Category: #botw

Blog(s) of the week | 20th September 2015

Having spent some time with trainee teachers this last couple of weeks I’ve tried to steer them towards some interesting books that have helped me develop my understanding of teaching and learning. One book in particular that stands out is – Why students don’t like school by Daniel T Willingham. In the book Willingham neatly explains a theory of how we learn and makes the argument that the way schools tend to deliver their curriculum conflicts with the way people actually learn, which may be why schools (secondary in particular) end up trying to ‘get year 11 through’ with last minute strategies rather than addressing the actual problem – are students learning things from year 7 onwards or just covering them?

Just because teachers are teaching does not mean students are learning.

This may be hard to digest, challenging the status quo of how curriculums are traditionally designed. It eeks of the phrase “but this is how we’ve always done it…”

Blog 1: Why students don’t remember what they’ve learned by Joe Kirby

Blog 2: FACE it – a formula for learning by Tom Sherrington

#neverstoplearning

Blog(s) of the week | 13th September 2015

This weeks #BOTW is from Doug Lemov’s hugely successful Teach Like a Champion blog which explains and analyses lots of different teaching methods.

In particular these blogs look into the idea of using student work (both past and present) to model expectations and de-construct answers with students.

Blog 1 – Forget the rubric, use student work instead – In this blog Dylan Wiliam suggests that rubrics quite often mean little to students and that using student work to model expectations instead is far more powerful.

Blog 2 – ‘Show call’ technique – In this blog Doug has captured on video a teacher making great use of student work in the moment to model answers during a maths lesson. If you don’t have access to a visualiser in your classroom you could use the work of students from previous years to model and de-construct success criteria.

#neverstoplearning

Blog of the week | 9th September

With the start of new school year already underway, the first Blog of the week for this new academic year goes to Andy Tharby for his post Three ways to become a teacher again.

…the greatest teachers I have worked with seem magically to combine both – a wonderful depth of subject knowledge and an acute empathetic understanding of how school makes young people feel. That’s what I’m gunning for this year.