What should education outside planet Earth look like? One of my students’ favourite thought is to imagine that we have found a new planet to inhabit and that they have been put in charge of the extra-terrestrial education system. What will they bring to the future home of humanity? What classes would they mandate? What […]
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The single most requested training I get from MFL teachers relates to listening skills. Colleagues often feel this is the most difficult skill to prepare pupils for, possibly because it is easy to misunderstand the myriad of micro-skills that make up “listening”. For pupils it is also difficult: it often triggers anxiety and leads to […]
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As a teacher, I am keen to ensure that the lessons and enquiries I plan for KS3, 4 and 5 measure up to emerging standards for the most representative History curriculum possible. Like many teachers, I use Twitter as a resource for keeping up to date with teaching ideas, and the #MeToo movement – along […]
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With all the talk of a “catch-up curriculum”, what is my priority upon our return to in-person learning? Keeping great geography at the heart of my lessons. While I don’t want students to dismiss the past two months of learning as ‘irrelevant’, I also want to be mindful that some of the content covered simply […]
Read moreIn my previous blog ‘ Four Stages of Reimagining the Classroom’ , I presented the fictional Hammerhill Academy’s English Department and their journey to setting up a virtual learning provision. Since then it would be fair to say that Hammerhill – like all real schools across the U.K – would have gone through a rapidly transformational voyage of virtual learning discovery. The most […]
Read moreIt is almost impossible to read about the pandemic in the UK news without coming across some reference to concern regarding pupils’ mental health as a result of lockdown. Whether or not you believe the accuracy of the scale of the reported issue there is no doubt that, as with adults, young people have found […]
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If you had said a year ago that working from home was possible for a teacher, the idea would have been unthinkable. We can’t teach from home! We need to be with our pupils – seeing what they’re doing, motivating them, watching out for their behaviour and making sure they’re focused. How would we mark […]
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Many of the students in my examination classes are struggling to engage in online learning and need ways to boost their motivation. They are unsure of the merit of spending time learning new content and practicing examination questions, as they feel that their grades will be generated from data that has already been collected. It […]
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A game of snakes and ladders – that is how my 9-year-old son describes lockdown. This piqued my interest, and I was drawn away from my online virtual marking and gazed at him across the kitchen table to ask him to explain his metaphor. Zac is in Year 5 in an expanding multiphase academy, where […]
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We will soon know Ofqual final decisions about awarding grades for GCSE and A Level students this summer. Their consultation closed just over a week ago and has received a record number of responses, not only from educators but also from the young people whose grades are at stake. In our profession we are all […]
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