I haven't taught any A Level subjects for a few years now, and my favourite - Economics - for even longer. But I'm back in the game, and three lessons in I'm loving it. Being a headteacher, I don't teach much. For the last two years I filled a gap teaching Computing to Year 7 … Continue reading Greeting an old friend

Thinking about the knowledge you want students to acquire is fruitful. We spend a great deal of time as teachers planning lessons and sequences of lessons, but perhaps not enough time considering the nature of the cognitive specimen in question. I am currently teaching Year 7 students how to use spreadsheets. Critical to basic spreadsheet … Continue reading Let knowledge drive your lessons

At the risk of over simplifying things, don't children go to school to learn stuff? Okay, that's not the only reason, but can we agree that it is basically the point of school? But what stuff should they learn? Is it useful stuff (that will help them get a job), or relevant stuff (which they'll … Continue reading The right stuff

Don't worry, this isn't road-kill. I'm just dissecting a rat. The rat in question is 'bad homework'. Why does it happen? Much has been written about what constitutes good and bad homework, most recently this pithy blog post by Greg Ashman (it's hot off the press as I write and has prompted this response). I'm … Continue reading Bad homework

Cambridge seminars expect rigour and logic from their speakers: a braced subtlety of exposition and explanation, tested proofs of cause and consequence. But water doesn't do rigour in that sense, and neither did Roger, though his writing was often magnificently precise in its poetry (precision being, to my mind, preferable to rigour - the former … Continue reading In Praise of Precision

'Feedback' is used to describe the high-pitched whine that emanates from a speaker when the audio waves are picked up by a microphone, or other audio-input device, and amplified back through the speaker in a continuous, building, loop. It is piercing, irritating and unwelcome. This form of feedback is a useful metaphor for another meaning … Continue reading The best form of feedback is more teaching

One of my university lecturers, a long time ago (in Brighton, so also in a galaxy far, far away), told a story which was probably apocryphal. None-the-less, it made the point. It went like this... In the 1980s, a British company decided to start buying in components from Japan. They were very specific in the … Continue reading Defective teaching

"The whole is other than the sum of its parts." Kurt Koffka There seems to have been a resurgence in debate about curriculum, at least amongst the blogging classes. This interest has perhaps been driven by the freedoms created through a slimmed down National Curriculum and removal of NC levels, and perhaps also by arguments in … Continue reading Zen and the Art of the Computing Curriculum

Anyone can teach IT, can't they? That attitude may be changing now the subject has morphed into Computing (all that pesky programming and the like), but when I started teaching IT it was definitely the view. IT teachers themselves were conscripts from other subjects, usually D&T or Maths. As long as you were geeky and … Continue reading Confessions of an occasional IT teacher

I’ve been fortunate to observe a number of colleagues using multiple choice questions in their teaching recently. Sometimes these were being used to promote recall of previously taught material. Others were using MC questions to highlight misconceptions. The design and use of MC questions for highlighting misconceptions seems to be a tougher thing to get … Continue reading Tips for using MC questions to highlight a misconception