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Teaching texting

A lot of folks are very worried about the impact of teenagers texting. In a Daily Mail article (oh! the shame), John Humphrys expressed the view that "SMS vandals... are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours" and goes on to warn of the danger of "our written language [ending up] as a series of ridiculous emoticons and ever-changing abbreviations". Sounds pretty dreadful, doesn't it? For as long as there have been mobile phones, it has been the job of schools and teachers to confiscate 'em. The standard approach seems to be blanket bans in classrooms and a grudging [...]

2011-08-23T14:43:29+01:00August 23rd, 2011|English|

What's the point of assessment?

Came across an interesting challenge by @purposeducation - #500words campaign, This week the topic is #purposedassess, so here goes... Everyone knows that there's two different types of assessment, right? There's summative assessment which is all about finding out whether students have learnt everything they've been taught. This is the kind of assessment that the media reports on and which schools are judged on. GCSEs, SATs, A levels etc. Then there's formative assessment, or Assessment for Learning as its been rebranded. This is all about finding out what kind of progress students are making. This is (hopefully) what goes on in classrooms [...]

2011-08-22T12:10:55+01:00August 22nd, 2011|assessment|

Formative assessment and the mark scheme

I’ve been consciously and actively using exam board mark schemes as an essential component of formative assessment with my classes for some time now and thought it was time to share what I was up to more widely. I led a CPD session on this recently and while none of what I said was new or even particularly surprising, it did at least remind us what the point of marking all those essays is. Before putting my presentation together, I decided to check out what was out there already. Plenty of stuff on formative assessment but nothing specifically (nothing that I [...]

2011-07-23T23:03:52+01:00July 23rd, 2011|assessment, English, learning, training|

100 Word Challenge entry

This is my attempt at Julia Skinner's 100 word challenge. Be gentle with me. Bronzed Tanned. Weather-beaten. Sun-kissed. Interesting that a bunch of pallid, over-coated islanders should so worship the sun. Or maybe not so interesting. We don’t get enough of it perhaps to feel complacent. Bronzed has always seemed such a heroic ideal. Not only because statues of soldiers are routinely cast in the stuff, but because of the Bronze Age heroes I lapped up as a kid: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon. For me, a particularly pale specimen, the reality of spending time in the sun is very far [...]

2011-07-21T18:31:55+01:00July 21st, 2011|Featured|

Emerging leaders

Have just completed the last session of the leadership course I've been on for the last 6 weeks. What great CPD! For this final session we all had to prepare a presentation on a project which had lead or wanted to lead and demonstrate the leadership skills we had used. Whilst my presentation focussed on internal issues within my own school which are not really suitable for blogging about, what was particularly great was that I got to listen to and comment on 15 other people's projects. We had a real mix ranging from making maths lessons more creative, to building [...]

2011-07-20T21:36:13+01:00July 20th, 2011|leadership|

Does group work work?

Have just been reading 59 Seconds by Professor Richard Wiseman (@RichardWiseman) and am rather dismayed to note that contrary to popular belief, but according to scientific research, groups are less creative than individuals! Does this mean that by getting students to work in groups I have been stifling their creativity? Apparently this is down to what Wiseman calls 'diffusion of responsibility'. Because there are other people to take the blame, we make less effort when we are part of a team. The consensus view in education now seems to be all about groups. Is this just a vogue? Does it need [...]

2011-07-18T22:17:05+01:00July 18th, 2011|learning|

What's the point of lesson observations?

I feel I need to start by saying that I am not questioning the need for lesson observations. They're a crucial part of developing our professional practice and ensure T&L is quality assured. No, what this post is really concerned with is asking what we hope to achieve by observing teachers. For some time now I have been musing on the purpose of lesson observations  as well as considering new ways to encourage staff to develop their teaching practice. This has been merrily percolating at the back of my brain for some time but has now, I hope, turned into something a [...]

2011-07-17T11:35:16+01:00July 17th, 2011|Featured|

Rip it up: Hula hooping about literature

I keep this post on the site to remind me just how far I've come. When I wrote this in 2011, despite teaching for 12 years, I knew practically nothing about education. I am now rather ashamed and embarrassed at my naivety but it's good, i think, to remind our selves that we all have feet of clay.  If you do decide to read on please know that I would now disavow pretty much everything that follows.  December, 2018 Day 1 Have just finished reading Phil Beadle’s book, Dancing About Architecture at 2.39 am. I received it in the post today and tore [...]

2018-12-16T22:59:11+00:00July 16th, 2011|English, learning|

The Learning Loop

For last few years we (the English faculty) have been teaching our GCSE course over 3 years. I made the decision this time last year to begin our three year programme of study with a scheme of learning which would encapsulate everything I believe education should be about. I had recently had some training on the impact of intrinsic motivation & growth mindsets and wanted to see if this was something we could foster in our learners. The other rationale (or perhaps, excuse is a better word) was to introduce the skills needed to successfully navigate the new GCSE course. We [...]

2011-07-12T22:58:25+01:00July 12th, 2011|learning|

Zooming in and out

For some years now I have been using what I call The Grade Ladder with students to help them understand the skills required to perform at different grades. This isn't particularly original and has been around for quite while. I first encountered the terms 'evaluate', 'analyse', 'explore', 'explain' and 'identify' in GCSE English specifications but it's obvious at even a cursory glance that these skills are underpinned by Bloom's Taxonomy.   So, to IDENTIFY, students had to be able to give an opinion and support it with textual evidence; to EXPLAIN they had to show they understood the relationship between their [...]

2013-07-19T12:08:59+01:00July 11th, 2011|English, learning, reading|

Using Learning Continuums

After reading How to Teach the Perfect Ofsted Lesson by Jackie Beere, I came up with the idea of the Learning Continuum. The idea is that the learning objective for a lesson should be viewed as a journey. Students can achieve outcomes that meet the objective at different levels. Aha, I hear you say, isn’t he just talking about differentiated outcomes? Well, yes, but the difference here is that the emphasis is placed on students continuing on through the learning journey over the course of the lesson. The diagram above is a useful way of explaining what I mean. [...]

2011-07-11T20:33:58+01:00July 11th, 2011|English, learning|

So, what are learning spies?

A few years ago an Ofsted inspector told me I talked too much and that as a result the lesson that had been observed was 'satisfactory'. I was gutted. I was also determined to do something about it. The task of getting out of the way so that my students are free to learn for themselves has been challenging but also without doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me. As an educator I mean - obviously the birth of my children etc. was way cooler! Following some training with Zoe Elder on Observing Learning, I began experimenting with the [...]

2011-07-11T20:18:53+01:00July 11th, 2011|learning|
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