As the summer holidays draw to an end, I’m starting to think about adjusting back to a life of to-do lists. As a teacher, form tutor and Head of Department, being organised has always been critical for me. There is so many plates to spin as a teacher that I don’t think I could survive […]
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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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As History teachers, we are just about to embark on ‘exam madness’ season. We have precious little time left with our exam classes. We will be prepping and delivering extra revision sessions on top of completing all of the other tasks that are part and parcel of our profession. So it is no surprise that […]
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As you look at your partner, do you ever think that their brain is vacuous? Well, as I was preparing for a KS3 science lecture about Cryogenic Engineering and its applications, that is exactly what I was left thinking as I dropped in an MRI scan of my partner’s brain into the presentation! To excite […]
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So, horror of all horrors, the dishwasher broke! And to make matters worse it was after a dinner party and we had used every plate, bowl, fork and knife in the place! So, the hunt was on for a new dishwasher and in this I learnt some new Chemistry and am now incorporating my dishwasher […]
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Last summer, I was asked to take part in a project on assessment at Key Stage 3 to consider what the Programme of Study for languages might mean for the design of new assessments in the classroom. Reviewing this document, I was reminded of the emphasis on the interconnectivity of the four skills of speaking, […]
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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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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 […]
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At Edtech startup pitches, you often hear the phrase “we’re disrupting education”. But technology is not helpful when its main aim is to replace the teacher. Not only does that needlessly discard very valuable pedagogical knowledge, but students would also miss out on the special human-to-human skills teachers have when it comes to understanding them […]
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