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The Grand Unified Theory of Mastery

2013-07-19T22:30:51+01:00March 10th, 2013|Featured, learning|

Is this all you need to know about motivation, learning and professional development? No, probably not. But, it is a beguilingly complete way of tying together many of the theories which have baffled and bedevilled me over the past few years. Here they all are, neatly and beautifully packaged for your convenience. I love the fact that Pete Jones (@Pekabelo) has designed this as a tube map as it resonates with an idea I read about recently about 'staying on the bus'. All too often in life we 'get off the bus' as soon as we get to some sort of destination. Rarely [...]

Pedagoo London presentation

2018-07-23T10:18:07+01:00March 8th, 2013|Featured|

Last weekend I was invited to Pedagoo London at the Institute of Education to provoke all and sundry with my rambling thoughts on how teachers can behave in lessons if they want to be judged 'outstanding'. I don't claim that this is in anyway the most important part of what we do, but it is a huge area of stress for many, and something which is regularly over complicated by feckless school leaders and overpaid consultants. If you've ever been told that your lesson 'lacks sparkle' or been fobbed off due one boy in the corner coughing for a brief period, [...]

Grit vs Flow – what's better for learning?

2013-03-04T23:14:42+00:00March 4th, 2013|Featured, myths|

At least it wasn't Brain Gym! Bugger! Having just put up a new classroom display exhorting the benefits of 'flow' and using the idea in training materials, I have just had this thrust in front of my slack jawed face by my new bête noire, Alex Quigley! (NB: this is not true - Alex is a thoroughly decent chap, and a man I admire greatly.) I've been fascinated by the idea of 'flow' since reading Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's book some years ago. The idea is that if you're totally immersed in the experience of performing a task you will perform it [...]

A reader's view on the teaching profession

2013-02-28T20:22:45+00:00February 28th, 2013|Featured|

This post was sent to me in response to yesterday's post by an NQT considering leaving teaching and wishing to remain anonymous. Why do so many teachers leave the profession? About me: I am 26 next week. I finished my PGCE in July 2012, after spending 5 years working as Teaching Assistant whilst I did a degree with the Open University. I have worked both professionally and voluntarily as a football coach with children aged 5-16 years for over a decade now; I began coaching at 14 after a back injury stopped me from playing. I cannot speak for anyone but myself. [...]

Why do so many teachers leave teaching?

2013-10-20T11:28:31+01:00February 27th, 2013|Featured|

  Apparently 50% of  teachers leave the profession within their first 5 years. I've heard this statistic bandied about for quite a while, and while you can argue the exact figure back and forth a bit (some estimates put the figure at 40%) either way it's a bloody big number. Here's another perspective: 404,600 fully trained teachers under the age of 60 are no longer teaching, compared to around half a million still actively working in English and Welsh schools. So that's almost half of the qualified teachers in the country not actually teaching. And it's getting worse: some 47,700 teachers [...]

The problem with progress Part 3: Designing lessons for learning

2014-05-25T18:20:25+01:00February 16th, 2013|Featured, learning, planning, SOLO|

Over my last couple of posts I've suggested that you can't see learning in lessons, you can only infer it from students' performance. This means that as a teacher, when you get students to respond to exit passes, signal with traffic lights and otherwise engage in formative assessment what you see are merely cued responses to stimuli. What I mean by that is that the tasks we set students to check whether they've learned what we've taught only tell us how they are performing at that particular time and in those particular circumstances; they offer no indication whether the feckless buggers [...]

The problem with progress Part 2: Designing a curriculum for learning

2021-11-19T09:27:05+00:00February 14th, 2013|Featured, leadership, learning, myths, planning|

Can progress be both rapid and sustained? We start out with the aim of making the important measurable and end up making only the measurable important. Dylan Wiliam Does slow and steady win the race? 'Rapid and sustained progress' is Ofsted's key indictor for success. Schools across the land chase this chimera like demented puppies chasing their own tails. But just when when you think you've gripped it firmly between your slavering jaws, the damn thing changes and slips away. You see, the more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that progress cannot be both rapid and sustained. You cannot [...]

The problem with progress Part 1: learning vs performance

2022-11-28T15:05:37+00:00February 12th, 2013|Featured, learning, myths|

What's more important? Learning or progress? Take that progress! We want learning We've known since the publication of Ofsted's Moving English Forward in March last year that demonstrating progress is not the be all and end all of an inspector's judgments, but just in case anyone was in any doubt, Kev Bartle has forensically scoured Ofsted's Inspection Handbook and come to these damning conclusions. He unequivocally states that,"There is no such thing as progress within lessons. There is only learning" before going on to say: Even Ofsted (the big organisation but sadly not always the individual inspectors or inspection teams) realise that ‘progress’ [...]

Icebergs, taking risks & being outstanding

2024-01-19T10:53:07+00:00February 11th, 2013|Featured, learning, planning, training|

How do we recognise a great teacher, a great lesson or great teaching and learning? How do we know what we're seeing is outstanding? The sad truth is that often observers don't (or can't) see the wood for the trees. They see your planning, they see your interactions with a group of students and, hopefully, they see the evidence of impact in your students' books. But most of what goes into making your lessons finely crafted things of beauty are invisible. Observers only ever get to see the tip of the iceberg. If a writer of prose knows enough of [...]

Houston, we have influence: The Top 100 education blogs

2013-02-04T22:22:49+00:00February 4th, 2013|Featured|

I started writing this blog on the 11th July 2011 with the intention of recording all the thoughts I've always had about teaching and learning. In the past I'd amaze myself with how what seemed profound at the beginning of the week would become lost in the hurly burly of planning, marking and teaching. I wanted a place to stop and stare. I wanted a sounding board for all my wild, untamed ideas. And, I confess, I did want a bit of an audience as well. I wrote recently about the transformative effect Twitter has had on my career, and I'm [...]

Live Lesson Obs: Making lesson observations formative

2013-07-19T09:22:37+01:00February 3rd, 2013|Featured, leadership, learning|

You can push and prod people into something better than mediocrity, but you have to encourage excellence. David Lammy We've all experienced the dread and agony of formal lesson observations, haven't we? We've sweated blood over our preparations, filled in inch thick lesson plans and obsessed over meaningless details in our presentations. Or is that just me? A while back now I read something (I forget exactly what) by Phil Beadle which went along the lines of "Be brilliant and they'll forgive you anything." This nugget has rattled around in my stony heart ever since with the result that I've started [...]

A Universal Panacea? – my homage to Twitter

2013-01-20T19:42:46+00:00January 20th, 2013|Featured|

The number one shift in education I wish to see in my lifetime? In an effort to participate in the Blog Sync project coordinated by @Edutronic_Net I blithely signed up to write about whatever was agreed on as the months's suggested topic. Sadly for me, the subject was not one that's been sizzling up my sleeve for an opportunity to flare into life. In fact, I've really struggled to know what to say about this. Being somewhat cynical about the chicanery which goes on outside, above or below our classrooms, I am, I'm sorry to say, inherently suspicious of anything purporting [...]

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