Should students be punished for poor behaviour?
The following blog was written for Teachers Register - the online solution to supply teaching. Punishment is a bit of a dirty word for many teachers. There often seems to be a presumption that children are naturally good and that any attempt to control or impede their impulses is somehow akin to child abuse. I’ve seen enough cruelty and cynicism from children to inure me against the belief that being [...]
Praise for #PsychBook
My new book, co-written with the quite marvellous Nick Rose, has landed. What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology is a whistle-stop tour of what we consider to be the most useful and important psychological principles teachers ought to be aware of. In case you're wondering whether it's for you, maybe you'll find the following opinions persuasive: This is a must-read book for every beginning teacher. And even the [...]
What do new teachers need to know about behaviour management?
Full disclosure: this article appeared first on the Teachers Register blog. Teachers Register is an online solution for schools needing supply teachers without wanting the hassle of going through a supply agency. You can follow them on Twitter here. When I first resolved to train as a teacher – and worse still, a secondary school teacher – everyone I informed of this momentous decision would stare at me aghast and ask, [...]
Developing expertise #5 Explore connections
This is the fifth post in this series detailing ways teachers might go about training their intuition in order to make better judgements and acquire real expertise. You can read the previous posts here. We should always be on the lookout for similarities, analogous situations and anything which reminds us of other areas of our practice. When we conscious build on the similarities we spot we can explore why they’re [...]
Robert Coe’s foreword for #PsychBook
Right. It's done. What Every Teacher Needs to Know About Psychology is off to the printers tomorrow and should be available in the next few weeks. It's always a tense time when what you've written is exposed to the full glare of real readers. You never really know what the reaction will be like, but it's been very encouraging to have secured Professor Rob Coe's services to write a brief foreword. If [...]
What is the Phonics Screening Check for?
In case you don't know, the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) is a test given to 5-6 year olds at the end of Year 1 in order to establish whether pupils are able to phonically decode to an appropriate standard. The purpose is twofold: firstly it's a policy lever designed to ensure schools are teaching Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) effectively, and second to identify those children with specific learning difficulties who need [...]
Developing expertise #4 Acknowledge emotions
In previous posts I've discussed how creating the right environment, seeking better feedback and creating 'circuit breakers' could help us the develop the kind of expertise required to hone our intuition. This post discusses the role of emotions and how we could change the way we respond to our feelings. Our emotions provide us with important and useful data, but much of this information is misleading and requires conscious processing. We tend to be all too willing to go [...]
When assessment fails
I wrote yesterday about the distinctions between assessment and feedback. This sparked some interesting comment which I want to explore here. I posted a diagram which Nick Rose and I designed for our forthcoming book. The original version of the figure looked like this: We decided to do away with B - 'Unreliable but valid?' in the interests of clarity and simplicity. Sadly though, the world is rarely clear or simple. [...]
Feedback and assessment are not the same
You don't figure out how fat a pig is by feeding it. Greg Ashman At the sharp end of education, assessment and feedback are often, unhelpfully, conflated. This has been compounded by the language we use: terms like 'assessment for learning' and 'formative assessment' are used interchangeably and for many teachers both are essentially the same thing as providing feedback. Clearly, these processes are connected - giving feedback without having made [...]
A response to the Education Select Committee: Why Amanda Spielman should run Ofsted
So. The Education Select Committee has rejected Amanda Spielman as the next Chief Inspector. Andrew Old has already summarised why he feels Amanda would have been a terrific appointment here and I agree with him entirely. The purpose of this post is to reflect on quite serious flaws in the Select Committee's reasoning. In the document detailing their decision, they claim that they sought to "test Ms Spielman’s professional competence and [...]
10 Misconceptions about Comparative Judgement
I've been writing enthusiastically about Comparative Judgement to assess children's performance for some months now. Some people though are understandably suspicious of the idea. That's pretty normal. As a species we tend to be suspicious of anything unfamiliar and like stuff we've seen before. When something new comes along there will always be those who get over excited and curmudgeons who suck their teeth and shake their heads. Scepticism is healthy. Here [...]
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