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Popular Posts

Lesson Planning: getting lessons to "flow"

[I am currently working with a colleague who struggles to get their lessons to "flow". I've written this with them in mind but thought I'd share it because it's unlikely they're the only person in the world struggling with this particular aspect of teaching! I don't think I'm saying anything special; I'm just trying to verbalise what many experienced teachers do almost without thinking.] When planning, it is vital to look at the whole curriculum sequence to make sure your lessons are properly sequenced and so that you know what comes next. I am, however, going to focus more on getting the “flow” of an individual lesson right. What I say can certainly be extrapolated to cover a whole sequence - in fact, this is a scaled-down version of what I do when I plan a whole sequence. What is “flow”? It’s a deliberately wishy-washy term for an aspect of planning that I can’t pin down to an easy definition. [I’m sure someone out there has given it a nice name,...

Book Review - The Future of Teaching - Guy Claxton

After spending a good few weeks of the summer reading edubooks, it was recommended to me that I read Guy Claxton's latest The Future of Teaching: and the myths that hold it back . I, naturally, had heard of Claxton, but hadn't read any of his work (although I had listened to some of the interview James Mannion did with him on his podcast ). I found a digital copy online (thank you eLibraries!) and settled down for, what I hoped would be a day or so 'seeing things from the other side'. If you know me at all, you'll know I'm a fan of explicit teaching having tried the whole discovery/inquiry/enquiry thing at the start of my career and, unfortunately, found it didn't work as well as I wanted it to, before making repeated small changes and ending up where I am. My journey is not one that started with research or blogs or books - those all came later - it is one that I made mostly alone. I, alone, made changes to the way that I taught in order to improve the out...

The canvas might be blank, but the plan isn't

Those who know me and who've read my blog previously, will know that I am not a fan of PowerPoint. It's time-consuming and I don't see it as worth it. Instead I use OneNote and, what Adam Boxer calls a "blank canvas" (Boxer, 2021a). Something I've heard a lot is that doing things this way requires you to have better subject knowledge than teaching via a PowerPoint and I disagree. There is an idea that using a blank canvas and live modelling is somehow "winging it" - because I don't walk into the room with a slide deck, that I'm somehow making it up as I go along. This is very much not the case. Everything is planned, and it is planned using the same principles that should always underpin our planning, no matter how we intend to deliver it. Start with what you want the students to know* by the end . What knowledge do you want them to have? Then work backwards. How will you know if they have this knowledge? How will you get your point across to...

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