With our open evening looming, strict instructions came our way to tidy up our rooms and make sure our displays are on point. Having just moved to a new school, lots of the displays weren’t mine and, as such, weren’t really me. Don’t get me wrong, I love an attractive, informative display as much as […]
Tag: #naughtybutnice
Some Days In Teaching Are Sh*t, But Teaching Is Definitely NOT.
Some days in teaching are sh*t, aren’t they? They really are. There are times when you come home, barely able to drive safely or hold an entire sentence together. Days when your year nines have run rings around you, break duty caused endless admin after there was an ‘incident’, multiple meetings drag on and achieve […]
Why I’m Not Going To Lay Down The Law As The First Lesson Back.
It’s customary, I know, to get students back into the swing of things with a swift run through the rules and classroom expectations. We’ve all seen powerpoint after powerpoint with lists of rules or, for the more open-minded, questions allowing classes to come up with their classroom expectations. I won’t be starting term that way. […]
How To Cope With The New School Year: Remember Behaviour Management is an Iceberg
With the new year in mind, I’ve been thinking about behaviour management of my new classes… The vast majority of behaviour With the new year in mind, I’ve been thinking about behaviour management of my new classes…management lies beneath the social surface and a great deal of it goes on predominantly outside the […]
Home Contact: What Difference Could It Make?
We all have some students whose behaviour or attitudes or despondency seems beyond our ability to impact. Those hard nuts to crack. Sometimes it’s that they continue to shout across the room and nothing we do seems to stop them. Sometimes it’s that they persistently do no work at all. Sometimes it’s that they just […]
If You See Behaviour Management As a Battle Ground, You May Win The Battle But You’ve Already Lost The War
Behaviour Management: Is There A Way To Practically Apply The Principles of Respect and Relationship? In writing my last blog post, I realised that respect and relationship as foundations for behaviour management might sound like some sort of impractical pixie dust solution for helping lessons to fly. I really don’t think that they are. They’re […]
Stop Working, Get Out and Do Something! School Will Survive…
When was the last time that you: Went out and saw a movie during the week? Took an entire evening off without staying late for a meeting or working once you’d put the kids to bed? Binge read a book in an evening? Spontaneously just went out for a meal? Went to see a play […]
How Can We Set Decent Purposeful Cover & Ensure It Gets Done?
Setting cover can be a real pain! Either you’re, in some sense, being expected to be in two places at once. Or you’re sick. Either way, it can feel somewhat futile if you doubt that the work will being done, perhaps more so if you’re home struggling through a migraine or the like and are […]
Round Two: Skullduggery Pleasant
Recently, a colleague stopped me in the corridor. His face was a mixture of concern and outrage. Without knowing what was wrong or, indeed, what I had done wrong, I ploughed in with the question: “Is everything ok? Are you ok?” “Well,” he replied, “I thought that you were an English teacher.” “I am!” “But […]
Why Do We Even Do This Job?
It’s nearing the end of the school year and, exhausted as we are, I bet that most of us are actually feeling pretty nostalgic about it already. Why? Because this is the point in the year where some of our students say, “Thank you!” It might be that they randomly drop by our classroom or […]