Lessons Learnt

2020 - The year of live-streaming or videos. For me these have been on various platforms. In the professional sense with Google Meets, Loom and Skype. With social events on Zoom or Houseparty and I have to admit I have even fallen into the black holes of video's on Insta and TikTok... there has been some desperate times but now I feel is the time to reflect on the lessons learnt from all of these platforms.  During lock down we held virtual lessons for our 6th form in a 'tutorial style' on Google meets. The premise of these was to review some of the work we had asked them to do independently, i.e. Flipped learning. I found Loom a super useful tool in structuring these tutorials (alongside my Husband’s surface pro... Accountant vs Teacher budget right there...) as I was able to model live worked examples. If you haven't used Loom give it a try as it is very easy but the surface pro definitely helped the functionality.  There are endless lessons to reflect on from lockdow...

The honeymoon period is over and the learning gap between the students is emerging. This week I want to reflect on a lessons learnt from my Year 10 class.  Despite having been teaching for 10 years now, every year I struggle with a Year 10 class and my Year 10 class this year is no different! They are a mixed ability class and when I say mixed ability my gut tells me their likely GCSE outcomes will range from grade 7 - 3.  I say 'gut' because our systems are still being re-built from our cyber attack and I have very little information about their prior attainment. They are also very mixed in their behaviour and levels of engagement so I have to pull every trick out of the box for meaningful learning to take place.  Which brings me to my lesson learnt this week and building on my last post about the use of modelling it is also the use of scaffolding that has given me some success with this class.  One of Roshenshine's Principles explains how rather than setting lower ...