There are trillions of choices teachers make when they teach. This dizzying complexity makes teaching rewarding, tiring, stressful, and sometimes even thrilling. Understandably, faced with the complexity of the classroom, teachers are necessarily creative, but they also seek out stability and tranquillity. For many teachers, hearing calls for ‘disrupting education’, or the mention of radical reform …
This week saw the publication of the Education Endowment Foundation RISE (Research-leads Improving Students’ Education) Project. It was one of the first projects in England that attempted to mobilise the emerging role of ‘Research-lead’ into a more specific school improvement process, with related training and support. With the rise in interest for research evidence over the past …
As the year comes to the end, my envy at the legion of best book lists of the year drove home to me how little time I’ve devoted to reading books. My next best attempt is to list and share my favourite educational articles from 2017 that I squeezed into the corners of evening and …
The run up to a general election often trots out the good, the bad, and the ugly, of education policy. We know that what sells to the voter on the doorstep often doesn’t translate well into the reality of a well-functioning school system; evidence & experience are often trumped by the demands of party ideology …
General Election ’17: An Education Policy Overview Read More »
“Memoria praeteritorum bonorum” [‘The past is always well remembered’] Roman saying The general election is a matter of a few short weeks ago. For those of us in education, we will pay close attention to edu-policies that have been hastily inserted into party political manifestos! The problem with education is that everyone is a seeming …
New words are coined each year. In our age of the Internet, new words pour into the English language at a prolific rate. Many, tagged to technology, are shortcut abbreviations and initialisms reflecting our centuries old tradition of quick and easy communication. One such abbreviation is TL;DR – a handy short for ‘Too Long; Don’t …
(Nomads II, by Pablo Jurado Ruiz) Every once in a while the bleak personal stories of our students are opened up to us like a drawer of knives. We get a brief glimpse into personal prisons that children shouldn’t ever experience. Names will rise to the surface of the mind of every teacher when I present this …
