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About

I am a Teacher of English and Lead Teacher at a mixed comprehensive school in North West London. I am lucky enough to be involved in whole school T&L and curriculum planning within my department. These two roles have been really insightful alongside each other and have presented massive learning opportunities for me. 

I geek out on all things T&L and am always trying new approaches and developing old practices in my classroom. So many things on here have been a collaboration with my amazing department or inspired by some of the lovely folks on EduTwitter.

I'm a mum of two and write bilingual children’s books in my spare time, to help to keep the Gujarati language alive and around for my kids. My culture is very important to me and a huge part of who I am.

This blog is basically because I can't sit still and I want to develop my practice, to have a place to put everything together and reflect on everything I've learnt (and gotten wrong) along the way.

Find me on Twitter: @missmika_eng

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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...
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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...
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Misconceptions about ‘Mixed Ability’ in English

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