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Old Andrew

Ofsted's new Inspection Handbook – a cause for celebration

2014-07-30T22:19:04+01:00July 30th, 2014|Featured|

As detailed by Old Andrew here, I attended a meeting with the new National Director for Schools Policy, Sean Harford in Birmingham on Friday 25th July. This had followed a series of telephone calls and emails in which I provided "free consultancy" on Ofsted's new Inspection Handbook. Whatever your ideological stripe, whatever your beliefs about the purpose of education, everybody can, I hope, agree that reforming Ofsted is in everyone's best interest. During the past month Sean has "taken a scythe" to the 500+ pages of subsidiary and subject specific guidance to produce a slimmed down document that will be useful to inspectors, and [...]

Awards Season 2013 – my votes in the Edublog Awards

2013-12-07T09:48:11+00:00December 7th, 2013|blogging|

It's that time again. The rhythm of the year inevitably reaches a staccato climax as the Edublog Awards, or Eddies, trundle laboriously into view. And happily the voting process appears much less flawed than in past years with every individual only able to vote once for each entry. Even better you can actually see who has voted for you. So I will know! Back in 2011 I was nominated for Best New Blog and got very over excited. In my self-depreciatory way I tried to mobilise my very modest Twitter following, and my mum, to vote for me. With almost imperceptible results. [...]

The shocking mediation of Ofsted criteria by 'rogue' inspectors

2013-11-10T17:06:41+00:00November 10th, 2013|training|

There's a lot said and written about what Ofsted do and don't want to see in lessons, and it turns out a lot of it is nonsense. Fortunately though we have Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, saying all kinds of sensible things: Ofsted should be wary of trying to prescribe a particular style of teaching, whether it be a three part lesson; an insistence that there should be a balance between teacher led activities and independent learning, or that the lesson should start with aims and objectives with a plenary at the end. We should be wary of too much prescription. [...]

Why the knowledge/skills debate is worth having

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

'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 [...]

Some thoughts on Learning Styles

2017-03-17T09:34:53+00:00December 5th, 2011|learning, myths|

The rusting can of worms that is Learning Styles has been prised open again and the wriggling mess is crawling all over the educational twittersphere. And on that note I will stop extending the metaphor. A visual metaphor for the visual learners who didn't get my first sentence Last week Ian Gilbert wrote Learning Styles are dead, long live Learning Styles. He said: I have been in too many situations where young people who weren’t ‘getting it’ one way then started ‘getting it’ when we tried a different way, to dismiss the whole learning styles thing as a fad. As [...]

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