By Gemma Bott At last the final half term of the year has arrived. The time of year when you can get caught up with all of those jobs you’ve been putting off or just not had time to do. For secondary school teachers, exam classes have left, hopefully leaving extra PPA time in the […]
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The sun is shining and the holidays are just around the corner, so what better excuse to roll out a list of recommended reads to see you through the summer. Here’s my pick of the top five reads for ten to thirteen-year-olds. Scavengers by Darren Simpson If you like stories where things aren’t quite what they […]
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Andy Chandler-Grevatt Back to School. The end of the summer break and the new term. New students, new timetable, new you? What will you do differently this school year? An often neglected part of our ambitions, planning and targets is looking after ourselves. How are you going to look after yourself this year? Teachers are […]
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Professor Chris Kyriacou I have spent more than 30 years teaching about and doing research on what constitutes ‘effective’ teaching. Over the years I have become more and more convinced that the key to being a successful teacher, both in terms of the quality of learning you promote, and in terms of maintaining your own […]
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In my first blog I wrote about how my headteacher had wanted to create a ‘culture of reading’ at my school. This time last year, in quiet moments, I worried that it would be impossible. I forgot that creating cultures is something teachers do all the time. Whether it be a culture of neatly presented […]
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It is a strange time of year if you teach in FE, a Sixth Form or have A-Level classes on your timetable. Second year students have sat their exams, and have flown the nest. Many of them you will miss in some way; the occasional one evokes Greg Davies’s speech to his Sixth Formers in […]
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This is the message at the heart of National Writing Day which is being celebrated on the 26th June. Over the last year we’ve been interviewing authors including Christopher Edge, Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Gill Lewis. One of the regular questions we ask is their tips for aspiring writers. Here are some of their thoughts: […]
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Every year thousands of young people from across the UK pick up their pens to enter BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words competition. As part of ongoing language and lexical research, the Oxford Children’s Dictionaries & Children’s Language Data team at Oxford University Press has analysed almost 113,000 short stories submitted to the competition for the […]
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I am not sure about you, but I am constantly curious about how plays get their titles, as some appear to be quite random; think of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or A Streetcar Named Desire or Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. Have your students ever asked you why Miller called his play […]
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Summer exams are almost here. It is a time for cautious optimism, but also a little teacher anxiety, as we will our pupils on to succeed. Worried questions race through our minds: what if they don’t understand the question? What if a word in the question trips them up? What if they give up? Each […]
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