So you’ve kept Joe, or Leah, or Sam back after a lesson where they pushed you to the point where you had to issue a detention. You didn’t engage in discussion about it in the lesson, but now is the time. This is the point at which you have an opportunity a) to confirm that […]
So you’ve kept Joe, or Leah, or Sam back after a lesson where they pushed you to the point where you had to issue a detention. You didn’t engage in discussion about it in the lesson, but now is the time. This is the point at which you have an opportunity a) to confirm that […]
So it’s the summer holidays and top of my to-do list is getting this weary old body back into shape. What shape, I’m not sure. It brings to mind that old greetings card joke: “I am in shape. The shape I have chosen is a circle.” Anyway, I’ve been hitting the gym and going to […]
On EduTwitter I read a lot of discussion about how teachers shouldn’t need to be liked by students; they should simply be able to expect obedience and compliance from their classes, and schools should have ways of dealing with the students if they don’t comply as expected. And I agree. There must be an expectation […]
It’s early 2018 as I write, and a very tough time to be a child. It’s not that easy for the rest of us, but it doesn’t take much of a stretch of imagination to see that it must be unbelievably scary and confusing through the lens of a child. We have lived through a […]
Get your classroom relationships right. Then you can… Get your behaviour management right. Then you can… Teach your lesson. And… Don’t take it personally. Teaching is a profession; it is a job. The relationships which we have in the classroom are professional relationships, not personal ones, and as such need to be managed carefully and […]
I recently wrote a post about why I am leaving the teaching profession, and one of the reasons I cited was that I did not feel that the structure currently in place valued older, more experienced teachers. This may be one of the reasons why the profession is being drained of experience, and we now […]
We all know that reciprocal teaching is an effective way of reinforcing knowledge and empowering students. At sixth form particularly there are many opportunities for allowing young people to deepen their expertise and feel like the masters of their subjects that they are trying to become. A positive teacher is wise enough to harness these […]
The Guardian reports that older teachers are leaving the profession in droves and draining it of expertise. These are my reasons: 1. Teachers who don’t want to be managers are under-rated. Teaching is a profession in which an entrant can quickly establish themselves and quickly move up the hierarchy and into management. This is one […]
I think I’ve mentioned before that I started my career in sales and marketing. At that time as part of our sales training we were taught a number of ‘closes’, which should be deployed at the time when the customer was getting near to making a decision and just needed a nudge over the line. […]
