To those who craft – new year resolutions?
The new year awaits us all, and no new resolutions are needed for me. Be healthy, read more, love...
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Category: Practical Teaching
The Purpose of Keeping a Blog: Reflections on 15 Years of Blogging
As someone who has curated blog for over fifteen years, without a shred of advertising to keep it going, I have reflected on the purpose of keeping my blog and why I continue to write. I wanted to share my thoughts on the...
Read MoreThe Privilege of Teaching Internationally: Exploring the Pros and Cons
I signed up to the ‘UK Teaching’ subreddit recently to read a self-selecting group focus on the negatives of teaching. As part of my recent reflection about working as a classroom teacher (rather than a non-classroom...
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Throwback – Thoughts on preparing lessons on a Sunday Evening in 2012
Preparing a lesson Normally I prepare my lessons after marking so that my planning responds to my...
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fifteen Useful Ways I’ve Got Better Over the Past five Years
As I begin a new job I am inclined to reflect on some of the ways I think my practice has got...
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RAFT – A Model for Transition for Year 13 Students
1. What did transition look like for you when you had moved from highschool to uni/ last country...
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Lesson Plan Example iGCSE Literature – Cambridge 04575
The act of planning a single lesson plan for review is a necessary but problematic element of teaching. Geoff Petty, an educationalist whose consequentialist approach influences contemporary thought, says expert teachers do not necessary focus their planning on one-off lessons, but rather on the ‘bigger picture’. That bigger picture can include ideas for outside the class, adult-needs models of education, wider elements of cultural capital, and even just the assessment that the students are building towards.
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Some issues of the focus on close-analysis of literature – iGCSE and IB. How we do things differently?
I think we’ve seen some students really lack motivation to tackle literature. It’s bigger than one classroom, and maybe even in one school. Kierkegaard bemoaned how the humanities were losing their true purpose (posing questions about how to lead a better life), and Rosenblatt believes the same, too.
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Some reflections of updating my time management – February 2013
Any job worthy of endeavour requires the worker to sovereign over their time. There aren’t many tasks in people-jobs that can simply be processed to completion. Time needs to be allocated, and life needs to roll on.
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What books should students read for A-Levels/IB or Undergraduate?
Students seeking success in literature should aim to read beyond the limits of the classroom. Each of these books have proved very useful for both my students and me in teaching and reading literature at the higher levels.
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