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
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
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 […]
Recruiting for shortage subjects – new kid on the block?
I recently had a great conversation with Chris Rose from Future Teaching Scholars, an initiative from the Department for Education that’s being run by the Education Development Trust. They are doing something new and exciting with recruiting Physics and Maths teachers: part-funding students through their undergraduate Physics- or Maths-related degrees, with efforts to have these […]
My Staffrm Highlights – Student Feedback, Teacher Responsibility, Homework and Scrabble
Having two blogs is a bit of a nightmare at times. I tend to use Cupofteaching for anything longer and my Staffrm blog for those shorter pieces. Most of mine tend to be shorter, so I keep drifting towards Staffrm. Not that I blog very often. Anyway, here is the low down on my Staffrm blogging in condensed form – […]
Mail merge: life saver? Personalised feedback for students
I wrote an article on my Staffrm Blog about how I use Mail Merge. I wanted to share that here too. The picture above shows an extra from one of the feedback sheets, automatically populated using Mail Merge to give each student individualised feedback on an assessment, along with their target and historical grades. Here’s the rest […]
The Big Questions – G494 and G495
Every year my A2 students prove themselves to be amazing mathematicians. They struggle with the written aspect, though. I don’t have a perfect solution, but I did draw up ‘The Big Questions’ about G494 and G495. We’ve got them in a random generator and we tackle 2 or 3 each lesson. The general order of […]
TLAB15 ‘All in the Mind’
On Saturday 21st March, Berkhamsted School – and particularly the ever enthusiastic @nickdennis – hosted the third Teaching, Learning and Assessment Conference Berkhamsted (TLAB). It was another wonderful conference with a delectable range of talent on show and I was delighted to be able to attend for a third year running. I wanted to outline a few […]
Scrabble!
I was recently invited to a new platform called staffrm (they are also on Twitter as @staffrm), where the blog posts have a limit of 500 words. It’s great for little snapshots of good practice or reflection and is well worth having a look at. You can follow others to keep up with their posts. It’s nothing really new, but […]
It is #timetoembed
Are there any plans that you had at the start of the year that haven’t yet come to fruition because you’ve been sidetracked? *puts hand up* Are there plans that have come out of events in the first term that you’ve yet to really even think about? *puts hand up* The first term has been totally […]