Explanations: Top Ten Teaching Tips “There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.” Michel de Montaigne quotes (French Philosopher and Writer. 1533-1592) Very recently I responded to a question about great teaching by Joe Kirby (read this excellent blog post) with the answer that explanations, questioning and feedback were the holy trinity of teaching. I have written about questioning and feedback at length, but I have never written about teacher explanations. Too often we can be distracted in our planning by the tools of learning without giving the required time to the integral act of communicating our subject. These are my top tips try to address different aspects of effective explanations – the what and the how of explanations – the content and the delivery. Top Ten Tips: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. My core message: clear and effective explanations matter!
Peer marking and how to make it work in your classroom - TES English - Blog - TES English English and media teacher Ms Findlater explains the process of introducing peer marking to her pupils. Effective marking is essential. So, too, are time-saving strategies. How can we juggle the two? We want it done well but we can't, and shouldn’t, undertake detailed marking on every piece of work a student produces. As a new teacher, I remember ‘doing’ peer marking with a year 9 class a few times. This would, indeed, have been the case at that time. Don't dumb it down Prior to the peer marking task being completed by the students, a copy of the success criteria/mark scheme is shared with them, the same one that I’m expected to use. Show me the skills Students highlight three key words at every level that helps them remember what they’re being asked to assess. Moving on up The students underline the word that describes the level of difficulty within each grade description. Follow my lead I then ask students to look over past marking in their books from me. Over to them Take it all in
Why teaching skills without knowledge doesn’t work In this second of three blogposts this week, I want to explain why unzipping knowledge and skills is so counterproductive. When we detach knowledge from skills, achievement suffers. In England, 17% of kids leave school at 16 functionally illiterate: unable to read a daily newspaper, according to research over sixty years by the University of Sheffield. Back in the classroom, one of the reasons for all this was dimly becoming clear to me. The counterproductive strategy of reducing literary and grammatical content and lionising real-world activities is propagated, inspected and enforced by Ofsted. An example of this approach failing is where entire units are given over to skills-based projects. Literature on a leash Even schemes of work on great literature are under-teaching and under-assessing knowledge. Another area where without knowledge, complex skills disintegrate is in teaching great novels. Opportunity Cost Like this: Like Loading...
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