Introduction. I’m celebrating writing my 100th post, which may be the last for some time, by trying to link together various posts relating to teaching. I suggest in my post ‘How do I know how good my teachers are?’ that there are three key sources that contribute to my judgement of the effectiveness of my … Continue reading
I spent the first week of the Easter holiday in China taking part in the pre-departure training for 30 teachers of English due to spend a month in Essex later this summer. It was my third trip to China in recent years forming part of an ongoing link between Jiang Su Province and Essex. My … Continue reading
The recent wave of blogs and twitter exchanges that have focused on the evidence-base that underpins educational policy and practice has been fascinating. I am one of many eagerly anticipating the ResearchED Conference organised by Tom Bennett at Dulwich College in September. This has been catalysed in part by the exuberant Ben Goldacre, author of … Continue reading
I am in the fortunate position of being the line manager for Art at KEGS and over the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved in the Art Departmental Review. This a process that involves observing everyone in the department, giving individual feedback then team feedback and looking more widely at achievement issues overall. We … Continue reading
Increasingly I am becoming frustrated by the lack of sophistication that is applied to the whole process of evaluating educational outcomes. As a consequence, all kinds of perverse and spurious conclusions are drawn and school, teachers and policy makers end up jumping through hoops that have no real basis. If we’re not careful, we’re going … Continue reading
An analogy I draw upon increasingly to help with my thinking about teaching, learning and school leadership, is the contrast between a plantation and a rainforest. In general terms I feel that our entire education system is deeply inhibited, shackled and spoiled by Plantation Thinking. This affects government policy, school leadership and the day-to-day of … Continue reading
This series on teaching Great Lessons is all about the habits of day-to-day teaching; our instincts; our default-mode…. the things we do automatically. I want to suggest that one of the most important habits of a Great Teacher teaching Great Lessons is to find joy in what they’re doing and in what the students … Continue reading
“The sky’s the limit”…… It’s a wonderful motivating phrase. It suggests that anything is possible; that there are no limits. To infinity and beyond and all that…. As I’ve discussed already in Differentiation and Challenge and Journeys, the straight-jacket of one-size-fits-all learning activities is deadly. In Great Lessons, it should be our default-setting to think … Continue reading
Take a look at this image. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, photographed over several days in 2003-4. As explained by Professor Brian Cox, in this patch of sky, the size of a thumbnail placed 75 feet away, there are over 10,000 objects, invisible to the naked eye. Each object is not a star..but a galaxy, … Continue reading
I spent a while thinking of one word that could capture the spirit of this post. AGILITY. It does the job. It’s all about the ability to adapt, to change course, to respond, to deal with multiple simultaneous demands, to keep up with all the individual students’ journeys, to be spontaneous and flexible and to … Continue reading
