I’ve been flicking through Jamie Clark’s Teaching One-Pagers recently, and overall I’m a big fan. Evidence-informed summaries of research and practice – informative, accessible, perfect for the staffroom coffee table.  As Oliver Caviglioli points out in the foreword, One-Pagers is... Read More ..read more

This term we’re trialing an approach to pre-teaching academic vocabulary. Here’s the basic process: Step 1: Subject teachers identify 10-12 items of key vocab for an upcoming topic in either science, humanities, or maths. This should happen a couple of... Read More ..read more

I’ve written a few things on the Bell Assessment Framework this past year. Here were my initial reflections on implementing the framework, and some musings on how it could be improved. In this post, I share some thoughts on using... Read More ..read more

Some requests from senior leaders in my previous context: ‘Pete, we’re desperate for another first aider on this trip. Are you a qualified first aider?’ ‘Oh no! Our psychology teacher has left us out of the blue. We need cover... Read More ..read more

This is completely imaginary blah blah blah. Hi Pete, Thanks for agreeing to write the official practice exams for the Test Of English Within Academic, Research, and Technical Settings (TOEWARTS), 2025 specification. As you know, endorsed exam practice resources like... Read More ..read more

I’ve had some help from Adri Szlapak with this update! We’ve been adding interesting EAL stuff to a doc throughout the month. Here it all is! New releases Pedagogies for Equitable Access was released at the end of July. For... Read More ..read more

Be More Toddler: A leadership education from our little learners, is a short reflection on leadership by Emma Turner. The author is an experienced leader, consultant, and former co-head at a UK school. It’s published by John Catt books. The... Read More ..read more

The personal statement for the Assessment Only Route to QTS is 2000 words. In this statement, you should respond to the following questions: So, you’ve got roughly 400 words to address each question. This took some thinking about. Reflecting on my own practice can be quite an uncomfortable / damning / enlightening / frustrating / disappointing / ‘do I really think-do-say-feel that?’ process. Being tasked with summarizing things like ‘what a good lesson looks like’ in barely 400 words was quite stop-start process for me. Everything I wrote sounded pithy, flowery, or contrived. Awful task! It f ..read more

This CPD session that explored types of inclusion was for delivered to our EAL department only (4 staff). Why this session? I took a course on EAL coordination through the Bell Foundation back in September/October (see my review here). The input on types of inclusion that referenced Evans et al (2020) was an important takeaway from the course. I felt like it was worth sharing this with my team and reflecting on how well we address these different areas of inclusion in our setting. Approach Mostly reflective tasks and discussions, with a bit of trainer input to describe content in Evans et al ..read more

The second CPD session I delivered to the whole high school this year focused on oracy development. Why this session? Our EAL learners need more opportunities to develop their communication skills in mainstream settings. Curriculum coverage and institutional constraints can make this challenging. However, making tiny tweaks and leading lessons with oracy related activities can (I believe) have a huge impact on teaching and learning – for all, but particularly for EAL learners. Approach I chose to deliver this session as a recorded presentation (35 mins). Basically, Term 3 for us was a killer ..read more