Success In Education

Y our time is your most precious resource. I am sure that with your range of commitments at work that it is limited and that you want to be as productive as you can be, but how successful are you? If you are a middle leader the chances are you are juggling your leadership responsibilities with a sizeable teaching load, if you are a senior leader it is likely that you have a broad range of diverse responsibilities and tasks that fill your days; whatever your level of leadership managing your time is crucial to increasing your productivity and maintaining your well-being. Make lists: I have always made lists, ensuring that anything I had to do was written down so as to remind me to do it. However lists can be improved with additional information especially about when you are going to do the task. This is linked to prioritisation; make sure you know which tasks need doing first and when they need doing by. My own lists would contain deadlines and I would prioritise tasks with

Be honest, do you ever get that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach as you travel to school, as you enter the building, as you enter your office or classroom, as you turn on your computer, when the phone rings or as pupils come through the door? Those who don't find something else to read, those who do keep going. It does not matter whether you are training to be a teacher or an experienced head, this applies to you. This is about personal courage, about accepting  and overcoming demons, and finding ways to improve your quality of life and in so doing becoming a more content teacher. To begin with you need to realise you are not on your own, whether you are a trainee teacher or a headteacher it is likely that we have all experienced this at sometime in our career and that at this moment in time several of your colleagues share your experiences. Our profession is laden with expectations about conduct and professionalism, about leaving emotions at the school gate, about it b

I've worked with hundreds of teachers, all of whom are very different and so what I write in this blog can never be seen as applying to every member of the teaching profession. I've seen every type of personality and every quality of teaching. Every good teacher makes it work for them in their own way, their personality determines their teaching and so they have their own vulnerabilities. Here's something to think about. Some teachers appear to be able to put on an "act" in their dealings with children but most with whom I have worked are authentic, their relationships genuinely reflect their personalities. So what type of teacher do want working with 5 year olds or vulnerable teenagers? Do you want detached automatons or teachers who are emotionally engaged? I believe that engagement is at the heart of great teaching and to work with children you have to emotionally connect with them. But at what price? I want sensitive, empathetic staff working with the chi

Welcome to my new blog. With the launch of Success In Education I have decided to combine my two current blogs into one and publish all new posts through this blog. Please feel free to dip in to the other blogs, there is plenty to read and think about and I hope you find something of interest there and here. In this blog I will write about a range of issues but mostly those that concern Success in Education, namely: leadership (especially "personality centred leadership"), emotional well-being of teachers and leaders, values-focused schools, outstanding teaching, outstanding learning. Thank you for reading.

Over the years I have undertaken many activities which have induced terror in me, most often as a result of altitude and the potential death-inducing effect of gravity experienced on high mountains. But nothing compares to that feeling of terror I experience whenever a course-leader utters the word "ice-breaker" resulting in a tail-spin of fear and loathing as I descend to depths of misery! Why do I hate these apparently innocuous preliminaries? There are a variety of reasons so here are just a few. Firstly I don't want to share details of my life, loves, hobbies, achievements, failures and so on with a bunch of strangers. Then I don't want to play silly games with a bunch of other people who also don't want to play games. Thirdly, do your job; I've come here to learn something, not bugger about. And fourthly (and in this list most importantly), I have a brain, I'm a professionally and academically successful and intelligent teacher, so treat me

The ultimate purpose of any school leader, at any level, is to ensure that the pupils receive teaching of the highest quality. Some schools choose to be highly prescriptive about lesson planning but I believe that this makes teaching little more than a technical undertaking and not the imaginative, creative and exciting experience it ought to be for teachers and learners alike. Rather than providing a rigid proforma that must be followed I prefer giving teachers a framework within which they can create lessons. Starting with a sterile lesson plan sheet produces linear lessons where component B is considered after the construction of component A and so on through to the end of the lesson. The planning is linear and often the starter is set in stone by the time the main activities are planned. This can be avoided if the whole lesson is considered before a lesson plan is ever constructed. A couple of years ago I introduced an approach I called the 5Ps. This suggested that before fo