In this blog the focus is on new starts and ensuring that all students feel included. Focus on the hidden curriculum.

“The first weeks of school can be the most stressful time of the year. Teachers are trying to figure out their schedules and classrooms, and students are trying to make new friends. One of the best ways to start the new school year to help teachers and students get to know each other better is to introduce the hidden curriculum. Understandably, teachers want their students to know about the syllabus and assessment criteria. However, I sincerely believe in "go slow to go fast." The hidden curriculum is the unwritten rules students need to learn to succeed in school and life. This can include social skills, attitudes, values, and unwritten rules. The hidden curriculum is often an unspoken part of school culture. A successful introduction of some aspects of the hidden curriculum at the beginning of the school year can significantly influence the students' later learning and success. This blog brainstorms and curates’ activities to bring the idea of the hidden curriculum for the first few weeks of school.”

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Start as you mean to go on. Doctoral researcher and classroom educator Sean Harris examines some of the practical and research-informed routines for starting lessons well.

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The education book Making Every Lesson Count describes six pedagogical principles – from challenging to modelling to feedback – that can give us a great framework for teaching. Helen Webb offers some ideas and tips for how these principles can work in practice.

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There are 8 cultural forces that define our classrooms as well as our schools. These represent the tools or levers teachers, and school leaders utilise to transform and shape the culture of their educational context.

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A series of short posts and booklets summarising some everyday classroom practices.

Click HERE to download the booklets.

There are several superb summaries of educational research that have been compiled into easily accessible websites and articles in pdf format that can be read online and shared with staff. Although they are easy to find via an internet search, they have been pulled together here by Tom Sherrington.

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Apple's ONE video on diversity and inclusion is a great reflection point for us all. Wouldn't it be great if we could all create such expressions of inclusion.

The transcript of the film is:

Open a door, and it opens all the others. Open a mind and see what happens next.

No great thing, no beautiful invention, was created in a vacuum. It happens when we leave our comfort zone and come together.

Embrace faiths, cultures, disabilities, differences. Embrace races, ages, ideologies, personalities, creating a tool or devise nobody saw coming.

Humanity is plural not singular. The best way the world works is everybody in, nobody out. So, who we are made of is everyone.

The truth is we don’t see things the same. The power is we don’t see things the same.

In this blog, Tom Sherrington addresses the following six areas where there are wide differences both within and between schools in the impact of teaching on learning. The blog provides a very good reflection piece for us all.

• The extent of accountable reading embedded in the curriculum.
• Routines that involve all students in thinking and responding to classroom discourse
• Procedures for checking knowledge retrieval, addressing gaps that are revealed.
• The reliance on bookwork/ task completion as a proxy for learning
• Emphasis on fluency-building, consolidation and practice.
• The presence of small-step feedback and improvement loops

Click HERE for the blog.

In this blog Tom Sherrington identifies the number 1 problem in teaching is how to personalise teaching for each student. He looks at the following aspects:

• Teacher mindset.
• Ineffective testing or checking protocols.
• Exposition without checking for understanding.
• Weak questioning or response techniques
• Excessive scaffolding
• Poor Vocabulary Development

Click HERE for the blog and the downloadable PDF.

I just came across this 'awesome' video. I will let the Kid President speak for himself. It's a good provocation for us all – and hopefully it will make you smile.

Click HERE for the video.

If you liked that you may like THIS.

If we are to ensure that every pupil can make progress then a key skill for every teacher is the art of differentiation, both in their lesson planning and their teaching.

Click HERE and HERE for two supplements from SecED on differentiation.

Let us never forget why we came into education: to make a positive difference to the lives of young people. At the heart of all that we do is that individual child, with their hopes, aspirations, fears and doubts. The writer and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou said: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Research informs us that the emotional atmosphere of the classroom is important. The emotional centres of the brain can take over the centres for learning, so our attention goes from what the teacher is saying to that which is upsetting us. It matters that students feel safe and encouraged if they are to learn to their full potential. Whilst the following infographic is written with parents in mind many of the messages are as relevant for teachers: students need to feel that they are noticed, valued, trusted, encouraged, and appreciated.