Peregrinations of a Pedagogue

The Shifting Sands of School Culture Throughout a career in education, one of the most fascinating—and challenging—phenomena to observe is the delicate nature of institutional culture. I have spent the majority of my career in environments where a “culture of respect” was the default setting. In those schools, the discipline of learning was ingrained; classrooms ran smoothly not because of...

I stumbled across this last night; something I will be trying with my classes. The FLMOP Framework The goal is to provide the Means of Participation (MoP) before the Task/Question. Front-Load (The “Signal”)

Over the past year or so, I’ve been luxuriating in the fact that once again I’m back working in the Google ecosystem. One thing I’ve been introduced to by my boss, who’s somewhat of a Google nerd(!), is the ability to mess around with the suffixes at the end of the URLs. Here are some examples: Forced copies The whole...

It can be a daunting task for parents to guide their children through the process of preparing for public examinations. As the summer exams approach, I offer this advice to help parents navigate the complexities surrounding getting adolescents properly prepared for their exams: The important stuff Keep things in perspective. Yes examinations are important, but they are a long way...

Digging a hole, 2022. Reflecting on my experiences across international start-ups, I’ve seen that the relationship between Owner and Head is the single biggest predictor of a school’s success. Here is my ‘open letter’ to those taking that leap. Dear Owner, Congratulations! You have decided to invest in a school. In order to have amassed enough capital to allow you...

Dear Colleague, Congratulations on securing employment at Malvern College Egypt. MCE is one of a growing group of Malvern College International (MCI) Schools that exist around the world. In joining MCE, you are joining a family of schools which, although all very different, share a set of principles and values that inform their culture. The ‘Malvern Qualities’ articulate what MCI...

 Interview panels are fond of questions about vision. I’m often stumped - even more so when it’s asked over Zoom and I haven’t yet visited the school in question. I usually end up muttering something vague and non-committal - cringing inwardly as I do so - and resolve to do better next time.  Having done some digging around I’m going...

I stumbled across the archive blog posts of Sarah Thomas recently. They are a treasure trove. Sarah was Deputy Head at Uppingham where we overlapped for a short spell. As a young teacher, I remember thinking she was superb; reading through her posts reminds me of why.  I hope Bryanston continue to leave up her posts up on their website...

A gap between our trip from MCS to MCUK and our longer ride presented the opportunity for some supply teaching. This has been a hugely valuable professional experience placing me firmly back in the classroom and offering an insight into a variety of different schools. I’ve picked up lessons in French, chemistry, maths, drama, geography and English. Having been prepared...

There are people, I know, who secure immediately every job they apply for. I am not one of those lucky people. I know as well as anybody the sting of disappointment that accompanies a rejection email. The sting gets worse, of course, the further along the process you get; the most painful rejections come when you’ve been to two or...

A presentation I’m putting together requires an engaging slide to give a bit of background as to who I am. This is potentially dull stuff, so I wanted to make something that would catch people’s interest. Looking around for ideas, I headed to Doug Belshaw’s blog where, sure enough, he has a post about representing his CV as a London Underground...

(With thanks to Jon Standen for passing on this meme!) Steve Munby gave an excellent presentation yesterday evening in which he presented his thoughts on school leadership in the pandemic era. He structured what he said around six principles, which I share with you here: Show up and ‘walk into the wind’ Crisis moments are not the time to delegate....

A couple of weeks ago I gave this presentation to parents entitled ‘Making Kids Cleverer’: As I explain at the start, the thrust of the arguments draw heavily on David Didau’s book of the same name. The arguments centre around two things: the importance of knowledgethe role of knowledge in increasing cleverness I deal with each in turn below: The...

In this post, I’ll be pulling together some models for the use of devices in schools and making some comparisons. This is a complex area of school management, so for the sake of clarity and brevity, I’ll be restricting myself specifically to devices, not to other pieces of hardware. Although I will need to refer to software, I’ll only do...

I was asked the other day what I thought excellence in a school looked like. I’m embarrassed to say that I turned my answer into a diatribe against trying to bottle, spread and legislate for excellence. I should have put a more positive spin on things. But the point I was rather clumsily trying to make is that by definition excellence...

Frank Williams, founder of the Williams Formula One team, purportedly used to ask this question of any proposed change or innovation: Does it make the car go faster? I love the simplicity of this. It encourages a laser-like focus and chimes with Occam’s Razor one of my favourite management heuristics. Too often in schools, we get distracted by things that...

I’ve spent a good deal of my 9 years as a senior leader trying to convince people of the value of working canonically. My preferred cloud-based document software is Google Docs, built from the ground up around the canonical principle. But to be fair most other well-known word-processing packages now operate in much the same way. It’s been hard going,...

My leadership philosophy I’ve been a senior leader in schools for nearly a decade now. During that time I’ve done some things I’m extremely proud of and also some things that, looking back, I hang my head in shame over. I’ve grown and changed as a leader. My 35-year old-self was cringe-makingly self-confident - back then I thought I knew...

I’ve recently rediscovered the embedded video on the school system. It shows one of the first presentations I did to parents when I first arrived in Thailand over three years ago. Good grief it’s embarrassing! I sound like a rabid English nationalist and the delivery is brash and shouty. I’ve always enjoyed public speaking - even crediting myself with being...

Several conversations I’ve had recently, both on and offline, have convinced me of the need to do some housekeeping on my Twitter timeline.  Since I wrote my EdD thesis, where I waxed lyrical about the medium, Twitter has got a lot bigger. It’s getting harder to tweet in an honest and authentic way without mobilising an angry mob. This tongue-in-cheek example has...

As I begin my last term in Thailand, I’ve been rooting through my belongings and came across a table in my notes that we were referred to (no official source, I’m afraid) in our induction training. Having spent nearly three years here I find it generally holds true, with the caveat that we’re talking about people and there are huge...

I’ve been binge-watching stuff by Dylan Wiliam over the last few days. He seems to talk a lot of sense and is easy to listen to. He makes the point that there are four broad sets of reasons as to why we educate people:<ol><li>As preparation for life - to allow them to find their way in the world</li><li>To pass on...

We hosted an online forum for boarding parents yesterday to discuss what boarding might look like if/when we’re eventually allowed to re-open. Boarding parents are rightly concerned about what might happen if there’s a second wave of infections, and about how we’re going to ensure that the boarding houses are kept safe. Our plans so far are as follows:<ol><li>Be prepared for boarders...

It’s very easy to start feeling lost with the scale and complexity of the job of being a school leader. Especially at times like these, when fires are burning all over the place, it can be hard to step back and see where everything is going. I recently watched this presentation by @Barker_J and @TomRees_77 in which they neatly break down...

I see a lot of teachers who start every lesson with a learning objective written up on the board. Often the first job of the lesson is for children to note the ‘L.O.’ down in their books. I’ve long thought this was a rather wooden and mechanistic way to start a lesson - certainly to start every lesson. But the practice...

This little post draws upon an online diagnostic tool that I’ve used as an aid to self-reflection. The tool purports to describe your personality and so underline strengths and weaknesses. It does this by presenting a series of binary choices - both with merits - and forcing you to make a decision. My personality type according to the Leadership Matters tool is:...

When/if our current situation comes to an end I hope there will be some benefits that come out of it; not least in a bit of a change of priorities. Here are the things I hope I won’t forget:<ol><li>Physical health is precious and is best maintained by regular physical exercise. In the past, I dropped exercise when things felt a...

Lockdown presents a perfect opportunity to catch up with some reading (and mess around with some HTML). I did this a while ago, but the widget broke. So here it is again, updated for 2020: Tim's bookshelf: read A Quiver Full of Arrows by Jeffrey Archer Shakespeare by Bill Bryson Loved this book, as I do all of Bill Bryson’s works....

I’ve always preferred to appeal to people’s better nature when getting them to follow rules in school - both pupils and staff. This liberal-from-the-outset approach is appreciated by most, though I have learnt that it doesn’t suit every context or individual. Nonetheless, I was pleased to discover that the British Police have summarised the approach that I have always subconsciously taken,...

For the last three years, I have been working at Harrow International School Bangkok. Prior to this, all my teaching experience had been in the UK-independent sector. So what’s it like teaching in a Thai international school? The first thing to point out is that Harrow is not just any international school - it’s one of the largest and longest...

Somehow I’ve ended up looking back on a twenty-plus year career in teaching which has involved neck-deep involvement in boarding throughout. I didn’t plan it like that, that’s just how things evolved. My first experience of boarding was at Warwick School, a day school with a boarding house attached. Next came Uppingham, a boarding school with a tiny handful of...

One of my strengths - and also a terrible weakness - is a certain lack of self-censorship (colleagues past and present will no doubt chuckle to themselves!) I respect authenticity in people and have been frustrated in the past by politically-correct-but-boring co-workers, relishing working with those who are the opposite. But making this point at interview, whilst trying to reassure...

If you find yourself job hunting during the lockdown, the likelihood is you’ll need to use an online platform such as Skype or Zoom. Here are a few tips: Make sure you are smart - dress just as you would be if you were going for a face-to-face interview. Make sure the light is behind your computer screen, not behind...

We were very lucky to have Andy Buck in school just before half term to do some training/teambuilding for our senior leaders. The training took place between 6 and 8pm on a Thursday evening at the end of a long week, so I didn’t have high hopes at the outset. But Andy smashed it -  I left with much to...

A week ago I came back from a fantastic school trip to Chiang Dao in Northern Thailand. We spent a couple of days rafting down the Mae Taeng River. Apart from the marvellous scenery, there are two things I want to commit to memory from the trip, which could come in useful again in the future: A. The ‘Fish and...

Sometimes schools throw up wicked problems - problems which have no obvious solution or problems in which every possible solution has serious drawbacks. Left to fester such problems can quickly start to feel overwhelming. Who hasn’t lain awake at night worrying about such things from time to time…? I recently took one such problem to Andy Buck. Andy offers coaching for...

A couple of years ago Thai visa regulations put a stop to our recruitment of ‘gappies’ - young adventurous types looking for a something constructive to do in a year off between school and university. So it was that we pivoted to recruiting recent graduates for year-long internships instead. What a revelation this has been - at least three years...

I was fascinated by Dominic Cummings’s recent call for new Downing Street staff: on the one hand, it gave a little insight into the machinations at the heart of the government complex; on the other, it illustrated rather nicely what happens when someone is so secure in their position that they can say what they really think. It got me...

Having recently read Jill Berry’s review of the year and look ahead and re-discovered my own attempt from back in 2014-15, I thought I’d have another go at #nurture. What’s happened this year? Back in December 2018, as soon as the term was done, we wasted no time in hopping on a ‘plane and getting home. A traditional family Christmas also included...

My first - and so far only - brush with celebrity came from a Telegraph article that was written about my finances back in 2015. It caused a little bit of a stir at work and taught me some important lessons of the perils of courting publicity whilst being in someone else’s employ. For the purpose of this post though,...

Mick Farley was a fan of weekly one-to-one conversations with his core team. I generally found these meetings useful, and could see how they helped with delegation in a large organisation. The tradition has continued under Jon Standen and is one that I seek to emulate with my own team of direct reports. Susan Scott lists a series of questions...

If you’re a senior leader and you’ve not yet read Susan Scott’s book ‘Fierce Conversations’, I encourage you to do so. The book is a stirring call to action: Think about it. What are the conversations you've been unable or unwilling to have ... that if you were able to have would change everything? She lays out some guidelines for...

If you are responsible, like me, for getting a large number of dates into an Outlook calendar you’ll want some way of automating the process - particularly if the dates don’t repeat regularly and there are loads of them! The first step of the process is to get all the dates into an Excel spreadsheet. The column headings you’ll need...

I am fortunate that I’ve always worked in schools where presenteeism isn’t an issue. You do your job and you go. There has always been an unspoken understanding that: This is not to say that staff haven’t expected to work hard, and for long hours when needs must, but they are treated as adults. When they’re done, they’re done. Jonty...

I wrote recently about the canonical principle and how I think it can be applied to school management. The canonical principle works hand with Occam’s razor in beginning to strip away many of the problems that can bedevil systems in schools. Put simply (there is no other way!) William of Occam’s principle boils down to this: It is a principle that can...

Someone asked me today for advice on what blogs to follow in the education world. I subscribe to blogs through Feedly, which presents a convenient way of keeping abreast of things in one place, and at my own leisure. Here are the ones I go to most frequently filed under things I consider to be ‘work’: Education and Productivity: Education...

Image source: http://ccsindo.com/services.html In today’s ICT Steering Group meeting - the first I have chaired - we had a go at devising a creed. The idea being that this would provide direction and purpose to the group when buffeted by inevitable competing demands for changes to our systems. I gave members of the committee two minutes to write on post-it notes things...

I’ve taken the leap after nearly 5 years from Postach.io to Blogger. My blogging has been sporadic, and I resented having to pay $50/year for a service that I was rarely using. Also, I was getting frustrated by the formatting issues that seemed always to arise in the translation between Evernote and Postach.io. Lastly, as I think I will soon...

Here’s a little bugbear of mine: Headteachers who talk about staff as if they were personal possessions. In the past, when I’ve been introduced as ‘my head of geography’ or ‘my deputy’ I’ve always felt my toes curl. The rank and file work in service of the school, just as Headteachers do. Referring to staff as if they were indentured labourers...

I’ve realised over the past year or so that I waste an awful lot of time on social media. I’ve also realised that the vitriol found on some social networks, particularly if you venture a political opinion, is pretty poisonous. I want no part in it. Just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, I deleted LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and...

A few takeaways from the session on social media at the Fobisia Leadership Conference 2018: Your school should sit on every social media platform that it can - even if it's not used. For example, just because your school doesn't use Snap-chat at the moment it doesn't mean that it won't in the future. You don't want to find yourself...

Natasha Devon gave a superb talk at the Fobisia Leadership Conference this weekend. One thing she showed us that really resonated with me - and that could easily be used to foster discussion of gender, sexuality and mental health amongst either staff or pupils - was this ostensibly harmless, tongue-in-cheek advertisement: Once we had watched it she unpacked for us...

There was a very interesting talk at the FOBISIA Leadership Conference over the weekend on the use of CEM data for target setting. The speaker pointed out that the chances graphs generated by CEM show that: Almost any grade can be obtained from almost any starting point. Those of us who have to counsel students on their prospects would do...

Having just spent half a day at the Bangkok Google Summit held at the Thai-Chinese School I thought I’d share these two little gems: Gem #1 I have for years been using the goo.gl link shortener, but I have just found out that it’s due to be deprecated. It gave short links, but they were never particularly memorable. This is where...

The recent death of John Smyth, resurfaced memories of the Christian camps I attended as a schoolboy. John Smyth had long since left when I attended Iwerne Camps in the early 1990s, and my experiences of the camps were more or less entirely positive, with one notable exception - the Christianity! A quick trawl of the internet confirms that the...

Someone told me about this the other day. It needs sharing more widely. Go here and it gives you (for free) loads of useful little classroom tools to project up on the screen all set to a background of your choice: Random name picker

Just over a year ago I moved from Oswestry School (NOR +/- 450) to Harrow International School Bangkok (NOR +/- 1600). I remember when I was at Oswestry feeling somewhat maligned by the ‘big boys’. When I met teachers from larger independent schools I sensed their air of superiority. It’s true that small independent schools often struggle to compete in terms of facilities...

The other day I took a group of staff to Tom Sherrington’s workshop in Bangkok. I knew Tom was excellent and so I was keen for staff to be able to attend without being put off by the price tag. As a result, I gathered expressions of interest and paid for tickets ahead of time. I realise now that this was...

Quite regularly these days I am faced with e-mails like this one: I fully understand that moving overseas is a big step for people, and they want to do it with their eyes open. But to my mind, these are the wrong questions to be asking before you’ve even met people from the school, or found out a little bit...

On Saturday I attended a full day workshop run by Tom Sherrington. It was excellent, so I share my main takeaways here. In no particular order, here they are: Senior leaders should be very wary of blanket diktats. 'Everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere' was the Dylan William quote that he endorsed as mirroring his own view. Allowing for variation...

Having completed my first year at Harrow Bangkok, I thought I’d share what I have so far discovered about living here. In no particular order, here are my tips. You are welcome to contribute more, if you have any, using the comments section. I will be adding to this post as I get more information. These tips are written with...

CC - Amy Gahran I have not blogged regularly this year - I can think of various excuses, but principal amongst them was that it regularly felt I was simply adding to the noise and making little impact. But reading the back catalogue of Doug Belshaw last night reminded me of how useful a blog is. If nothing else, a blog provides a record...

I am new to the international circuit. I’ve been through several versions of the ISI inspection regime, but I’ve never undergone a CIS Accreditation. When I arrived at my current school in August last year, they were already well underway with the self-evaluation. Immediately I could sense a difference in tone and style. Sure, ISI and OFSTED encourage schools to...

Last weekend I attended the FOBISIA CPD leaders’ conference in Penang, Malaysia. Added to the novelty of traveling to such exotic places for training conferences (in my previous life an annual trip to Manchester or Birmingham on the train for CPD resulted in sharp intakes of breath!) I picked up some useful things, which I record here for posterity. The...

Charlotta Wasteson (some rights reserved) Anyone who has ever taught a Year 6 computing class will give a wry smile when it’s suggested that children these days are digital natives. At some stage, teaching this age group, these things will happen: You will find a studious pupil beavering away and saving their work to someone else's profile, blissfully unaware that they need...

Schools are complicated, dynamic institutions. Those who lead them must cope with multiple competing demands on their time, all the while trying to shield those who work for them from the worst ravages of bureaucracy. The aim must be, surely, to liberate teachers to get on and do what they are paid for - to teach. Nonetheless, keeping up with the ever-changing...

This is the first of a series of posts I plan to create for social media managers in schools. This one focuses on my social media channel of choice, Twitter. I hope it will be of use to people who run school Twitter accounts and provide a source of ideas for how to gain some traction in the Twittersphere. My first piece...

Today’s staff training session, at which we were introduced to mission statements, goals, objectives, values etc., reminded me just how confusing these terms can be. Specifically, we were shown the school’s mission statement: We were then shown the six values that members of the school community are enjoined to rally behind:

So, after six years I have finally packed up and left Oswestry School. Yesterday, after dealing with one or two last bits of admin with my successor, I handed in my keys and my ‘phone and said my goodbyes. It has been a wonderful place to work and to test and then refine my skills as a senior manager. In...

Some schools are fortunate enough still to employ serious wordsmiths. These are people who were taught how to write English properly, much as Winston Churchill was. As Churchill explains in one of my favourite passages from My Early Life: [B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on...

Richard Taylor made the point recently that high-level academic qualifications can be a barrier to innovative thinking. Surrounded by MBAs he often finds he’s the one who can think outside the box, whilst the formally educated apply their models and generate identikit ideas. Sifting through applications for jobs I find often find - for expediency’s sake if nothing else -...

This blog post arose as a response to an exercise set for this Leading an Independent School Course, completed in 2015. Vision, values, mission and ethos are much talked about aspects of good leadership in schools. In order to be inspected by the ISI schools must have stated aims - which they dictate - against which they will be assessed....

Eric Anderson, one time head of Eton, is quoted as saying that good schools are about ‘machinery, machinery, machinery’. What he was driving at, I think, was that well-run schools need robust, well-run systems. With the inspection regime now being what it is, nowhere more so is this the case than in the need to put good systems in place...

Today’s @teachthought blogging challenge asks bloggers: What are your three favourite go-to sites for help/tips/resources in your teaching? This is tough. There is so much good stuff out there. I came back from a course recently which showed me so many new sites that I felt I had to share them the Oswestry staff and to blog about it. To condense it...

I was asked recently in an interview how important I thought resources and the built environment were to children’s education. I think the question was designed to elicit a grand vision for the school - one in which classrooms dripped with all the latest technological innovations and magnificent new buildings were to be found at every turn. But I was...

I attended a talk the other day about the dangers of being a generalist. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that: the most successful CEOs focus on just a handful - 2 or 3 things at most - that they can achieve mastery in We should aim in life to do something that made us happy, that we were good at AND...

Every so often in schools - as elsewhere - difficult, unpopular decisions have to be made. I have found that it helps to try and head off the problems that staff, pupils or parents will raise by construction a FAQ document. First off, the act of constructing such a thing really focuses the mind. Secondly, if you get it right,...

There was a fascinating Twitter exchange yesterday about Stuart Broad’s refusal to walk after clipping an edge and (to his full knowledge) being caught out. On the one hand were those who thought this sort of gamesmanship was perfectly legitimate, particularly in light of the fact that the Australians, given the chance, would have done exactly the same. On the...

Source: http://adigaskell.org/ When I started teaching back in 1999 e-mail was the new cool thing in schools. In the 17 years or so since I have seen some hilarious things. Near the top of my list come: an e-mail from a deputy head on e-mail etiquette that was itself littered with typos (and not in an ironic way!) the history...

I have been experimenting again with Hackpad recently. Since I last looked Hackpad seems to have been acquired by DropBox. But I note that Hackpad has some useful features for teachers of computer science - not least that any code you paste in has line numbers by it. Here is a little bit of code I’m going to get my GCSE computer...

Land’s End to John O’Groats summer 2015 with my own female adolescent! Having been reminded in a post by Nick Dennis of the letter that John McConnell, an Eton housemaster, imagines being written to all mothers on their sons’ 15th birthdays, I thought it would be fun to have a go at my own version. I have used John McConnell’s structure heavily...

Click here to enter feedback and/or ask questions as we go along. Navigating around - the ‘Google Waffle’ E-mail

Picture credit: carix.com.au Years ago I remember a colleague telling me that if you can’t do a higher degree as a teacher then you can’t do one at all. He had a point. Teachers work damn hard in term time, but if you’re organized it’s perfectly possible to secure weeks at a time totally free from conventional work. If doctors,...

Those of you who know me, will be aware that since September 2011 I have been pursuing a professional doctorate at the University of Birmingham. Today I attended the university, at the request of my supervisors, to undergo a mock oral examination - a ‘Viva’ for those in-the-know  - in which I was to defend my thesis. After the initial pleasantries,...

I am writing this on Saturday 30 Jan, one day after the inspectors have left. Things are very fresh in my mind. For reasons of confidentiality though, I will only put this post in the public domain once our inspection report is also available for all to see. It now is and can be viewed here. I hope in writing...

Tom Sherrington wrote a great post the other day entitled ‘The Principles of Effective Teaching’. As ever it hit the nail on the head. Classroom teachers young and old should read it. Nonetheless, it got me thinking that in all the schools I’ve worked in so far following those principles to the letter still wouldn’t quite be enough… In each of...

The recent announcement about the extension and beefing up of the ‘Troops to Teachers’ programme has galvanised me into writing this post. I’m not a military man per se (though those who know me will get that my rather stiff walk leads many to assume that I do have some sort of military background!) I have however had a long and very...

Source: Guardian (http://goo.gl/Nv9QDR) I have only met Tony Little once - at a dinner in Eton for the friends of masters. Even in our brief meeting though he seemed to exude the kind of warm humanity that I have come to associate with the very best school leaders. Not for him anxious looks over the shoulder to find someone more...

At this time of year, as the summer holidays beckon, many teachers receive little gifts from their charges. A lucky few go home with armfuls of wine, chocolates and thank you cards. All this is nice, of course, but for me, it’s the personal messages of thanks peppering the year that mean the most. Nothing makes a teacher’s pride swell...

The recent furore in America about teachers cheating for their pupils in standardized tests reinforced for me all that is wrong with the introduction of payment for results to teaching. What those teachers did was entirely wrong, of course, but so too is the climate that induced them to cheat in the first place. I am amazed that so many...

Modern Accountability: Dusting off the "Old School" I’m not suggesting we bring back the dunce’s cap or Victorian-era silence. However, in an age of complex pastoral systems, there is something to be said for the “old school” approach to daily accountability. Sometimes, the simplest methods for managing the “rough and tumble” of school life are the most effective at building...

Here’s the thing: I would love to go to the office in shorts and flip flops and nip off for a surf at lunchtime, whilst still feeling that the work I did was making the world a better place. Perhaps naively, I have in my head an image of that sort of life for the residents of Palo Alto, California -...

The fact that I love Google has become something of a running joke at Oswestry School. Since stumbling across the platform in late 2011 it has transformed the way I work. It wasn’t long before, with the wide-eyed zeal of a neophyte, I imposed GAFE on the whole school. In the 2 years or so since we moved over to becoming a GAFE school I...

At this time of year, I always thank my lucky stars that I am not an examinations officer. The potential for getting things wrong by one small administrative slip-up is huge. I’ve been in examination halls where some candidates have calculators, some don’t; some have dictionaries, some don’t; some need all their scripts presented to them on green paper, whilst still...

Well over a year ago now we inserted this innocuous sounding target into our academic development plan at Oswestry School: 100% of all staff have ‘Oswestry Google Proficiency’ (by September 2018; 50% by December 2016) Inspired by the work of Doug Belshaw and his evangelism of open badges I saw this as an obvious candidate for certification using an open badge. Although I didn’t know this at the time, he was working on something very similar...

Picture credit: http://www.bodmincollege.co.uk/school/governors/ I had the great pleasure of sitting in on our governors’ away day last weekend. The insights it gave me into the mechanics of governorship were superb. Stuart Westley, ex-England cricketer and one-time Headmaster of Haileybury led the session. Here are the salient points: The usefulness of AGBIS membership Schools that are not members of AGBIS should be...

Dear Parent(s), I very much hope the contents of this letter reaches you in some form or other. If you cannot speak English you are my particular target audience: we will have to rely on services like Google translate to get my message across. I have felt for some time that overseas parents, particularly those unable to speak English, are...

Last week it was reported that the great British adventurer, Bear Grylls, had caused a Twitter storm by leaving his son an outcrop of rocks some way off the Welsh coast. This sort of thing was fairly typical of the genre: > “RNLI slams Bear Grylls leaving son on rocks off Abersoch http://t.co/EYDuAE0Ad1 > What an #Idiot!!” > > —...

For a long time, there had been gripes in our school about the haphazard way buses were booked, so I decided Google could come to the rescue! Here’s how. I set up a Google form like the one below, with a link to it via our school intranet: I then opened up the Google Sheet behind this form like so:...

This was one of those conferences that I am lucky enough to attend every now and then in which I learnt a lot. No dull presentations, no repackaging of old ideas. It was good. Best of all it was free! Here is a rundown of what I took away: Google voice typing really works. No longer a gimmick. Report writing...

I got an oblique mention on Claire Bracher’s own post on this topic pop into my notifications this morning. I’m not in her top five, but what the hell I thought I’d take the cue to share my own #Twitterati anyway. Claire, by the way, is definitely my go-to person on StaffRm. She doesn’t work in the same phase at me,...

This week’s TIDE talk touched on the topic of organising school calendars, so I thought I’d explain what happens here for what it’s worth (and lay bare the system’s weaknesses for any who might be tempted to copy wholesale what we do). We are a GoogleApps for Education school, so we’ve set up a shared Google calendar (called the provisional calendar)...

Location: Oswestry, Shropshire, England Current gig: I work as the Deputy Head (Academic) at Oswestry School, a non-selective co-educational 3-18 establishment. Current mobile device: HTC One M8 Current computer: HP Chromebook - I am completely enveloped in the Google ecosystem - for most of my work that is all I need.

Herewith the text of the Keynote speech I made at the Oswestry #TeachMeet on 29/4/2015. The slides I used are here. SLIDE 1: Splash page SLIDE 2: Welcome, welcome, welcome… especially to those who have travelled far to be with us.

The #TeachMeet went fantastically well with some great presentations and that unmistakable buzz you get when teachers start bouncing ideas off each other. It was great to receive tweets like this as people headed off home for the evening: > “Great to share excellent teaching practice at #ostm and of course drink wine and win the raffle! @OswestrySchool” > >...

With the appointment of two energetic heads of teaching and learning this year, we have begun a determined assault on mediocrity in the classroom. The mantra this term has been to get pupils - of whatever ability - into their respective ‘struggle zones’: Despite having recently redrafted our Gifted and Talented Policy we are slowly coming to the realisation that labelling...

Sue and I went on a course at which we met the indefatigable @timrylands.  It is to him I must give much of the credit for the list of useful sites, apps and widgets that appear below: Padlet - online collaboration RealtimeBoard - a great place to organise all your teaching and to work collaboratively. Tag Galaxy - great for brainstorming...

Today’s post is about new technology I’d like to try this year so it is rather fitting that today I’ll also be delivering an INSET session entitled ‘Getting Advanced with Google’ to the Oswestry school staff. But rather than talk about software I thought I’d mention a piece of hardware that I am planning to put to good use this...

Today’s post focuses on one of the areas of my teaching that I’d like to improve as a result of observation feedback. If I’m honest I don’t get observed nearly as much as I’d like and ought to be. When I am observed there’s always a danger that my position on the SMT will prevent people from being as candid...

Slowly, imperceptibly, I have moved from being a young, wet-behind-the-ears pedagogue to being a slightly more careworn middle-aged one. I started in 1999, the memory of my own schooling having left a far deeper impression of the teacher I wanted to become than had my Nottingham PGCE. Back then I was a misty-eyed idealist. Having had a private education myself...

For a long time now I’ve been using video as a fun alternative to getting kids to make a conventional presentation on a topic. Film making is an excellent way of getting reluctant writers to do some research and then get some material down for posterity. But of course, using video is not without its problems. If the activity isn’t...

Thank you to everyone who attend OW day. Fantastic to see old and current Headmasters together again. pic.twitter.com/pQP0YQJltQ > “” > > — Great Walstead (@greatwalstead) June 24, 2014 I noticed to my delight the other day that my old prep school headmaster - Gordon Parke - whom I thought impossibly old even way back in the mid-1980s is still...

Why was it that most of the Twitterverse united in revulsion last week at the story of Marte Dalelv’s 16-month sentence in Dubai for being raped? Why is there similar revulsion over the issue of female genital mutilation? And if westerners, almost universally, see these things as perverse why don’t the many of the people in the countries where they occur?...

Quite a number of years ago, when our daughter was still at primary school, her headmistress, adopting the earnest and concerned expression which I have come to associate with bad news, took us to one side. Our daughter, we were told, was displaying signs of dyslexia: would we like her assessed? Having already been in teaching for some time at...

Inspired by the various educators on staffrm who’ve been blogging under the hashtag #routines I have decided to join the party and lay out my routine for all to see. The trouble is, despite nominally living a life that, in term time at least, is ruled by a timetable there is less structure to my day-to-day existence than I might like. I...

He gets between 500 and 1000 Twitter interactions per day, holds down a demanding full-time job, is a family man, and still manages to churn out high-quality blog posts at a phenomenal rate. But he gave me a good half hour of his time last night to answer some of my questions about his new-found celebrity. They say give a job...

Today it was Founder’s Day at Oswestry and an opportunity to catch up with pupils of the recent past (I’ve only been at the school for three years). It is rather wonderful to hear what they’ve been up to since they left and hear their stories of what it was like ‘back in their day’. One particular pupil got me thinking though....

Today’s @TeachThought #reflectiveteaching post asks: How do you curate student work–or help them do it themselves? Here’s how I do it: Exercise books - lower down the school (I teach a couple of Y8 classes this year, last year I taught a Y7 one) I still use good, old-fashioned exercise books. I get pupils A4-sized hardback ones as I find...

Work scrutiny is one of those jobs that can get put on the back burner and then end up never getting done if you’re not careful. It can be tedious, difficult to arrange and time-consuming. And I should stress that I’m no big brother manager - I happen to think that most people, left to their own devices, work hard and...

Script of a talk delivered in chapel to the Sixth Form: Do you know what is special about today for all lovers of Apple products? On this day 29 years ago, believe it or not, the first Apple Mac was released. The year was 1984 - the same year as the Los Angeles Olympics. As it happens California was the...

I have on the shelves in my office an analogue record of my teaching going back over the years. Before contemplating what might happen to my teaching over the next five years I thought I’d look back and reflect on what has changed in my teaching in the five years since 2009. Sure enough, I have a record. Looking back...

I stumbled across the #Nurture1415  the other day and thought it was an excellent idea (I’m only sorry I missed the first two years!) Thanks to @ChocoTzar for galvanising people into action and to anyone who can be bothered to read/comment on mine and perhaps do their own… Positives from 2014 Probably my proudest achievement this year was non-work related. I managed...

Many thanks to @paullawleyjones for putting me on to shelfari.com and pointing out that it is available as an embeddable widget. I plan to record all my reading in 2015 on this page and so avoid that terrible mental blank that can descend when someone asks me what I’ve just read! <div id=”ShelfariWidget263576”><a href=’http://www.shelfari.com/’>Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog</a><script...

There was a wonderful article in this week’s Christmas Special edition of the Economist. One particular paragraph got me thinking about time and how precious it is: Alas time, ultimately, is a strange and slippery resource, easily traded, visible only when it passes and often most highly valued when it is gone. No one has ever complained of having too...

Sitting in the sumptuous surroundings of the College dining hall at Eton this weekend, where I had been invited by a friend to the ‘Masters’ Dinner Night’, the conversation turned, somewhat inevitably, to the ethics of private education. The guest opposite me, a state-educated merchant banker, was insistent - despite evidently enjoying the meal - that Eton and its kin...

It’s 7.40pm and your wife has just texted you from the train to say that she’ll need picking up in 15 minutes. The station is 10 minutes away but thankfully you won’t have to walk anywhere to get the car tonight - it’s right outside your office where you left it after picking it up from the garage earlier in...

The indefatigable Jill Berry (@jillberry102) invited me to respond to a series of set questions based around the theme of leadership. The over-arching question being: What are your experiences of, and your thoughts about, school leadership? Having read what she wrote, I put finger to keyboard and composed my own responses. Here they are: What is your most memorable experience...

I’ve been re-reading some of the chapters in this book recently and came across the very useful chapter on handling disciplinary investigations, the main points of which I list here (as much for my benefit as for anyone else’s!) but I hope some others might find the advice useful. Prevention is better than cure. Disciplinary incidents happen in every school, no matter...

The blogosphere is awash with advice on how to deal with incompetent employees. And indeed, for those of us who work in schools, these types of individuals are relatively simple to sort out. Rare is the school these days which doesn’t have laid out in black and white procedures for dealing with under-performance. The advice, basically, is to follow the manual,...

Today’s @teachthought 30-day blogging challenge asks bloggers: Do you have other hobbies/interests that you bring into your classroom teaching? Explain. I’m very lucky. There is a big overlap between the things I enjoy and the things I must do in my day-to-day working life: I like tinkering with computers, finding new apps and widgets and putting these to use in the...

I am a salaryman. There I said it. I might like to pretend I’m free, but I’m not really. Every year when I come to teach about the EU I tell my class that I could walk out of the door right now and go and live and work anywhere I liked within Europe. But it’s a sham really. I...

Last week at Stephen Winkley’s memorial service, the congregation learnt that the great man regarded tinkering with the curriculum as a ‘lower order’ preoccupation - not something that he felt much need to bother himself with. I know what he meant. Beyond a certain - quite limited - diet of things every child MUST know, it matters surprisingly little what...

Having been inspired by the numerous Tweachers and Teacher-Bloggers that there are out there I thought I’d try my hand at the @TeachThought 30-day blogging challenge. As I go along I’ll be linking each of my posts to this one so that they are curated in one place. I’d love for people to comment on my posts and to refer...

I must admit I’ve been pretty bad at getting pupils to reflect on their work in the past. However recently I’ve adopted several practices that have helped in this important area: Firstly as a school, we’ve adopted WWW (what went well) and EBI (even better if) as something we aim to put on every piece of work. The latter, EBI,...

My nine years at Uppingham got me used to not having any weekend to speak of at all during term time. There we taught lessons on Saturday morning and all staff were expected to be involved with games in the afternoon. Sunday was usually written off with chapel, parent-teacher meetings, house trips and the countless other events that the authorities saw...

Today’s @teachthought blogging challenge asks bloggers: The ideal collaboration between students–what would it look like? I am well aware of the massive positive effect pupil-pupil interaction can have on learning. Thinking back to my own school days, I suspect I learnt at least as much (certainly in the subjects I was struggling with) from my friends and classmates as I did from...

Today’s @teachthought blogging challenge asks bloggers to: Write about one way that you “meaningfully” involve the community in the learning in your classroom. If you don’t yet do so, discuss one way you could get started. Er… Um… Er… I once had a parent come in to speak to a class about their job as a hydrologist, thus making them...

Today’s @teachthought 30-day blogging challenge post asks bloggers: What does your PLN look like, and what does it to for your teaching? PLNs are a subject very close to my heart, not least because I am in the process of writing up my dissertation on the topic. I became interested in Twitter having attended this seminar at the University of...

Today’s @TeachThought blogging challenge asks teachers to cast modesty aside and name their three biggest strengths. Here are mine: I always put my classroom teaching first. There are a hundred and one other demands on teachers' time (crazy, I know - how did we create such a system?!) but I view prioritising my teaching as a non-negotiable. If you don't...

Michael Gove did an awful lot of good for the British education system. His desire to make exams more rigorous, to arrest the race to the bottom being pursued by the exam boards and his disdain for modular educational baby food were all good things. Not only this, but the energy and conviction with which he pursued his reform agenda...

This is a delightful idea from @bleidolf67 for day 16 of the @TeachThought 30-day blogging challenge: ‘If you could have one superpower to use in the classroom, what would it be and how would it help?’ What teacher hasn’t wished they could administer at the click of their fingers a harmless but too-painful-to-ignore jolt of electricity to any pupil careless...

Today’s @TeachThought blogging challenge asks teachers to cast modesty aside and name their three biggest strengths. Here are mine: I always put my classroom teaching first. There are a hundred and one other demands on teachers' time (crazy, I know - how did we create such a system?!) but I view prioritising my teaching as a non-negotiable. If you don't...

Today’s @teachthought 30-day blogging challenge asks bloggers the following question: Which learning trend captures your attention the most, and why? (Mobile learning, project-based learning, game-based learning, etc.) Having just tweeted this you will understand that I am prone to scepticism about many of the latest bandwagons in education: However, there are areas where I think real changes are starting to be made. By no...

This is the 8th post in the @TeachThought 30-day blogging challenge. Today the question is: “What’s in your desk drawer, and what can you infer from those contents?” This could have been embarrassing! I have forced myself to be honest though and photograph the main drawer in my desk entirely as I found it when I opened it up. Here...

Today’s @teachthough blogging post asks some pretty random questions. Here goes: Share five random facts about yourself. I weigh 16 stone and am 6”1’tall. My favourite place on earth is the Langdale Valley, Cumbria.

This is it, right now. It’s just coming up to midnight and all is deathly quiet. I have vacillated over the years between being a lark and an owl. Unusually I can live with both (though not at the same time!) Either very early in the morning or late at night the place is quiet and stuff gets done. During...

Today’s @teachthought 30-day blogging challenge asks bloggers to list their to EdTech tools in terms of their effectiveness for teaching. Here’s my list: RealtimeBoard - I use this every lesson. It is amazing and I can't believe more people haven't caught on to it. Google classroom - This is a bit of a cheat this because it's only just come...

I am amazed by the voluminous amounts of guff that is spouted on the subject of giving pupils feedback. This is one of those areas of educational policy where something that falls into the category of the blindingly obvious is leapt upon discussed, cogitated and commercialized to a hideous degree. Neophytes trot out acronyms like demented members of a wayward religious sect: AfL, APP,...

Clearing out some files the other day I stumbled across the reflective piece at the base of this post which I’d been asked to write for one of my first PGCE assignments. It is interesting in that I was writing it only 4 years after having left school myself. I had yet to teach a single lesson.Despite being so wet behind...

I’ve been an induction mentor for the last three years and it’s a very rewarding job. New teachers are an enthusiastic bunch, unsullied by the cynicism that afflicts some of the old-timers. I’ve tried as a mentor: to be generous with my time (hard in the hurly-burly of a busy term and requiring iron discipline but essential nonetheless. Meeting are...

We live in a busy world. We’re always in a rush. Over the last day or so you will have been bombarded with new timetables, new names to learn, new course notes to get to grips with as well as, for many of you, dealing with the unfamiliarity of your new surroundings and living away from home for the first...

We are now coming into our third year of being a Google Apps for EDU school. Staff are becoming increasingly proficient at using Google tools. But I still frequently come across people who aren’t aware of the full power of the package. In light of this, I have set up two hour-long sessions for staff to show them some of...

Herewith the text of a speech I gave to pay tribute to Mr Robb as he left Oswestry to move to Gresham’s. I constructed the speech to read a bit like a Michael Aspel ‘This is Your Life’ tribute: You were born Douglas Robert Kenneth Robb on the 3rd September 1970, the youngest of three children. Just before your birth,...

One of the things I really love about being a teacher is the number of times you get to make a fresh start: new academic year, new calendar year, new term, first day back after half term etc. At these junctures, I quite often convince myself it will all be different this time, that I’ll get up and run every...

As I have mentioned before, I’ve wasted a lot of time over the years looking for and then changing the to-do list apps I use on my phone and computer (oh the irony!) Particularly at this time of year, as preparations for the new school year get underway, many teachers will be wading through their to-do lists like there’s no tomorrow. There...

This is day 4 of the @teachthought 30-day blogging challenge. This time the task is to articulate what it is that I love most about teaching. For me this is easy - it’s the day-to-day interactions with pupils. In no other job do you get to rub shoulders on a daily basis with people in the flower of youth. They...

I left prep school in 1989 - an aeon ago in the fast-moving, ever-changing world of education you might think. Back in 1989, it was another seven years before the oldest pupil currently at Oswestry was born. There’s clearly been a lot of water under the bridge since then… A year or so before I left the school was having...

Traditionally the staff duty rota has been a long list published in the Common Room noticeboard. It quickly became covered with the scrawl of people swapping and yet still people forgot! I thought there must be a way to tidy the rota up and to automate the sending of a reminder and, sure enough, there is. I’m no uber-coder, but...

Having been wallowing in the shallow end of Twitter for six months or so I have marvelled, from a safe distance, at the exciting antics of the strong swimmers in the deep end. Twitter has incredible power to link teachers and to allow them to share their thoughts. For senior leaders, doing jobs that have traditionally been isolating, the potential...

Big news was broken at the Society of Independent Heads Conference in London on Thursday morning this week. Out of the blue came the revelation that the government wishes to align ISI inspections more closely with those carried out by OFSTED. As the person responsible in my school for ensuring ‘compliance’ this news came as a bit of a blow....

Right, that’s it. I’ve been on a run and it’s cleared my head. Now I’ve got an idea to present to the #edinvent panel tomorrow: The problem Small British boarding schools like the one I work in (@OswestrySchool) are at the mercy of overseas educational consultants (‘agents’ in the parlance of the sector). Whilst many of these agents are decent...

A recent exchange on Twitter (pictured) prompted me to look again at the wisdom of having moved entirely digital with all my sixth form teaching this year. Since September 2013 I have been using RealtimeBoard (RTB) combined with Google Docs for all the aspects of my teaching that I would previously have delivered using a combination of paper and PowerPoint. Posts...

I stumbled across the SAMR model the other day (thanks to the prolific @dajbelshaw). For those readers unfamiliar with the model (Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition) it’s a good way of thinking about what we do with technology as educators. Since the start of this term, I have been using RealtimeBoard (RTB) for almost all of my teaching. At Sixth Form...

One of the bonuses of being teacher is that, unlike normal mortals, you get two opportunities every year to set new year’s resolutions, not just one. As the new academic year draws ever nearer I thought I’d pen a few tips for those who will be joining the profession in September and, as a corollary, remind us old lags of...

The start of the new academic year can be an exciting and refreshing time, not least because it enables managers to get their teeth into new members of staff and train them up in just the way they want them. New processes that old-timers have still to get the hang of can be ‘baked in’ from the start with new...

When I first started out in a posh boarding school, although I was well aware of the huge privilege my surroundings offered, there were enough ‘normal’ kids around to mean that the education I received was grounded in the real world. True, most of my schoolmates came from determinedly middle-class backgrounds and there was a scarcity of pupils from ‘traditional...

Now seems as good a time as any to discuss what we do at Oswestry in terms of getting ready for the new round of UCAS applications. The golden rule is: “Do as much as you can this term - it will make the hectic autumn term much, much easier…!” So what do I advise? Send out letters early explaining...

I’m not going to lie, this recent bout of bad weather has caught me off guard. I like the snow, but this time around it’s come at a very bad time. I had cued up the last week of term for spelling out to my examination sets exactly what they need to do over Easter. Most of them will make...

I’ve had great pleasure in working with some exceptional individuals during my teaching career thus far. My first head of department, Simon Chapman, at Warwick took mentoring seriously and had all of the qualities I outlined in my earlier post on good mentoring. At Uppingham too there were some exceptional individuals - I’ve always had particular admiration for people who...

Recently I failed to get through to the second round of an interview for a Headship. I’m not going to lie, experiences like this always leave me feeling a little bruised, but on this occasion, I received some really useful feedback - in sharp contrast to the usual platitudes about there ‘being a strong field.’ As an added fillip today,...

Earlier this month one of the superstar heads of the independent school world passed away. He was a witty, refreshingly human and honest man. Like all the best heads opinion in the staff room was sharply divided about him. I was fortunate, as a young teacher, to have stayed on the right side of him. Stephen Winkley taught me an...

Last year I was very lucky. I had a classroom of my own. This was it and I could organise it as I wished. This year I am not so fortunate and am moving all over the place for my lessons. I decided that having my own classroom on a 30% timetable was a luxury the school couldn’t afford and...

Today’s post on the @TeachThought 30-day blogging challenge is about my biggest teaching accomplishment. This is hard. Much of what goes on in the classroom is about small, incremental improvements that build up over time. Attributing any particular pupil’s progress purely to oneself is a dangerous game. @echeadmaster made this point powerfully the other day: The implication is clear: there...

A colleague’s chance encounter with Jonny Mitchell, headteacher of Thornhill Community Academy of Educating Yorkshire fame, on Twitter resulted in an invitation to visit the school. I leapt at the chance. Mitchell has been lauded for the rapport he has with his pupils, and for his leadership style. I wanted to see for myself what life was like at the sharp end of the educational...

The other weekend I was confronted with a trio of recalcitrant teenagers to deal with. They had indulged in some night time antics and had been brought to me, as the on-duty member of SMT, to receive a dressing down. The poor housemaster looked exhausted. He’d been up most of the night dealing with things. It was him who’d had...

There has been a lot written recently about the concept of the flipped classroom. It makes good sense, now that it’s so easy and the technology so ubiquitous, to get pupils to do more of the spadework at home whilst taught lessons are given over to refinements. Long periods of time given over to watching audio-visual resources in class, or to carrying...

“Enjoy your three weeks of silent, independent revision, see you in the New Year.” Thus I dismissed the lower sixth last week. Earlier in the lesson, I had tried to gee them along by relaying how Daley Thompson had always made a point of training twice on Christmas Day because he knew his competitors would be having the day off....

Today is day 18 of the @TeachThought 30-day blogging challenge (where is September going?) Today’s prompt is: Create a metaphor/simile/analogy that describes your teaching philosophy. For example, “A teacher is a ____…” I thought I’d be facetious with this one: A teacher is like a cliff: covered in chalk and prone to sudden collapses. Teaching is like Facebook: time-consuming, strangely...

No matter what sort of school you find yourself teaching in, the pupils you face in front of you will each be very different. Each will have their own strengths and weaknesses, each will have their own hinterland. This means that in order to get the best out of them a bit of differentiation is called for. My (now rather...

A teacher, now long retired, but whom I still greatly admire once told me that the best lesson he had ever seen was conducted on a beach. The teacher in question had no resources, illustrating all his points by sketching in the sand. This is a poignant reminder of the fact that good lessons don’t need to be fancy -...

I work in a school where many of the pupils come from overseas. They arrive in deepest, darkest Shropshire and are immediately thrown into the rather idiosyncratic environment of a fairly traditional British boarding school. I wanted to explore whether technology could be brought to bear - particularly in those all important first few weeks - to help pupils adapt to the...

Having been on the receiving end of several appraisal systems (both good and bad) I thought I’d pen a few thoughts about what makes for effective appraisal in schools. Firstly let me set my stall out clearly against the pernicious target culture which has infected some much of the modern workplace and has had disastrous unintended consequences in some cases. Schools deal...

Inspired by the bloggers at the recent Social Media for Researchers course I went on at the University of Birmingham this is the platform I intend to use for my musings about education, technology and life in general… Useful things I learnt today were: Tweetdeck is a powerful way of managing your Twitter and Facebook feeds BUT the IoS version...

Tuesday 23 July 2013 Some time ago a friend mentioned in passing that he’d done the GR20. This particular friend, a teacher at Eton, had done it as a school expedition and it sounded fun, so I decided to look into doing it as a family holiday. Conscious that, at 12 and 14, my kids weren’t getting any younger and...

Most of us can remember very little of what we learnt at school. Beyond the broad brushstrokes, the specifics will be hazy. So there is a lot of truth in Einstein’s observation that: ‘Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.’ The best education changes you deep down as a person - it has...

Back in September 2012, I sent an e-mail to all staff. We were going to adopt Google Apps for Education right across the school for all teaching and administrative functions. I’ve kept a copy of the e-mail that I sent. It seems like we’ve come a long way since then. We’ve got our own extensive, and growing intranet using Google Sites as...