Month: Apr 2016

At prime minister’s questions today, David Cameron accused Labour’s candidate for Mayor of London Sadiq Khan of appearing with a London Imam who supports ISIS.

Only one problem. The Imam in question – Suliman Gani – does not support ISIS.

In fact he thinks they’re “evil”:

And even more amazingly, Gani actually supported – and even canvassed for – the Tories at the last general election:

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Here he is with Tory candidate Dan Watkins:

And here he is with Tory MP Tania Mathias:

And here he is with Zac Goldsmith himself:

The Tories are so desperate – or arrogant – they think they can win elections with outright lies and smears. We cannot rely on our biased media to show the truth. 

So please share. Thanks:

There are many moments that have stayed with me from my ten years of teaching. The overwhelming majority of them are positive, but there is one in particular that has been circling around my head the past few days that makes me feel so sad about what current government policy is doing to our children’s experience of learning.

Early on in the first term of Year Seven, I often broached the question to my English class “What makes good writing?”. It’s a big question, and not one I ever expected to hear answered in its entirety, but still the responses that I got were pretty telling. The particular set of responses I remember was from Autumn 2012, just before I disappeared on maternity leave. Fresh from SATs preparation, hands shot up as I wrote the question on the board, and the answers spilled out proudly into the classroom: “varied sentence starters”, “correct use of conjunctions”…

My child is not a genius. He’s fairly bright at best,

He doesn’t have attainment medals glowing from his chest,

He’s pretty well behaved – at least, I don’t hear that he’s naughty –

He’s not a music prodigy, or known for being sporty.

He’s reading not too badly, can decipher what’s on signs,

His writing’s not too scrawly if he keeps between the lines,

He doesn’t have additional needs as far as I can tell,

And up to yesterday, I thought that he was doing well.

But then I got the test results, and thanks to you, I’ve learned

That instead of being proud, I really ought to be concerned.

A five year old that reads and writes seemed pretty good to me –

(Even though he gets confused between the letters B and D)

But it seems he’s way behind, and the levels that he meets

Only indicate…

It can be done.

Birmingham City Council has passed a motion stating that it does not want its schools to become academies

Source: ‘Our schools will not be academies,’ says major local authority | News

A teacher’s take on the jargon of explicit teaching…

I know that parents have to decode a lot of jargon whilst their kids are at school. I’m often asked about some of the acronyms commonly seen and heard in my classroom. Perhaps they sound more like a quartet of elderly folks in a retirement home, however WALT, WILF, WALA and TIB are some the latest educational buzz words.

Explicit teaching focusses students toward the learning/understanding/skill, rather than the doing/task/activity. Below are some useful acronyms that are becoming more and more common in schools, for making learning explicit for children.

WALT = We Are Learning To…
Sometimes called a Learning Intention, a WALT  makes the learning, concept, understanding or skill clear to students. For example, “We are learning to use talking marks in our writing”. I find WALTs extremely useful in differentiating between the task or activity and the actual learning…