A great WordPress.com site. The Ramblings of an Enthusiastic Teacher. If you look up to those lofty peaks with raging jealousy, you will end your days in sadness and regret.
If you look down at the path you came up, you can become proud or even arrogant if you like of every step you took. But if you skim the horizon with your eyes and take in the gorgeous sweep of panorama before you, you will know peace and rare humility. We do not have to be number one in this world. We only have to be number one to ourselves. This quote was taken from a 2004 graduation speech by Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen in which he refers to the Helsinki Bus Station theory, an interesting read if you haven’t come across it already.
Its poignancy at present refers to the mindset which some pupils inhabit and the need to change this. This blog is the culmination of recent reading and conversation that have left their mark of late. At that hinge point of receiving the results from the language exam, it quickly revealed that weaknesses arose in the writing element. ResearchED 2013 Is GO. If you build it, they will come. So I’m running a conference this September....
Beginnings are often noisy: babies delivered in an eruption of clamour and viscera; shuttle launches where a dot of metal balances on a skyscraper of exploding fire and prayers. This firework went off so quickly I didn't even hear it until my house was on fire. Last week: I'm invited to the Teach First launch of Ben Goldacres's 'Building evidence into education' at Bethnal Green Academy. As usual he's fired up and switched on about Bad Science; eloquent, spiky and charging into education. Research in education is one of my hobby horses- mainly because while some of it is excellent (as some of anything usually is) a lot of it is poorly constructed, riddled with bias, and empty of utility. Tuesday evening: I'm watching...well, I'm watching GI Joe, and marking essays.
Why all of us must improve our teaching (no matter how good our school) I have been a teacher of English for 24 years, a Headteacher for 9 years and, at the age of 48, this much I know about why all of us must improve our teaching.
For the past month, since I last blogged, I have been thinking about how to develop our school so that it is a truly great school. I set myself the challenge of motivating colleagues to embrace change just when things look pretty damn good, which was derived from Charles Handy’s observation that, The paradox of success, that what got you where you are, won’t keep you where you are, is a hard lesson to learn. Consequently, for the last month I have been trying to articulate the case for all of us to improve our teaching. What follows repeats some of what I have blogged already, steals from things I’ve read, but is, fundamentally, really simple; as Jonah Lehrer says in his book Imagine, the answer to any problem is incredibly obvious…we curse ourselves for not seeing it sooner. Like this: Like Loading...