Posts

Lesson planning

Image
 This blog is response to a request from a colleague who is new to teaching - how do you cope with lesson planning?! For me, this is my favourite part of the job. I love planning lessons as it is the one time I get to be creative rather than encouraging creativity in others. But I still get into the position of overwhelm very easily, and that is with a lot of years of teaching. There are so many elements to a good lesson, that it’s hard to codify exactly what you should do, and it is certainly a skill you develop over time. Your lesson plans become reflective of you as a teacher, but it is pure experience that gets you to that point. So what follows is designed to be a starting point, not a definitive list. Step 1: What is the purpose of this lesson? This has to be the key starting point. It is easy to get swept up in great ideas that will be fun and engaging to do, but it they don’t actually support the things they need to learn then you are entertaining and not teaching!  So start wi
Post a Comment
Read more

Preparing for the future and how to say no!

It can be really helpful at times to think about your boundaries and plan ahead for when you will need to put these in place. Doing it when you’re feeling calm and seeing the big picture can allow you to make good decisions and have strategies ready for when they are needed. There are times when you’re going to need to dig deep into your energy reserves and really plough on, but there are also times when to not push yourself over the edge, you need to say the word no.  Each of us is different and will have ways of going about this. The advice in here is what I have found works for me and my personality. I will say that I do not say the word ‘no’ as a default position. In fact, I often find myself saying yes, even when inconvenient. As a result though, when I do say no, or ask for help myself, I often have a willing team around me who will go that extra mile.  Planning ahead  Get yourself a wall planner and put in all your dates for the academic year - your parents evenings, data drops,
Post a Comment
Read more

The 7 steps to teacher happiness - a summary of Mark Goodwin's talk

Teacher Happiness I have been very fortunate over the last few weeks to go to a number of talks. From ResearchEd in Maidstone, to Festival of Metacognition in Birmingham and then this week to the Festival of Education at Wellington College. I'm really luck that my school recognise how important training is for me to stay motivated and enthused in my teaching, and how much they are willing to support that. (To be fair I got free tickets for both the festivals in Birmingham and Wellington, which I think helped my case a little!) Over the next few weeks I'm going to be ruminating on what I've learnt, and how I can put this into action in my lessons. Also how I share what I have learnt with my colleagues. But to start with I want to write about a talk I went to yesterday - 'The 7 Habits of the Happiest Teachers I know'.  I decided that this next academic year I'm not only going to have a focus on improving my practice in the classroom, but also to improving my own w
Post a Comment
Read more

What’s the ‘meta’?

  Lots of words are used to explain theories of education, and in fact the language is often the part that puts teachers off. Our time is valuable and for many the idea of doing lots of reading and research beyond all the planning, marking and data analysis we have to do is just a no. However, understanding how we can help our students become independent learners is obviously a workload win!  ‘Metacognition’ is a term often used in school and in teaching advice at the moment. It is often described as ‘thinking about your thinking’ which is not a particularly helpful description for some of us. Understanding its difference to other areas of our teaching can help us plan better lessons.  Research shows that transferable successful independent learning involves three key processes: Cognition Metacognition  Motivation We have all of these things in our tool set at my school, it’s just being clear which tool is for which and therefore how we can utilise them together to help our students le
Post a Comment
Read more

The cheats guide to homework marking part 1 - Thumbnails

  Context At my school we set weekly homework tasks in one of my subjects and fortnightly in the other at KS3. Homework is weekly at KS4. Teaching just over 400 students a week I needed to come up with some cheats else I would never have time for anything other than homework! I would love to take credit for these cheats, but they’ve evolved from conversations with many other teachers over the years.   For context I’m in a school where every student has a chrome book and we use google classroom to set homework’s. Thumbnails On google classroom you can get an overview of all students work on an assignment with small pictures of each assignment. If you can design tasks that allow you to see from a small picture that they have both completed their homework, and got the right idea you’re on to a winner!  This can work many ways: 1. Coloured boxes: get them to drag and drop the boxes into the right places. At a glance you can check they have a) moved, and b) got the right colour order. For e
Post a Comment
Read more

It's ok to stop...

When I started this blog I was determined to help others with their workload. Over the years I had found lots of hacks that allowed me to cope with being a full time teacher with a predominantly KS3 timetable across two departments, teaching on average about 400 students a week, as well as being a Mum. I hope I have never given the impression that I'm an expert in this field, but it is one that interests me after meeting my limit a few years ago as I wrote in a recent post you can read here. Yet I still get to the point where teaching becomes too much. I reached this at the end of last term. Having got through a term with an Ofsted visit both at my own school and my husbands, and put on a fundraising concert for our new building, plus the usual workload of teaching, I hit the wall again. This time, embarrassingly, collapsing on the floor of the staffroom where I was found 15 minutes later having a panic attack because I did not understand what was happening to my body and spent the
Post a Comment
Read more

Using 'Wakelet' to organise online resources

Image
Context  I am constantly collecting up resources. I get really passionate when I find something that will help me teach, and often get inspired to write entire new schemes of work from what I find. But often I find things at times that are not convenient. I have one of those brains that loses things (including the plot) very quickly, and therefore there is no guarantee I will ever remember that gem of a resource again unless I find a strategy to help me remember.  For a long time I created a 'resources' folder in my email inbox and placed things in there. But I could count the number of times I actually opened that folder on one hand. I'd go in and there would a wide range of different topics, I'd be confused by the subject lines that made perfect sense at the time (or had none because I was in too much of a rush at that moment - the 'I'll sort it later' mindset). I'd feel so overwhelmed that I'd rather start google searching again, not being able to
Post a Comment
Read more