Over the past year, I have found great solace in trying to improve my bass playing, mainly as a distraction from the stresses of education and as a way of stabilising my mental health. As the worst member of the greatest (cough) staff band around – The Lines – I have always tried to bring …
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BEWARE THE ZOMBIE TEACHER!
After the financial crisis of 2008, a phenomenon emerged in the business world that has continued to this day – the ‘zombie’ business. This is a business that staggers along, earning enough money to cover its debt but not enough to pay it off. It covers daily expenses but doesn’t make enough to invest in …
UNDER PRESSURE – The legacy of CAGs.
‘Have a fun INSET day everyone. What are you doing?’ ‘Revising’ ‘Have a lovely weekend everyone. What are you all up to?’ ‘Revising’ ‘Anybody up to anything fun this evening?’ ‘Revising’ Revising, revising, revising. That’s what Y13 students tell me all the time now. It didn’t use to be like this. They’d tell me about …
WHAT ARE YOU REBELLING AGAINST? WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?
If you look around at the moment, the world seems an angry place. There has been a fair bit of writing on it and many commentators think it explains why Brexit occurred and why Donald Trump was elected in America. If you spend any time on Twitter or Facebook (in public forums), you will see …
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BEFORE ROSENSHINE, LET’S TALK ROSENTHAL
In 1963, after 6 years of teaching History, Barak Rosenshine went off to pursue his Ph.D. in Education at Stanford University. That was the start of the journey that would eventually make Rosenshine a household name in the world of education, as he eventually developed what would be known as the ‘Principles of Instruction’. There …
REBEL IDEAS IN EDUCATION
Recently I have been reading Matthew Syed’s ‘Rebel Ideas’ and his books are always rather thought provoking from an educational perspective. Previously he has written ‘Bounce’ that looked at Carol Dweck’s ‘growth mindset’ theory and ‘Black Box Thinking’ that leaned very hard on ‘The Checklist Manifesto’ by Atul Gawande, which inspired the book for schools …
HUNTING BLACK SWANS
Educational debates on Twitter are always wild affairs. It’s interesting in this brand new world of evidence in education, a lot of debate still comes from lived experience. This seems fair enough because if you have seen something or dealt with something that has changed your perspective on an issue, you hold that to be …
WILD CARDS FOR SCHOOLS – Questions that get you thinking…
I love charity shopping and I’m always looking for the ‘diamond in the rough’. Normally I buy books or clothing but every now and then you find something that piques your interest. You wonder what it is doing in a charity shop and then snap it up to contemplate later. Recently I came across a …
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The magic of teaching…
In my bedroom as a teenager, alongside pictures of pop stars like Wendy James and Whitney Houston, I used to have a postcard of William Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’ on my wall. I think I picked it up at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge on a school trip. I was slightly mesmerised by Blake’s artwork …
IF YOU HAVEN’T GOT SOCKS…
A point I’ve been making continually in my blogs is that there are huge structural issues that impact how well students do in school and I think the educational community should get more involved politically at trying to change them. This can be seen in the data related to poverty and how harmful it is …
On Teaching... 