Every school I have ever worked in or visited is keen to improve. When school leaders often talk about improvement, they more often than not consider what is needed to help teachers grow and develop. This may be in through the provision of resources to complement the teaching and learning that we wish to see […]
Category Archives: Professional Growth
When teachers and school leaders struggle with feedback
Most of us have been there, that moment when we do not appreciate the feedback and comments regarding our work. Feedback, even if it is meant to be constructive and focused on improvement, can be really tough to take at times. Develop a thick skin, we may have been told. As much as we can […]
Turning off distractions, being more focused and getting your momentum back
Being a productive and effective school leader requires a positive mindset and the motivation to do our very best each day. I found that over the last 12 months that the mood I was bringing to school each day varied significantly. It was not that I had got bored with my work, quite the contrary; […]
Are you getting in the way of the feedback you really need to grow?
It is questionable whether teachers and leaders are given regular feedback in order to grow professionally. When teachers work with students feedback is given in most lessons throughout the learning journey. The same does not happen for the adults in the school. We need to change this. When busy, teacher feedback is often the first […]
The guilt trip of not doing enough in our schools
Working in education is a lifelong passion for many teachers. Even when teachers are sick, they dose-up on vitamins, cold and flu medication, just to make it into school because they cannot bear the thought of another teacher, substitute or other, messing up their class. As teachers we do have an illness when it comes […]
We need web literacy for teachers not just students
This talk from Alan November got me thinking further to a post that I wrote called: Avoiding “Just Google it!” with your students. One of the points in Alan’s talk refers to the need to explicitly teach web literacy skills to students in schools. Upon reflection, I too am short of some techniques in […]