“Curriculum development must rest on teacher development” Lawrence Stenhouse, ‘An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development’ Paying attention to the careful, skilled development of your curriculum is essential business for every school. Though it has always been in view for teachers and school leaders, there is no doubt the focus has become more acute for …
Recently, I published a blog on the EEF website on a ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum – you can find it here. I have republished it on my website for regular readers. A New Year’s Prediction: 2019 will be The Year of Curriculum. Prompted by forthcoming changes to the inspection framework and recent reforms to SATs and GCSEs, many schools will be about to begin, or …
How do children learn best? It is a complex question isn’t it. It is striking that as teachers we may be knee-deep in our pupils learning for most of the working week and yet we may well be foxed by such a seemingly simple question. When you get thinking, what may first come to mind …
When Incoherence and Compliance Trump Curriculum Read More »
We don’t grade lessons anymore, right? That would be foolish, wouldn’t it. Back in 2013, Professor Rob Coe made a challenge to the teaching profession and OFSTED. He proved that judging lesson observations was not only ‘harder than we thought‘, but that grading lesson observations and ‘seeing learning’ was a fool’s errand. Collective scales …
The only guarantee you get from the job of teaching is that you will learn and fail. The trick – well, doing a little more learning than failing, whilst trying to learn when we do fail. Of course, human nature abhors loss, mistakes and failure. School teachers are no different. This is compounded by the …
Since 2012, I have written numerous posts about feedback and marking. This is no surprise given our school system has been seemingly addicted to making ‘progress’ visible, with feedback becoming a quick fix for all our ills. Of course, feedback is richly complex, like most things in the classroom, so I thought it may prove …
This last month, the Department for Education, the teaching unions and OFSTED united. Yes, you heard me right. The topic that saw this unique collaboration: teacher workload. The recruitment and retention issue faced by schools is meeting a demographic boom. Add that to stagnant school budgets and a deeply embedded accountability culture that sees compliance …
