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 […]
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. […]
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. […]
As teachers, although it may be counter-intuitive, we have to be positively aware that when every time we change position – standing, sitting, leaning, crouching, facing, beside or behind a student – we send out complex messages and influence the way our students behave. Our choice of position will depend on a number of factors: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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