What does this lovely old lady reveal positive messages about student success? Why is her story potentially so powerful? Nola Ochs is a special lady. So special she appears in the Guinness Book of Records. Back in 2007, Nola Ochs became the world’s oldest college graduate when she graduated
(Image based on the Education Endowment Foundation Toolkit findings) All the evidence tells us that great feedback works. Simple. Let’s do more of that and all of our students will gain…easy! And yet, what do we mean by feedback? What does great feedback look like in the classroom?
After over a decade of teaching English I am still finding new approaches and understanding more about how students learn to write. In the last year or so, my thinking has developed to focus upon the primacy of vocabulary knowledge and also the need for a huge amount of varied
For teachers, April can prove the cruellest month – and May is only bloody worse. Exam time is upon us and it is the final days of deadlines, exam revision, and of schooling, for many of our students. In those final lessons the tension can prove palpable. The confident and quiet
Teaching Assistants, like their teacher colleagues, get flak and plaudits in equal measure. Some of the headlines conflate teaching assistants with unqualified support staff to create ugly headlines: “Unqualified Teaching Assistants ‘Harming Pupils’ Education’ Teachers Say“. When you spy some of the evidence, like the headlines from the Education Endowment
Mr Laing was my year 8 Maths teacher. He was a rare breed indeed. He helped me, and my fellow pimple-clad teens, find mathematics interesting. Intermittently, he would betray a deep excitement about a mathematics problem or reveal that he had woken up in the middle of the night with
(Comic via http://xkcd.com/552/) I have had an interesting fortnight in my role as a school leader and Research-lead. In this job, you get to share a lot of teacher training materials and the like, coupled, or most often, decoupled from the evidence. In just the last couple
I remember my time at school particularly fondly. I was happy to get involved; I would volunteer to read and attempt to make wise-cracks and more in the relative safety of my group of friends. Like any teenager slouching grimly into adulthood, I was uncertain of myself, frightened of being
All the evidence indicates that teachers develop intensively in their first couple of years of teaching and that they then plateau in their development, regardless of the intricate plans for continuous professional development (CPD) that schools construct. This was my personal experience. You conquer the struggles of simply managing your
Every once in a while the bleak personal stories of our students are opened up to us like a drawer of knives. We get a brief glimpse into personal prisons that children shouldn’t ever experience. Names will rise to the surface of the mind of every teacher when I
You can’t read or hear about an Education Secretary (see here) or Shadow Secretary (see here) lately without chewing on a bit of GRIT and being told about how we should all be teaching ‘character’ for the betterment of…well, everybody. It surely proves good politics on the doorstep.
My journey to school each morning is mercifully short. Each day I follow the same habitual steps, with little variation beyond the odd song that rattles my morning stupor. Every so often though, I drive past a student of mine. Now, each time, driving past him evokes a whir with