Cup of Teaching

Year: 2017

  • All-Through Form Tutor

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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?

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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?

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    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…

  • Is my feedback working?

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    All too often students responding to feedback is ineffective. It is worth considering: is my feedback working? At the end of a topic my class will typically do some form of short test. As you mark a test paper you quickly come to realise which questions students are performing well on and which ones they are not:…

  • So much is such a waste of time

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    I have just read David Didau‘s article on why mini-plenaries are such a waste of time and it struck a bit of a chord. Of course they are, and there’s so much more that is a real waste of time; whether it’s us wasting students’ time or our own time being wasted. You hear so many…

  • Assuring Quality

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    by

    Drew Thomson-Jones
    in

    In many schools, scrutiny has become a term that everyone is now very familiar with. This will often take the form of looking through student books, wandering through lessons, reviewing lesson planning, and carrying out student surveys. These are applied in a variety of different ways and usually carried out by the Senior Leadership Team or a Head…