A quick add-on to yesterday’s post about timely interventions during student-led projects. It’s worth mentioning that some of my colleagues have been experimenting with what Paul Ginnis calls ‘observer servers’, but one what one of the SMART team christened ‘Mini-Nick and Margaret’ – students who leave their groups and whose job it is to go […]
“Secondary children universally miss primary school”. Really?!?
This morning I saw this tweet from John Sutton pop up as my year 7 SMART class were sitting down for their register Now, I have a huge amount of respect for Stephen Heppell, but I suspect he may have overstated his case here. So I checked! I asked both my year 7 class, and […]
The role of mentoring / coaching
Our year 7 SMART classes have just finished their very successful SMARTprentice project in which each form was split into two groups, and each of the 22 groups ran a small business for two weeks. All the profits will be donated to a charity of the groups choosing. I’ll come back and fill in some […]
You Tube help
A quick question for you. We’ve been making growing use of videos posted to You Tube in classrooms, and many I’d like to share with students via our VLE (there’s far more good stuff out there than we’ve got time for). I’m wondering what the best way of going about this is… I don’t particularly […]
Handing it over : Part 2 (not quite so sucessful!)
Yesterday I wrote about my plans for handing some control of the curriculum in my year 9 History classes to the students and the first of three activities, the personal project on any 20th century topic. Today, I’m going to look at the second activity which didn’t work quite as well! In our revised schemes […]
Handing it over – Part 1 (success)
In this and the next blog post I’m going to be looking at the first two of my three attempts this year to hand over some control of the curriculum to my students. Why? One of the things that seem to be increasingly important both with a skills focussed curriculum and with the massive growth […]