I have written a countless number of essays. At school, university, and back at school again, showing my students how to do it. In my fourteen years teaching I must have modelled hundreds of essays. I have likely set and assessed thousands of the blighters. My go-to strategy has always
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous rocks in all of history, providing one of the keys to the history of language as we know it. When it was found in 1799, the inscrutable script foxed the world – but by 1822 it provided the key to the mysteries
Since 2012, I have written numerous posts about feedback and marking. This is no surprise given our school system has been seemingly addicted to making ‘progress’ visible, with feedback becoming a quick fix for all our ills. Of course, feedback is richly complex, like most things in the classroom, so
Since I have been writing this blog in 2012, no subject has interested me more than the nuanced, complicated staple of teaching: questioning. As a teacher of nearly 15 years, I have attempted annual to crack the code for asking great questions. I am working on it. Happily, I have
“A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him your facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and facts and he fails to see your point.” Leon Festinger Dorothy Martin was a charismatic leader with
Each year we are all faced with the nerve-shredding, tolerance-stretching spell that is revision. It never seems to get any easier. Each group of students proves a unique, gnarly challenge as we go about training, convincing, supporting, and more. It has proven a consistent topic for me to write about,
It is that time of year again. Nerves fray, students and teachers (probably parents too) as we arm our students with the obligatory revision strategies, resources, wall plans, flashcards, apps, highlighters, revision guides, and whatever else we can get our hands on, in the flimsy hope that some of it
Carol Dweck’s research on the dichotomy of the growth and fixed mindset has proven near ubiquitous in schools over the past couple of years. It has proven the topic of a thousand inspirational assemblies, many a wall display, and has offered interesting debates about motivation and psychology in relation
As the old adage goes, ‘if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is‘. Now, you can often turn this sceptical spotlight onto many headlines that you read in the news, on the internet, or see on television. Under more intense scrutiny, most assertions that find five
I don’t think there are many English teachers who haven’t asked the following question in the last year: ‘how do I help my class better remember quotations?’ It is an age-old question, but it is a very good one. It is not about producing unthinking parrots that squawk
And the evidence says… Feedback is the answer! It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a teaching wanting to help their students learn effectively must give lots of feedback. Marking, lots of it, should get to the root of many of our problems. We just need more of it, right?
Sometimes a research study comes along and confirms what you suspected all along. The ‘Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis‘ does just that trick for me. Now, ‘Green Eggs and Ham‘ is famously a very short and funny story by Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel). The ‘Green Eggs and