Effective Papers For learning

I've written before about attitudes to risk in teaching , arguing that whilst  'risk-taking' in the classroom is often interpreted as a very positive trait, associated with inspiration, creativity, and excitement, we may well be better served by rejecting this view in favour of more careful approaches. We recently ran a staff meeting on the topic of managing the risks of giving feedback to low attaining students - I'll briefly outline the approach and share the resources below. Staff meeting feedback to vulnerable learners from Cherwelllearning Firstly came clarification what exactly we meant by 'vulnerable learners' in our context (essentially, individuals working at low levels of attainment and not currently making strong enough progress). We then overviewed our key messages about features of teaching that we think work best in the context of our school.  Having visited a fair range of other schools to investigate this issue, the question 'how do you...

There’s much I enjoy about my work: the banter with students and colleagues, the fact that you get paid actual money for spending time reading and talking about poetry, those lessons where you are teaching material so palpably interesting and worth-knowing that you really can’t think of many places you’d rather be.  There are other, less predictable dispensers of joy also - when students say funny stuff in essays (recent favourites: 1-  “...in Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Fruitility’...”, 2 - “...Romeo and Juliet’s ‘star-cross-eyed lovers’...”, 3 - the ‘shepherd’s pipe’, as symbolically employed by a soldier in Stevie Smith’s wonderfully bleak dystopian poem ‘Come on, Come Back’ replaced with a reference to his being in possession of a “shepherd’s pie”); the fact that, after an intense working week, Saturdays function as an oasis of ‘getting life back’: of messing around with the kids, of leisurely cups of tea, of the same weekly debate with my wife over whether access to watching Ma...