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. […]
You can decide to like a class. We’ve all been there – that knot in the stomach when you have to face 8S again. The faces which swim into your head, those of the students who need somehow to be ‘managed’, to be cajoled into compliance or manoeuvred quickly through the sanction escalation ladder […]
There are many broad starting points for building positive classroom relationships between teachers and students based on trust and encouragement. 1. Never pretend to be perfect. Don’t pretend to know everything, or to get everything right. Apologise for mistakes. Cultivate an atmosphere where it is not shameful to make mistakes. In fact, I would […]
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 […]
1. Be polite: Be polite to everyone, including the most annoying student in the most annoying class, the one which you have come to dread when you see it on your timetable, the class which makes your stomach clench as you see them lining outside the room. If you have a quick wit and a […]
As every teacher knows, your behaviour management starts at the moment in which your students see you. Particularly important are the routines which you set at the classroom door. It goes without saying that every lesson is a clean sheet as far as behaviour management is concerned. Whatever happened in the last lesson, however badly […]
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