The advice to ‘catch them getting it right’ is hardly a novel idea. But I would argue that, like the smiley face and the sad face, it is not often put into practice with enough consistency and therefore with enough impact. In fact, I think in practice it often deteriorates into an exercise of stabbing […]
If you have to share a classroom with 30 young people, it’s an awful lot easier to get things done if there is an understanding between you, a tacit contract that you will treat one another with respect, that the students will let the teacher teach, and the teacher will help the students learn. […]
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 […]
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. […]
All students need to be treated equitably. This emphatically does not mean that all students should be treated the same. But all students should feel that they are fairly treated in the classroom, and part of that is that they should all feel that the teacher is including them in the lesson. There […]
