October 2012
24 posts
Miss D's English and Literacy Blog: Strategies to Develop Children's Understanding of Texts →
englishteacheronline.tumblr.com
Questioning
It is essential that pupils have the opportunity to interact and engage with texts and move beyond literal comprehension. They need to consider questions that require them to deduce, infer, justify and evaluate.
Literal questions: repeating directly, or in own words what the text…
Miss D's English and Literacy Blog: Phil Beadle’s 14 Steps for a Perfect Lesson →
englishteacheronline.tumblr.com
1. Don’t have a full time job. If you are to teach a perfect lesson, then the first thing you must ensure is that you are not a full time teacher. Full time teachers haven’t got the time to teach perfect lessons. It’s only gurus who can do this because gurus don’t have pigeonholes to check.
2….
Feedback, feed-forward, peer-assessment and project-based learning →
biancahewes.wordpress.com
This is by far one of my favorite posts of the year, and the best I’ve seen on feedback in a long time. It’s worth the time it takes to read and re-read (and you should re-read it).
I stole my scaffold for peer and self-assessment from Geoff Petty. I think he’s great because he shares so many wonderful resources for free online. Petty argues that too much of the feedback we give students is BACKWARD looking and often this feedback is quantitative (numerical e.g. 7/10; 70%), but even qualitative feedback (words e.g. ‘You didn’t begin your sentences with a capital letter.’) more often than not looks backwards at what WAS done or, typically, WASN’T done. Petty advocates for a method of feedback that is both backwards and forwards looking, and to do that he uses the ‘goals, medals, missions‘ protocol. It’s really neat because the language is accessible to all age groups and is non-threatening. Essentially the ‘goals’ are the criteria for the product (be it a short film, an essay or a presentation) and the ‘medals’ are what has been achieved (this is the backward looking stuff) and always takes the form of positive statements, e.g. ‘Your introduction is strong.’ The ‘missions’ are the important part of the protocol – this is ‘feed-forward’ as it is looking at what the student needs to work on to improve the product.
Ms. Nickelodeon: That moment... →
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…when you realize next year is going to beso. much. easier.
Having autonomy in my classroom is awesome (I know what books I have to teach, but can choose how I teach them/how much time I spend on them), but it is also exhausting—we’re talking two to three hours prep every night, and I am…
This is my 1000th blog post
WOW.
Nothing amazing to report, except that tonight we stayed for a 2.5 hour
INSET on Safeguarding children. The Children’s Act sets out a range of parameters that are relevant to schools and it was interesting to hear and discuss the impact we make as teachers.
The Children Act 1989 is designed to help keep children safe and well. If necessary, it helps a child to live with their family by providing services appropriate to the child’s needs.
Local councils have a duty to provide services to ‘children in need’ if these services will help keep a child safe and well.
A ‘child in need’ may be:
- disabled (for a definition of disability see the Children Act 1989 link)
- unlikely to have, or to have the opportunity to have, a reasonable standard of health or development without services from a local authority; or
- unlikely to progress in terms of health or development; or
- unlikely to progress in terms of health or development, without services from a local authority
Local councils must identify the extent of need in their area and make decisions about levels of service they provide.
There are also the child protection issues within this, which encourages the identification and reporting of suspected abuse.
It all certainly made me think about ‘little Johnny’ who misses a lot of lessons and doesn’t say boo-to-a-goose when he’s in…
