How to stay positive in order to be a positive teacher.
Interesting article from the Guardian on how to stay positive and help your own wellbeing. Nothing revolutionary, but wise counsel nonetheless.
5 alternatives to ‘hands up’ in the classroom.
‘Hands up’ means that all the keen, able, confident kids in the room put their hands up and their names go up on the smiley side of the board and accumulate lots of ticks against them. They get loads of praise, and their sense of self-worth is reinforced. Then the others, who realise that they will probably not […]
Make a parent’s day today.
At the end of the day today, when you’re tidying your desk and getting ready to go to the pub, or to football, or home, or whatever your thing is on Friday, take a moment before logging off your school management system. Look through your registers and find three kids who have properly earned your praise […]
How to see the good in your classroom: look for it!
So you have your classroom set up for Positive Behaviour Management. The students understand your system. You have greeted them at the door, and you have managed to find some good behaviour to commend by noting someone’s name on the positive side of your board. As you hasten over to write their name on the board you […]
Praise loudly, blame softly… like Catherine the Great
I’ve talked quite a lot about the benefits of Positive Behaviour Management and about its effectiveness in the classroom, but I haven’t yet gone into details about the nuts and bolts of how it works. It is essentially simple, but there are many strands which work together; I’ll go through all of them in the […]
Take charge of YOUR class in YOUR classroom.
“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.” Albus Dumbledore, as quoted […]
How to turn a lesson around in minutes.
Imagine the scene. It’s Thursday afternoon, and you’ve skipped lunch because you had to go to one of those life-sapping meetings, the meaningful content of which could have been conveyed in a one-line email with the subject line “Something we have to be seen to do for Ofsted if they ever turn up”. Your stomach […]
How to stay strong for students
Worldwide, parents are waking up to something which will rock them to the core. For those of us in the UK, this is the second seismic political event of 2016. Only a week ago, this article talked of how children are affected by news of world events, and this can be exacerbated by the reactions […]
Here’s to September 2016’s new PGCE students! It’ll be brilliant!
I was in my friend’s shop recently, choosing between two reasonably priced necklaces and having a chat at the same time, when my friend told me that Hannah, her assistant, was going to start her PGCE course after the summer. “I know I’m mad,” said Hannah, “Everyone tells me it’ll be the worst year of […]
Building Strictly Positive Relationships
Everybody thinks that they are an expert on education because at some point in their life they spent the best part of at least 11 years in a classroom. It’s an easy trap to fall into – we can all think of education secretaries who have plummeted into it.
As adults, we all have experience of a childhood. This is rooted in the fact that we were all children once. We grew up in the same way as we watch our charges grow up. If we are parents we have a second experience of parenting a child and watching them develop.
strictlypositiveteaching.org 