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Are you a Spinner or a Grinder?

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Thanks to the good weather that the UK has experienced this summer, I was fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time in the saddle cycling around Scotland.  During these trips I got to considering how I was approaching the many challenges that appeared around almost every bend, namely hills!  In cycling there are two main approaches to climbing a hill – spinning and grinding and, while both have merits, everyone has their own preference. In layman’s terms, spinning is where the cyclist selects a lower, easier gear and pedals faster, although it can be tiring after a while.  Grinding on the other hand is where a higher gear is chosen, and the cyclists has a slower cadence but has to put more effort into turning the pedals. Many cyclists when they first start are grinders, and stop when tired or the incline is too steep, awhereas most pro cyclists will opt for spinning to keep the cadence (of their pedalling) more consistent.  This year I have been pushing myself to be a spinner
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Why I Don’t Mind Failing

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Last weekend I attempted to make ice cream for a book club meet I was hosting. The recipe I was following was from Nigella Lawson and was one that I have successfully made countless times before. For some reason this time it didn’t work with the cream splitting, leaving me with home-made butter and whey that had a distinctly minty orange flavour. Staring failure in the face I made a decision just see what would happen if I froze the whey and use the butter in some other recipes.  This led me to make some orange and mint flavoured scones , orange and mint frozen whey and cartons full of orange and mint caramel popcorn for a friend’s barbecue…. Joshua Morris in a recent tes.com article comments on how we have perhaps become too concerned with success and do not allow our students the option of failing. With the now obsessive culture of school, teacher and student success we are at the stage where everybody is scared to get things wrong. I have recently seen this myself at school w
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And in the Beginning: How Do We Start a Lesson?

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I have signed up to take part in a staff peer mentoring scheme at school.  This was all well and good (a bit of peer mentoring can be a great thing in helping validate how great we are as educators), but when I was asked what I would like the focus to be, while I admit that there is always areas of improvement, I was stuck for an exact area to develop.  As a solution to this the mentoring coordinator suggested that he might come in and video a lesson and then we could see what develops from there.   Of course the lesson we had arranged for the videoing to take place in was on a day where the HoD was bedridden with man flu (actually it might have been proper flu as nothing usually slows him down)!  This meant I was having to get cover work sorted for his classes, briefing the cover teacher and starting the lesson.  Even with these beginnings and rushing about, on reviewing the video I realised the area that I really needed to work on with my own class was right there - the start
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Forget the Reading, Get Writing!

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Presently, for the spring term my Year 7 class are studying Baroque and Classical Music, while my Year 8 class are happily ploughing through the Romantic period. I always start these projects off with a keyboard performance module that then morphs into a class performance on several instruments.  These bits work fine with both year groups.  The bits that the students have always struggled with has been learning the historical elements.  We in the department have tried the old 'death by powerpoint' approach, and mind mapping, but it has never been satisfactory as the bright kids end up waiting for the others to catch up, while the ones who are still working on improving their language acquisition (96% of our students are EAL - some to the point that English is their fourth or fifth language) or have SEN requirements have struggled. Having been doing a lot of reading about differentiation, listening to webinars and picking peoples brains at school, I thought I would try some
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Location: Qatar
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Marking, Planning and Just a Little Teaching

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While I would like to say that I am tech savvy and keep up with all that is new, in reality I am always a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to embracing new stuff, and generally hold off purchasing 'the latest thing' for quite a while (usually until about 3 months before the next latest thing is launched!).  Thus it has been with Facebook, iPhone, Macs, the smart watch, and most recently, Twitter. I finally joined the Twittersphere last year as a colleague recommended it as a great source of CPD and advice for teachers.  After an initial false start (some scumbag had got my email address blocked after using it as a spam address), I set up my account and waited for all the followers to hang on my every word.  While I waited (and still am) on this multitude to materialise, I decided to research others who I could follow, and while doing this came across @TeacherToolkit .  Not only does this feed direct you to resources that you can download, but it also has the 1 minute CPD s
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New Year, New Ideas

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So it is the last week of the Autumn term and the school is slowly winding down towards the winter break.  Which means it is a great time to start thinking about what we are going to be doing in the Spring Term of 2018!  Already it is beginning to look like it is going to be very busy, and so any ideas that can help with lessening marking/ preparation workload are greatly appreciated. I must admit that most of these ideas I am looking at are taken from # teachertoolkit.co.uk , which is a website I would heartily recommend, along with the twitter account - I have learnt more from these in the last couple of months than I thought possible.  The site has had some great ideas about differentiation, plenaries and homework that I am already using - check out the takeaway homework menu  which we used as a starting point for developing differentiated homework options which the students love - but what I am finding most interesting is the free online resources that is out there to use. W
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Location: Qatar
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Parlez Tu Spreken Sie English? Na'am?

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Having lived in the Middle East for some time now, I find it somewhat of an embarrassment that my knowledge of Arabic has not got much further than the numbers 1-10, hello, goodbye, thank you, please and a few other one or two word answers.  This feeling was reinforced yesterday when I had to  cover a year 10 Arabic class.  To put it mildly I think I understood maybe one word in a hundred and that is being generous! This actually got me thinking about how we approach teaching EAL students in schools.  We expect them to at least try to participate, and encourage them to answer questions which in a lot of subjects - mine included - are abstract concepts and not recognisably linked to everyday life.  I remember from one CPD session that we were told that the moment an EAL student starts asking to go for the toilet, that is the first sign that they are developing understanding and language acquisition - I cannot even do that! From this experience, I am now rethinking how I appro
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