LeadingLearner

Teacher Monitoring; Lessons from Pig Wrestling

Imagine the Department for Education offered you £100, 000 to do either:

a) Employ two more senior leaders to monitor and improve the quality of teaching in your school

b) Give every teacher an hour or two additional non-contact time per week to collaboratively plan learning, assess gaps in pupils’ knowledge and support pupils who were behind with their learning.

Instinctively I’m drawn towards b); systemically we have implemented a) across schools in England for the past few decades. Continue reading →

Over the Bar Teaching; Limit Differentiation

On Thursday I had the pleasure of listening to Ross (aka @TeacherToolkit) talking about Mark. Plan. Teach., his latest book.  The issue of differentiation and the challenges it poses for teachers popped up in discussions a number of times during the day.  My views on differentiation have changed over the years and changed quite significantly.

Continue reading →

The Teaching X Factors #ThursdayThunk

Just before half term we had the pleasure of hosting Professor David Hopkins, at the Trust, who led us through an “instructional round”.  By the end of the day we had developed a series of theories in action about the teaching we observed across Years 5, 6 & 7.  I’ll blog in more detail about this on Sunday. Continue reading →