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
As an English teacher I am surely granted the eternal power of an exaggeration fueled headline every once in a while. Ok – so perhaps highlighters aren’t the biggest problem in education, but if you know me well, you may have heard my complaint whereat these gaudy coloured pens symbolize
As part of our whole staff training at Huntington School we have been sharing ideas and collating ‘Top Ten Strategies’. This list is the fruits of our labour: 1. Differentiated questioning. Given the time we take doing it daily, effective questioning may well be the highest impact strategy we can
I was brought up by my family to believe that you got your just rewards for working hard. It is a belief that has stayed with me and nourished me throughout my life. Well, with some important qualifications. You see, we weren’t very good at mathematics in my family.
It is exam results week and teachers all over England will be picking through the remnants of their students’ results – their successes and failures. My thoughts come to one of the mainstay strategies that correlate with exam success. That dull and nagging pain: revision. We know that a world of
Alternatively titled: ‘How do we get the best teachers to Prestatyn and Great Yarmouth?’ “Come To Sunny Prestatyn Laughed the girl on the poster, Kneeling up on the sand In tautened white satin. Behind her, a hunk of coast, a Hotel with palms…” So starts ‘Sunny Prestatyn‘, by Phillip Larkin.
Wayne Rooney, aged 16, scoring an iconic goal against Arsenal. Genius derived from genes? Or does practice make perfect? Most young boys grow up in Liverpool playing football and little else. I fulfilled the stereotype with aplomb. I’d play football in shop doorways, braving passing buses, or, more safely,
[Insert inspirational quote about failure here] I fail therefore I succeed. Failure is the pathway to success. Learn to fail – learn to succeed. The internet is awash with aphorisms like these. A million posters about attitude and mindset capture the same common sense truth. Failure, although bitter to the taste,
Few things in education are as spectacularly emotive and ire-inducing as the choice of books we read for English Literature in schools. This last week we have seen Gove receive a full-frontal assault for the mere suggestion of removing books from the GCSE specification (did he or didn’t he