The Michaela Inspection Result Is Good News for Everyone | Anthony Radice

Ofsted have a lot of blood on their hands. In the very recent past, they were a progressive inquisition, striking fear into the hearts of teachers who actually wanted to teach. But they have been working to dispel this image, publishing a myth-busting document and engaging on social media to answer questions and promote their claim that no particular teaching style is preferred by inspectors.

Many of us remain skeptical, including the folks at Michaela. I attended the very first Michaela day of debates, in which Katie Ashford argued passionately for the abolition of Ofsted. At that time, of…

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The Michaela Inspection Result Is Good News for Everyone | Anthony Radice

Ofsted have a lot of blood on their hands. In the very recent past, they were a progressive inquisition, striking fear into the hearts of teachers who actually wanted to teach. But they have been working to dispel this image, publishing a myth-busting document and engaging on social media to answer questions and promote their claim that no particular teaching style is preferred by inspectors.

Many of us remain skeptical, including the folks at Michaela. I attended the very first Michaela day of debates, in which Katie Ashford argued passionately for the abolition of Ofsted. At that time, of…

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http://ift.tt/2tiYoFu

Direct Instruction Transforms Behaviour | Anthony Radice

We must be very clear that the choices made by pupils are their own responsibility. If they decide to be rude or defiant, they have made that choice, and they must take the consequences. Few things make my blood boil more than hearing senior leaders blaming classroom teachers for pupil behaviour.

But at the same time, we must acknowledge that the methods used by teachers will influence the behaviour of pupils. When teachers spend their time trying to entice pupils to learn something through an endless variety of activities, the implicit message pupils receive is that they are consumers of…

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Whole Class Instruction Enables Targeted Support | Anthony Radice

In-class differentiation means that the whole class is disadvantaged, because they cannot experience an ordered classroom where the expert instructs them. They cannot experience a coherent curriculum because the curriculum must be personalised.

But there is a huge difference between in-class differentiation and targeted support outside class. Schools such as Michaela, for example, target pupils who need it with an intensive synthetic phonics programme. This is because they recognise that without these fundamentals firmly in place, pupils will not be able to access fully the rich knowledge…

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An Orwellian Education | Anthony Radice

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950)

In George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945), education plays a crucial role. It is because most of the animals do not succeed in learning to read and write that the pigs dominate the formulation of the principles of Animalism, the allegorical equivalent of Marxism-Leninism. But it is not only literacy which matters. Memory is a vital component of the plot too, as most of the animals fail to memorise the Seven Commandments, the founding principles of the Rebellion which are painted in large letters on the barn wall. Thus when Squealer, who represents Stalin’s Minister…

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The Importance of School Culture | Anthony Radice

When I was a newly qualified teacher, I worked in a large, chaotic comprehensive, whose head was good at wangling money for new buildings, but apparently uninterested in creating any sort of discipline structure, so that those shiny new buildings wouldn’t have their carpets plastered with chewing gum shortly after completion. Teachers would cower in the staff room during breaks, reluctant to police the riotous corridors and playgrounds. It was a horrible place.

It won’t surprise you to hear that as a new teacher in such a school, I had a lot of trouble keeping my year ten class under…

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We Need Better Courses, Not More Adaptive Teaching | Anthony Radice

In recent years, there has been a gradual move in the English education system away from the darkest days of individualised learning, when teachers were expected to plan different lessons for different pupils, thus ensuring curricular incoherence and chaotic classrooms.

This move is to be welcomed, but we must not be complacent. Even if the insanity of planning thirty different lessons is not being proposed, the residual ideas still haunt many classrooms, to the extent that many teachers still feel that it is somehow wrong to teach the whole class the same thing, and require every pupil to…

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