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But are challenge and love enough? Not quite. All great teachers teach students how to reach the high standards. Collins and Esquith didn’t hand their students a reading list and wish them bon voyage. Collins’s students read and discussed every line of Macbeth in class. Esquith spent hours planning what chapters they would read in class. “I know which child will handle the challenge of the most difficult paragraphs,

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your tale

“I know most of you can’t spell your name. You don’t know the alphabet, you don’t know how to read, you don’t know homonyms or how to syllabicate. I promise you that you will. None of you has ever failed. School may have failed you. Well, goodbye to failure, children. Welcome to success. You will read hard books in here and understand what you read. You will write every day…. But you must help me to help you.

John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of learning from your mistakes until you deny them.

Howard Gardner, in his book Extraordinary Minds, concluded that exceptional individuals have “a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.” It’s interesting that those with the growth mindset seem to have that talent.

You were looking for the key for years/But the door was always open."

"Night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out paedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch."

If he had a fault, it was that of ostentation, of seeking to be not only himself but a performance of himself as well, and, the driver thought, around here everybody is a little bit that way too.

Friends, Romans, and countrymen: this book is required for the AS exam next year, so start reading it!!

The more I read, the more convinced that this book will not work for our 10th graders. Quite a charming book, though.

Far-fetched and contrived so far.

Don’t fall into the trap of playing ‘can you guess what is in my mind?’ when you are using questioning in your classroom. If all you are doing is giving three second pauses and asking basic recall of knowledge questions then you might as well not be using questioning at all from an engagement perspective. Simply explaining would have a similar effect.

The idea is simply that rather than ‘learning’ at school and ‘practising’ at home, as in the traditional school model, pupils do the opposite. They typically watch online educational videos made by their teachers at home for homework where they learn new concepts. At school they do what they would have traditionally done for homework, practice questions and activities which gets them applying their knowledge.