Let's Move On From Here...

  What Every Teacher Needs To  Know About Reading   How were you taught to read?   Can you remember anything about the process? What about learning to talk? Can you remember that? Most people will have little or no memory of the process of language acquisition beyond those cute stories we are told about the words we could not pronounce. I wanted a “big R” for my birthday. Turns out, I had seen a violin in a music shop window, and I was trying to say guitar”! The acquisition of a first language – sometimes called a “mother tongue” – seems to be a natural process which the human brain has evolved to undergo. All the evidence suggests that unless a child is deprived of linguistic input in the critical period up to the age of 5 or 6, they will generate grammar. Even silent children who do not speak will have a complete grammar by the time they are about 3 years old. The same is not true of reading and writing – those are not natural skills and we have to be taugh...

The vast majority of students will experience stress during the exam season - in fact something would be strange if they didn't. I am not one of these people who think that all stress is bad - just the opposite. For one thing, the modern world is one of deadlines and accountability for most of us and stress goes with the territory. For another, some of what we call stress is actually what motivates us to try hard and to do our best! However, for some students stress gets out of hand, and rather than driving them on, it paralyses them. That is what we must help our students to avoid at all costs. Here are my 4 P's of exam readiness... 1. Preparation It is vital that students not only are prepared, but that they feel prepared for exams. They need to know what each paper will look like, how long to spend on each question and what they are being asked to do. Preparation is about having no suprises on the day. It also means having a plan if things go wrong. I use things l...

The new grading system which replaces the familiar A*-G with 9-1 is giving me a bit of a headache and the recent nonesense about "standard passes" and "strong passes" has really not helped. Rob Webster posted the following on Twitter recently: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 At least the emojis are easy to understand! I don't necessarily have a problem with talking about passing and failing exams, but I do have a problem with shifting goal posts and a lack of clarity.  I also have a problem with a grade 9 that is norm referenced. How do I as a teacher answer the question: "What do I have to do to get a grade 9?" when the answer is, "Be better than the vast majority of other students."? For this reason, I have a problem with predicting grade 9s. Honestly, I don't think we should do it. It's hard enough to predict the criteria referenced grades, but how do I predict whether or not a particular student will be one of t...

Should schools teach about "fake news" says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's education director: Click for BBC News article I have no interest personally or professionally in what is in the PISA tests; they are at best an irrelavance as far as I am concerned, and at worst a dangerous distraction from the real business of education. I do however completely agree that we need to teach our young people the skills to evaluate the information that they are bombarded with. And it's not something you can necessarily put into an exam. We are bombarded with information which puports to be valid and true: the President of the United States of America tweets lies and then denies it. For Trump, and many like him, words have power but no weight - he uses words to influence the credible and then blames someone else for putting the misinformation into his hands. You have to admire the balls on the guy. History departments do a great deal toward...

Since you didn't ask, here are four things I think we are not teaching our kids well enough: What a healthy relationships look like and how to spot an unhealthy one. I'm not necessarily advocating sitting the nation's teens down in front of The Archers, but the Radio 4 audience seems to have had its collective eyes opened by the story of Rob and Helen Titchener. How much misery could we prevent if we taught our youngsters how to recognise the signs of coersion and manipulation and how to raise the alarm?  What real men and women look like naked. Here's the thing: most teens that I know, know that the images they are seeing are manipulated. They know that they are being presented with unrealistic ideals. But that doesn't help when they are looking at their body in the mirror and worrying about the fact that one of their balls is bigger than the other or that their labia are not quite like the ones on Youtube. They need to see that there is a huge varia...

I clearly remember my sex educations lessons at school. There was the talk on periods in Junior School where all the girls were gathered together to learn that once a month we would shed our womb linings. There was the Science lesson where a supply teacher (brave, brave woman) who was the first teacher to use the word penis in front of us without embarrassment. There was the RE lesson where we watched a Swedish film in which Eric and Inger ran nekked as the day they were born into the sea togther and when they came out Inger was pregnant. God knows what happened out there, but the upshot was Inger giving birth in a scene so graphic that one boy fainted. Nothing about consent though. Nothing really helpful. Nothing that made sex sound like something you wanted to do one day. If you were gay or questioning there was nothing for you at all. Later there was much talk of AIDS. We were that generation. Sex equalled death.  And yet for all that, we were lucky. We learned about se...