David Didau
@DavidDidau
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English Lead at @OrmistonAcads . Making Meaning Field Guide OUT NOW: For bookings contact katie @thelearningline .co.uk
Bristol
Joined May 2010
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So, the follow up to 2021’s Making Meaning in English is out. Bringing the English Curriculum to Life is the product of 3 years working with an amazing team of English leaders practitioners and teachers at
@OrmistonAcads
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Let me get this straight, the govt is being advised to reopen schools but to ensure pupils remain 2m apart. Have they actually met any children?
Coronavirus: School closures 'have little effect' on slowing spread of COVID-19
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Next Thursday 18th June at 3pm (BST) I'll be doing a FREE webinar on 'What every teacher needs to know about reading'. Watch this space for details...
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NEW JOB > I’m excited to announce that from January I will be Senior Lead Practitioner for English (or, as I’m calling it, King of English) for
@OrmistonAcads
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Hands up, who would like
@twitter
to make it possible to edit tweets *after* you’ve sent them? (So fed up with sausage fingered auto corrects and lamentable lapses in my ability to punctuate)
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Netherlands makes trains free on national book day for those who show a book instead of ticket
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SLT: if you want to ensure your curriculum and it’s implementation are half decent, give curriculum leaders more time with their departments. An hour a week should be a *minimum*.
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So goes my first week back as a teacher in 8 years. Loved it.
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Ok. Here’s a new website which will host all our OAT English resources. It is very much a work in progress. Feedback welcomed
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This may be unfair, but Gavin Williamson is giving every impression of being either completely incompetent, dumb as a truck or, not inconceivably, both.
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*NEW* Implementing English: five useful teaching strategies
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So, after 8 years of fannying about as a consultant I’m going back to the classroom to teach English in not 1 but 3 amazing schools
@BroadlandsBS31
@GloucsAcademy
&
@HolmleighParkHS
. Am pretty excited (and v nervous!)
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At long last, my new book, Making Kids Cleverer: A manifesto for closing the advantage gap, is out in the world. The argument is divided into 10 chapters and a conclusion and, over the coming days and weeks, I...
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Finished week 6 of Couch to 5k with a 25 min run. This is a significant achievement.
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Still a depressing amount of schools grinding the flightpaths organ. There really is no need
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Impossible to watch without smiling
In case you wanted to remember the reception when a real president walked through a park near the
@WhiteHouse
.
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*NEW* Teacher-led vs student-led lesson activities
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*NEW* Three animated films about learning > In case you're wondering, it's me doing the voice over!
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Who’s going to teach all this Latin? Do we have loads of unemployed classicists knocking about?
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#NewToSLTchat
New to SLT? These are your top priorities:
1. Seek out every opportunity to strip out every demand on teachers except that they plan and deliver a great curriculum...
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The crassness of this makes me pretty cross. Nowhere are people more accommodated, nowhere is more forgiving, nowhere gives more ‘second’ chances than school. The adult world is brutal.
This morning I made a mistake. As a result I was 20 minutes late for a meeting. No one gave me a behaviour point. I apologised and we moved on. I’m not in detention now. That’s because I’m an adult and I live in the real world. Why should our teenagers be treated so differently?
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Why did we bother having a consultation on how to go about assessment this year if the govt was going to shrug its shoulders and tell us to do whatever we fancy?
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My top tips for being able to silence a room with a glance:
1. Be a senior leader
2. Have a lot of experience
3. Don’t move to a new school
You know the teachers, the ones who can silence a room with just a twitch of the eyebrow – here,
@JarlathOBrien
has a few tips to help you do the same
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How many decisions in education are made for the convenience of adults rather than the benefit of children? Many? Most?
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*NEW* The problem with flight paths
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If anyone wants my slides from Saturday’s
@researchED1
on why using the curriculum as a progression model is trickier than you think, here they are:
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*NEW* Why 'just reading' might make more of a difference than teaching reading
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*NEW* The case against Power Point (as a mechanism for implementing the curriculum)
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We have a new home for all OAT English curriculum materials. Everything continues to be freely available to download.
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This is the most harmful, pernicious myth surrounding students' behaviour. It underpins a shameful attitude responsible for chewing through new teachers. Of course it helps to have planned lessons, but students never behave *because* a lesson is planned.
@ModernCassie
'Low level disruption' is indeed a serious problem - it indicates that a significant group of your pupils is not engaged with your lessons
Suggest you think about your lessons rather than disciplinary solutions
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The reality for many Year 11s seems to be continual high stakes assessment right up to the wire. Anyone who thinks this is preferable to an exam needs to think very carefully.
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Next Thursday 18th June at 4pm (BST) I'll be doing a FREE webinar (although there's an option to pay a fiver if you feel flush) on 'What every teacher needs to know about reading'
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This is actually great.
What is white privilege?
We asked
@JohnAmaechi
, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.
👉
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As promised, a blog on how we're going about Assessing English at KS3
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We all make mistakes. I find it’s best to face it and apologise as humbly and sincerely as possible.
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Not only is ‘practice’ spelt incorrectly but the injunction against splitting infinitives is a hangover from Latinate grammars that has no validity in English. It wasn’t until 1800s that grammarians took against it. At best it’s a stylistic preference, but it’s not even stylish.
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Even if
@educationgovuk
are not yet able to make an announcement on GCSEs and A levels surely they can bloody well announce that SATS are cancelled?
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Whenever I see ‘Paper 1’ on an English curriculum plan for Year 10 (particularly for term 1) something inside me dies.
Teaching test prep throughout KS4 is killing our subject for so many students.
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Not sure about this vaccine.
On one side there's world renowned virologists, medical experts & Nobel prize winning scientists saying it's an amazing breakthrough but on t’other side some bloke from Chorley says he's seen I Am Legend & this is how the zombie apocalypse starts.
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What a fecking relief! Youngest got the grades to go to Kings
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I really feel for all those who spent Christmas working out how to reopen schools in Jan, set up testing and all the other bobbins. Can only imagine how frustratingly must feel. Hang tough.
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Finished week 5 of Couch to 5k with a 20 min run. This is the most I’ve run without stopping for... years.
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A fantastically useful breakdown of how to analyse mock exam results and how to share this analysis with students via
@adamboxer1
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OK, you asked for it, here it is: Using mini whiteboards in English
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A short thread on curriculum: In many of the schools I visit there is much confusion and concern about what i
@Ofstednews
mean by Intent, Implementation and Impact. I worry we are in danger of overcomplicating something which should be very straightforward 1/n
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If kids don’t behave it’s your fault because you haven’t planned your lesson well enough
I'm curious; what is the worst teaching advice you have gotten?
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FIRST BLOG of 2023! >> When retrieval practice goes wrong (and how to get it right)
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How to observe a lesson
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Learned a great new word: apricity - the warmth of the sun in winter
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My new book, Making Meaning in English, is now complete. It'll be published by Routledge at some point in the next few months. I'm quietly excited
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‘Cold call’ done well can be great. Done badly it is one of the easiest ways to convince children they’re rubbish at a subject. Use with caution.
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Provocation: if you don’t routinely use mini white boards in your teaching then your teaching is less effective than it would otherwise be.
(This may not be equally true for every phase or subject.)
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Grade Allocation Advice by
@mrbakerphysics
> this is fantastically useful for HoD’s needing to organise the ranking of students for GCSEs/A levels
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This is true. I’ve never done anything as emotionally draining as a full day of teaching
One of the most important facts about teaching that I think is regularly ignored by non-teachers is that it's exhausting.
Perhaps, people assume a full-day's teaching's like 6 presentations, which would be hard, but it's harder - more like 6 sales pitches.>
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*NEW* Why we need to read aloud
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*NEW* Is reading comprehension even a thing?
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This is extraordinarily good! >> Beyond Knowledge Organisers - building the best curriculum in the world. via
@jon_brunskill
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ENGLISH TEACHERS: I'm trying to put together a list of common problems in English teaching to work on some possible solutions. This is what I've got so far. Any constructive comments or suggestions would be welcomed.
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1. Learning is not ‘like this’.
2. No matter how you teach, learning is broadly similar for all students
3. Teaching in the simplest, most direct way is likely to be most helpful for all, especially the most disadvantaged
Great discussions facilitated by
@LCCollaborative
are being had amongst
@KCS_District
leaders about why and how to meet the needs of today's students with
#StudentCentered
instruction!
#learningtogether
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*If* you believe excluding students causes them to become involved in gang crime (and really, evidence does not support this) then high quality, well funded PRUs are a much better answer than driving down behavioural standards in mainstream schools.
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They say: everyone understands that Thinking Hats are a metaphor. No one actually makes kids wear them. I say:
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*NEW* The curriculum: Intent, implementation and impact
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What works best for children with SEND works best for all children
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Nothing could be further from the truth. Who you are is, by and large, irrelevant. *What* you teach is the entire point of your professional existence. *How* you teach also has relevance, but *who*? That’s just narcissism.
“Who a teacher is, is more important than what a teacher teaches.”
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My calendar’s looking suddenly clear. If any schools in the Bristol area need an English teacher to help plug any gaps do get in touch.
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Speaking as a parent, I'm very grateful my children's teachers have set work for over Easter. 2 weeks of nothing to do is not a holiday. Routine, structure and purpose are the best ways through this.
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A reminder that coursework is unfair way to assess children not because teachers are dishonest, incompetent or unprofessional but because teachers are human beings.
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This. When students ask ‘why do we have to learn this?’ maybe the answer should be ‘to make your mind a more interesting place to spend the rest of your life’
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*NEW* Specifying a concept-led KS3 English curriculum
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*NEW* Curating a reading curriculum
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School leaders: Are you doing anything like this? Stop. It’s cobblers.
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This video on phonics by
@Suchmo83
is a very useful primer. All secondary English teachers should watch:
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What works best for children with SEND works best for all children
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Thoughts on how writing should be dealt with in the English curriculum
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You have drama cover.
Write a horror story for your industry using just four words
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If you work in EYFS or KS1 you really should read this extraordinary post by
@solomon_teach
(H/T
@jpembroke
)
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Imagine if, no matter how appallingly customers behaved, pubs were prevented from asking violent, offensive or dangerous people to leave. Who would benefit?
#nomoreexclusions
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*NEW* Feeling guilty at not marking students' books every day?
I've got you:
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Here are the slides I used at
#rED22
yesterday in my talk on Intelligent Accountability: (Thanks to
@Mr_AlmondED
for spotting the typo!)
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Quite extraordinary that The Sun think throwing sweets at teachers ought to go unpunished. Shameful that a parent would seek to undermine normal standards of civilised behaviour like this. Well done to Market Bosworth School!
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The sooner ‘outstanding’ schools get reinspected the better for everyone
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Latest resource on > 30 creative sentence types:
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Apparently, Einstein said, "I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."
A reminder that however smart you are you can still say daft things.
Teaching is a pretty important condition for students being able to learn.
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Told by PE teacher that The Lady of Shallot “wasn’t challenging enough” for Year 7 because some students had read it in Yr 6. I pointed out I was also studying the poem with Year 13
#nobservation
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Here are 5 recommendations for English teachers: 1. Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, 2. The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg, 3. Doing English by Robert Eaglestone, 4. You Talkin’To Me? By Sam Leith, 5. The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth
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*A NEW POST* Embedding reading fluency in the KS3 English curriculum
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Following the success of last night's webinar on reading, I've scheduled another on Building a Reading Culture
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My daughter's GCSEs are in. She's very happy. Interestingly, her CAGs were identical to the Ofqual algorithm.
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A reading curriculum: Gap-widening vs gap-narrowing
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Daughter cam home school saying she’d been taught the hymen lick manoeuvre today.
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