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About three years ago, in the middle of an SLT meeting, I used the word ‘undergird’ to describe how we needed to support staff. As is their wont, a couple of my colleagues reached for their smartphone to google (other search engines can be used) to check whether or not I had coined yet another […]
January 10, 2016
“I wish to register a complaint.” Thus begins the famous “Dead Parrot” sketch from the Monty Python team. Well, I wish to take up the complaint because, like John Cleese’s Mr Praline character in the sketch, I feel like someone keeps trying to sell me (and the education system generally) a dead parrot. In this instance […]
June 2, 2015
This is my first ‘doing’ post as a Headteacher, but I thought it was about time to begin looking back at what has been going on at Canons since I took a hold of the reins last September. In fact, the aim of this post is to show how I have tried not to take […]
October 11, 2014
This is a summary of my presentation to Teaching and Learning Takeover (TLT14) this October. The organisers asked me to base my presentation on my most-read blogpost The Myth of Progress Within Lessons. This is what I came up with. I began by reasserting my twin premises from the original blogpost: There is no such […]
July 12, 2014
This morning I read and retweeted a Guardian ‘Secret Teacher’ article on the horrendous mess to which high stakes accountability and it’s recently deepened links to performance related pay (PRP) have led. I liked it, at least in the sense that I found it awful but was glad to see it placed in the public […]
April 2, 2014
Since becoming members of the Teacher Development Trust’s ‘National Teacher Enquiry Network’ a number of opportunities have come the way of Canons High School. The latest of these was a general invitation to NTEN members to meet as a very small (I hesitate to use the word intimate) group with the CEO of the Education […]
April 2, 2014
Preamble Having written more than one blogpost criticising the use of medical language and metaphors in education, I rather find myself on the back foot with the title of this post and its content. Let me deal with that straight away. My concerns about Big Research in the form of Randomised Control Trials (taken from […]
March 23, 2014
Although I’m an English teacher by training and by trade, throughout further and higher education I was a student of both literature and history. The choice of the latter was unexpected for me: I’d only achieved a grade D in GCSE History, having failed to be ignited by the dampened matches of “the History of […]
February 23, 2014
I love the notion of the panopticon as a metaphor for contemporary society. Or rather, I hate the notion of the panopticon as a metaphor for contemporary society, but love teaching it to my Y13 Sociology students and am utterly fascinated by it. For the uninitiated, the panopticon was a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham […]
January 11, 2014
Two confessions to begin this post. The first is that the title is a shameless decision, made purely so that I can crowbar in a Barry White choon. The second confession is that I am not a Teach Firster. I know. I know. God please forgive me, but nearly 20 years ago I went to […]
kevenbartle's Blog 
January 30, 2016
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