It is just over two years since I hung up my board pen and left the classroom behind. It was a space I had been in for over 20 years and, although the location of the room had changed over the years, it was absolutely my comfort zone. Regardless as to whether my responsibility was…
How the new teaching frameworks can support teachers to grow Learning we know is a complex thing. Developing the intricate web of knowledge that pupils need, with its various interlocking parts, woven together with their experiences and wider understanding of how the topic sits within the world, is difficult and teachers spend significant periods of…
My interest in CPD doesn’t seem to be one that is likely to end any time soon. Knowing that so much time has been invested, with seemingly so little impact on what happens in the classroom, continues to buzz round my head like an annoying mosquito. I know that when professionals do get access to…
What can we learn from curriculum development in our schools to support teacher developing? It has been refreshing to see how much progress has been made in recent years with the curriculum in schools. Having come through the days of complete freedom on an individual teacher level, the prescription of National Strategy tied closely to…
Now I have finally recovered from the weekend, I finally feel that I can put some reflections down from this year’s ResearchEd conference in London. This was only my second time of attending the national event, and the largest event I have attended since a Pixl conference back in February 2020. A lot of my…
Teachers have many different tools available to them. Sometimes the sheer choice of what we have available can be overwhelming, and the absence of absolutes can make these choices even more difficult to navigate. All we have available to us are ‘best bets’ as Professor Robert Coe calls them in The Great Teaching Toolkit, so…
School improvement is a complex thing. Whilst some seem to believe it can be done almost overnight and have even got some great examples to share, for most of the rest of us, it is a long slog which takes time and sustained effort to get right. Sometimes the lure of the quick solution calls…
One of the questions I am sure I frustrated my parents with as a child, my husband with as an adult and my colleagues with as a teacher, is the question ‘why’? I know myself as a parent it was something my own son could drive me up the wall with, incessantly asking why eating…
The EEF report, much like the P4C (Philosophy for Children) report that came a few months ago, landed into the Twitter sphere to much fanfare and lots of conflicting ideas. Starting with a webinar, which many were unable to attend, the information was already framed in terms of what did and did not work. Some…
There is a lot of discussion which takes place around student behaviour at the moment. Debates around whether students should have phones, how we can alert them to the end of break times and whether they should sit up and smile in lessons are without a doubt hot topics which divide many on social media.…
Teaching it Real 