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 …
13-year-old Arvind Mahankali from New York (correctly spelled “knaidel,” a word for a small mass of leavened dough, to win the American national competition) Americans love a ‘Spelling Bee‘. They are unique competitions where precocious children battle it out in a linguistic street-fight, whilst anxious parents look on with a mix of pride and anguish. …
If the path of repeated deliberate practice makes something like perfect, then imitating good models of writing provides solid foundations for the pursuit of writing excellence. ‘Shared writing‘ is one specific strategy that models writing in a highly effective way and is one of my favourite and most effective teaching strategies. ‘Shared writing’ begins with …
If I am continually vexed by any one question in education it is ‘how can we enhance student motivation?‘ Of course, I do not have the answer, and if there is one it is multi-faceted, complex and, frankly, not going to be solved in this blog post. From my position as a classroom teacher, I …
