Leadership Queen of stepping down 25 Feb 20212 Mar 2021 Yesterday, I was involved in a post about stepping down as HOD. Now I am Queen of stepping down. I initially stepped down when I moved to Rome – I…
Curriculum… Fostering pupil voice and their experience of texts 7 Mar 20217 Mar 2021 Over the lockdown period, I had the fortune to join a series of English and Media Centre webinars with Barbara Bleiman, who is an absolute legend in the English world. …
Speaking and LIstening Revisiting old posts: The power of presentation 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MARCH 2013 In my role as Literacy Co-Ordinator I am expected to run a CPD day each year. In year 1 the focus is on developing Speaking…
Vocabulary Revisiting old posts: Developing key vocabulary across the curriculum 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JANUARY 2014 Strategies to develop key vocabulary across the curriculum Important considerations: 1) Students must know / understand the key vocabulary – no good using if they…
Teaching and Learning Revisiting old posts: Foldables 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MARCH 2014 On Saturday I attended the Pedagoo conference. It was a great day and opportunity to touch based with Twitter colleagues. Having been to a number…
Personal Revisiting old posts: Happy 1 Year at the Welly 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MARCH 2014 There is a sense of irony in starting with a cake to celebrate an anniversary and that is because, in a lot of ways, I…
Leadership Revisiting old posts: learning to lead from Dr Seldon 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JUNE 2104 Last night I, along with colleagues of mine from the Academy were invited to Wellington College for a talk on leadership. The timing for this…
Professional development Revisiting old posts: Moving forward with research 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JUNE 2014 The word research seemingly appeared in almost all presentations today with one professional stating ‘he was losing the will to live’, although he was criticised…
Leadership Revisiting old posts: The power of collaboration 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN OCTOBER 2014 In July we designed a new KS3 curriculum that saw our year 7 pupils move into mixed ability groupings. The decision was made, in fact,…
Professional development Revisiting old posts: CPD – Who or what is it for? 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MARCH 2015 Once an opportunity for teachers to enthusiastically develop their practice or enhance their teaching and learning pedagogy, CPD’s alignment with PRP, accountability and the need…
Wellbeing Revisiting old posts: it’s ok to have a moan sometimes…it’s much more honest. 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN APRIL 2015 What a treat to read such a positive post on teaching this week! And then how interesting that the responses to the post fell into…
Leadership… Reflecting on old posts: Moving from Inadequate to good 2 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN APRIL 2016 In the fifteen years I have been teaching, I have had the honour and privilege to work in two schools during challenging times and then,…
Reading Revisiting old posts: Raising the profile of reading 1 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JULY 2016 We all know the scary stats when it comes to reading. The National Literacy Trust state that 3/10 teenagers read independently, 54% prefer television to…
Curriculum… Revisiting old posts: Collaborative planning 1 Mar 20211 Mar 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MAY 2017 Last year Kaz Armstrong, our KS3 Subject Lead and the English department collaborated to create a Key Stage Three curriculum that we felt would equip…
Teaching and Learning Revisiting old posts: Displays set the tone 28 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JULY 2017 This term a key priority for the department has been on creating the right environment. Displays, you see, set the tone, establish the culture, support…
Reading Revisiting old posts: Tutor time reading 28 Feb 202128 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JULY 2017 Moving in to the academic year 2017-2018, I am really keen to focus and develop three things with regard to reading across the academy: Our…
Teaching and Learning… Revisiting old ideas: When ideas from Twitter come together 28 Feb 202128 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN NOVEMBER 2017 I love reading and, as a result, I love teaching reading. Just this week, I got over-excited reading Oliver Twist with year 8, getting into…
Assessment… Revisiting old posts: knowledge 28 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN JAN 2018 - talking about knowledge since day dot. This isn’t a radical blog post but I kind of promised myself I would write more this year…
Teaching and Learning Revisiting old posts: Explode a quotation 28 Feb 202128 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN 2017 Jamie Clark originally introduced this idea and it is something we now use at the start of every lesson. It's a simple idea but has had…
Assessment… Revisiting old posts: interleaving and recall 28 Feb 2021 Over the past year, I've been conscious that we haven’t interleaved our texts as much as we should and that our pupils’ retention is poor so, this term, I've spent some time addressing…
Curriculum Revisiting old posts: KS3 Curriculum 28 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MAY 2018 So we began this process nearly two and a half years ago and we are finally getting to the point where we have a curriculum…
Vocabulary Revisiting old posts: Ian’s work on vocabulary 28 Feb 2021 POSTED ORIGINALLY IN MAY 2018 This blog is a thank you to Iain Kemp – a Teach First participant who joined us this year. At the start of the academic…
