Can you explain what skills are and how to develop them? Did you feel confident naming some of the key skills? Maybe you cited the more popular skills cited – literacy, numeracy, or perhaps ‘problem solving’, ‘critical thinking’ or ‘teamwork’. After some naming of skills, could you confidently explain the ‘how’ of developing those skills? …
For a long time now I have been reading about vocabulary development. After teaching English Language and English Literature for over a decade and a half (including child language acquisition), I came to the stark realisation that I didn’t know enough about how children not only learnt to read, but went on to read to …
Illustrated by Ronald Searle, in Life Magazine, 1960. Reading a classic novella like ‘A Christmas Carol’ is tricky for our teenage students. Yes, they have likely heard of Scrooge and seen a film adaptation or three, but when faced with the actual text and the world of the story, with its antiquated social context …
Does public speaking matter? What do the Houses of Parliament, the Oxford Union, big business board rooms, assembly halls and court chambers have in common? They are the seats of power for people who lead our nation, the great…and the not-so-great and good. What other common factor is at work in such settings? Each respective …
Authentic Assessment: Assessing Speaking and Listening Read More »
Reading too slowly? The movement towards a ‘slow education‘, encompassing deeper, richer learning experiences, is surely the antidote to our assessment driven, checkpoint laden curriculum. In my previous post I explained that we should slim down our content-filled curriculum to maximise the opportunities for reading. More reading is surely a rallying call every teacher, not …
“I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.” Spike Milligan My usual attitude closely resembles a ‘less is more’ approach with regards to the curriculum: less bureaucracy, less outcomes and data, less focus on testing – the list goes on. …
