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Feedback: it's better to receive than to give

2012-02-20T22:48:10+00:00February 20th, 2012|assessment, learning|

As every teacher ought to already know, feedback and formative assessment are the most powerful, most effective things you can be doing. This means we need to be taking every opportunity to let our students know, "where they are going, how they are going there and what they might go next." Obvious, isn't it? Well, maybe not. Here are a few interesting points I have gleaned about the effective use of feedback from Visible Learning for Teachers. Hattie says that feedback should be: 'just in time', 'just for me', 'just where I am in my learning process', and 'just what I [...]

Attention, meaning and mastery: The questions every teacher needs to answer every lesson

2025-03-13T16:10:37+00:00March 13th, 2025|Featured|

After a loooong hiatus from blogging I've decided to give substack a try. You can subscribe here. For the next few blogs I'll also post here on the Learning Spy site but, depending on how things go, I'm intending to eventually port everything over. I hope you'll come with me. *** Training teachers how to use pedagogical techniques is, I've decided, of limited use. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched a teacher act on feedback to improve on how they are, say, cold calling, or using a visualiser or mini-whiteboard, and yet still somehow the lesson is a series [...]

The purpose of a system is what it does

2024-06-20T07:23:10+01:00June 20th, 2024|leadership|

Following a recommendation from Sam Freedman, I've recently devoured Dan Davies's The Unaccountability Machine. It's an attempt to analyse 'what's gone wrong' in what we might call The West over the past decade or so through the lens of cybernetics. I know, right? If your first thought is to assume that this must have something to do with tech (or Dr Who) you can be forgiven as the term has been thoroughly hijacked since it was first coined by the American mathematician, Norbert Wiener in 1948. The word is derived from the Latin (via Greek) kybernetes, meaning 'steersman.' The French, [...]

Attention, meaning & consolidation: matching technique to purpose

2024-06-08T11:40:04+01:00January 12th, 2024|English, reflection, training|

It's become increasingly clear to me that training teachers on how to use pedagogical techniques is of limited use. Over the past year or so I've lost count of the times I've watched a teacher act on feedback, improve how how they are, say, cold calling, or using a visualiser or mini-whiteboard, and yet still somehow the lesson is a series of missed opportunities with students failing to learn what was intended. A few years ago I read (or at lest, skimmed) Mary Kennedy's 2015 paper, Parsing the Practice of Teaching and was struck, like so many others, by her [...]

In defence of accountability

2023-04-06T09:18:45+01:00March 19th, 2023|leadership|

This weekend saw Joe Kirby publish a thoughtful blog in which he calls for an end to Quality Assurance. I agree with Joe's analysis of the causes of poor accountability - or QA - but not his suggested solutions. In his blog, Joe says that "QA warps time, trust, thinking, teaching, leadership and learning." There's no doubt that this can  sometimes be true, but it runs the risk of becoming a straw man argument in which poor QA is attacked in order to justify getting rid of all QA. In order to see if Joe's arguments are true, we ought [...]

OAT English curriculum project

2023-02-26T15:49:39+00:00February 26th, 2023|English|

Since January 2020 I've been working for Omiston Academies Trust as their Senior Lead for English. Over that time I and the amazing team of lead practitioners I lead have created what we think is a fantastic English curriculum. Not only have we been working on a book which will explain the entire process from intent, to implementation to impact, we've just launched a website - OAT English - to host all of the resources and training materials we've created. All the materials are covered under a Creative Commons license so that - as long as you don't try to [...]

Implementing English: five useful teaching strategies

2022-10-09T13:57:32+01:00October 9th, 2022|English|

Working across 43 schools means I get to see a lot of English lessons and talk to a fair number of English teachers. In oder to support our teachers we've been working on identifying what we think are high impact, low effort approaches to teaching English that any teacher could adopt or adapt. I've learned from every single one of our schools and, working with my colleagues in the English lead practitioner team, have been working to combine and refine many of the great ideas and approaches I've experienced to a set of  simple teaching strategies we can use to train [...]

Flat packed curriculum

2022-10-09T08:28:58+01:00September 25th, 2022|curriculum, English|

“It is so easy to be wrong – and to persist in being wrong – when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.” Thomas Sowell Why do we buy so much flat pack furniture? First, it's many times more affordable than bespoke hand-made furniture, and second, it also saves us the not inconsiderable cost of having to make it ourselves from scratch. It also allows to replace outdated, unfashionable old pieces handed down from our grandparents and apply our own taste to the homes we live in. In implementing the KS3 English curriculum we've developed at Ormiston Academies Trust [...]

The case against Power Point as means of implementing curriculum

2022-03-21T11:19:15+00:00March 13th, 2022|curriculum|

First things first: I have nothing against PowerPoint. As means for displaying visual information it definitely has its merits. I have no issues with teachers using slides to share pictures, diagrams or moving images with student (although I do have a few reservations about using it to share text.) My argument here is focussed on the widespread practice of using PowerPoint (or any other similar product) as a means of implementing the curriculum. When I began teaching the idea of displaying slides in classrooms was a distant dream. My first classroom didn’t even have a modern whiteboard and I made do [...]

Assessing English at KS3

2022-03-05T17:53:30+00:00March 5th, 2022|assessment, English|

Throughout my career, the de facto approach to assessing English at KS3 has been to use extended writing. After all, this is what students will be faced with in their GCSEs so it kinda made sense that this was what we should get them used to as early as possible. In order to take this approach, we need a markscheme. Most markschemes attempt to identify the different skills areas students should be demonstrating and then award marks based on well well these skills are demonstrated. The weakness of using markschemes - or rubrics, if you prefer - is that it comes [...]

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