It’s with an element of retrospective frustration that I regard my early years of teaching. Keen to learn the trade and to teach as well as possible, I kept my head down, taught 5-6 lessons a day, planned and marked almost exclusively alone and all within the same four walls. I often passed up opportunities […]
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This week we’re delighted to welcome David Shanks, MFL consultant and lead practitioner at the Harris Federation, as our guest blogger – look out for part two next week… “It’s a great networking opportunity.” “I’m off to network over dinner.” “Sorry, I can’t tonight, I need to show face and network at an event.” When […]
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With the summer term well underway, you might be making plans to welcome September’s new Year 7 cohort to school on induction day. With this in mind, we asked former Leader of English (and parent) Jill Carter what advice she’d give to parents whose children are about to start secondary school for the first time. […]
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With the summer term well underway, you might be making plans to welcome September’s new Year 7 cohort to school on induction day. With this in mind, we asked former Leader of English (and parent) Jill Carter what advice she’d give to parents whose children are about to start secondary school for the first time. […]
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This month our guest blogger is Yvonne Kennedy. Yvonne has been exploring the interconnectivity of skills at KS3 and has some fascinating insights that we thought you might be interested in hearing… Last summer, I was asked to take part in a project on assessment at Key Stage 3 to consider what the Programme of […]
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In a previous blog post I outlined a very basic memory technique which works by creating a story out of to-be-remembered information. This makes the information more memorable than recalling a list of unrelated words and the technique itself requires no real groundwork, after all, you are just making up a story. Whilst impressive results […]
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When I visited a local school recently I was talking to Martin Heeley who has been working on and developing some ideas I gave him during the course. As we have a focus on the blog about what to keep of the ‘old ways’ and what technology we can harness cheaply or even free to […]
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I am able to commit a huge amount of information to memory in a very short space of time. I can memorise the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 2 minutes, a list of 240 random words within a 15-minute time limit and, given an hour, I can memorise the […]
Read moreNow that we at last have news about the new specifications for teaching from September, I have turned my attention to analysing what is actually new and what we as teachers should focus on and develop. The researchers at the University of York often post thought provoking articles, and as I was thinking about these new […]
Read moreIt was so good to be present at Language World when Dr Geoff Brammall was honoured as an ALL fellow. He has worked tirelessly for the language community and I respect him so much. Carol Hughes nominated him and asked us why what we thought about this. Carol has written this post on questions and […]
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