Talking to some colleagues at school recently we were reflecting how there were less opportunities than there had been in the past to get together with colleagues from across the school and share ideas around teaching and learning. So, rather than cursing the darkness, I lit a candle! Having spoken to the Assistant Head we […]
Term one in review.
A few notes, as much for myself as anything else, about the various units from the last term. Year 7 The lessons introducing the ideas and concepts of History are pretty much sorted now, although I need to look again at the assessment task. I’d like to replace the one shot written test with some […]
Rebooting Review – Term One
This year I’ve been trying to ‘reboot’ my teaching with a more project / inquiry based approach. This is another of those posts I’ve been meaning to write since the Oct half term, and in fact several draft existed, but I rejected either for being overly naval gazing or too glib. Now, with a little […]
Marking stickers
In our dept we’ve been looking at various ways of making peer and self assessment more meaningful and at the same time helping to speed up the time it takes us to mark students books at KS3. We’ve been experimenting with various forms of comment stickers, and I thought it would be useful to share […]
First half term review – Pt 2 – Their take
Over the course of this last week I asked several of my KS3 classes, and my AS class to write their report on me. This was set in the context of having just (or just being about to set) learning goals, or completing reports for them. We discussed why we did this, and agreed that […]
First half term review pt 1 – My take
Big changes this year – I’ve given up my TRL so my number of teaching hours has shot up, plus I’m no longer teaching SMART, so I’ve gone from seeing one year 7 class 8 times a fortnight, to teaching 6 out of 10 year 7 forms once a week! What went well Pretty […]
The big inter-table quiz challenge
When I went to teach my year 10s today (OCR Pilot GCSE History, second lesson) the lesson I had planned just didn’t strike me as having enough oomph about it, so I fished out something I used regularly a couple of years ago but haven’t for a while – the inter table quiz challenge! Having […]
And I’m feeling good
Our new unit this half term in SMART is ‘Community’ and we’re starting off looking at the class as a community. As part of that we’ve been talking about respecting other people’s feelings. Today we had a great lesson that created loads of buzz, so I thought I’d share it here. We started by talking […]