Appraisal: down but maybe not quite out!

So, it’s that time of the school year when teachers dust off their performance management paperwork, remind themselves of the targets set 12 months previously, and then cobble together some ‘evidence’ to meet them. In some schools this is a routine, perfunctory process, a bit time consuming and inconvenient, but nevertheless relatively benign; in others,

Collaborative teaching cycles: from scrutinising learning to understanding learning

I’m not really a big fan of the practice of book scrutiny. What is book scrutiny? Book scrutiny usually involves a head of department or key stage co-ordinator collecting a sample of students’ books from across the teachers of a year group and evaluating the quality of student progress against some form of rubric or

Holding your nerve – the missing element of great teaching?

It occurred to me this week just how much good teaching is dependent on holding your nerve – how difficult it can be at times to stick to your guns when you have to contend with so many daily pressures. I don’t mean the undue external pressures, which often force teachers to compromise their practice:

Teaching problems and the problems of teaching them – lesson #1

   ‘Do you think they’re true, all those things they say about B – Mr Arthur?’   ‘What things?’   I told her.   ‘That is three-fourths coloured folks and one-fourth Stephanie Crawford,’ said Miss Maudie grimly.                                    

Worksheet 2.0: learning concepts, deliberate practice and desirable difficulty

If you had told me a few years ago I would be extoling the virtues of worksheets via the public medium of a blog post, I would have thought you were barking mad. Early in my teaching I had been encouraged to see worksheets as a bit of a remnant from the teaching Dark Ages