When I started teaching, some of the lessons I put the most time into were revision lessons. Cards, podcasts, notes, I wrote them all. While I’m aware that there a few places (particularly in the sixth form) that perhaps I still need to provide better quality revision notes, these days revision lessons are both far […]
Ten things #10 – Embrace Failure
This is the final of ten posts that develop some of the ideas I mentioned in my presentation at TMClevedon — This still sounds wrong somehow, doesn’t it – surely we should be encouraging success in our schools, not failure? Well, yes…. But, if we praise success above all else we can help develop a […]
Ten things #9 – Project Based Learning
This is the ninth of ten posts that build on my talk at TMClevedon last month — I’ve written before about Project Based Learning and the lightbulb that went on in my head when I first read about it. Like any idea it’s easy to do badly, and as David Didau pointed out, we must […]
Ten things #8 – No hands up
This is the eighth of the ‘ten things’ I discussed in my talk at TMClevedon — This was one I’d read about but wasn’t much taken with, until I saw the Classroom Experiment. And what I saw in those classrooms, with one or two students dominating, suddenly looked dangerously like my classroom. So, I’m going back […]
Ten things #7 – Stop giving grades
This is the seventh of the ‘ten things’ I discussed in my talk at TMClevedon —- One of the most shocking things for me from the ‘Inside the Black Box’ research was the impact that adding a grade to a piece of work had. Not only did it lead to 0% increase, it also reduced the […]
Ten things #6 – Success Criteria
This is the sixth of the ‘ten things’ I discussed in my talk at TMClevedon — Part of the effective feedback loop means that not only do students know what they’re doing well / not so well, but where they are in terms of their learning and how they can take the next step. One of […]
Ten things #5 – Collaboration
This is the fifth of the ‘ten things’ I discussed in my talk at TMClevedon — One of the ways in which technology allows us to do genuinely different things (as opposed to a digital version of the same thing) is in the way that we can collaborate. If you ask my Mum the best […]