Caveat alert! The following is based on my context as a secondary school Geography teacher. I have had some interesting discussions recently about noise in classrooms. The question often centres on whether pupils should work in silence. As is so often the case the discussion quickly becomes polarised despite the fact that neither side actually advocates…
At our school, we build our idea of excellent teaching and learning around four pillars. The first two, challenge and feedback, are fairly uncontroversial but the other two, engagement and independence, sometimes raises eyebrows. I think this is because the two terms get so misused in education out of a desire to make everything something…
Reading “The Confident Teacher” this week by Alex Quigley (@HuntingEnglish) started me thinking about the idea of Independence. It is one of the key pillars of teaching and learning that we focus on at my school but it is something that still causes confusion.
Like every other school in the country that I have come across we are trying to build more independence in our students. I fear that as schools and teachers have become more accountable for results the temptation to spoon-feed has increased; these are our results, not theirs. As we hurtle towards our first exams of…
