It is decades since Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam opened up the ‘Black Box’ to reveal the crucial importance of assessment as learning, but it would appear the messages from …
Breaking Beyond Our Old Ideas
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify … into every corner of our minds.” John Maynard Keynes Knowledge …
Beyond National Curriculum Levels: One Year On
Let me recall a tale of two Parents’ Evenings. My colleague attended the usual fare at his son’s primary school and he learnt that his son was working at a level …
Have We Got Feedback Backwards?
Does a steepling pile of marking like this loom large in your nightmares? The effect of good quality written feedback is one of those few constants that most teachers can agree …
Moving Beyond National Curriculum Levels
A fair few months ago the government announced the end of KS3 levels. Only there has been little real change – to my knowledge – in the status quo because …
‘The Butterfly Effect’ in Schools
“If a single flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, so can all the previous and subsequent flaps of its wings, as can the …
Winning Ugly & ‘Gritty’ Learning
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 …
Improving Written Feedback
This week I gave a seminar at TeachMeet Clevedon. I am going to post more fully on my topic of teachers getting better by undertaking ‘deliberate practice‘ sometime soon. One …
Explanations: Top 10 Teaching Tips
“There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced …
Make your ‘Marking Policy’ a ‘Feedback Policy’
Marking workload getting on top of you? Many schools, and departments, have been reflecting about their marking policies ever since OFSTED declared more than a healthy interest in scrutinising books. …
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