Very good reminder of some fundamentals around how reading comprehension actually works. Starkly and depressingly relevant for anyone trying to 'teach' Eng Lang GCSE reading papers.

Oxford headteacher wins national award after transforming school Greyfriars Catholic School's headteacher, Lyndsey Caldwell, was named a Bronze Winner in the Pearson National Teaching Awards for Headteacher of the…

👀👀 www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2507779...

A thread on smartphones in schools...

At Ormiston Academies Trust, our vision is for a school system where every child can thrive.

Learning, behaviour and wellbeing are top priorities in our schools, but all can be impacted negatively by smartphones.

Absolutely - lots of disagreement about what that means, particularly in subjects like Eng…

Sure - being required to teach lessons when you don't agree with or believe in their design is a nightmare - I remember that feeling from some of the old NLS materials... really hard.

Maybe then it's more a question of leadership / culture - how to promote ownership but not necessarily authorship of lessons and materials.

I think that's right Matt - and does seem to be the reality in departments which are being most successful from what I can see.

The perennial 'headspace' problem... getting the detail right of lesson prep is so vital but requires thought and consideration... how to achieve the conditions for this is a real challenge.

I'm not suggesting we should go back - ultimately that level of unasked-for autonomy was not good for students or teachers, but creating the conditions which encourage and support teachers to really think through the detail is still important. Hard though!

Agreed - in the days when curriculum was much less organised / standardised, workload re planning and resourcing was horrendous - but, it did mean we had to really think about the detail of each lesson, and develop that inner sense of whether an approach or activity was going to 'work'.

This is the only misstep I’ve seen Phillipson make so far.
There is no way colleges can wait until Jan to find out if they can still offer BTECs next September.
Open evenings are this term! Ads needs designing, staff sorting.
That she said marketing materials can be sorted in Jan is naive at best.

Thanks - that's really interesting stuff. I liked these defining features.

Thank you.

Great - thanks David, much appreciated.

Yep! Sitting around in the hols trying to do some work and getting massively distracted by great conversations on social media - love it!

And that's right - and it seems to me that schools are often a bit clearer on the coaching available through IC than what's available to staff for whom IC isn't the optimal. I think I still prefer fewer, deeper opportunities for observation, ideally with a subject expert.

Brave New World - Running Non-Judged Observations So - no judgements at our school on lesson observations from now on. We've joined the revolution - it was quietly exhilarating last year to...

Takes me back to this, written a decade ago minus one week... heady days! thinkingonlearning.blogspot.com/2014/08/brav...

Yes, me too. Not sure that IC always allows for or encourages professional discussion in this way...

Agree - so a non-specialist observer might be able to notice if modelling is absent - eg s's patently not knowing what to do - but should be v v cautious before commenting on the quality or impact of modelling that does happen... quite likely to do more harm than good?

That puts it really well - thank you.

Therefore advice to observers along the lines of 'be alert to the fundamentals, but be very aware of your limitations' *especially* when observing out of subject...

Although I'm thinking in terms of people observing lessons - proposing that an 'expert' may feasibly be able to spot an absence of or problem with underlying structures (eg if tasks aren't modelled), but if the fundamentals are in place, observers are likely to run out of expertise v quickly...

This bit is sort of what I had in mind: "expert teachers have fast and accurate pattern recognition capabilities, while novices can not always make sense of what they experience; expert teachers perceive meaningful patterns in the domain in which they are experienced"

Thanks Zoe - will take a look.

I’m sure I read a definition of expertise as being around the ability to internalise and spot underlying patterns and fundamental structures in a domain… anyone know where this might be from? @informededu.bsky.social you’ve done great stuff on expertise - ring any bells?

Exciting times for Teaching? Is it just me or is there a growing sense of purpose in the profession at the moment, a feeling of a few things coming together at once? R...

Had a look back, and this one from 2013 (!) reminded me of the excitement of the times - I loved the sense back then of collective professional learning and sharing. Still do, tbh. thinkingonlearning.blogspot.com/2013/03/is-t...

I haven’t read these for ages. They’re brilliant and very funny

Blimey! That would have motivated me to do the project for sure!

Quite a lot of ‘sit around in groups, discuss how you’d teach X, and write it down on this sugar paper’ as I recall… the blind brainstorming with the blind!

😂😂😂 I was excruciatingly bad at that…