How do you feel today?

Working at a school this Friday, I came across a resource that I really liked but I could see that, with a few tweaks, it could be even more useful. So, I’ve made my own version of it.

Each ‘emoticon’ has beneath it a strip of five boxes that could indicate intensity or that could be [...]

Exploring deductive reading

This is a resource that is part of the Teaching Inference and Deduction materials that I presented at our English Conference recently. It’s function is to serve as a thinking chart during an activity that simulates the fact that able readers frequently predict and reflect on reasonable reading conclusions.

At the conference I used a (very) [...]

Tracking Characters

Here’s one of my resources from the recent Conference (see previous post). This is an exercise that helps students to explore one of the skills of reading to deduce: how able readers can track multiple characters in a text.
The important element in using this piece of work with a group is not to focus on [...]

Talking Maths (and English)

This week, among other things, I was asked to kick-off a development session on talk. The brief was straightforward enough – a bit of a background on the importance of talk to learning and then outline one strategy for supporting extended talk in the classroom. Straightforward indeed, but then, as I began pulling together my [...]

Extending answers

The blog finally gets audio!
I thought I’d share a little piece of my work with Year 10 English today. This group is described on the timetable as a ‘less-able, less-motivated group’ of students with low abilities. Some teachers might even refer to the class dismissively as a ‘bottom set’. I hate the term myself. To [...]

Buoyant in a sea of ideas

On Friday it was my privilege to be challenged by the ideas of Dr. Barry Hymer. Our pyramid of schools had invited Dr Hymer to share ideas on creating an ethos of enquiry-led learning. To my shame, I had not encountered his ideas before nor those of his colleagues working in the field of philosophy [...]

Paperchains of love

Carol Ann Duffy’s psychologically rich poem, Havisham, prompted me to develop a new starter this week. Students were given a strip of paper which I made by cutting an A3 sheet into several strips lengthwise. They were asked to write the word ‘love’ at one end and then to devise ‘an emotional scale’. This meant [...]

Tessellate to learn

I have to thank Mary Walker for this one. She alerted me to a freeware program that has huge potential for developing learning activities. It goes by the not-so-catchy name of Formulator Tarsia and is developed by the Hermitech Laboratory of Mathematical and Modeling (sic) Software. A direct download link to the program can be [...]

Priorities chart – thinking and reflection

This post is the last in a quick series on ‘ten tools for thinking and reflection’.
Tool ten
The last tool for thinking and reflection is this rather interesting form – the priorities chart. Here students are asked to devise a series of actions (for a character or themselves) and to place them on the two axes [...]

SWOT chart – thinking and reflection

This post is the next in a quick series on ‘ten tools for thinking and reflection’.
Tool Nine
Can there be anyone who has taken part in any form of professional training and not come across this chart?
The SWOT analysis promotes a more generalised form of reflection on a situation or state of being. It’s a little [...]