XFacebookYouTubeLinkedInEmail

Blog archive

What's the point of classroom displays?

Having broken up for the summer and feeling warm and expansive, I foolishly asked Twitter what it would like me to write about next. Michael Oxenham came back, quick as a flash with "classroom display". Dutifully, I then asked Twitter what made a good classroom display. These are some of the responses: @tim7168 Also things that make the classroom 'theirs' (primary). Lots of photos, work etc. @benking01 Examples of best-practice from students and ensuring that the work displayed is more than just 'pretty' - Must be informative. @oldandrewuk Having nothing which can be used as a projectile or cannot be easily repaired. [Health & [...]

2013-07-21T11:53:30+01:00July 21st, 2013|learning|

How can we retain the best teachers?

Do we face a crisis in teacher retention? A few months ago I wrote a post which asked, why so many teachers left teaching. In it I considered the possible reasons for the shocking statistic that 50% of teachers leave the profession within their first 5 years of teaching. Lots of people got in touch to tell me why they had left, or were considering leaving teaching, and they had some terrible and depressing stories to tell. Every time a teacher is forced out of their job though stress, bullying or poor leadership our heart sinks further and we beat our breasts [...]

2015-02-28T08:11:20+00:00July 20th, 2013|Featured|

Fireworks teaching: why less might well be more

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Philip Larkin – Toads Many people (and many students) seem to expend considerable energy in attempting to use their wits to drive off the need to work. This provokes the ire of others (often teachers) who consider it character forming and good for them and I-had-to-do-it so-why-shouldn’t-you? The ability to work hard and get on with difficult and onerous tasks is a terribly important life skill and I expend a fair bit of my energy in convincing [...]

2014-08-22T19:17:36+01:00July 15th, 2013|Featured, planning|

Where lesson observations go wrong

UPDATE: Since writing this post in July 2013 a lot has happened. Ofsted has stopped grading individual lessons and many schools have recognised the futility and harm caused by lesson grading. Here is my most recent post on the subject. Can we define an outstanding lesson? No. I get asked this regularly, and I've really tried. But I don't think it's possible. I can describe a specific example of a lesson which was judged as outstanding, but that really isn't helpful for three reasons. 1) Stand alone lessons don't provide evidence of much except the performance of the teacher and the students [...]

2015-12-16T11:49:39+00:00July 12th, 2013|Featured, training|

Another year in the life of an English teacher

So, another year is done. The Learning Spy has officially entered into its third year of existence. And, after 173 posts I'm not only older but, just possibly, a tiny bit wiser. This time last year I reported that the blog had had almost 50,000 hits. It has now had over 230,000 and is, apparently,  the 18th most influential educational blog in the world! I'm still not at all sure about the accuracy of this measure but it's evidence of something. In other news the Teach 100 rank me at 123, so it all balances out. I love blogging. It's a continued revelation how much [...]

2013-07-22T20:41:45+01:00July 8th, 2013|blogging|

Why the knowledge/skills debate is worth having

'I note the obvious differences between each sort and type, but we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike'. Maya Angelou I've come an awful long way since September 2011 when Cristina Milos took the time to point out that my view on the teaching of knowledge and skills were seriously skewed. I'm flabbergasted that, as an experienced teacher, I could have been so ignorant. I said at the end of that post that "I guess my conclusion isn’t that skills are more important than knowledge: rather that both are required for mastery of a subject." But I didn't really believe it. If [...]

2015-01-26T08:41:20+00:00July 7th, 2013|blogging, myths, SOLO|

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 4: Practise

What does practice make? Well, it turns out that my mum was wrong. Doug Lemov points out in Practice Perfect that practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent. What we practise we get good at. And sometimes we get very good at doing things badly. Take writing for instance. When I scribble notes I always use capital letters correctly. This isn't a boast: I just do. It would never occur to me not to, I don't even think about it. When I read students' work they invariably omit capital letters for proper nouns. Now, I rarely meet a secondary student who [...]

2013-07-19T14:12:46+01:00July 4th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 3: Scaffold

So, you've explained the new concepts and ideas students will need to know, deconstructed examples so that they know how to use these concepts in practice and you've modelled the process of how an expert would go about creating an effective example of whatever product students need to create. Surely they're now ready to be released, joyfully, on to the foothills of independent learning? No, not quite yet they're not. Everyone benefits from scaffolding to help move them from kind of knowing vaguely what to do to being confident. Confidence is key; if students lack it then they're really going to [...]

2013-07-19T14:15:02+01:00July 2nd, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 2: Model

Over the past few years I've thought a lot about how and what we should teach. My journey has been long and painful. I used to evangelically promote the teaching of transferable '21st century skills' like creativity and problem solving. Now I reckon that actually these skills might be subject specific, and that solving a maths problem might be very different to solving a problem in English. And perhaps being creative in science may possibly be fundamentally different to creativity in history. I used to be firmly convinced that everything students needed to know could be outsourced to Google. Why bother learning [...]

2014-04-21T21:48:10+01:00June 30th, 2013|English, Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 1: Explain

"Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process." EB White There are some definite pit falls to avoid in explaining things to kids. The biggest criticism of teachers talking is that it's boring. And, generally speaking, boring kids is not a good way to get them to learn stuff. But to suggest that teachers should therefore avoid explaining their subjects to students is a bizarre leap. Surely it would be vastly more sensible to expend our efforts in improving teachers' ability to explain? This then is the aim [...]

2013-08-29T18:51:34+01:00June 26th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Great teaching happens in cycles – the teaching sequence for developing independence

Last year I wrote a post called The Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson, which has become by far my most viewed post with almost 10,000 page views. Clearly teachers are hungry for this kind of thing. But it’s become increasingly obvious to me over the past few months that many of my notions about what might constitute an outstanding lesson have been turned on their head. It’s not so much that I was wrong, more that my understanding was incomplete. If we accept, as I’m sure we do, that as teachers we want to accomplish different things at different points in our schemes [...]

2016-09-25T13:35:23+01:00June 24th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Wellington Education Festival

Thank you so much to all those who squeezed in to my Deliberately Difficult session at Wellington today. Photo by @headguruteacher I realise that lots of people were unable to see the screen due to the thronging hordes (really!) blocking their view, so here, as promised, are the slides I used : Ed fest desirable difficulties from David Didau As ever, I met some lovely people; some for the first time, some old acquaintances. But particular highlights for me were having lunch with childhood hero Johnny Ball (and getting the gossip on what really goes on at Strictly Come Dancing!) [...]

2013-07-19T23:21:52+01:00June 22nd, 2013|training|
Toggle Sliding Bar Area
Go to Top