TeacherBee

"What are teachers doing at home on full pay?" was the provocative tweet from  ITV correspondent, Rupert Evelyn this week. A reply from our Welsh Government Minister for Education certainly put the record straight! Whilst school buildings are indeed closed to all but the children of key workers and those identified as vulnerable, it seems not everyone realises that teachers are still working and children are still learning, albeit that both are adjusting to a very different kind of reality.  Many of the children in my LKS2 class have shown extraordinary adaptability and have quickly learned how to use Microsoft Teams to communicate with me and to access their daily suggested home-learning activities. They have regularly had to practise the skill of following instructions and many have been able to upload photos and files to show me activities they have completed. The activities themselves have been chosen either to revisit and practise previously taught knowledge...

A few weeks ago I read  a piece from the BBC on the financial gains and losses    likely over a working life, for people with different degrees.  Unsurprisingly, the Institute for Fiscal Studies' investigation found that studying creative subjects at university was unlikely to result in financial gain. For a woman, the net result was close to zero but for a man, the projected loss was £100 000 compared with their peers who did not go to university.  There is a certain type of middle class snobbery that looks down on, or even feels sorry for young people who choose higher education courses in, say, media or theatre or photography. I know this to be the case from personal experience as a parent of a current photography undergraduate, and some teachers are not without guilt here. There is an implicit as well as explicit hierarchy of subjects and a corresponding attribution of value.  Yet, over the past few weeks, how many of us have ...

This post follows on from Saturday School - What about the Gap? - Part 1 The second session I chose was led by Mary Myatt and entitled 'Curriculum: Controversies, Concepts and Conversations. She began by talking about some of the thorny issues that crop up when curriculum development is being discussed: the notion that skills are transferable across subjects; the ever-present false dichotomy of knowledge versus skills when they are intrinsically linked; the privileging of activity and task completion over thinking and learning (should we ask 'Have you learned?' instead of 'Have you finished?'?), leading to what she called a 'cardboard curriculum'; the superficial links that can be made in the attempt to plan cross-curricular themes or topics; the loss of entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum and access to powerful knowledge for pupils who are too often taken out of class for interventions (this one really hit home).  Mary spoke about the ne...