Immerse yourself in the art and science of teaching and learning with a comprehensive range of blogs. Explore dynamic topics such as effective feedback strategies, impactful explanations, the art of questioning, and more. Gain valuable insights into pedagogical techniques informed by research evidence, along with an array of practical tips. These blogs are useful for teachers, leaders and everyone interested in education.
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
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
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
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,
What if we are not the accurate judges that we think ourselves to be? What if our natural biases get the better of us, even when we don’t expect them to do so? Does it mean we are not really very good at assessing the work of our own
What does the classroom of a great teacher look like and sound like? I imagine there are many answers to that question: from pin-drop silence, as students are abuzz with mental activity, to a symphony of talk, conducted with deft expertise. Many great teachers conduct their classroom with unconscious skill