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Should we stop doing good things?

2013-07-22T18:03:20+01:00September 12th, 2011|training|

Surely doing good things is something we should do more of? Especially at school. I have seldom met a teacher who is not interested in doing the best for their students and therefore pretty keen to do good things. Good things are, well... good. Aren't they? Having just watched Dylan Wiliam's keynote speech at the SSAT conference in 2010, I'm not so sure. The speech was provocatively titled, "Stopping people doing good things: the essence of effective leadership". Needless to say, this is not a leadership style I have encountered before and until watching, probably wouldn't have been interested in trying. [...]

What's the point of assessment?

2011-08-22T12:10:55+01:00August 22nd, 2011|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 [...]

Formative assessment and the mark scheme

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

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 [...]

What's the point of lesson observations?

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

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 [...]

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