The UK Government announcement that a range of public service workers would be receiving a pay rise was inevitably received with mixed emotions: it didn’t include nurses or care workers, the timing considered poor given challenges in the private sector, and WORST OF ALL…it included teachers. Ok maybe not worst of all, but I had […]
Leadership in the Secondary School Science Department
I have found leadership in science departments a fascinating thing. Well, leadership in schools. Maybe it’s just leadership in general, but the majority of my exposure and experience has come in the education setting. I want to consider leadership in Science here, particularly as the Science Department is a slightly unusual beast where it brings […]
Questions and Questioning: What I learned #SASFE18
I was delighted to attend my third St Albans School Forum on Education, #SASFE18, on May 12th; quite possibly the best I have been to (perhaps because this year I was relieved of the pressure of running my own workshop!) Mikey Smyth has put together a truly joyful event. It has been kept intentionally small in […]
All-Through Form Tutor
I am in, I feel, a slightly unique position. I was with my first form group, tutor group, whatever you want to call it, for their entire seven years at the school. I started at the school – actually, I started teaching – at the same time as they started Year 7. By the time […]
Why don’t people join teaching?
Having written Why teach when you can be a banker?, one of the areas I focused on but lacked evidence for was the reasons why people don't go into teaching. It's clear from many articles, surveys, Twitter and so on why people leave the profession. However, I claimed in my article that the media has […]
Why teach when you can be a banker?
Teaching physics is a joy (I’m bias). But really, it’s bloody brilliant. Teaching is brilliant, physics is brilliant. Teaching physics is genuinely bloody brilliant. So why is there this struggle to recruit and retain physics teachers? If you have a physics degree, you can do an awful lot of other jobs that can pay you […]
Learning Relationships: What I learned #SASFE17
Today I attended the St Albans School Forum on Education 2017. The general theme of the conference was around Learning Relationships and all the keynotes and seminars were designed around this, with a fantastic wide range of approaches taken. I wanted to run through, very briefly, what I saw and what I took away. Mike […]
Automaticity
Mental operations that process information with little or no conscious awareness represent automaticity (Feldon, 2007). We come across these every day: driving a car, walking, speaking. The benefits to us is that these activities impose little or no cognitive load and our working memory is freed up to consider other things. I hope you can all recognise that this transfers to […]
Doing What Works
Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). Its appearance frequency on my Twitter timeline is ever-increasing, and whilst I could get a general grip on it from what people were saying – as it seemed rather like common sense – I did some reading today of various things, including an interview with its 1988 ‘creator’ John Sweller. I certainly see […]
Having Time to Chat
I have yet to blog about my change of school last September and I was reflecting on what has changed about what I do and how his has made me a better teacher or leader. Interestingly, one shift that my old school was making into this academic year was from a CPD programme focused on […]