What a week! My visit to Blackthorns Primary School in West Sussex turned out to be hugely enjoyable. I was shown round the school and into all the classes by Marianne Brand, the school’s new head teacher. Years ago, Marianne was a teacher at my daughter’s former primary school, St Thomas Aquinas, and so it… Continue reading My week in the round
I’ve just been reading ‘Why some kids can’t spell and why spelling tests won’t help’ by Misty Adoniou, who is a ‘Senior Lecturer in Language, Literacy and Teaching English as a Second Language’ at the University of Canberra. The piece, which appeared on the website ‘The Conversation’, begins from the perspective that spelling does matter. On… Continue reading De-misty-fying spelling!
In case you missed the announcement last week, ‘selfie’ is the Oxford Dictionaries‘ new WOTY (word of the year). Apparently, given its ubiquity, the decision was almost unanimous. Since its rise in popularity, it has also spawned a host of bizarre derivatives: ‘helfie’, ‘belfie’, ‘welfie’, as well as ‘legsie’! Last year Oxford Dictionaries went for ‘omnishambles’, though… Continue reading WOTY 2013
I’m reading what I think is by far and away one of the best written books I’ve come across in many a year: Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn by John Hattie and Gregory Yates. One of the most obvious assets of the book is that it is enormously accessible to teaching… Continue reading Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn