We did a piece a week back on advice for NQTs to help them get their work-life balance in order. The feedback from that just reemphasised to me what a tricky transition those early years of teaching can be, so I decided to get the best possible advice for all those aspiring NQTs out there – from you! If you’ve got more advice I’d love to hear it, just comment below or tweet me with the hashtag #nqttips. And if you like it – don’t forget to share it!
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Regular readers will know that I have a keen interest in student voice, and to get student voice really right you’ve got to know what you’re doing when you come to questionnaire design. With student, parent and staff voice you’ll get really important feedback from your questionnaire if it’s done right – but you’ve got to really careful in your design otherwise you’ll get bad results that will set you on the wrong track. To avoid yourself falling into this trap, here’s a brief guide for how to put together effective questionnaires. Step 1 – Do You Really Want
Read more →Key Stage 3 is often a time when boys can become disengaged with learning – making them less likely to achieve at Key Stage 4 and more likely to disrupt the learning of others in your class! Here are ten whole school approaches you can take to try and improve the achievement of boys in your school at Key Stage 3. I think in many respects they’re general good practice too, which you could apply to developing learning with any group across your school with some modification. 1) Identify Boys That Need Support A programme of assessment through
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Do you think enough about the safety of your school’s data and hardware? Mark Exley, of Lapsafe Products, talks us through why ICT safety is such a big issue and the practical steps you can take to help. Earlier this month, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) reported an unfortunate incident at Holly Park School in Barnet in which an unencrypted laptop was stolen from a school office. Unfortunately, cases like this are not uncommon. In fact, theft of school mobile ICT devices appears to be on the increase. Often large and open-plan, schools can be prime targets for both
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This is critical to your developing career and should be invested in seriously; it says more about you than you might imagine. It is deceptively easy: you have all that experience which you just have to present in the right order, and they will be lining up to offer you interviews. Except of course it’s not quite that simple, even in these days of shortage of good candidates. There is a core to a good application that is simple, in essence, but tricky in the execution.
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I think I said in an earlier post that we’re incredibly proud at Creative to have just finished the first three DVDs of our collaboration with Sue Cowley on Promoting Positive Behaviour in the classroom. Not only has she written many popular books on the subject, but if you’ve ever had the pleasure to see her at a conference you’ll know she’s also an incredibly engaging speaker. The idea behind the DVDs was we wanted to provide a really practical guide to behaviour management that any teacher could use to help them in the classroom. DVDs 1-3 The Positive Lesson,
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So NQTs – how has your first half term been? If your half term is going to be catching up on mountains of marking and lesson planning rather than a week of rest and reflection, now’s the time to take a step back and see what you can do to try to bring your life back in to balance.
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If he hadn’t already in life, in death Steve Jobs has quicky been canonised to that most sacred of states – the management guru. In death people have applied his quotes to all manner of human endeavours. If there was one area though in education where Steve’s wisdom has light to share it’s within the arena of Student Voice. To me it shows up some of the flaws in the way it’s sometimes applied, and also it’s power in improving learning.
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One of the things I always think is a bit of a shame is that we have have great content at Creative (even if I do say so myself) but which only sees the light of day when someone joins us for a course. I do think that’s a shame because some of it can be selected out relatively easily and we could help others by sharing it. So this morning I could some time to look through our course on Stretching the Gifted and Talented in Geography. I really liked the content and thought it would be applicable to
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This was an idea I had last week – and I wondered what your thoughts were on it. At Creative Education we spend lots of time updating our courses, and course materials – pretty much essential these days with the pace of change in education. Every now and then we decide to stop running a course – either because it wasn’t as popular as we’d hoped or because we’ve replaced it with something better. For those courses we stop running that’s the end of it – those materials we’ve developed never get seen again. Which to me seems like a
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In order to be effective in your role you’re going to have to say ‘no’ to some of the people, some of the time. Otherwise your work-life balance will get caught up in a twisted vortex of increasing demands on your shrinking time. But as we all know, saying ‘no’ can be tricky – especially in an organisation like a school where everyone is under constant pressure. So if you are in the position where you have to have a difficult conversation – here are some things to bear in mind to help keep the discussion professional and productive.
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Our initial post on 10 Great Maths Games Sites – as suggested by friend of the blog Vijay Krishnan – has been one of the most popular ever with literally thousands of teachers taking a look. So I thought it would be fun to try it for a new topic. So here we go – 10 Great Literacy Games Sites:
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“This post was written by David Black, CEO of Autology who make it possible for every pupil to access a wealth of high quality electronic learning resources to support their study. You read your books on a Kindle, read your magazines on an iPad and listen to music on your smartphone – so why are students still learning in our classrooms using pen and paper? Electronic textbooks have been one of those frustrating things in technology that has always seemed just a few years away.
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I have to admit – and this is something of a mea culpa – that I did learn Latin in school. I remember the teacher in question getting very irate over the waggish schoolboys who dared to question whether there was any point learning a dead language. When you’re young of course it just seems a bit of a laugh, but now with the benefit of age and experience you see that time at school as an incredibly precious opportunity. Was it wasted by learning Latin?
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What with Pooky leaving and me taking over the reigns here at the Creative Education blog it was only today that I started to catch up on my pile of new TES Magazines. Firstly I think the new design’s really great (even when Pooky’s not listening), but there was one short story that I just wanted to draw your attention to. It really affected me, because it showed what a huge impact and stabilising force schools can be in some children’s lives – particularly those that really need it. Here’s the article itself, it’ll only take a minute to read
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