“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 …
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 …
“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 …
When I was eleven years old I sat a tricky exam. I remember very little of the exam itself, but I remember small, tiny cracks of the day with some vividness. I was driven to the school site by my mother, on her way to work, rather than simply wandering to the end of my …
Why the Sutton Trust is Wrong about ‘Open Access’ Read More »
