The Strictly Positive Teacher has in mind the mental health and wellbeing of their students, and wants to ensure that they are acting in a way which works with students’ natures. They know that in order to maintain a good positive atmosphere within the classroom and thereby be in a position to be able to […]
Concentrating on something intently enough to learn is hard work, meaning that learning something requires someone to pay attention. Most teachers and psychologists would therefore agree that the ability to focus and sustain attention is crucial to student success. I remember being told years ago that the maximum attention span of an adult was 45 […]
One of the tricky but unspoken things about being a teacher is that often you’re the only adult in a room full of children. And children are not adults. Because adult members of school communities are charged with preparing the children in our care for adulthood, there is a temptation for schools to require students […]
As if more proof were needed that mental health issues in schools are a serious problem for young people in education, it seems that their teachers’ poor mental health adversely affects how well students do in school. A 2018 Dutch report describes a world where one in five teachers experiences burnout symptoms, where teacher’s workload […]
It may seem sometimes that there is nothing we can do to help address the epidemic of mental health issues which exist in our schools. We ourselves are under so much pressure from above to deliver progress and grades that it is difficult to raise our eyes over the educational parapet and see the bigger […]
In the classroom, what we’re aiming for is that students’ mental health and wellbeing are cared for, so that they feel good about being there and want to do their best. This in turn should positively affect our own wellbeing and mental health as teachers. To do this, we want to look for good rather […]
The Guardian hates schools with high behaviour standards, apparently, if you believe some of the furious response to this article which appeared in the paper yesterday, linking back to recent pieces on isolation booths, high rates of exclusion and the so-called “flattening the grass”. The furore whipped up by this interests me for a number […]
A number of simple changes have transformed the nation’s education system into one of the world’s most successful. http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/10-reasons-why-finlands-education-system-is-the-best-in-the-world
It is a requirement in UK, in common with many other nations of the world, that teachers “set homework and plan other out-of-class activities to consolidate and extend the knowledge and understanding pupils have acquired”. This is a tricky concept for me, as it accepts as fact that homework will, by its very nature, ‘consolidate […]
If you want a depressing read as an antidote to all the festive consumerism this holiday season, and a really, REALLY good reason to draw a line under the list of gifts you’re collecting for little Johnny or Gina, you could do worse than to pick up a copy of ‘Born to Buy’, by Juliet […]
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