20 Minutes for Change

Welcome to a recording that might change the way that you think about neglected and abused children. Press the grey play button to hear it (and make sure that volume isn’t muted). The recording lasts 20 minutes.

IWB choice

If, like me, you use an interactive whiteboard (or IWB for the acronym obsessed) for much of the active content of lessons, then you’ll often find yourself feeling frustrated by the software developers behind such devices.
In the UK there are two varieties of IWB that have found favour in our secondary schools, abbreviated by teachers [...]

How to write a scheme of work

Whether its the renewed Secondary Framework or the revamped National Curriculum, I have found that much of my outreach time in recent weeks has centred on writing schemes of work. And yes, I do agree that they should properly be called Schemes of Learning or even Learning Schemes but we teachers are an odd lot [...]

The polyhedral curriculum (at last!)

As a boy I remember being captivated by Norton Juster’s story, The Phantom Tollbooth. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s an allegorical adventure that takes the main character of Milo on a journey to a fantasy land known as Dictionopolis, where all the world’s letters are grown in orchards. A rival kingdom, [...]

How to kill a love of reading

Just when we think that teachers have no standing in our communities, one of those delightful and flattering conversations occurs. You know the ones – they begin with a circuitous preamble (about the weather or a statement beginning with ‘I don’t know how you do it’) and then move towards the request for one’s opinion [...]

How to comment

“O brave new world,
That has such people in it!”
So says Miranda, alone on the island, save for her ageing father and two otherworldly creatures, both his slaves. Her sentiments are echoed by many of us getting to grips with the technology-rich world with its blogs and social networking sites and heaven knows what else!
It’s a [...]

Sir, you taught my mum

It’s finally happened: the moment I always knew would come but secretly dreaded.
Today I was blithely checking the books of a Year 7 class when a girl with bright red hair chirped the words, “Sir, you taught my mum.”
Like many of those profound moments in life, I didn’t see it coming. Sure the hair should [...]

Invisible differentiation

We’ve all heard that metaphor for swans – you know the one, bird serenely gliding on the surface hiding legs frantically paddling beneath. It’s an image that often comes to mind when I see the best teachers. Of course, make it look too easy and observers think it is; a trap that newly qualified teachers [...]

Mind the gap

Does your school’s information flow freely and to where it is required?
Okay, so it may not be the most immediate or glamorous task that I have ever undertaken, but this week I have been working on a way to link our school’s pattern of teacher observation to its performance management process. Just stifle that yawn!
Our [...]

If everyone did this…

This one is for fellow hot-beverage-a-holic, Judith (the woman who put the ‘tea’ in teacher!), and for all you folk out there that know ‘we should only boil as much water as we need but hey, that means I have to fill my kettle more frequently which means walking more often and…”
I heard about this [...]