I recently had the great pleasure to read a paper called, provocatively and insightfully, ‘Professional Development: A Great Way to Avoid Change’. It was published in 2004, by an Australian educator, Peter Cole. Though over a decade old, the messages about the deep rooted flaws in much of the professional development undertaken by teachers still …
The iceberg of teacher workload Ask somebody who isn’t a teacher, or is not related to a teacher in any way, and you may get the impression that we have it easy. A glorious vision is painted of the life of a teacher: home at 3.30 to beat the rush-hour treadmill; the endless luxury …
I had the pleasure to attend The Key conference today on ‘Assessment After National Curriculum Levels‘. There was a great presentation by assessment guru, Tim Oates. He was followed by a presentation from Chief of OFQUAL, Glenys Stacey; before an afternoon with schools presenting their new assessment models, including our own at Huntington School. Glenys …
This month I wrote an article for Teach Secondary on a topic dear to my heart – teacher explanations. If you are interested then you can give the article a look here: Infectious Explanations Teach Secondary Article. We attribute too much of teaching to supposedly ‘natural’ qualities – like how we individually, uniquely convey an …
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Does a steepling pile of marking like this loom large in your nightmares? The effect of good quality written feedback is one of those few constants that most teachers can agree has a positive impact on our students’ learning. With this universal truth acknowledged, we create assessment policies and armies of teachers scratch away in the books of …
“After 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching…is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented…The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity would be in the emergency room of a …
With greater flexibility in setting the structure of the school day, there is a huge variety of practice emerging throughout UK schools. From different models of lesson lengths, to extended school hours, early morning school starts and even late school starts. We also have a plethora of after school programmes and models. Given the evidence, what …
