What bores me?
What bores you? Long-windedness Egocentricity Idleness Fickle fashion Sauceless pasta Overlong discordant improvised music solos Vanity Some of Thomas Hardy Endless grey sky Snobbery Whingeing Especially about my own ailments…
How to fail at everything in life
I saw this hand-written sign that someone had photographed and posted on Facebook recently. It said: Three ways to fail at everything in life 1. Blame all your problems on…
Don’t ask questions of individual students during whole-class questioning
What’s the point of asking individual students questions in front of the whole class? I can’t see one, unless it’s to grab an inattentive student’s attention - that is fine,…
Teacher workload
There are good reasons for making strenuous efforts to reduce teacher workload. Here are some: It is too heavy. This is my thirty-third year in education and although I don’t…
Are ‘pre-starters’ a good thing?
What if classroom-based lessons typically began with a pre-starter activity for students to do? Would that be a good thing, a bad thing, or just unnecessary? This blog explains what…
The problem with … retrieval practice
Retrieval practice – done well - is an almost magical thing. After teachers help learners to get new information ‘in there’, it’s the most important thing we can do to…
Rest
Some people think that if they rest, it’s a sign of weakness, or laziness, or failure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rest is essential, a kind of elixir…
How to improve a school?
… is, for school leaders, and no doubt others, an ever-present brain teaser. What makes school improvement hard is that there are so many variables that can affect a school’s…
How should we treat people?
If you had to choose only three of these randomly selected adverbs below, and rank them 1,2,3 in importance for how you believe we should treat each other in the…
The problem with … ‘collaborative learning’
It is essential that people collaborate - of course it is - and providing young people with plenty of opportunities to collaborate at school through, for example, organising group work…