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Reading for School
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Assessment For Learning – Warnock or Guardiola? A review of Dylan Wiliam’s ‘Embedding Assessment for Learning’
Part of my summer reading has been a review of Dylan Wiliam’s ‘Embedding Assessment for Learning’ (AfL). Despite AfL’s popularity over the past 20 years, Wiliams and Black criticise how errant data managers misadministrate it. Reading this book would help such...
Thoughts about Deans for Impact – First Book from BSM
To start my new school I have read a dozen books on pedagogy. Here are some thoughts on the first. Deans for Impact attempts to use evidenced-based teaching into the classroom for pragmatic and profound impact. Evidenced-based teaching seems to be a no-brainer - do...
Thoughts about Duffy from Rees-Jones’ Book ‘Writers and Their Work’
Yesterday I read about 50 pages of Rees-Jones' book of Duffy's work. Despite Duffy's A-Level presence, she lacks background material. This book is fairly dense. These thoughts are those that remain: Surrealism - Duffy employs surrealism to explore ideas that do not...
Guest Post – An English Literature Workshop with Myself, Age 14
Today's post is an Oxbridge student's reflection on what she would say to her 14-year-old self. It captures the earnest position of the profound thinker in British culture. Read more of Shreya Manna's wonderful writing at https://paradiseprose.com/ MISS MANNA: [forced...
Improving Inference as an English Teacher
Teaching students how to read is not really the remit of the secondary classroom teacher. It is a tremendously difficult task that ideally requires several MA-level qualifications and one-to-one time with students. It is a SENCO-level role that is very rarely funded...
Using Total War as an ECA: Decisive Battles in History and Exploring Literary Context
Exciting students in history opens them to wider cultural trends. In Beijing I ran, with the able and smart Welshman Aidan Jones, a Time Commanders ECA using the Total War series. Click here to visit the Time Commanders Website for an Example of this ECA
Being a Lifelong Learner – Thoughts about Teaching After 15 Years (and why most teachers don’t improve after 3-5 years)
An Easter of reading raises some old truisms: That most teachers do not 'improve' after 3-5 years. That most ineffective teachers 'catch up' to expert teachers after 10 years or so. That these statements are made in terms of impact on external performance measures....
Podcast Libraries – Educating Yourself beyond a Curriculum
Teaching students for fifteen years has allowed me to recognise some of the deficiencies of my early education. One choice every teenager needs to make in school is whether to follow a vocational or academic route. It is an impossible choice. I would define the...
Thoughts about the Purpose of IB: Reprioritising Reader-Response in Literature
English teaching's essential purpose in our politicised times is to make students culturally critical. I feel that this particularly suits the IB's international element, and the need to perhaps reframe 'international' mindedness as 'intercultural' mindedness (and not...
The Vegetarian Book Review: Planting Desire and Rooting Order?
The Vegetarian is a dark book that has sat with me for a few weeks now. Conventionally about the descent of a Korean woman into self-harm and mental illness via her change to a vegetarian lifestyle, it defies easy definition. Instead, I think it seeks to challenge...