Teaching can sometimes be an incredibly lonely job. It can stifle creativity and drive the brightest, most optimistic of teachers to downtrodden distraction. We teach in teams, but most teachers who face a full teaching timetable experience a gruelling war of attrition alone in the classroom, surfacing for air briefly at lunchtime. It is hard …
Do teachers and school leaders need to down tools to survive and succeed? Schools are incredibly complex places. We often use analogies that compare schools, and indeed the classroom, to emergency scenarios. Such language captures the sense of stress and struggle; many times have I felt as though I was languishing in a bunker awaiting …
Dropping Your Tools and Avoiding Education Gimmicks Read More »
‘Who wants highly qualified teachers?’ This week Nick Clegg attempted to emerge from the shadow of David Cameron and Michael Gove by impressing his own (focus group friendly) opinion on education policy. He reopened the case about whether QTS – qualified teacher status – should exist meaningfully for the teaching profession in England. Of course, …
Why Michael Gove is Wrong about Qualified Teacher Status Read More »
Excuse the cheap pun of a title. With all the public furore about the Daily Mail I couldn’t help but be mindful of a tabloid headline! DIRT, if you didn’t know, is an acronym. Apologies if you are tired of acronyms, but admit it, sometimes they are just plain useful. DIRT stands for ‘Dedicated Improvement …
“In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired; In pursuit of wisdom, every day something is dropped.” Lao Tzu (cited by Karl E. Weick) Most of us know, or have known, experienced teachers who wear the status of the bona fide expert with graceful aplomb; however, we have all known experienced teachers who don’t …
The summer holidays provides one of the few periods in the year when you can deeply reflect on the complexities of the job of being a teacher. After the desperate need for much needed rest is satisfied, there is time to reflect upon the high and lows of the school year disappearing in our rear-view …
My last post of the school year is a resolution for the school year ahead. There is no special philosophy, research or expensive equipment required. It is a simple focus on ‘opening the door’ more in the coming year. It is about sharing. Not just in the sense of sharing knowledge through blogs, Teachmeets or …
