Podcast and Blog

We have recently heard much about teacher workload in the media. Teachers being time poor is not news to any of us. It’s just taken a teacher shortage for the rest of the world to figure it out! One of the suggestions that have been made is that teachers be provided with ready-made resources and units of work to ease the planning pressure. I’m a huge fan of this idea. As a teacher, I adore having high quality, premade resources at my fingertips. I value knowledge rich information texts and well-…

It’s likely that you’ve heard of spaced practice and interleaving. These terrific teaching techniques can make a great deal of difference to our students’ learning.   Spaced practice refers to the practice of practising a skill or retrieval of knowledge a little bit at a time, over a period of time. This is far more effective than massed practice or practising all at once. Interleaving involves mixing up the questions you ask from within a subject area rather than grouping the questions together…

Have you ever tried to teach in a loud, echoey classroom?  I have, and it left me irritable and with a headache.  If you aren’t sensitive to noise, you may not pay much attention to classroom acoustics, but I can guarantee that you have students who do.  I once worked in a school where teachers complained that children were getting up and leaving the room without permission.  At the same time, teachers also commented that they had headaches and that their classrooms were just too loud.  See a co…

If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll know that I LOVE a good text-based unit. Using quality picture books, novels or informational text to teach English is enjoyable for both students and teachers alike. This idea has been embraced by many teachers, which is wonderful. However, I’d like to talk today about the value of a unit of work that goes for a little longer than a week.

Using a different book each week feels neat and tidy. We can write the title of the text in our planners and keep …

Using mentor texts to teach writing and the ‘top of the rope’ concepts of reading can be a highly effective method of instruction. Mentor texts provide context and modelling for vocabulary, syntax, parts of speech, text structure and language features. The challenge with using mentor texts is that it’s really easy to overcomplicate our units. Even if we create targeted units that walk our students step by step through the skills and knowledge we want to teach, it’s not always easy to align the c…

Every classroom has students who hate writing and will avoid it at all costs. They might groan and moan when you say the word ‘writing’ or ask to go to the toilet the minute you need them to sit at their desk. When they do sit down, they take 500 years to write the date and then poke the person next to them or engage in some other off-task behaviour. Their antics mean that you can’t spend time supporting those who WILL engage but need some support or conference with those who are quite capable…