Secondary

Help your students prepare for the GCSE Citizenship exams

Thank you to Victoria Marston, co-author of Citizenship Today for the following blog post.  With GCSE Citizenship exams around the corner, how can you best support your students? Keep them focused – even once on study leave – by talking them through this handy ‘PREPARE’ aide-memoire: Practice… Read More

Business: A great way to think about delayering!

I am currently teaching organisational structures to my Year 12 groups, and they always ask for real examples of concepts such as delayering, chains of command and spans of control. I thought that this business example would be a great way to not only teach organisational structures, and motivation, but… Read More

The Benefits of Uninterrupted Reading

Recently, I have been reading up on the benefits of whole class reading. Doug Lemov’s ideas in Reading Reconsidered seem to be (rightly) influencing many primary teachers to eschew small group reading for whole class texts. These ideas seem to align with a trend in my own secondary teaching in… Read More

Chemical Anniversaries: 1968 – Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn

Lise Meitner has an element, Otto Hahn a Nobel Prize. This is evidence of the esteem in which the science community holds both scientists. They worked together for over thirty years, were born a year apart and died fifty years ago.  While their lives are closely entwined their collaboration is… Read More

Pre-release for Edexcel Business 2018

The prelease came out at the end of November 2017 and is focused around the confectionary industry. This also links with a blog that I wrote last year about the Kraft and Cadbury takeover, ideal pre-reading for studying Edexcel. The pre-release is an opportunity for students to do some of… Read More

How to recharge your teaching batteries

Imagine having that Friday feeling all the time? Well, you won’t have to wait much longer because the Christmas holidays are nearly here. For many teachers, the Christmas holiday is the best time of the year. Not only do you get time off, you get all the festive fun thrown… Read More

Do atlases still have a place in the modern secondary classroom?

Geography departments within secondary schools across the UK rely on printed atlases for many different areas across the curriculum. Although there has been several different breakthroughs in recent years with ‘google maps’, ‘digimaps’, and various different apps – pupils require atlases to understand the organisation of continents, shape of countries… Read More

School trips for Sociology

A common question I hear from many teachers is about where to go on school trips for Sociology students as sadly much of the feedback in the past has been that days out away from school were either not that valuable educationally or were a headache in terms… Read More

2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

The Medicine/Physiology and Physics prizes went to the popular topics of body clocks and gravity waves. The subject of the Chemistry prize is perhaps a little more obscure yet very important for those interested in the molecules of life. The three chemistry prize winners, Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard… Read More

10 Things Effective Teachers Do

Looking to become a more effective teacher? Read John Dabell’s list of the 10 things that effective teachers do. If only we could bottle the skills, knowledge, behaviours, qualities and competences required to be an excellent teacher.  The contents could be poured onto the heads of newly qualified teachers so… Read More