Poor teachers face tougher system under shake-up

Click on this link to see the article from the BBC.  We all need to be aware of the actions being taken by government.  This simply adds to my belief that the teaching profession has never really taken control of its own professional standards or professional identity, and that the need to do so is still critical.

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Professor Dylan Wiliam at The Schools Network Annual Conference

Ever want a quick and simple tool to help with plenaries?

Plenaries are often the Cinderella in our lessons.  We should plan for them, but often forget, and often when we have planned one we run out of time or forget it is there.  Well this little wonder of a PowerPoint can have you up and running with wonderful plenaries with little or no planning; sounds too good to be true doesn't it? The PowerPoint is really simple; ask a student to pick a number, the number they choose links to a question and you can use this to check student learning from your lesson.  Simple!

AfL plenary resource: Pick a number

How do we keep Students on their toes?

It is always a challenging task to ensure that we keep students engaged and involved in all of our lessons and that we are on top of assessing how well each individual is accessing what we are trying to teach.  There is a lot of advice out there about how we can make those minute by minute assessments to make sure we know students are with us.  You can find lots of ideas in books such as Jim Smith’s Lazy Teacher.  However, we also have good ideas at Cheney and below Toby Lockyer has been kind enough to share his 21^st century version of lollypop sticks.  These resources can be used to support no-hands questioning and for other activities that will help keep your students on their toes.

Once again thank you Toby for your contribution.

Toby Lockyer (Maths Department) writes:

I have organised the two types (for excel and power point) of virtual lolly stick resources into a folder including working examples.

They have instructions on how they work. Their uses are very similar as for lolly sticks.

They are in: staff resources/maths/toby/Random name and prize generators (virtual lolly sticks)

If you want me to pop over for five minutes and show you them in action I’d be more than happy to.

Toby π J