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Controlled assessment and why I hate it

Yesterday I took a break from ploughing through my Year 10 controlled assessments to exhort myself to "bloody well get on with it" and stop moaning about my work load. Marking is virtuous. You know it's important so you get with it. Plus, it produces a warm satisfying glow when you finally get the bottom of the stack and scribble your last improvement target. Except, I got to the bottom of my pile of summatively assessed controlled assessments and thought, what was the point of that? I now have a list of marks for each of my students. Some [...]

2011-10-28T11:15:46+01:00October 28th, 2011|assessment|

The joy of marking

I'm a big fan of marking students' work. I love it so much I let a big pile of it build up to do over the holidays. As an English teacher I'm faced with a lot of marking and most of it needs to be read carefully rather than given a cursory tick 'n' flick. I know that marking students' books helps to ensure that they care about the work they produce. I also know that providing formative feedback is the most important intervention that I, as a teacher, can have on my students; there is nothing I can do that will [...]

2011-10-27T11:09:21+01:00October 27th, 2011|assessment|

End of term

Term 1 is always far more exhausting than I expect it to be. Some of the highlights from last term include meeting some cracking education types including Ian Gilbert, Phil Beadle and Jim Roberson; being published by The Guardian; completing day 1 of the Critical Skills Programme; Compering my school's awards evening and attending my first ever TeachMeet. But what's had the most impact on my teaching in recent months? Easy: keeping up the blog. Firstly, it's been a fantastic way to record my own musings and meanderings. In the past I'd teach a great lesson or think something really profound [...]

2011-10-24T01:01:25+01:00October 24th, 2011|Featured|

Objective Quest – Day 5

Phew! After two days of 'curriculum enrichment' followed by an evening compering awards evening I'm knackered. Friday's lessons seem a long time ago now but I'm committed to reviewing the learning objective techniques used. Sadly though, I've reached my limit and this will be the final installment of the Objective Quest for a while at least. So, without further self-justifying twaddle, here are Friday's lessons: Lesson 1 - Yr 9 - 3-2-1 This is the first of two lessons with Year 9 today and they are spending both lessons reflecting on the term's learning and preparing a presentation for Thursday afternoon. [...]

2015-04-22T17:57:14+01:00October 18th, 2011|English, learning|

Objective Quest – Day 4

Am starting to feel slightly exhausted by all the different objective introducing techniques whirring around my head like a cloud of relentless cheerful wasps. I long to use the same one all day for all my lessons but am stubbornly committed to seeing it through. At least until the end of the week. And the surprising reality is that as of today I have only managed to plough through 15 of the buggers! Lesson 1 - Year 9 - Create Fun Signs This was a lesson I'd agreed to cover for a colleague so that she could go on a learning [...]

2011-10-13T22:59:25+01:00October 13th, 2011|English, learning, SOLO|

Objective Quest – Day 3

Quick update on the Learning Objectives google doc: we're now up to 47 ways to introduce learning objectives! Only three more to go so if you have any good stuff lurking in the cluttered cupboard of your brain, please add it here. Another 3 lesson day, punctuated by Jim Roberson doing some motivational speaking for our Year 10 & 11 students. P1 Year 11 Connected Words Lesson 1 was with Year 11 and our objective was To be able to explore the ways power is presented in Of Mice and Men. The chosen techniques was Connected Words. I gave different tables different [...]

2011-10-12T20:34:06+01:00October 12th, 2011|English, learning|

Objective Quest: Day 2

OK, after a positive start yesterday on my quest to try out 40 different learning objectives before the end of term, I was raring to go today. I only have three lessons on Tuesday and spend a lot of time running around trying sort things out, have meetings and generally try to stay on top of running the faculty. P1 Year 11 - Order the Learning The basic premise of this one is to take out the words of the objective and arrange them in order of importance. Today's was on the ending of Of Mice and Men. I wanted them [...]

2011-10-11T18:47:42+01:00October 11th, 2011|English, learning|

50 ways to lead your lesson

The problem is all inside your head", she said to meThe answer is easy if you take it logicallyI'd like to help you in your struggle to be freeThere must be fifty ways to lead your lesson...Paul Simon Last week the inimitable Kristian Still challenged the good people of Twitter to amass 50 different ways to introduce learning objectives. Well, after much cajoling and exhortation from Mr Still we managed it! 40 Ways to_introduce_learning_objectives_ from David Didau I thought it might make an interesting experiment to see how well they each work. I reckon I can cover most of them before [...]

2013-07-20T12:33:38+01:00October 9th, 2011|English, learning|

The Learning Pyramid

Consider this little gem that periodically does the rounds in education circles: (This is just one of the very many variations on the Learning Pyramid doing the rounds on the internet. For more examples visit The Corrupted Cone of Experience.) Seductive, isn’t it? The false sense of security comes from the fact that it bears out and validates our experience as teachers: we get to know our subjects so much better because we teach them, so it follows that the best way to retain new information is to teach it to someone else. And look: there are some numbers [...]

2021-12-11T15:14:55+00:00October 8th, 2011|myths|

Going SOLO

A few months ago I wrote about some of the concerns people have had with ubiquity of Bloom's Taxonomy and that there were other, perhaps more useful taxonomies around. Well, since then I've been quietly experimenting with SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) developed by Biggs and Collis. Biggs says As learning progresses it becomes more complex. SOLO, is a means of classifying learning outcomes in terms of their complexity, enabling us to assess students’ work in terms of its quality not of how many bits of this and of that they got right. At first we pick up only one or few aspects of the task [...]

2011-10-05T23:22:52+01:00October 5th, 2011|learning, SOLO|

How to have a successful life

This week Mr Phil Beadle graced us with his towering presence and 'edutained' 60 Year 11 students. I was going to call this post "Beadle's About" but I'm sure he's heartily sick of any comparisons to the bearded prankster Jeremy (no relation) Beadle. To be absolutely honest, I hadn't heard of Mr Beadle before I was bullied into reading Dancing About Architecture, his fantastically leftfield book on creativity in the classroom. For sheer bloody minded buffoonery it beats the hell out of anything Sir Ken has written and I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone wanting to liven up lessons with some [...]

2011-10-01T15:08:18+01:00October 1st, 2011|learning|

Reading should be our top priority

I've just read a sobering piece on reading in UK schools from Mike Baker's website written by Roy Blatchford, a former headteacher and Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, and Director of the National Education Trust. Here it is: Provisional figures for 2011 indicate that, in England, one child in five reaches age 11 unable to read confidently. Confident, that is, to access the secondary school curriculum they are embarking on this month. History suggests that those same children will struggle over five years of secondary schooling to achieve an English grade C at 16+. The latest GCSE tables indicate that thirty [...]

2011-09-28T20:55:52+01:00September 28th, 2011|English, literacy|
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