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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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 September, upon joining a new school (and thus a new department) I decided to give myself a target: to make sure that departmental meetings were meaningful, insightful and valued. In short, I wanted to ensure that our Geography departmental meetings were more than just a discussion of admin or a list of discussion points […]
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If a week is a long time in politics, then 21 years must be an eternity. Yet I can still remember the furore when Stephen Byers – then education secretary – was interviewed on the radio about government plans to improve numeracy in school and got his calculations wrong. No journalists have tried to trip […]
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Written by Louise Pennington, Professional Development Leader for maths at Oxford University Press. The Multiplication Tables Check The Standards Testing Agency (STA) published the Multiplication Tables Check Assessment Framework in November last year. This document contains some key information about the Year 4 testing that will be statutory from June 2020: Voluntary pilot 10-28th June 2019 3 week window in June 2020 […]
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Over a year ago, in a previous post for this blog , I wrote about my focus of encouraging students of ALL ages to ‘Speak Like A Geographer’. This was in light of having previously restricted this focus on terminology to GCSE and A Level cohorts – and wondering why they didn’t manage to adjust to the required key words and […]
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‘Inspire Maths is future proofing both our children and our curriculum’ – Maths Teacher at St Thomas’ C of E Primary School St Thomas’ C of E Primary School became an Advocate School for Inspire Maths in Spring 2017. Assistant Headteacher Liam Noon, and Maths Subject Lead and Teacher Judith Myhill discuss the triumphs of implementing […]
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Is spelling really that important any more? Especially in the modern world where children are growing up using onscreen documents, emails, texts, all with autocorrect? Unfortunately, as Jerrold Zar illustrates in his poem ‘An Ode to a Spellchecker’, we can’t always trust the computer to spot the ‘Miss steaks aye kin knot sea’. The truth […]
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Vanessa Pittard shares expert advice on how to build firm foundations with mastery. I’d like to suggest that one of the benefits of mastery is the avoidance of misery. I’ll focus on primary maths, but what I write here applies as much at KS4/GCSE as to Key Stage 2. What’s the point of introducing mastery […]
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