My mother was a teacher, and met my father when he, too, was briefly teaching. When they were both teaching they wore gowns as daily uniform, and had to shake chalk dust off them when they left their schools. They were about as calm, tolerant, middle-class and focused on education as it was possible for […]
I have concluded that there is almost no activity which doesn’t teach me something about teaching. Freed from some of the rigorous constraints on my time by leaving a school environment, I’ve taken to a daily gym session to force me out of bed, refresh my mind and body and ready me for the challenges […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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