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Teach Secondary

What every teacher needs to know about teaching for social justice

2019-10-29T09:05:45+00:00February 3rd, 2018|Featured|

The marvellous Teach Secondary magazine continue to publish my articles on a regular basis but don't hold that against them; there are loads of other excellent reasons for reading. Here's a link to my latest. The world is not a fair place. Some children are born into advantage; others are not. Many children in many schools have been raised in an environment where there is access to books, where their parents value reading and education, where there are middle class dinner table conversations about current affairs and abstract concepts. Such young people have an educational advantage from the start – this [...]

What every teacher needs to know about… seating plans

2016-09-09T08:50:06+01:00September 9th, 2016|planning, psychology|

Remarkably, the rather excellent Teach Secondary magazine haven't yet seen through me and are still running my half-baked ramblings. Here's this month's pale offering. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a teacher in possession of a large roomful of children must be in want of a carefully crafted seating plan. Secondary schools have normalised the idea that children should sit in the same seat every lesson. Seating plans may be a great way to learn students’ names, keep order and establish routine, but they may be undermining children’s ability learn. Ideally, we want our students to go off into the [...]

What every teacher needs to know about… classroom display

2016-05-26T21:13:45+01:00May 26th, 2016|Featured|

Once again the finest monthly publication for secondary teachers, Teach Secondary, have demeaned themselves by publishing another of my sloppily put together rants. This month my barrel scraping has reached a new as I quibble about such harmless trivia as teachers putting up posters. Sorry.  The firmly established, yet largely unexamined, position on classroom display is that there’s nothing quite so magical as a classroom plastered in beautiful display work and nothing half so bleak as a bare wall devoid of all humanity and joy. A good teacher will, as a matter of course, strive not only to fill every inch of wall space with exciting [...]

What every teacher needs to know about… students who leave secondary school unable to read

2016-04-25T11:19:48+01:00April 25th, 2016|reading|

Many thanks to the good folks at Teach Secondary magazine for publishing yet another of my incoherent rants. This time I set my sights on the lamentable and inexcusable failure of secondary schools to teach students to read with adequate fluency and accuracy. If a student leaves secondary school unable to read it is the school’s fault. I’ll leave that opening sentence hanging, parked like a tank on your lawn, while we consider what is actually involved in teaching students to read. Reading involves two linked abilities: language comprehension and decoding. Decoding is the ability to turn squiggles on a page (graphemes) [...]

What every teacher needs to know about… rote learning

2017-02-09T12:45:00+00:00February 24th, 2016|learning|

As per, here's this month's Teach Secondary column for you delight and edification. These days it is rare indeed for children to be taught much by rote, or, to use a less pejorative term, by heart. Rote remains a much maligned and neglected method of instruction. Certain ways of thinking about education are so ingrained that they become understood increasingly literally and separately from the complexity of ideas that originally gave them meaning. We don’t even consider whether rote learning might sometimes be an effective tool – we know, deep in our hearts that it is an unnatural instrument of evil, born in [...]

What every teacher needs to know about… Edtech

2016-01-10T11:27:33+00:00January 9th, 2016|Featured|

Here's my most recent Teach Secondary column: Technology has been transforming education for as long as either have been in existence. Language, arguably the most crucial technological advancement in human history, moved education from mere mimicry and emulation into the realms of cultural transmission; as we became able to express abstractions so we could teach our offspring about the interior world of thought beyond the concrete reality we experienced directly. This process accelerated and intensified with the invention of writing, which Socrates railed against, believing it would eat away at the marrow of society and kill off young people’s ability to [...]

What every teacher needs to know about '21st-Century learning'

2015-10-09T12:54:30+01:00October 9th, 2015|Featured|

Here's my column in this month's Teach Secondary magazine which is packed full of stuff much better than my meagre scrawlings so you'd be well advised to subscribe. You’ve seen Shift Happens, right? Several years back this ‘inspirational’ video was on heavy rotation in school INSETs up and down the land. Although it’s fallen from favour more recently, there’s still an updated 2015 version doing the rounds (look it up on You Tube if you can be bothered). Among its many outlandish propositions we’re told that “the top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004” and that “we are [...]

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