How to handle the return of lesson observations

How to handle the return of lesson observations - article for tes

An article for tes on how to make the best of lesson observations now they're coming back post lockdown learning.

How to handle the return of lesson observations - tes

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Managing the markload

There is no way to dress it up - marking is and will always be one of the biggest burdens in teaching. The other things like planning, training, meetings and emails all push themselves to the top of the to-do list - their turnarounds are short and they can’t be left. You can’t not plan your lessons, not turn up to meetings (tempting as it may sound) and the emails demand responses. So marking, despite being an incredibly valuable teaching tool, gets left to the wayside. It causes a great deal of anxiety for so many as the pile continues to grow or is something that forever needs doing. It is also one of the biggest reasons so many work well beyond 8-5 and spend so much of their holidays working instead of relaxing and recharging. It will always be a challenge, particularly if you too teach essay subjects like English but there are some tools that have helped me to avoid bringing marking home and to some extent staying if not on top of it, at least afloat. Marking codes The most mundane...

Differentiation: shattering the glass ceiling and stepping up to the challenge

Over the last few years, what we see and what we expect to see in the classroom has massively changed. We’ve gone from super-pacey, four-part, not-too-much-teacher-talkey lessons, to progress for the long haul, repeated learning and in-depth modelling. This is much more a shift in mentality than it is just methodology and thankfully, the same can be said for differentiation. But it is still something so easy to get wrong! Despite all the controversy that comes with differentiation, with high challenge and upward scaffolding, the glass ceilings once put in place with it, can still be shattered for the wide range of students our classrooms hold. While the transformation of what we know as differentiation is in no way complete, we can still adapt during its transition to something better - it is just a case of reassessing how we are differentiating and why. The past life of differentiation Previously, the suggestions and perhaps expectations of differentiation were planning using “All, mo...

Marking metacognitively

Marking gets such a bad rep; it’s seen as something we essentially get our knuckles rapped for not keeping up with as opposed to a valuable tool to both measure and facilitate progress. But what also gets too quickly forgotten is that it’s not just for the teachers. Feedback can and should make students better learners and provide opportunities for self-reflection so they can develop and understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind what leads to that development. This entire post is how I’ve adapted my marking system after reading @funkypedagogy’s Metacognition book and @Xris32’s blogs on feedback. The main thing I took away from them was how important it is to provide students with the opportunity to reflect instead of taking it for granted that because I had told them how to progress, they understood how to. One of the many things the Metacognition book demonstrates is how exam or assessment wrappers can be used to help students understand their strengths and shortcomings. I’ve made a ...

Miss Mika (English)

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