Teachers are familiar with the problem of marking and over-marking – so we decided to think about what would happen if you never marked another book again… Continue reading Marking: What Would Happen If You Never Marked Another Book?
Teaching is full of pitfalls and teachers need all the support they can get in the classroom and beyond to make positive change. Is this change possible though? That’s the real question… Continue reading The Pitfalls of Teaching
The machines are taking over! No, that’s not a pejorative reference to the robotic life forms otherwise known as SLT, merely a dawning realisation that the age of automation is closing upon us. First, they came for the retailers, then … Continue reading 5 Teaching Tasks We’d Happily Let A.I. Do For Us Instead
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. There’s probably not a teacher out there who hasn’t thought if only at one time or another. And the NQT year is one of the most fruitful if only times there is. When you’re in … Continue reading 5 Things You Wish You’d Done as an NQT
Bags of Sweets Initially bought for prize and reward purposes, that pretence might be maintained in polite company but left alone with a pile of marking we’ll be mainlining Haribo Tangfastics until the lines on the page begin to blur … Continue reading 5 Things You’ll Find in a Teacher’s Desk
April Fools’ Day is a day of wariness on all fronts. You can’t believe anything you read, hear or see and those excuses your students offer for no homework or being late are dealt with even greater scrutiny. That being … Continue reading 4 April Fools’ Day Pranks Teachers Can Play
NQT Advice: Handy to know! Whether you’ve simply got an NQT joining the department or you’re taking on an NQT as a mentor, it’s always handy to have a little NQT advice to hand for when things start getting a … Continue reading NQT Advice: Five Things to Tell Your NQT
I read an article recently about a school that had stopped teachers from marking altogether. Instead, every two weeks, the teachers had a one to one with pupils to discuss their work… Can you imagine how liberating that would feel? Unfortunately, most of us aren’t lucky enough to work in a school like that and marking becomes one of the most difficult things to manage as a result. Until your school stops marking entirely, here are some of the things I find helpful to make it manageable: Strategic speaking and listening units: I always look at my year as a whole … Continue reading Making Marking Manageable
All my life, I’ve been a perfectionist. Give me a task and I’ll want to do it, not just well, but perfectly. I’ve always wanted to be top of the class. I’ve wanted to have the gold star. I’ve wanted to be the one who wins. And then I became a teacher. It started off well enough. In my NQT year, my university supervisor commented on how immaculately I had arranged my evidence folders. Perfectly labelled, perfectly filed, perfectly annotated. Colleagues were shown examples of my exemplary marking. I was asked to lead a CPD session on inspiring lower ability … Continue reading When Is Good Enough, Good Enough?
Marking often feels like a never-ending task – what can you do to get on top of that marking again? We have some ideas below! Self-Marking Having students mark their own work is a stroke of pure genius. Providing students with the answers to a series of questions/tasks means they’ll easily be able to identify fixes, improvements and mistakes in their own work. Immediate reflection like this also means misconceptions can be caught early instead of waiting for you to find the errors later. Avoid Triple Impact Marking Hopefully you work in a school that has a sensible, well-informed marking … Continue reading Top Tips to Tackle the Marking Workload for Teachers
