Change and continuity in teaching Literature

I’ve been trying to be more actively interventionist in my Literature teaching this year, inspired by some thinking about Personalised Learning I’ve been moved to consciously work on some ‘high impact micro-teaching strategies’ that might help student learning as a follow up to some thinking on formative assessment over the past couple of years. So, [...]

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Should I be on “The Facebook”

In the normal classroom discussion the other day I was interested to find that everyone in the class (16 of them) have joined a Facebook group that one of them set up as a Literature study group. They’re all there, I asked and checked, and are discussing and asking questions and supporting each other (I [...]

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It begins

What do you do first lesson of the year? What do you do first in that lesson? With that group for the first time. Remember, this is the first class of the year after the long summer break, and after the long induction and prequel and all that thinking about how you’re going to do [...]

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The power of the voice

                                          I had one of those, ‘thank goodness that effort wasn’t  totally wasted’, moments a couple of weeks ago when doing some revision work with literature students to do with podcasting.   Teaching the poetry [...]

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Waiting for superman

I had this post in my Instapaper ready to read for ages, and finally got to it today, at the end of another busy week with little time for reflection. I was alerted to it by Will Richardson and while it’s context is distinctively (I wrote uniquely, but hesitated) American, it has ramifications here too. [...]

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Teachers ‘phobic’ over test data (Murdoch press obsessed with it)

Or at least that’s how Tom Alegounarias, a board member on the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority and president of the NSW Board of Studies, sees it in a ‘hard-hitting’ (read self-aggrandizing) speech at a conference in Sydney somewhere yesterday as reported in the Murdoch press. No doubt over neatly wrapped mints, glasses of [...]

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Weird Science

Today the Victorian Government announced that it had shelved a $28 million dollar project to invent a “pleasant tasting, attention-sustaining, low-priced drink that enables secondary students to work safely and with sustained alertness all day” because it failed the common-sense test. And yes, I’m pretty sure that Coca-Cola might have already invented it. There’s more [...]

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The Key is Good Teachers

A little while ago I was involved in a forum convened by the Grattan Institute which was looking at teacher performance and evaluation, and how that all fits together. So, I was interested to see a report coming out of that institute by Ben Jensen called ‘Investing in Our Teachers: Investing in Our Economy’. All [...]

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Teach for Australia (revisited)

I’m not commenting (I already have) I’m just pointing to this from the AUSTRALIAN today. PROFESSIONALS wanting a mid-career change of lifestyle will be encouraged to become teachers under a plan to ease their entry into classrooms. Under the plan, professionals could be teaching in classrooms after just eight weeks of specialised training. Announcing the [...]

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Just the facts Ma’am

I went looking for a picture of the Blues Brothers because I thought that the old ‘just the facts, ma’am’ quote came from them, but I found that the quote actually came originally from a much earlier TV series called Dragnet, which I vaguely remember from the black and white TV past, and which the [...]

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