One of the problems facing the teaching profession today is that we have become accustomed to looking for deficits in our work. This blogpost is about where I think this ‘deficit model’ approach comes from, how I think it has gained traction, why I think it is a wrong-headed model to take at present and […]
October 20, 2013
Here is the opening to my #TLT13 presentation this week. The greatest allegory ever written isn’t Animal Farm by my literary hero (God, how he’d hate that description), George Orwell. Instead it is Julia Donaldson’s seminal ‘The Gruffalo’. Undetected for years, this ‘children’s book’ (and I’m doing the fingers version of inverted commas as I […]
October 2, 2013
This blogpost is a write-up of the notes Hélène Galdin-O’Shea and I wrote to help us in our presentation to the Labour TeachMeet event on the fringe of the 2013 Labour Party Conference. The TeachMeet-style event, organised by Labour Teachers and hosted by Tom Sherrington and Chris Waugh in Brighton on 21st September, was an […]
June 29, 2013
If you’re only as good as your last post on a subject then I am completely off my rocker to even try and attempt a second “Myth of…” post. The first one, on “The Myth of Progress Within Lessons” is closing in on 7000 views making it easily my most widely read post (by a […]
June 25, 2013
“If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together.” This proverb, happily ‘borrowed’ from a Steve Munby presentation at the Festival of Education, is a pithy reflection of the philosophy that underpins Teachmeet Collaborate. A biannual event this teachmeet, itself a collaboration between Canons High and Park High […]
June 9, 2013
This ‘doing’ post is all about the work that I have been engaged in as a Deputy Head in the last year and a half or so. It comes with a bit of a health warning in that the school I am employed by is not actually a Teaching School. Last year we received a […]
June 3, 2013
This is the most uncomfortable I have been starting a post: much more uncomfortable than I was writing the one about the ten best education policies by Michael Gove. I have spent 36 hours actively mulling over whether to write it now and at least six months pondering the general theme, a theme I touched […]
May 19, 2013
Imagine if the teaching profession en masse were given a magic lamp with their very own genie in it, and that every teacher were given a vote on a collective three wishes. There would, I think, be two certainties and one highly contested third wish. The certainties would be that something pretty awful would befall […]
May 12, 2013
National Curriculum Levels are dead. That’s the starting point of this post. In secondary schools, at KS3, they have been dead for 5 years now. They were brutally and fatally assaulted with the disastrous KS3 tests of 2007 and then dispatched with a bullet to the head in 2008 when the SATs were scrapped by […]
April 29, 2013
This is a post about performance as an adjective and performing as a verb in the context of teachers. In some senses, given the current context, that makes it also about performance-related pay (PRP) but I want it to be about more than that. I want it to be about the whole hoop-jumping extravaganza that […]
October 30, 2013
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