Kindle Notes & Highlights
Now, I rarely spend excessive amounts of time mapping out lessons, and focus my energy on subject knowledge and sleep.
department is covered as a standard expectation, and the department staff plan collaboratively to resource for the following year. This enables staff to feel a sense of accomplishment and peace of mind (before they leave for the six-week break) that they are fully informed for the first few months.
Senior leadership can encourage a culture of restful minds by enquiring into the extent to which their staff have been equipped to leave work at work.
Coaching enables teachers to do less, but do it better, by being goal focused and not trying to embed large, unmanageable change into their practice
if there is one thing school leaders can do to improve staff wellbeing, it is to replace one-off performance-management observations with coaching.
Imposter syndrome in its simplest definition is thinking you are not capable of carrying out a role that you really are capable of. It is a condition of self-limitation, as you think that your achievements are all as a result of luck, and you are merely waiting for the day you are exposed as a fraud.
Marking: ‘If it is not making children make better progress, then it’s not worth doing.’42
Finally, we need to rebrand feedback so that instead of it appearing on the to-do list in the form of an unhelpful, persistent after-thought, it is a pre-planned, conscious part of our working schedule that we need in order to carry out the central core of our practice.
Feedback is possible without marking every book; and moreover, it is effective for improving outcomes for students, by making them active participants. The feedback – successful feedback – was not a product of onerous script by the teacher, but instead as a result of the verb ‘feedback’ – the conversation, the discussion, the delivery of how to do it.
Feedback is the dialogue that acts as a starting point for students to understand what they have mastered and provides guidance as to how they can then master the next step in the process of their learning.
Prioritise time for exemplar models and feedback. Allocate time for feedback into units of work so that ‘pauses’ are present for you and the students. Create a system that gives time back to you for the meaningful stuff.
Move away from over-testing using extended responses that act as a drain on marking time. Avoid using an assessment system that tries to track progress as though it is linear (it isn’t!). Prioritise knowledge over exam format. Ditch testing key stage 3 as though they are key stage 4 or key stage 5.
Equipping ourselves with the knowledge of the subject is the most time-efficient and empowering process to aid teaching. Subject knowledge-led development has somewhat fallen to the wayside for teaching strategy, and the two should work hand in hand, rather than one steal time from the other. I would stand by the view that this is one of many ways that we can halt the large turnover of teachers leaving the profession: by giving them the tools they need to feel confident with content.
The knowledge organiser distils key substantive knowledge to help students identify the foundational content for that unit.
Resourcing should be collaborative and with context Teachers need to share their teaching practice and learning experiences in order to stimulate a learning culture in schools. –
Stop making throwaway resources, and create resources that you can use across topics, year groups or throughout units instead of just singular lessons.
