Whilst doing some re-wiring of my music equipment the other day I put on a 12″ of the best of James Brown, and this track really stuck out to me, have a listen…
Whilst I’m not really into the rather un-PC sentiment of this song, it is undeniably a classic record. It is by a massive [...]
One of the things that I love about teaching is the fact that you are constantly learning, monitoring and improving your practice in response to the pupils you teach. However, I find the hectic pace of full time teaching can often make it quite difficult to make deep changes to pedagogy possible. When things are [...]
This is the second of my articles from the free #pgcetips ebook for trainee teachers.
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
Anthony Robbins
When I was completing my PGCE we had a number of guest lectures from an expert on synthetic phonics. The University, quite rightly, deemed this to be very [...]
This is the first of two articles I have written for Tim Handley’s #pgcetips project. The project involved crowdsourcing a book providing tips and advice for PGCE students, and can be downloaded for free from his site. Lots of the book was straightforward, practical advice for trainees, so I opted to write articles that were [...]
A couple of weeks before the end of term I received the results of the optional QCA tests which my class took at the end of May. I thought I was the last person to take too much notice of data produced by testing, but I actually found it really interesting analysing the results, and [...]
At secondary school I was one of the unusual breed of students who loved doing exams. Certainly there was the nerves and the stress, which was not something I enjoyed, but I also got an immense amount of satisfaction from sitting down in a really focused place and exploring my ideas in an extended way. [...]
It has, without a doubt, been a whirlwind of a year. I have to come out and say that if I thought the PGCE was hard work, I hadn’t seen anything compared to what I have faced this year. Now, I wouldn’t claim that to be a typical NQT experience, but then I have never [...]
Having had some interesting discussion on classroom space in my earlier post, I have been thinking about and discussing this subject a lot.
To me there is a real distinction between ‘forward thinking’ (for want of a better term ’21st Century’) environments, and what is simply non-standard use of classroom space.
To me, the thinking on innovative [...]
Tweet from @ianaddison: Tweet from ian addison(@ianaddison) Fave QCA example: We must do 6 weeks of email in year 3. 6 weeks!!! @charliedeane’s sch does it as part of her egypt topic! #ukedchat
I noticed this tweet this evening and it really got me thinking. The idea of doing email in a discrete unit [...]
My time as an NQT is coming to an end, and with it the extra afternoon off time table I get for my professional development. This time has been invaluable this year, sometimes just as a chance to sit back and reflect on my practice, sometimes to give me a bit more time to relieve [...]
