Our last episode attracted some really interesting feedback, so we've used that to cue us into this week's discussion. After setting out our stall last week with apocalyptic statistics about boys' education - we're now embarking on our mission to explore what we do,...
An intrepid group of educators are headed off to Brighton to run a teachmeet on the fringes of the Labour Party conference, here is part of my contribution to the event - I'll upload the full speech after the event. The presentations in full will all be available on...
He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata. (What is the most important thing? It is people, it is people, it is people.) I start a new year in a new role, Head of Department for English. As part of my application process for the position, I was asked to...
This month's #blogsync calls for "an example of a great classroom explanation". I must admit that I have thought twice about the following contribution as there's a sense that it really does put me in the firing line - and with a recent damning judgement by an...
Homework is one of the most fraught areas of secondary teaching. We know it's important, its impact is visible and its routines don't offend common sense. Yet in the daily reality of the classroom homework is so often reduced to an after-thought, a misery and a...
This is the information that accompanied my two presentations to Pedagoo London on 2 March 2013. The event was a grass-roots un-conference run by teachers for our own professional development. It brought together a group of about 200 practitioners from all over the...
In this presentation, delivered live to Teachmeet BETT 2013, I introduced the intentions behind the development of EDUTRONIC and then provide evidence, in the form of a snapshot of a single interaction with a Year 8 Student, Henry via his online English journal
Teaching writing is one of the greatest joys and challenges of the English domain. Along the way, you encounter, acquire and discard many approaches and strategies - but there are always some that stick. Unlike the teaching of reading, for which I entered the teaching...
Albert Einstein defined insanity as: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet, inescapably, the English education system ignores this logic, and repeats the same tired strategies and the same ill-informed notions in and out of the...