need for a huge amount of varied repetition of writing skill, particularly
Concise and Precise Micro-writing Read More »
(Sourced from stl.illustrator.com) For teachers, April can prove the cruellest month – and May is only bloody worse. Exam time is upon us and it is the final days of deadlines, exam revision, and of schooling, for many of our students. In those final lessons the tension can prove palpable. The confident and quiet students
Catchers in the Rye Read More »
(Image via The Daily Mail) Teaching Assistants, like their teacher colleagues, get flak and plaudits in equal measure. Some of the headlines conflate teaching assistants with unqualified support staff to create ugly headlines: “Unqualified Teaching Assistants ‘Harming Pupils’ Education’ Teachers Say“. When you spy some of the evidence, like the headlines from the Education
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Mr Laing was my year 8 Maths teacher. He was a rare breed indeed. He helped me, and my fellow pimple-clad teens, find mathematics interesting. Intermittently, he would betray a deep excitement about a mathematics problem or reveal that he had woken up in the middle of the night with an answer to some mathematics
The Power of Teacher Expectations Read More »
(Comic via http://xkcd.com/552/) I have had an interesting fortnight in my role as a school leader and Research-lead. In this job, you get to share a lot of teacher training materials and the like, coupled, or most often, decoupled from the evidence. In just the last couple of weeks I have been repeatedly ‘exposed’ to popular
Causation and Correlation in Education Read More »
