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...

I'm currently involved in planning a full INSET day for the first day back in January, and would appreciate any feedback on our thinking at this stage. General attitudes towards INSET expressed online would suggest that teacher experiences are patchy at best, and I'm very aware of our responsibility in school to get this stuff as good as it can be. Partly, I'm writing this just to get my own thoughts clear; partly to ask any teachers with the time or inclination to comment whether this sounds like a decent use of time. I'd be particularly interested to know if there are any glaring omissions in the proposed content - what's missing? Does it seem like content which would be helpful for all subjects, or is more domain-specific content required? If this was emailed round as a plan at your school, what would be your response? Focus Our focus for this day is on teaching disadvantaged students. Whilst being a generally high performing school, we have a sizeable gap in the...

I’m currently planning an INSET session for September based around the notion of expertise in teaching and learning. My plan is simple - a presentation about what we mean when we talk about expertise in the context of being a teacher, before giving faculty groups time to reflect on what expertise looks like in their own contexts - what would they prioritise or reject from the suggestions below, and what would they add? Here then is my first rambling attempt at an outline structure - I’d welcome any comments from the twitter-sphere for improvement. What is expertise? I’ll start by suggesting a definition of expertise based on having the ability to quickly see the underlying structures of whatever domain the expertise resides. An expert in baroque music then, would be characterised by their capacity to listen to a piece and quickly identify elements of form or style that are typical or otherwise of the genre; they’d be able to identify and consider what is conventional or typical, and w...

Final of this trio of presentations - a very Willingham-y, and probably quite 'you had to be there' Year 11 revision evening. Might be some bits of interest if you are doing one yourself.

So - another quick presentation - this time on modelling, the focus on which over the last 4 years has hugely improved the clarity, accessibility and challenge of our lessons. At the heart of teaching - taking care and paying attention to the way that we model key skills and content.

Had a great time at TLAB again this year - another really high quality event. I spoke about trying to create the conditions in school which help teachers learn, focusing on aspects such as domain-specific TLCs, the importance of conscious restriction of focus, and being vigilant to 'playpumps' - initiatives which look like they are going to be great, but don't turn out to be. A key theme of my talk was about the difficulties that teachers have finding enough time and headspace for reflection, alongside some ways of trying to manage this as leaders. Would blog more but marking calls (see last slide...).